Famous Last Meals (9 page)

“Don't you, like, have to win an election or something first? Or do you get picked?”

He assured her that getting elected was going to be the least of his problems.

“That's right,” said a familiar voice coming from behind them. He turned to look over his shoulder. It was Emma. He missed placing his next bet, not that he had many chips left.

“What are you doing here?”

“Same as you. So, have you decided yet?”

“Yes, I'm putting it all on thirteen.”

“About running in the by-election.”

He looked at her straight on. He was reminded of their first exchange on Sparks Street, when she had told him that she was keeping an eye on him. “We don't quite have a bead on you yet.” Well, she—they—had a “bead” on Adam Lerner now. He was in their crosshairs. She waved at somebody across the room. Adam looked over and saw the others, Gilles, Pookie, Isaac, Eugène, Jean-Marc, Oliver. What a remarkably average-
looking group they made. Did they know as much as Emma did about his impending decision? And why him? He was the least political of them all. He had no idea how to run for office, what his staff would have to do. He liked gathering information, but didn't care what it was used for. They wanted someone they could manipulate, someone naïve, bland, visibly attractive but not arresting, someone who would go down smoothly with the electorate, someone they wouldn't have to think too much about. Well, he would see about that. He would show them. But when he tried to formulate that next thought, the “what” he would be showing them, he drew
a blank.

Then he heard himself say, “Yes, I've decided. I'm going to do it,” as if hearing someone else, and Emma grabbed his upper arm with both her hands. “You'll need a chief of staff, someone with an administrative background. I'd be perfect, Adam. I have all these ideas about reforming the electoral process and getting better representation. Just think about it. Keep me in mind. We'd be perfect together. You might need some media coaching. I don't know, I've never heard you speak in public, but I bet you're great. If you did need some pointers, though—those scrums can be deadly, you have to think in three-second sound bites. I did my first degree in communication. Oh, Adam, this is so right on. Hey, you guys!”

They were all crowding around now, congratulating him, giving him hugs and good-natured punches on the shoulder. Eugène promised to teach him to speak French in two weeks. No one aside from Emma tried to pitch him for a job in his parliamentary office, but the air was charged with anticipation. When he said that he hadn't won yet, they laughed. Of course he would win, they said. But why was Don pulling out? What reason would Feeney give the press? None of them seemed concerned.

The
PM
was supposed to arrive the next day. Adam had never talked to him before. Would he remember Adam walking out of the reception for Lorne? He would expect Adam to be coherent, intelligent, informed. Didn't he have to live in the community he would be representing?

“You'll take ownership of the property that's in Don's name,” said Pookie. “I heard Monica talking about it. It's a trailer or a cottage or something. You have to pay a dollar for it. You do have a loonie left, don't you? Tell me you haven't lost it all.”

Nomination meeting, residency rules, duties, parliamentary procedure, rules of order, the passage of bills, committee work, party discipline—he tried to remember everything he had studied in grade ten history, when the teacher had tried to get the class excited about Canadian politics. The teacher had pulled out a board game thinking that the competition would make it enjoyable, but they were at age fifteen about as interested in politics as they were in the administration of pension funds.

The group dispersed. He saw his hostess, Tracy, talking to a middle-aged man, and Adam longed for those first moments, innocent by comparison, when she and he had found simple things to talk about. She reminded him of a crush he'd had in high school. There had been a couple of serious infatuations and one long-term thing that had lasted for two years at university until she went back to be with someone she had never told him about, an old flame who flared up just when her passion for him was waning. Mostly, though, he had friends who were female. He liked their company. He liked being thought of as good company, a pal, someone not likely to complicate matters with sex or love or, heaven forbid, both. It worried him sometimes. Would he ever fall in love with a woman who would be equally in love with him, and would it be something that would last?

After everyone else had dispersed, Emma convinced him to come with her up to her room to work on his presentation. She said she had something Monica had asked her to prepare for him, some things to say in front of the cameras when it came time to announce his candidacy, which was going to be very soon, she said. Lorne wanted it to happen the next day if he was ready.

They left the gaming tables and went to her room and immediately she began pulling his shirt off over his head without unbuttoning it, yanking his pants and underwear down, making whimpering noises, little stifled screams.

A number of times he looked at her and thought that he loved her, almost said it, may have said it, he couldn't be sure, the inside and the outside of him being indistinguishable as they moved in unison. He felt that every image that flashed in his head was immediately translated into words and spoken aloud at the top of his voice, and that somehow she was speaking through him, with him, as a single voice. How could it be that joined like that to her he could so completely forget who she was and what her motivations were?

Later he thought,
Wasted
. This is what addicts meant when they said they were wasted. Had there been a fire alarm at that moment he would not have been able to answer its call, don his clothes, put one foot in front of the other, one thought in front of the next. She lay with one arm flung over his bare chest, her face nuzzling the soft flesh where the pectoral muscle formed the pit of his arm.

“This is my new favourite place,” she said. “I'm not moving from here.”

He began to drift asleep and felt her trying to rouse him. Waking and dreaming became a liquid suspension. He sat up with a start, confused, heart racing, the alcohol (how many had he had?) making him believe that he could speak Arabic if he tried, but that if he did, terrible things would happen.

Groggy, still drunk, depleted, sticky, ridiculous in the bathroom mirror, he caught sight of himself trying to gather his clothes.

“Can I see you in the morning?”

“It is the morning,” she said.

“When did you move rooms? Why are you in this hotel, too?”

“Everybody moved. I don't know why. Nicer rooms, better service.”

“I don't understand what's happening.”

“Why does it matter?”

“It just does. This is all so bizarre. I feel like I've got no say in anything. How do I know…”

“How do you know what?”

“No, it's nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“How do I know … if I can even trust you? I mean, this, you and me, it all happened so fast.”

“Maybe you better leave. Now. Please go.” She opened her mouth and closed her eyes and for the longest time no sound emerged.

“Emma.”

“Get out!”

He hesitated a moment on the other side of the door. He could hear her crying.

When he got to his room, the phone was ringing. He said, “Emma, look, I'm sorry but I really don't know what's happening,” before his father cut in.

He apologized for calling again so late, but it occurred to him that Adam had more to say.

“No, Dad, I don't think so. Everything's good here.” The room looked impersonal, alien.

I have an ally, he thought, the notion undoing what remained of his composure, and he began to weep as openly and as childishly as he had heard Emma cry.

“I'm sorry, Dad,” he was finally able to say. “You must think I'm losing my mind.”

“No, no, not at all, son. You're under some pressure there. We understand.”

“I'll be home right after the vote. Only three days away.”

How was he going to hold out until then? He thought about Emma, fought back the urge to return to her room. Then everything, even the feeling he had had while talking to his father, curdled in an instant. All he wanted was to be home, where he could sleep late, read unassigned books, throw sticks for the dog to fetch, go to movies and pubs, not read anything in the newspaper except for the arts section and the funnies. Get a job, maybe in advertising. Find an apartment. Try his hand at writing. Put as much distance as possible between him and this darkening brown dream. It
was
becoming more dreamlike the longer he sat watching the blur of the fogged-in dawn. It wasn't real. He owed no one a thing. It wasn't as if they had paid him money. He would arrive home to find that it had all been a fiction, surely. Would he finally be awake?

In the morning Adam went downstairs to get a newspaper and something to eat. The newspaper box was in front of the hotel, near the semi-circular drive where cars could pull up under the overhang and unload. A bus was idling there. He walked out and knocked on the door. When it opened he asked the driver where he was going.

“Halifax International. Moncton eventually.”

“How much for a one-way?”

The fare was more cash than Adam had in his wallet, but the man said he would take a cheque. Adam got him to wait while he ran back inside for his things.

“Four minutes. If you're not back by then, all you'll see will be tail lights.”

The bus driver was a big man with a puffy face into which his eyes were sunk like dark pebbles in putty, a toothbrush moustache, a gut that hauled his spine out of alignment, and an attitude toward his passengers that was undisguised contempt. When he spoke it was to announce place names as if they were items on a list of communicable diseases. No one was allowed to sit directly behind him, because in those two seats he stowed the jacket of his uniform and a leather satchel, no doubt containing top-secret bus-company documents. Not until all the other seats had been filled did he grudgingly remove his things from that seat and stow them in the overhead compartment.

A requirement of the job was to pick up and deliver parcels sent via the bus to the depot stops, usually a gas station or a convenience store, often the two combined, strung along the route, and when he did heave his considerable bulk out of his seat, out of the vehicle, across whatever breathtaking expanse lay between him and the depot, it looked like the last walk of a condemned man. It appeared to be so painful, his shuffling stride, his belly moving independent of the rest of him, his back apparently in dislocation as a result of the weight pulling it forward and down, that Adam stopped
watching him.

In Truro a man got on and tried sitting in the seat behind the driver. Redirected he sat beside Adam. He said his name was Alexei. He had dark curly hair, a trimmed moustache that was fuller and more attractive than the bus driver's, oil-stained fingers and black plastic-rimmed glasses with one of the lenses cracked.

Alexei said he owned a truck and made a living moving things for people. Most of what he talked about had to do with mechanical matters: a motorcycle he had bought and was restoring and assembling; diesel trains; an annoying camera that beeped when the flash was primed but which failed to operate if the electronic sound component malfunctioned. He fixed it by removing the tiny circuit board that governed the beep. Adam could not place his accent. Perhaps French Swiss? A hint of Afrikaner?

Alexei restored old bicycles for people, more as a conservational, car-reducing measure than as a business. In fact he seemed committed to making as little money as possible. He described old passenger rail cars he had seen recently in the Annapolis Valley. They had been newly painted with gold lettering on purple. He called it their livery as if referring to a horse and rider decked out in their stable's silks. He spoke at length about automobiles of a certain vintage, but not just any old cars. He was interested above all in innovation. Renault, for example, had built a modular car a few years back in which the left back side panel, say, could fit the right front or any other quadrant, reducing the number of different components any factory or repair facility would have to stock. It frustrated him, as it would any thoughtful person concerned with efficiency and waste reduction, that so much of what we buy today—radios,
CD
players, toasters—can't be easily repaired. It would cost more, for example, to fix the music player Adam had in his bedroom than to scrap it and buy a new one. Where older appliances and the more expensive current models were made out of metal and had parts held together with screws, today's toaster was made of modular plastic parts fused and attached with rivets, since it was so much easier to design a production robot that put modules together with a simple rivet gun than to have one turning tiny screws into place. What was the true cost of the downward spiral that business had created by moving away from reparable appliances?

The result, Alexei answered himself, was that workers were paid less and less because they were doing less skilled work than had their predecessors, and so could not afford to buy the better made items, those assembled with screws. Thus was perpetuated a culture of diminishing value. Items broke sooner, had to be replaced sooner, went to landfills sooner, all because they couldn't be replaced economically. The trend toward managed obsolescence extended even to fruit. Apple growers in British Columbia, said Alexei, tried to get their produce to ripen all at once to maximize their sales to the US market. Consumers in California wanted their BC Delicious apple to look and taste a certain way, to be of a uniform size, and so the trees were sprayed all at once with a maturing hormone. Apple pickers sat around until the appointed day, when they would go madly to work, an army of them competing during a relatively short period of time to pick as many apples as they could. The trees themselves were pruned to grow in two dimensions, rather than three, to facilitate picking, and so tended to keel over in high winds.