Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (2 page)

Tonight Matt has the almost unmasterable urge to give that accent a go, see how ol’ Jatinder takes it. With any luck he’ll come right back with a Matt-like accent, a honky Canuck, rude and unremarkable as it may be. Couple of
oot
s, couple of
aboot
s. They’ll switch, they’ll swap, they’ll
become one another.

“Then there’s the Holiday Inn. The Quality. The Comfort.”

Light standards strobe past in slo-mo (traffic’s at a tetchy crawl tonight), shadows slap Matt’s wincing face. The dusk is deep enough, now, for a gibbous moon—just about full? just past?—to make its appearance low over the oncoming lanes. The moon? Here in the city she’s just another street lamp, the poor old girl. She’s just another bulb that wants changing once a month.

It’s so different at home. At home—the other home, the little patch of west coast paradise Matt still shares with Mariko—the moon’s a great big deal. One evening every month or so Mariko will snuff out all the artificial lights, tease Matt out into the field at the heart of their tiny forest and get him to squat with her in the “loon-light,” as she calls it. Play primitive, play primordial. Far from the city’s smog-glow there’s nothing to hide the universe from them, or them from the universe. There’s nothing between skin and sky, between their two bodies and that obliterating bigness.

Has Sophie been initiated yet? Tonight, maybe. Yeah, maybe tonight. Under this very moon she and Mariko will sink into some goddess-worshippy trance, some pagan sacrament or ceremony. Crone-song, crone-dance, who knows. All that holiness will get them good and horny, and they’ll troop together up to the moon-streaked bed …

“The Courtyard. The Crowne Plaza.”

India’s next, apparently, in terms of body count. Right behind Africa and gaining fast. Odds are Zane’ll be heading there before long, with his conscience and his movie camera. That’s assuming Matt can convince him to live, of course. A million cases so far, did he say? A billion? A kajillion?

“The Sheraton. The Sandman.”

Matt shivers, suddenly sno-cone cold. “Jat, you know what?” he says in his own nothing voice. “Wherever. Just take me there.”

He was fine when he left home this morning. Mariko drove him, an in-town day for her anyway. He was fine as they crept onto the ferry, fine as they churned across that half-hour of docile sea, fine as they crept off again in Vancouver. He was fine as they effected their no-big-deal goodbye at the departure gate, jets rumbling in and out overhead.

Fine? Fine-ish. Only moderately freaked out. They shared a dry smooch and the sort of back-patting hug you’d normally reserve for an over-clutchy colleague. Such is the stringency of the current setup at home (Matt batching it on the futon in his study, Mariko alone in their bed) that this whisper of contact was enough to conjure a brief, pointless perk-up in his cords. No sense bumming either of them out any further, so Matt steered her away before she could detect his arousal, there under the smirking scrutiny of that Native nature god. Musqueam, maybe? One of those coastal bands. It might be a raven up there, or a beaver, or a bear—Matt never remembers to focus, so he’s left with just the bulging eyes, the heaped slabs of red and black. The imagery was bang on, Mariko’s spiritual deal being so mystifyingly Indigenous these days—a sort of New Age shamanism, as best Matt can figure it, entitling you to wear beads and bits of buckskin along with your hemp and your hanging crystals. All Sophie’s doing, no doubt, though she’s about as Aboriginal as the Queen. On Mariko, more’s the pity, this cultural mishmash looks like some sublime union, some transcendent synthesis. It’s as though adepts of every faith have laid hands on her, hung her with their symbols. And then the high heels …

Bloody hell.

She said, “Give my love to Zane, eh? I know you’ll change his mind.”

Which brought on a brand new squirm of doubt. Matt had pretty much persuaded himself that Zane’s death was reversible, that one-on-one he could compel his friend to see the obvious: that letting yourself die was lame, that even the most saintly motivations were pathetic. When Mariko put it like that though, expressed it as an act of faith, Matt suddenly lost his. At what stage had their marriage started to work that way?

“But if not,” she said, “you’ll be all right, right?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“I’ll be fine.”

That would have been the moment. If she were going to cry, that would have been the time. You could see her refusing—an act of kindness, you could see that too, her sparing him the scene.

She said, “Got some gum?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”

He was busy picturing it all in reverse. He was busy picturing a future in which this past would be perfectly rewound. He’d be home again, boomeranged across the country and back. She’d be there to meet him and she’d instantly read the new conviction in his eyes. The old conviction. It was this very airport, after all, into which they’d walked together the day they met on that flight from Toronto. Seven years ago? Almost exactly, that was summertime too.

MAH-ree-koh. Matt practised it on his bus ride alone into town that day. Chanted it almost, MAH-ree-koh, his new mantra, his one and only mantra. Next morning he checked it out in a baby-name book. “Rounded. Circle. Complete.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I hope you get a decent movie. Something you can really tear apart.” She grinned, and she gave him one last peck, and she backpedalled into the crowd. She looked … what did she look? Sad, sure, but I’ve-changed-my-mind-don’t-go sad or have-a-nice-life sad? Maybe he should have asked. Was she waiting for him to ask?

And he was fine as he trod the long chute, the syringe that injected them one by one into the glossy body of the machine. He’d boarded last (why submit before your time?) and was therefore required to do the excuse-me shuffle, back in Economy, with the girl in the aisle seat to get to his window. Yep, still fine. Better than fine, he actually felt a little fizzy for the first time in ages. Did this mean it was really over, his time with Mariko? The end of each relationship brings with it, Matt’s noticed, a euphoria that’s the flip side of the one he felt at the start. Fission, fusion, they both give you a buzz. For a little while, at least, the raw shock of grief can be made to look like rapture.

Girl? Young lady? She was old enough to have two little hummocks tenting her tube top, young enough to have that “UM” sign hung like press certification around her neck. Matt, moronic in these matters, put her at eleven. If he had a daughter, might she be this age? Eleven from 2003 is 1992, so Caitlin? No. Nosiree. Of all Matt’s women, Cat was the most motherly, but also the most appalled by the prospect of …

All Matt’s women,
yeah, good one. Not counting Hanna-and-Helena—would that be one or two?—he’s had four.
Four,
at forty-four. What a farce. This sexual stinginess will help scholars of the future (so Matt fancies, when he’s up for a rueful laugh at his own expense) dice his life into neat chunks or chapters. The way they do with Bergman and his films for instance, into the Harriet period, the Bibi period, the Käbi period, the Liv period.
Kritikal Stages: The Life and Work of Matthew McKay.
No, but seriously, could a guy get any lamer? Four partners, four potential mums for all his phantom kids.

Miss Unaccompanied wriggled into position, scissored one goose-pimpled thigh over the other. She’d rack up a greater roll call of lovers by the time she could vote. Vote? By the time she could
drive.

Back at airport security Matt had chatted briefly with a young woman, a twenty-five-ish Goldie Hawn type who’d inspired in him the predictable little sexual frisson. Hey, a guy gets cuckolded (is that still the word when the other man’s a woman?), the coast is pretty damn clear, no? But what Matt did about it, as always, was nothing. Why is nothing what he always does? Matt’s never bought into Mariko’s notion that what makes him so unadventurous with women is virtue. More like some kind of hard-wired fidelity fetish, is what he figures. Today, though, as that young woman raised her slender arms for the brute with the beeper, it occurred to him, why not? Why shouldn’t this seeming backwardness be a sign of resolution, of character? Mariko’s always thought more highly of Matt than he’s thought of himself. She’s righter than Matt about most things, so why shouldn’t she be righter about this too? Such were his musings as Goldie was led to the counter and directed to open her backpack. From it she produced a huge, a
monolithic
blue dildo, which she was made to switch on to prove it wasn’t stuffed with explosives. As the thing writhed and bobbed before her Goldie looked back at Matt, and she giggled …

“Sorry.”

“What? Oh, no worries.” The umgirl, still squirming, had dinged Matt in the arm. Of more concern to Matt were his legs. What the heck was he supposed to do with them? Back in her sketching phase, Mariko had once dashed off a pen-and-ink nude of her husband and magneted the resulting masterpiece (it really was quite good, unnervingly so) to the fridge. The Matt up there was all appendage, a knot of torso from which great squiggles of limb flew off. Mariko had labelled it “My Beautiful Man,” and she’d meant it—she was never ironic in her adoration of Matt, never ironic about much of anything. To Matt, though, the drawing was a perfectly apt caricature, a right-on view of how ridiculous he was—a view of which he was reminded, now, by the grinding of his knees against moulded plastic.

He tight-crossed his legs, scrunched them up against the fuselage. “First trip?” he said. Buddy-buddy with just a hint, he hoped, of the avuncular, of the warmly uncle-ish. How do you not sound like a creep to a kid alone? How do you come off as unscary to a child who’s heard the lecture, seen the film?

“Um, no,” she said. “I do this trip all the time.” She freed her hair from its ponytail, held out a hank so she could assess its colour (black with arteries of orange, a Halloween motif), or perhaps the condition of its tips.

“Right,” said Matt. “Of course you do. Routine.”

The girl re-ponied her hair, gave Matt an appraising flash of her pale grey eyes. Mascara, but just barely—a marvel of understatement, of near-ascetic restraint. Twelve? “My mum’s on the west coast,” she said, apparently not detecting anything overtly spooky about the dork next to her. “My dad’s in T.O.”

“Going to see Pops, eh? Me too.”

The girl shrugged. She fished the in-flight magazine from the pouch on the back of the seat in front of her, started poking at buttons overhead in search of the reading lamp. The way she cocked her head …
Shanumi having her one good eye checked, blinking up into the light.
Matt can’t seem to quit watching Zane’s latest documentary—he screened it again last night, his fifth time, or maybe his sixth—and it’s giving him flashbacks now, haunting him like a bad trip.
Shanumi seaside, toddler glued to her thigh, bowing her balding head for a pastor or priest
…

“Please,” said the umgirl, tossing grimly through the magazine in search of the program guide,
“please
tell me I haven’t seen the movie.”

Just then a flight attendant happened by and leaned beaming into their little space. “You two are at the emergency exit,” she said. “That means you’d be first, okay, sir? You’d be the first one out.”

Which is when the fever made its presence felt. Something about that phrase
First one out,
a prophesy rendered irresistible by its sheer lack of content. It produced in Matt a shiver, and then a prickly sweat across his brow under the flap of his floppy hair.
First one out.
Bergman could have done something with that, brought it to dark life on film. Buñuel.

“Breathe normally.” The flight attendant was into her pantomime now, in sync with the safety spiel. “Always secure your own mask before assisting someone else.” It brought to Matt’s mind a bit of fortune-cookie psychology his high school girlfriend, Charlotte Tupper—the first of his four—once fed him.
Smidge of truth to that, but could you really do it? Say he and Mariko had had a kid, say that one false alarm had turned out to be true. She’d be, what, two now? Three? Did they really think he’d help himself to air while she starved for it?

“Flight attendants, please take your positions for takeoff.” Matt grabbed a last peek at the serrated mountains north of the city. Then he sat back and waited for the drone and the roar, for the G-force to flatten him against his seat, relieve him of weight. It was his favourite bit of every trip, one of his favourite of all feelings. The feeling of being … what? Held. Overpowered. The way mystics must feel overpowered by their gods and goddesses, the way women in bodice-rippers must feel overpowered by their raw-jawed ranchers, their sternly tender MDs. Matt gave himself up, briefly, to something so much bigger than himself that there was no contest—something that could kill him if it had a mind to, and to which he could offer up, in supplication, only a stupefied sigh. This feeling, too, was more intense today. Too intense. He was being crushed, coal into diamond. He was all nerve, a gem of pleasure-pain, a nugget of achy joy. And he was dripping like a can of cold pop.