The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (11 page)

After she had stuffed the coat into the hamper, Joe chug-a-lugged a nearly full Brita pitcher of water, said, “I really need a shower,” which was true, and then ran up the stairs to the second bathroom. There he found, to his shock, that the sedative bottle was in fact empty and the others had only a few last pills rattling around in them like forgotten patients roaming an asylum shut down by the state. He swallowed the ones that remained.

Joe sat on the toilet and nearly fell in; he cursed and laughed, closed the lid, and sat down again. He thought about his coat and considered what had happened: he might have made a big mistake about George. Possible? Yes. Probable? Not really. Still, if it was true, Michelle now knew that
something
had occurred and would know more once George’s body was found by hikers, or those Depression-era boy scouts, or when it was half-eaten by coyotes which now prowled the area because they’d been displaced from their habitat by developers—he’d read an article about it and even thought he’d once seen a white one running frightened across the highway at sunset; it had been too big to be a dog.

Joe looked down at the carving knife he’d just swiped from the kitchen while drinking the water, which he had hidden inside his plaid shirt and which had scraped his stomach a little when the handle was hit by his arm, which had been knocked by his rising knee as he came up the stairs. As he gripped the knife, last used to slice meat from a Christmas ham for late-night snacks, new images trickled down before his eyes as if they had burst the banks of his brain and overflowed, like rainwater spilling from the gutters of his roof. He saw his wife and son slaughtered from behind, their throats slit with no time to scream, his secret safe. Then, dropping the blade, he sat forward, his eyes closing, his hands patting them as if to dry up the pictures and keep them from ever coming back.

Perhaps one pill, like a single, fertilizing sperm, had completed its mission and for a second brought him clarity, dying and dissolving as it did. It was he, not George, he, not George (“surprise!”) who didn’t care, who was completely cold to his wife and son, who loved nothing—unlike his old friend—who was actually already in a crucial way dead. But before he could completely ingest this information, other medications muscled in to adjust his understanding of it.

Now he saw something strange upon the tiles at his feet: drops of blood were falling from the slight gash in his skin caused by the knife, skiing from his stomach over his belt and jumping between his pleated knees to the floor. To his terrible relief, they merged with the grey-white that was down there, were almost as clear as tears, were not, in other words, in any way human—
he
was not human, for the blood had come from him, and so he did not have to face his future or look back upon his past.

He, not George, had arrived on Earth—and by accident, not with the diabolical designs he had accused his friend of having. It had all been a mistake, and so now he needed to get out and go back to where
he belonged.

Patching his cut gut with a little circle bandage, which was not big enough but the last one left in the box, Joe stood up. He hadn’t showered but felt oddly cool, perhaps from a special inner air conditioning system he now secretly had, or maybe just because his realization had relaxed him. For whatever reason, his “body” was climate-controlled, and so he didn’t feel he needed the jacket Michelle had put into the wash when he tip-toed down the stairs and ran out the front door. His wife’s quizzical cry of “Joe!” followed him out, as faint as he knew now his connection to that name, this home, and her had always been.

“Joe” got back into the car and saw the shovel stupidly not hidden, just sitting there on the passenger seat, reminding him for a second of what he’d done and not very well, and shouldn’t have in the first place. He threw it onto the backseat to remove it from his sight, and its knife-sharp edge barely missed slicing open his mouth.

Then he drove. He drove for hours, past the part of the world he recognized, crossing over into places he’d never been before. At last, at dawn (at the start of what day?), his gas tank empty, he left the car in the middle of a road in a place in America he couldn’t name. Then he ran down the highway, laughing and screaming, because he was so happy that he would soon see the large and welcoming lights of his mother ship.

Rick thought if she told him the story again, he would kill her. It was an irrational decision, since she was near death and if he merely practiced patience, the event would occur without his committing a crime. But the anecdote—which she had repeated heedlessly for the third time today? Fourth?—was as inciting an offence to him as infidelity might be to a married man.

“It was at a restaurant in Paris forty years ago,” his mother said, as if sharing a delicious secret. “Jean Calot was suddenly seated at the table beside your father and myself. I’d always loved him in the movies—‘belle laide,’ ugly beautiful, I called him,” as if she had made up the movie star’s generally accepted nickname and needed to—once again—translate the common foreign phrase. “He had a little dog with him, which appalled your father—it seemed so unclean and against the restaurant’s rules, unusual for France. But I took that dog—a Pekingese, I think it was—hid it on my lap for the entire meal, and fed it scraps. Jean Calot whispered thanks to me at the end. ‘Merci, Mademoiselle,’ he said. Mademoiselle! And I was over forty!”

And clearly married—and borderline humiliating her husband, Rick’s father, by flirting with the film star. But that wasn’t really what infuriated Rick about the story—it was his mother’s obvious delight in all its shallow details: the fancy restaurant, the trip to France, the purebred pedigreed dog. They reflected what she relished in the world, what she
respected
, even worse.

Rick knew that his mother’s considerable wealth would come to him once she died: he was her only relation and now her kind-of companion (though he only came over once a day to spell an exasperated paid housekeeper before another could arrive). In recent years, he had refused loans or gifts of money from her, but he was no longer so completely self-righteous, because he was no longer so successfully self-employed. He also knew that the old woman suffered from dementia, a kind in a mild early stage that was losing the race to ruin her to the cancer more quickly killing her. He knew all this—he wasn’t proud of his emotions. (Nor was he proud of his life: he was an unmarried freelance business “consultant” in his forties, wasting time others would have used to achieve much and love others.)

Still, the fact that his mother clung to this particular story like a shipwreck survivor does a last piece of wood in the water—that this was what was keeping her afloat, that its (what was the word politicians always used?)
values
were still accessible in her brain long after most others had been washed away—repelled him. If this was what she prized—and if she lived more in movie fantasies than in life—what did it say about him? His fists primed to pummel her only relaxed when the last words of the tale rolled out of his mother’s mouth, and they were always the same—she was as practiced and perfect in her part as a Broadway star in a long-running play: “Mademoiselle! And I was over forty!”

Rick exhaled and rose, hearing the knock that was obviously the
night nurse.

An option beside matricide, of course, had always been available to him, but it had seemed too creepy and even cruel. Now, with his mother lingering longer in life than he had anticipated, it was imperative that he stop the story. And if the best he could do was simply change it to another, so be it.

He’d always heard rumours and hearsay about the service, but now trolled the Internet for actual information, which he found. He was tipped off to a storefront on 23
rd
and Third that had once played host to a hockshop, in the days when people still sold only things and not ideas. It had no official website or phone number; it wasn’t actually illegal but unsavoury enough to have to be discreet about itself. Some court would rule on it eventually. Until then, it was hidden in the back of the small shoe repair store, one so inexpensive and old-fashioned that it—ironically enough—attracted beat cops as clientele. They either suspected nothing or used the clandestine business themselves, the way they did whorehouses, providing “protection.”

When he arrived, Rick had a peculiar sense of having been there before, but he dismissed it as déjà vu or a wistful regret he hadn’t shown up sooner. The paunchy and sixty-something shoe repairman put out a “Closed” sign and took him into the back when he said what his need was. The man closed the door of a cluttered storage space. Half hidden by boxes of shoes was a cabinet that looked not unlike an old card catalogue used before libraries went completely to computers. (Maybe he’d even bought one at auction, Rick thought.) A crude scrawl on an index card taped to the front said simply “Anecdotes.”

“Buying or selling?” the man asked, getting right down to work. He had the kind of accent one didn’t hear much anymore.

Rick was caught off-guard by the lack of formalities but quickly recovered.

“I—buying.”

“Category?”

“Well . . . edifying, I guess. Is that a category?”

“Sorry,” the man said, flatly and with a touch of impatience. “The closest I can get to that is probably Inspirational.”

“Religious, you mean? No, that wouldn’t be right.”

“Well, there’s two sub-cats: Inspirational-slash-Religious and Inspirational-slash-Secular.”

Rick felt he wasn’t being given time to think. (Or to reconsider?) Maybe it was better this way. “The second one.”

“Okay. Good.” Then the man said, as if to himself, “That’s Lot Number Twenty-Five.”

Rick waited for him to approach the cabinet and offer up some choices, but that wasn’t the way it worked. First he was asked for whom he was buying—presumably people bought for themselves as well as others—and then with gruff tact what “the situation” was. Rick explained compassionately yet directly, and the man nodded once, immediately understanding (there were only so many reasons to replace the expression of experiences) and, after calculating silently, said, “Two days.”

“But—don’t I get to hear—”

“We choose for you. That’s our service. That’s what you’re paying us for.”

The last line was Rick’s blunt cue to cough it up, cash only, and he did. There was no handshake—Rick awkwardly offered one before withdrawing—just a receipt stamped “Bought” and pulled from a pad not unlike a policeman’s ticket book. Maybe the man had gotten it from one of those friendly cops. (And who would want more than a cop to have other anecdotes than his own painful ones, Rick wondered?)

“Thanks,” he said, but it was unnecessary. Still stupidly trying to ingratiate himself, he bought some shoelaces on the way out.

Two days later, the little envelope arrived. It contained a packet filled with solution and a sort of syringe. A tiny booklet of directions—in English and in Chinese—was the only other item. Dutifully following the instructions—and looking at the surprisingly elegant, crosshatched illustrations—he performed the procedure. (He had stayed after the night nurse arrived, and while she read a magazine in the living room, he entered his mother’s dark bedroom. As the old woman slept, he gently rolled the nightgown sleeve up her scrawny arm. The vein was easily found and pierced beneath her wafer-like skin.) The booklet said to give it twelve hours to work, not so much for the new story to take hold but for the old to be subsumed. It was like colouring your hair, Rick thought, remembering concealing the grey in his own, though it took longer.

The next day, he heard with trepidation his mother twice begin the usual story—“It was at a restaurant in Paris”—and each time get no further than the first line (the second time, no further than “restaurant”). Finally, on the third try, he heard her say:

“I was on a crowded subway about twenty years ago. It was in February, around Valentine’s Day. A girl in her twenties came on and sat down next to me. She had a half-flat balloon decorated with hearts tied around her wrist. She had obviously come from an office party and was very drunk and not used to being so. As soon as the car took off, she got a distressed look on her face. Then she vomited all over the floor. People scrambled into each other running to avoid her and it. But I unfolded a page of the newspaper I was reading and carefully laid it down upon the sick. Then I put my arm around the ill—and clearly mortified—girl, and rode with her like that until her stop.”

Afterwards, his mother’s face had the same self-satisfied expression she always wore after the Paris tale (as her voice had been just as smug during the telling). It was as if she had been dubbed by someone else’s voice in a foreign film, or had her lines changed and censored for a TV showing: her essential performance was still the same.

Yet it didn’t matter, not to Rick. As he heard her story—and heard it again and again, for his mother’s memory hadn’t been improved nor her repetitiveness decreased, only the specifics of what she said replaced—he was moved. He was more than moved, he found himself feeling something he hadn’t felt for his mother in years, not since the days when he was young, his father still alive, and her acquisitiveness and shallowness were not so intractably in place—when she could still surprise him with a sudden show of warmth and kindness. He felt love.

It was a lucky and last-minute love. As he helped her into bed that night, he sensed her slip beneath the silk sheets with finality: hers was like a body poured from a ship under the waves. She disappeared inside their liquid flutter, and before she fell asleep, she died.