Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (3 page)

Was this the thing called “being sick”? It’d been so long. The acronymed stuff, that’s what you had to watch out for. SARS was ancient history, there’d be something new by now, BIMP or GOOP or WACK or Christ knows what. Some critter would be carrying it, pig or hen or house cat (had Toto, Matt’s full-figured tabby, not been just a little off her kibble of late?), and would already have passed it on to a few humans. Not the standard victims this time, not the young or the old or the poor or the gay or the addicted, but the Matts of this world, white, middle-aged, straight.

Last trip to Toronto, Zane had invited Matt to an AIDS fundraising gala, “Grief Resolvable and Unresolvable.” There was to be music—
Death and the Maiden,
other dismally gorgeous classics—plus movies, cutting-edge stuff like Zane’s. “Special Guest Zane Levin”—that would have been down at the bottom of the poster someplace, where the with-it people would know to look. Theatre folks were scheduled to read out the names of artists who had died of AIDS, or were living with it. Nico, Zane’s partner (ex-partner?), had described the list of infected artists as “infinitely long.” Matt bought a ticket but then bailed. “My dad’s had a … The old man needs me to …”

That list must have horrified Zane, but would it also, Matt wondered—gulping and yawning, praying for his ears to pop—have offered him some comfort? The sense of camaraderie? He could look further back too, check out all those creative consumptives, Keats, Chekhov, Chopin. What was it with art and disease? They were the same thing, could it be that simple? There were tons of sick artists because
art’s a disease.
Certainly artists use disease—this was a point Matt had already made in a couple of his movie reviews
(Elephant Man, Rain Man)
with his usual gusto and grouchiness. And what about this, what if artists have to be sick so they’ll have something to say? Keats without his fevers, Dostoevsky without his fits, who’d care? Maybe Zane on the antiretroviral cocktail wouldn’t be sick enough. And maybe Matt was privy to these wonky, wow-man insights today only because he too was burning up.

Beep-beep-mboop-boop.
Jatinder’s cellphone plays the Cuban classic “Guantanamera.” One world? “Yes, hello,” he murmurs, then switches tongues. “Hi honey, I’ve just picked up my last fare”—Matt’s speculating here. “Some wound-up white guy who wants to play let’s-get-along. Oh and look at this, a fricking accident.”

Yeah, look at this. People are climbing free of two vehicles munched together in the merge lane ahead. A souped-up Mustang or Camaro has buried its snout in the flank of an SUV. Bad omen, except that everybody’s up and barking at one another so maybe a
good
omen, could you see it that way?

“Sorry about this, sir,” says Jatinder. He pockets his phone, cranes for an angle out.

“No, no worries,” says Matt. “What can you do?”

Not much. Ten minutes Matt’s been in T.O. and it’s total gridlock.

And he’s headed the wrong way anyhow. This should really be the ride to Zane’s place.
Surprise!
And then what?
Hey, I’ve thought about snuffing myself the odd time too, you know.
Though it’s just the once that Matt’s ever been serious, a couple of months ago, a week or so after Mariko opened her mouth and said, “Sophie.” Serious? In the sense that he actually saw his own death, saw his body inert, vacant—and slumped over in a beanbag chair, oddly enough, the crappy corduroy one he and Zane shared when they were roomies way back when.
But I thought about Mariko, what it would do to her. And I thought about Dad. And I thought about you.

Mariko. MAH-ree-koh. It’s true, if she’s the reason for Matt to kill himself she’s also the reason he can’t, or one of them anyway. Might Zane be persuaded to feel the same way? Matt’s why he got sick, Matt’s why he’s got to save himself …

“Jatinder?”

“Sir?”

“I was just wondering, could you maybe teach me to say something?”

“Say something, sir?”

“Just like
hello
or something.” Maybe if he tagged along. Maybe if he talked Zane into doing an India trip
together,
the two of them saving people by capturing the disease on film. Death to life, presto chango. The magic of movies.

“Hello?”

“But I mean what language is it where you come from?”

“Hindi.”

“So
hello
in Hindi.”

“Namaste.”

“Namaste.”

“Namaste.”

“And
goodbye?
”

“Namaste.”

“Oh, so it’s like
aloha
or something, you say it for both.
Namaste.
”

And then they could go beyond that, catch some yoga-type enlightenment on film too. What a trip—death and transcendence, Zane’d pretty much have to stick around.

“Shanti,”
says Matt. “That’s Hindi too, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My wife uses it. To sign off letters and things like that.”

“Peace,” says Jatinder. “And silence. Your wife speaks Hindi?”

“No.”

Not hardly. Matt pulls out his cellphone, punches in his home number. This’ll be his first call—he’s only just given in, permitted Mariko to buy him the damn thing, hook him up to what she hails as “the great big world.” God help him.

“Hi, you’ve reached Matt and Mariko, please give us a massage.”

That voice, the one uncomely thing about his wife. Put her in a kimono, jab a couple of chopsticks in her hair and you could pass Mariko off as a Hollywood geisha bending demurely to tip out the tea. Her voice, though, is that of a pickled hussy ordering one last round of shooters on ladies-only night. It’s a thrilling shock, that voice, emerging as it does from such an aerial vessel. It’s still, after seven years, a serious turn-on for Matt. When he isn’t irked by it he’s undone.

Beep.

“Yeah, hey,” says Matt. Now what? “Um, I’ve landed, and I just … I meant to get Toto her shots this week, would you mind? I miss her already. I miss you both.” Christ, break down and weep why don’t you.
If you have Sophie there while I’m gone, tell her to keep her grubby hands off my cat. And if Nagy calls, tell him to take his pissant little paper and shove it up his ass.
“I don’t know, I’m feeling kind of weird, I think I must be sick or something. But everything happens for a reason, right?”
Ahhhhhh!
“Anyway, gotta go. Bye.”

Is it true? Missing, is that what he’s doing about Mariko? He’s missing Toto, no question there. She spared them the custody battle, padded down the hall and established a new favourite spot at the foot of Matt’s futon. Her nonstop attention, almost vapidly intense—this may actually be what’s kept Matt from offing himself so far.

Two ambulances have manoeuvred their way to the scene of the accident, but nobody seems to need strapping down.
Mercy,
this is the word in Matt’s mind. Between two warehouses he spies a stretch of superhighway, folks howling into the city or out of it, three-six-twelve lanes of jointed steel. From up above, as the jet angled in tonight, Matt noted the spaghetti junctions, the cloverleafs. They were E.T. geometry, they were space-invader hieroglyphics—a cursive script in which earthlings were caught but which they couldn’t possibly decipher.

At the other end, as the jet lifted off, the streets of Vancouver had been so bright and glinty he had to turn away. The umgirl had woggled her jaw once or twice to deal with the altitude, old pro, then pulled out a music magazine. The articles (Matt snuck glances, making as though to check for the drink cart) were mostly about rappers, hip-hoppers, but the cover was all David Bowie, one of the boys’ old favourites. At film school Zane had designed his own T-shirt, “A Lad In Zane”—he was just coming out at the time,
way
out—as an obeisance to
Aladdin Sane,
the Bowie album. Hey, maybe that was it, maybe the guy was just insane, just bonkers. Maybe Zane had simply lost his mind.

Matt grinned, tried to stop. Why did his skin feel so funny? He hugged himself—steady, old chum—and tugged his travelling book from his briefcase. What he did first, actually, was he dragged out Mariko’s screenplay, the slab of computer printout with which she’d presented him before they left the Lair this morning. As she’d handed it over she’d offered up all the standard authorial disavowals. “It’s really not very … I know it isn’t exactly your cup of …”
She.
She’d actually titled the thing
She.
Sheesh. Matt turned a few pages, tried to be pleased. How long is it going to take him to get happy about this, about his wife’s (his ex-wife’s?) disturbing new accomplishment? A little longer, it would seem.

Matt grimaced. He stashed the manuscript and pulled out his real book, the snoozer he’d brought along for the ride, another gift from his dad. The Dadinator’s never been anything but baffled and miffed by Matt’s thing for movies. Back in 1944, movie crews helped with Operation Quicksilver: they built a phantom invasionary force (rubber, plywood, papier mâché) in northern England to fool Jerry into anticipating a D-Day landing at the wrong spot. According to Matt’s dad this is the one and only meaningful gift cinema has ever made to civilization. Otherwise it’s all pretty fruity. Over these past few months he’s nonetheless taken to clipping out articles, ordering books and disks and shipping them to Matt complete with scribbled endearments. “Thought of you when I saw this …” Damned if the old guy isn’t going soft.

Crowd Scenes.
A glossy little hardback, the book toured some of cinema’s most memorable hordes—DeMille’s Israelites at the parting of the Red Sea, hippies at Woodstock being warned off a batch of bad acid—and griped about Hollywood mobs, how Hollywood uses them to endorse its humdrum heroes. Pretty standard critical crankiness, but still gratifying. Matt saved his most intense scrutiny, though, for his bookmark, a shopping list in Mariko’s incongruously chunky hand.

Twine would be for Mariko’s sunflowers, so last spring. Sophie, back then, was just another funky young thing slinging coffees at the café, as far as Matt could tell. Them were the days.

Matt allowed his eyelids to flutter shut. He had that flying feeling, not just in the juddering, jet-fuelled sort of way but in the soaring way, the way he did as a boy, up over that dream-Toronto. Like a bird but without the flapping. He’d read once that a flying dream always gave you a hard-on, but he couldn’t recall whether or not this was so. Today it seemed to be giving him a hint of one—a dream of an erection, say—but also a sweetly excruciating awareness of each knuckle of his knobby spine. Each vertebra was a frame of film: if he could just get them all arranged in the wrong order, the perfect reverse, he could go
back
…

The night Zane barfed on his mum’s magazines, maybe? Yeah, that was probably the first time Matt ever bailed his buddy out.

They were about the umgirl’s age, maybe a little older. Zane’s folks were away overnight so the boys had the place to themselves. As usual they flaked out on the Levins’ giant bed, working their way through Mrs. Levin’s collection of
Life
magazines—surfing the net, or as close as you could come in those days. They’d made a stop at the liquor cabinet on the way up and, cunning little twerps that they were, decanted a little each from a whole bunch of bottles, a little rum, a little gin, a little scotch, a little Cointreau, a little Christ knows what. When Zane puked, the good news was that he didn’t get much of it on the white bedspread. The bad news was that he got it all over
Life. Lifes. Lives?

“I’m so dead,” he moaned. “I’m so dead I’m so dead I’m so dead …”

Matt, who’d only guzzled about half his glass, found himself dabbing frantically at a whole gallery of famous faces. Paul Newman clean-cut as Butch Cassidy, Robert Redford doing his tousled Sundance Kid. There were other kinds of pictures too—a couple of big-eyed kids from Biafra, for instance, the place mums went on about when you wouldn’t finish your Kraft Dinner—but most of the cover shots were of movie stars. Richard Burton haunted as Hamlet, Sean Connery almost hideously hairychested as Bond …

When Zane’s folks got home the next morning Matt took the fall. Flu, he called it. He had a crush on Mrs. L., who was perplexingly hot for a mother, but he knew about her temper too. She kind of bought Matt’s lie, kind of didn’t. To seal the deal Matt went into the washroom, stuck a finger down his throat and barfed for real, even getting a verisimilitudinous streak or two on the polka-dot wallpaper. The barfing initiated a little chain reaction in Matt, upsetting his stomach so much that he stayed home from school the next day. Cause and effect gone topsy-turvy.

So there was that, the time Matt made himself sick for his friend. And so many others. What about the time—

“Um, sorry? Oh, I was just … I’ll have the chicken, please.” Matt stirred, clonked his seat into its upright position. Why does he always get the guilts when somebody catches him drifting off? He took a bracing gulp from his Chardonnay, then peeled back the foil and prodded, with his hijacker-proof plastic fork, at the cordon bleu. Starve a cold, feed a fever—or was it the other way around? Out his porthole, cloud was heaped up like ploughed snow, a splash of dog-piddle here and there where the sun had stained it. And suddenly more mountains: shark’s teeth, shards of glass on a compound wall.

“My friend Zane?” he said. He canted his head confidingly in the umgirl’s direction. “The friend I’m visiting this week?”

“I thought you said your dad.”

“Oh, right. Well, I’m visiting both of them, actually. Kind of a twofer. Do you have a best friend?”

“Not really. I have tons of friends, I don’t see why one of them has to be my best.”

So, a spiky bit of business, this youngster. “Huh, see, I was the other way around. Anyway, just say for a sec that you did, that you had a best friend. Twenty years go by and you’re living way far apart but she’s still your best friend, and she’s doing something nuts. Something beautiful but like, barmy, right? And you realize you’re the only one who can stop her.”