Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

T
he airport’s automatic door goes
shhht,
and Matt steps out into the held breath of midsummer in Toronto. Yeck. He plants his feet, waits for the wooze to pass. At the end of each arm a suitcase tugs at his slippery grip.

Come on
down.

Matt raises his eyes. A jet slopes up into the fuzzy dusk over the parkade. “Lucky clowns,” he mutters. Where might they be headed? Back west where he’s come from, into earlier, into the afternoon? Or east, eveningwards? Away from this place anyway, where past and future are both clonged on the anvil of the present.

Jeezuz aitch, he really is feeling odd. It must be more than this hasty escape, this batty mission …

Shhht.
“‘Scuse me there, bud.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Matt shuffles forward a few feet, obliges himself to breathe. It’s been a while, he usually times his visits to avoid this nonsense. During the descent the captain crackled something about thirty-three degrees Celsius, forty-four with the humidex. There didn’t used to be a humidex, did there? There didn’t used to be a kajillion cars huffing hydrocarbons either. Or maybe it’s just that he’s older now. Maybe it’s just that he’s old.

Forty-four, is that old? Hey, if he were dead he’d be young.
Only forty-four, that’s so sad!
Some comfort. A curious age, forty-four, neither one thing nor another. Or call it both. A dollop each of life and death whirred up together and served with a silly cocktail straw.

Unless he
is
dead, could that be it? When your life’s over, what else do you call it? In which case what he’s looking for here is a rebirth, a reincarnation. Will Mariko be around this time too? Will she be his wife again, and put him through the same ordeal? “You keep coming back to earth till you
learn,”
she’s told him, but she hasn’t told him what. Or maybe she’ll be his sister this time, or his father, or his friend.

Forty-four degrees, that’s hot. What would it be in real numbers, in old-fashioned Fahrenheit? Multiply by one-point-something, add whatever. Matt puts down a bag to swipe at a tickle of sweat on his forehead. He’s been stewing in his own brine for hours, feverish, shaky—it’s a relief to have an excuse now, and to see everybody else dissolving too. Melting, Wicked Witch of the West–style, into the foul puddle of themselves. If he’s sick, well, so’s the city. If he’s going to burn, at least he won’t burn alone. Hey, we’re all in this together …

It’s so weird. You journey from where you live to where you once lived. Are you away? Are you home? Why did you leave? Why have you come back?

Matt cranks his head slowly left, then right, wary of the whirlies. Cars and shuttles jockey for position at the curb; travellers dart and weave, each one a rattled survivor towing his or her black box. A paunchy guy in a crossing-guard getup stumps over his way. Matt has the bewildering urge to embrace him.

“Cab, sir?”

“Right, you bet. But first a question. Where’s the … what have you done with the
air?”

The limo lummox favours him with a rigid, end-of-shift smile. He beckons an idling car with a flick of his walkie-talkie. “First visit to our fair city, sir?”

“Actually, I was born here. I grew up here. Sometimes—”

“Enjoy your stay, sir.”

“Oh, right. Thanks.”

A cab pulls up and a youngish man in a purple turban emerges from its far side. Matt gratefully, almost tearfully relinquishes his bags and folds himself into the back seat. Leather, cold against the wet lumbar of his shirt, cool beneath his palms. The leather’s creased like a palm too, fissured with history. So many fannies. Matt makes a few Brando-like noises (pained, impacted), thinking
On the Waterfront,
the primal cab scene.
I coulda been—

“Sir?” The cabbie jabs some buttons, sets the meter clicking.

Matt has to crane to make out the guy’s name on the dash decal. Mariko once told him you got better service if you used names, and though Matt generally resists her little blurts of wisdom—not because they’re misguided but because they aren’t, because they’re so effortlessly true—he’s glommed onto this one. Waiters, tellers, clerks, he chums them all. It doesn’t work, at least it doesn’t open them up much, but it does something even more miraculous: it opens
him
up. It calms him, collapses the distance. “Yeah, um, Jatinder?”
Too
close, is what he feels today. Over-close to everybody. “I’m thinking … I need to lie down soon. Very soon. Could you recommend a hotel nearby?”

“Of course, sir. No trouble.” A quick shoulder-check and they zag into traffic. And there’s that girl from the flight, the Unaccompanied Minor. Hey, why didn’t he get her name? She’s got her father with her now, a big scruffy brute, not quite Matt’s height but broader, beamier. About the size of Matt’s dad before he hit eighty (can it be almost a decade ago?) and swiftly shrivelled, like one of his own tar-caked lungs. Eighty-eight. A big year for the both of them, the boy starting to catch up now, half the age of his old man. A presage of some sort, so says Mariko. A turning point. The girl stalks the crosswalk, permits Pops to lumber along beside her with her suitcase. He’s had her about ten minutes and you can see he’s already flummoxed. Matt registers a slight tremor of relief—in advance of the customary quake of sorrow—at the thought that he has no kids to panic about. He palms the window, hoping for a high-five with the girl, but she’s gone.

“And what brings you to Toronto, sir?”

“Pardon me? Oh, an old friend.”

“Ah.”

“My plan was to drop in on him, surprise him. See, he’s sick. He’s letting himself die.” Matt shakes his head, wishes he hadn’t. “I have to stop him.” Wow, that does sort of sum it up. Has it ever sunk all the way in before? “But now it looks like
I’m
sick, so.”

“Ah.”

Do you tell people what’s really going on with the guy? Do you keep it to yourself? “Yeah, cough on the man and I’d probably kill him. Not much of an immune system.”

They were lounging against a pair of tombstones, he and Zane, the day Zane told him—about being positive that is, not about his plan to pack it in. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a favourite hangout back when they were teenagers. “Don’t panic,” Zane reassured him once he’d hit him with the news. “You can have my albums.”

“Seriously?” said Matt. “Even the Abba?”

“Damn straight.”

“Wow, thanks.” Matt went to slurp from his peanut butter jar—they’d brewed up rum and Cokes, old times’ sake—but his hand had gone wobbly on him. “Just my luck you’ll
live
or something, though.”

Zane shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Never know,” said Matt. He had another go at his drink, both hands. “These new drugs, you take them and you’re good, right?”

Zane nodded. He did nod, didn’t he? Then he started bopping around, trying for an Abba-type effect, the mickey as microphone.

“That’s Freddie Mercury,” said Matt. “You really can’t do anybody but Queen, can you?”

“Fuggoff,” said Zane.

“You fuggoff.”

Which was what, two years ago? Almost, it was autumn 2001, Matt in town for his dad’s eighty-seventh birthday. Eight plus seven is fifteen candles, five breaths to blow them out.

Jatinder’s taken to humming to himself now, something sweet and poppy. You could imagine it was Abba—“Mamma Mia”?—if you really put your mind to it. “Hey,” says Matt, “so you’re … That accent, India?”

“Correct, sir. Mumbai. It used to be Bombay.
Shit-for-brains.
”

“Hey there, buddy, I was just … Oh, I see. Sorry. Toronto drivers, eh?” Matt flinches as Jatinder tight-squeezes past the offending vehicle. “So, Mumbai. Hot, I guess?”

“In the humid season, very hot. And crowded.” Jatinder tsks, performs an odd shovelling motion with his free hand—he might be scooping spilled ash from a countertop. “Take about half the people in Canada? Now crush them into Toronto.” A fist.

“Yikes.” Matt’s never really been anywhere. Well, Europe with a backpack after high school, he and Zane, the done thing in those days. Late ‘70s. Matt flashes briefly on that arrival scene, not at Heathrow but at Calais, he and Zane staggering off the ferry after their riotous trip across the Channel to France. They’d checked off England and were ready for the real thing, a big world in which nobody else would understand.
Bonjour. Guten Tag. Ciao. Hola. Al-salaam alaykum.
They’d shared the ferry with a gaggle of French school kids, all busy barfing up Coke and chips. A chain reaction—one spewed and that inspired the next, and so on. Matt and Zane spent the whole trip tuning up their gagging noises, translating them into various tongues. By the time they docked they could ralph in most European languages, plus Russian, Japanese, a few others. Matt’s mum had a friend from Iceland so that was his specialty,
hœööööörrnnn
…

But other than that one big trip? Not much. A couple of Vegas weekends with Meg, an Alaska cruise with Cat, two or three daiquiri-infused getaways with Mariko. Nothing to help Matt fathom the kind of human density Jatinder’s talking about.

Movies, of course, and TV. Zane’s documentaries have come closest. He’s covered three continents so far, South America, Asia, Africa, each piece a fresh fusion of rage and dismay. There was Rio, there was Jakarta, and now there’s Lagos in Nigeria, Shanumi’s story. Always with the stats: this many infected, this many dead, this many orphaned. Numbing numbers. Say-uncle numbers.

“Anything in particular you’re looking for, sir?”

“Not really. Someplace not too scuzzy but not, you know, crazy either. I’m on a budget. Actually no, I’m
not
on a budget, that’s the problem. So what’s my best bet?”

Jatinder—Jat to his dear ones, Matt figures—imparts a pensive tilt to his head. “Well, there’s the Delta.”

Matt adores this accent, Jat’s accent, which he thinks of, for some reason, as spherical. Planet-shaped. And hey, maybe there’s something to that. Toronto, Mumbai, they’d be pretty much opposites, wouldn’t they, pretty much antipodes? Put a palm on each and you could hoist the whole world, couldn’t you?

But what Matt loves most about this accent is that he can do it. Well, he can come close. He and Zane picked it up about thirty years ago (criminy) from their beloved Mr. Kumar, the wry chess wizard who push-broomed the halls of their high school. Mr. Kumar was an unrecognized genius, so when he recognized
them,
recognized Matt and Zane—fired a wink their way when they’d been smoking in the stairwell, scooted them in the back door when they were running late—didn’t that mean they were geniuses too? Too soon to say what kind of geniuses (they both sucked at chess), but that would come clear in time. Mr. Kumar was their man, and they’d mimic him whenever they were alone together, taking on his mystique, they hoped, through a kind of sympathetic magic. They’ve been doing it over the phone again recently, conjuring the past as the future goes bizarre on them.