Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (31 page)

He gets back from town a little earlier than expected one evening. There they are, the two women stretched out on the phony sheepskin in front of the wood stove, its little window intricately aglow. They’re enacting the uroboros, a pair of snakes swallowing one another’s tail. They look up from their labours … and they smile.

Why not? Why not a full-scale ménage à trois, the three of them setting up house together? Mariko could hardly object. Judging by
She
she’s way into collectivity, and how much more collective could you get? There’d be a grid magneted to the fridge, a spreadsheet specifying chores and sleeping arrangements for each night of the week, Mariko-Matt, Matt-Sophie, Sophie-Mariko (hey, he’d be happy to batch it the odd evening, rest up). Weekends they’d all pile in together. Maybe they’d keep two places, a country place and a
pied-à-terre.
He and Mariko would spend a few days a week in town and then ferry up to the wild retreat, to escape the buzz and re-immerse themselves in youth and estrogen. Sophie’s recycling might get a bit oppressive, but that could be negotiated. Hey, it might not be a bad idea to save the world anyhow. Chances are Sophie would want a baby, and that’d be fine too. The lucky brat would get a brace of mums, one for energy and one for wisdom, one for suckling and one for financial support. In every dimension the family would just keep tipping back to equilibrium.

“Easy there, bud,” says Zane. “Give the guy a break.”

Matt lets up on the accelerator, allows the minivan to pull away. Minivan—that’s probably what they’d need too, what with the four of them.

“Speaking of which,” says Matt, “did you hear the one about the guy who got busted for buggery?”

“If I say yes,” says Zane, “will you spare me the punchline?”

“Found himself a good lawyer and got it reduced. Following too close.”

“Ha,” says Zane. “Ha.”

“But really, what do you … what’s it like?”

This is a question Matt kept meaning to ask Hanna and Helena, back in the day. More recently he’s been trying to screw up the courage to ask Mariko. What’s it like? Sex with Sophie, sex with a woman—sex with somebody who’s like you. Where do you get the friction when you don’t get it from difference?

“Like?” says Zane.

“I’m just trying … See, I prefer to take care of my partner first, and then, you know. Most men do. I researched it one time, I can’t remember the percentage, but you just want to flake out, right? Just drift off? You don’t want to find out you’ve still got all this
work
to do.”

“Matt—”

“So I was just wondering how it goes when it’s two guys.”

“Are you seriously asking me this? Which one of us gets off first, me or Nico?”

“Yeah. I’m doing like an openness-and-intimacy thing here.”

“Right.”

“So do you, I don’t know, maybe take turns? One time he—”

“Matt?”

“Zane?”

But then nothing. Matt makes as though to check his far mirror, and manages a peek at his friend. Zane looks as though he’d be willing to keep up the sparring, but the requisite gusto has plumb gone out of him. He’s got his head rocked back on the rest, his sock feet up on the dash. He’s keeping track of the road ahead through slitted, stoned-looking eyes. After a bit he says, “There isn’t going to be an answer, Matt.”

“Answer to what?”

“Why I’m doing this. Why this is happening to me.”

“Yeah, well,” says Matt. “Hey, you know what? I’m thinking maybe we’ve had our quota of thrills for today. What say we head back, try again tomorrow?”

Zane produces a mini-smile, an appreciative lip twitch. “Thanks, but no. I’m good. Quick doze and Bob’s …”

And he’s gone, lights out. Crazy joof.

Matt drives on alone, trying to take it easy on the bumps. He smiles to himself—following too close, not bad. For one of his early reviews he did some research into those old urban legends about men stuffing hamsters and sundry other rodents up their bums. He never found anything to corroborate these tales, but he did manage to rustle up an impressive list of objects that men, both gay and straight, were reported to have introduced into their rear ends. He worked up a pretty good riff about orifices—“two-way portals, crossings at the border of me and not-me”—how we use them both to foster and to destroy identity. Nagy made him drop the whole thing, on the basis that it didn’t pertain to the
movie,
whatever that might have been. Coward.

Zane—Hebrew variant of John. God’s gracious gift. Matt tries it on him now, “God’s gracious gift,” grabbing another glance over his way. But he’s zonkered, mouth an elongated O. Munch’s nap.

“What if nobody’s to blame, not even me?” says Matt.

Nada.

“Why do you always have to
do
something? Why can’t you just
live
with stuff like the rest of us do?”

Zip.

Matt’s got one true fan, he can hardly afford to ignore the guy. He took a few moments this morning, striving for kool.

Matt had to poke around on the web for quite a while to find the apposite sign-off,
ciao for now. Gtg
was another option, but
got to go
felt kind of brusque, and kool as he is Matt couldn’t quite talk himself into
ld. Later dude.
Maybe later.

Ford. Chrysler. Dodge. GM.

Wendy’s. McDonald’s. KFC. DQ.

This could still be Canada, but it isn’t. They’re on the other side now, where all this stuff comes from. They’ve made it across.

Not by much, mind you.

“What the hell was
that?”
says Zane.

“Gimme a break.”

He was so cool most of the way, Matt was. Not much traffic, so they cruised effortlessly over the bridge, craning to take in the foam-marbled river, the postcard-ready froth of the falls.

“Five billion gallons an hour,” said Zane. “We did the little boat ride on our honeymoon. The tourist thing.”

“Gosh, that’s so sweet.”

“What we couldn’t figure out was, whose water is this? Is this Canadian water or American water?”

“That there’s God’s water, son.”

“Oh.”

The border guy was decent, no big deal. Licence and registration? How long will you be in the country? What is the purpose of your trip?

Purpose of your trip—that’s the one that got Matt. That’s the one that for some reason caused him to flash on the gun under his seat, and forthwith to panic.

“Pleasure,” he said. So far so good. But then, “Hey, why don’t you test us or something?”

“Pardon me?” The guard was instantly tense, giant jaw cording up. Christ. This is what you
don’t
do. You don’t get smart, you don’t go off script.

“I just mean, you know. Quiz us. See if we deserve to get in?” Matt’s plan must have been to disorient the guy, distract him from the whole idea of a search. Brilliant, just effing brilliant.

There was an alarm button nearby, presumably, for which the guard’s finger was no doubt itching. Or perhaps he was fixing to draw. Matt briefly envisioned himself grabbing for Zane’s pistol, having it out with this dude the old-fashioned way,
peow-peow-peow.

“Something about movies, maybe,” said Matt. “You guys
are
the movies, right? You Americans? So shouldn’t you test people on the movies before you let them in?”

It could have gone either way. The frown on the guard said
full body search,
no question. But the frown, oddly enough, was fading. A bit of movie trivia had come to him, you could tell. He didn’t want to see it go to waste. He performed a quick three-sixty, checking on his buddies in their own little booths. Then, leaning conspiratorially in, he said, “What was
The Birth of a Nation”
—holding up a careful-now finger—“before it was
The Birth of a Nation?”

“The
Clan,”
said Matt. Yes! No, wait. Black guy. Was it wise to know this?

The guard grinned. “Big fan, are you? Got your bedsheets in the back?”

“Hardly,” said Matt, with what he hoped was a comradely chuckle. “Listen, we’re film guys, so, you know … the technical innovations and everything. The night shot. The tracking shot.”

“Ah, the tracking shot,” said the guard. “I see. That’s probably why the KKK likes it too. Not the lynchings or any of that, not the tips on how to tame a crazed darky, keep him off your white woman. No, it’s the
tracking
shot.”

“I was just, I just meant—”

“Yes?”

Zane. Zane?

Zane cleared his throat. “My friend here?” he said. “He’s a complete moron.
Complete,
believe me. The thing is though, he’s not a bedsheet kind of a guy. He just isn’t. He’s actually kind of decent.”

The guard leaned further in, peered over at Zane. He made a gun-finger, aimed it at him. “And I’d believe you why?”

“I don’t know. Brotherly love?” said Zane.

“Yeah, brotherly love,” said Matt.

The guard grimaced. He uncocked his finger, leaned back out of the car. “The
Clansman,”
he said. “Get it right next time.” And he waved them on through.

Zane’s still shaking his head in disbelief, relishing Matt’s idiocy. “I mean have you lost your
mind?”

They’re out the other side of town now, things are going rural again. No relief from the weather—America, it turns out, is under the same single-minded sky.

“The gun,” says Matt. “Did you maybe forget about the
gun?
What if the guy’d found it?”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” says Zane. “So your idea was to act so insane that it wouldn’t surprise him?”

“No, you ninny, so he’d never go looking for it in the first place. It’s all very psychological, you wouldn’t understand.”

Zane reaches under the driver’s seat, pulls out the pistol. “I’ve just about had it with your attitude,” he says. He levels the weapon at Matt, and squirts him in the temple.

“Jesus!”

Zane laughs alone for a while—it’s a few more squirts before Matt’s laughing too.

“You’re going to get us fugging
killed,”
he says, letting the car go swervy.

“Mm, not yet,” says Zane.

“And what if somebody sees you with it and thinks it’s real?”

“That’s the idea, my friend. Next time the other bastard pisses his pants.”

Matt scowls.

“I’d never shoot it anyway,” says Zane. “Might as well be fake.”

“That’s loopy.”

“Says the biggest faker in the world.”

Matt scowls some more.

“Oh, lighten up,” says Zane. “This is a collectors’ item, you know. Good fakes are illegal nowadays, Mercedes had to confiscate it from her nephew.” He tucks the weapon away again. “Anyhow, you’re
supposed
to have a gun down here, this is the good ol’ US of A.” He hums a few bars of representative rock ‘n’ roll. Springsteen? And then, “Hey, remember last time?”

“CBGB,” says Matt. Another clicker, another key to memory.

“CBGB.”

It would have been 1980 or thereabouts, the boys’ only other trip to the States together. Spur-of-the-moment thing, a weekend away in the Big Kumquat, as Zane called it. New York City. By day they did galleries, Warhol’s Marilyns and Maos, Basquiat’s graffitied skulls and skeletons. By night they did bars and cinemas. CBGB was already turning iconic at the time, dingy, a real dump—exactly the sort of noxious swamp you’d want punk to have come slouching out of. For movies they started at the brainy end, a night of Stan Brakhage at an arthouse so hip you needed granny glasses just to get in. No trace of narrative, DennyD would have been impressed. Matt’s favourite was
Window Water Baby Moving,
Brakhage’s silent, super-graphic record of his wife’s home labour—Zane got the woozies, needed Matt’s shoulder on the way out to the lobby for more licorice. The next night it was all cult, Ed Wood, Russ Meyer, and finally this new guy, David Lynch. Hard to think of a scarier baby than the one in
Eraserhead
—an ET-type creature trapped in the fouled nest of its own body. Birth as nightmare, how do you wake up?

Matt says, “Hey, would you ever want one? Would you ever want a kid?”

But Zane’s drifted off again. Lordy, it’s like travelling with an infant. Matt drives solo for a while, keeping his eyes peeled for a good spot. Up ahead an IHOP. “Come Hungry, Leave Happy.” He pulls in, eases to a stop in the parking lot around back. He turns to Zane. “God’s gracious gift.”

Nothing.

He fishes under the seat, comes up with the water pistol. Nobody around—he points the gun at Zane’s temple, mob-executioner style. “This is it, buddy,” he whispers, “you live or
else,
“and gives him a squirt. Zane squirms, goes still again.

Death and the other person, the two big strangenesses.

Matt turns the gun on himself. “Th-th-th-th-that’s all folks,” he says, and empties the cartridge into his head—okay, into his hair—in a series of cooling blasts. Then he slips out of the car, tosses the toy into the Dumpster. Zane’s struggling to the surface as he climbs back in.

“Rise and shine there, buddy.” Matt steers back out onto the road.

“You betcha,” says Zane, hauling himself upright. “Hey, we must be getting there.” He unfolds and refolds his map, fusses with his directions.

In terms of actual road names, the folks at the CCCRN have been less than precise. Past town it’s left, then left again, then right, then straight on through. Auto parts, fruit stand, burnt-out barn.