Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (33 page)

“He was my first crush, you know,” says Zane, back to his own voice. “Mr. Kumar. Not crush, but … It was different. It was something new.”

This must be another tricky area for two guys living together. Who gets the remote? Zane’s clicked all the way back around to the munchkins again, who’re gamely croaking out a few lines of “The Lollipop Guild.”

Matt says, “He was brown, for instance.”

“He was beautiful. He was the first man I ever looked at and thought, beautiful.”

“Spooky. That must have been spooky.”

“Not really. Not yet.”

“Right. Hey, remember chess? Remember how he’d set up all those chessboards in the cafeteria?”

“And he’d take on all comers. And he’d destroy us so sweetly, all at once.”

“Amazing.” Matt rolls onto his side facing Zane’s way, goes fetal.

“I wonder what happened to him?”

“Oh jeez. He’d be old.”

“Everybody’s old.” Zane clicks off the lamp. They’re left with just the bluey light of the tube.

Matt says, “Did I ever tell you about my first crush?”

“No.”

“It was your mum.”

“Oh,
gross.
Don’t tell me this, McKay.”

“She was a babe, Zane. Face it, your mum was a babe.”

“You are so
weird.
”

“Yeah, well. How is she these days, anyway? And how’s your dad?”

“Not so bad.”

“Good. And how do you think they’ll take this new thing?”

Zane shuts tight his eyes.

“Do you think they’ll survive it? Do you think any of us will?”

“Matt.”

“Okay, but—”

“Please.” And then he slips into his cartoon snooze,
snort-whistle-we-we-we-we-weeee.
He’s always been good at this—he used it routinely in the old days, to get out of dealing with anything difficult. How does Nico handle this? How does Mercedes? Matt lets Zane go for a while, then leans across the space between the beds and kablams him with his pillow.

Zane does a startled wake-up,
who-wha?
Lazarus late for work. Then he rolls over and he really is gone.

M
att keeps having to remind himself he isn’t the sick one. By the time the maids hectored them out of the Cubby around noon Zane was approaching spry, but after a muffin and a couple of coffees Matt’s still in a serious funk.

It’s the Nightmare. The damn thing visited him again last night, second time since he’s been away. As usual he was sitting in a cinema, and as usual Mariko was by his side. Her tense murmurings were barely obscured by the film’s soundtrack, drum machine and boinky bass. The movie, a big-budget dud, was set in a war zone this time. It was dim, darkly romantic—
Last Tango
meets
Apocalypse Now.
Sumptuous decadence, sexy despair. Meg was in it, and (yeck!) a Speedo-clad Mr. Skinner. Matt recalled his recent review of this turkey, and found it good. The eloquent savagery, the poisonous precision.

As the film progressed though, as one scene unfolded and then another, something began to come clear: it was no turkey. Jeezuz aitch, this thing was brilliant. “Tour de force,” “towering achievement,” those are the clichés Matt ought to have reached for. How could he have been so wrong? Was there any way to make it right, reverse his blunder? He jumped up, started shoving his way past a knobby infinity of knees, his lungs clutching at air that had suddenly gone thin on him. Underfoot there was a minefield not just of pops and popcorns but of sundry other stuff too, tomahawks and forks and fingers …

Matt woke up, as usual, mid-thrash, in the throes of a crushing sorrow. Quick peek—Zane was still asleep, his head sandwiched (bagelled?) between two pillows. Matt remembered hearing him up a few times before dawn, mopping at himself (night sweats, check) and rattling for pills in the biffy. In the morning light, though, he looked serenely ruined. A kindergartner after the fever breaks.

Matt slumped back, exhaled heavily, half sigh, half sob. When Jean Renoir premiered
The Rules of the Game
—that Mozartian masterpiece, that comedic cry against all fascisms—folks tried to burn the cinema down. Reviews were abusive. Who’s to say Matt wouldn’t have been right in there with the rest of them, most articulate of all the philistines, royally crapping on the tender masterpiece?

So he feels like garbage today. Sick of judging. Convinced that all his judgments—what’s good-slash-bad, beautiful-slashugly, worthy-slash-worthless—are worthless. Maybe one more coffee.

Or better idea, Coke. The weather … well, there isn’t any. Weather’s been cancelled. Nothing changes from one day to the next, even darkness doesn’t make much of a dent anymore. The old Corolla’s air conditioning is laughably inadequate. It was designed eight or ten years ago, after all, during an entirely different epoch in the earth’s accelerating history.

So they pick up cold sodas, and they get back at it. They put in another good hour of fruitless zooming, dust pluming in the rearview. The gravel-rattle turns from wholesome to headachy. Left, then left again, then right, then straight on through.

Matt’s at the wheel again today, while Zane works the dial. He’s sipping at some appalling elixir he brewed up in the Cubby’s coffee machine. If you decanted the green gunk from the bottom of a long-forgotten vase you could
maybe
reproduce this smell.

“I’d just let myself die if I were you,” says Matt, swatting at the rank air. He runs a palm ruminatively up his chin, against the grain of his one-day beard. This inspires a new thought. “Hey, the hair on your head,” he says. “How fast does it grow? Faster than on your chin, or slower?” He reaches over and rubs Zane’s noggin—the bald bit, and then the horseshoe of dark head-beard coming in.

“A little slower. I shave it every other day.”

Sixties stuff, early seventies—songs they first heard on their transistor radios. Matt’s was a Bible-sized black box, just small enough to slip under his pillow so’s he could rock himself to sleep. “1050 CHUM!” chimed like a fancy doorbell. “Dock of the Bay.” “Wild Thing.”

“So
that’s
why I can’t take in anything new,” says Matt. They’ve been singing tunelessly along, not missing a line. “I know every word.”

“Yeah, bizarre,” says Zane. He has a go at harmonizing to “Hang On Sloopy,” abandons the attempt.

“And no way to get rid of it all now.”

Auto parts but no fruit stand. Fruit stand but no burnt-out barn.

“Do you like
Dad
or
Daddy?”
says Zane.

“What?”

“Now that you’re going to have a kid.
Uncle Zane
sounds good.”

“As in, ‘Be nice to your Uncle Zane, he can’t help it that he’s like that’?”

“But really, this could be happening, right? You could already have a tiny little son or daughter. Bet you’d be good at it, if you ever got to do the daddying.”

“You think?”

“Sure. But would you? With Kate?”

“Dunno. What do you figure?”

“Dunno. Weird way to start a relationship.”

“Says the poofter who married the dominatrix in his movie.”

Zane pantomimes a direct hit. “How do you think she’ll manage? The money and all that if she does it alone.”

“Not sure. I’ve never really … I’ll have to ask her. I bet she’ll be all right. And with the hotshot bucks I’ll be raking in …”

“Yeah.
Dear Dad, there are these nifty sneakers.”

Matt says, “Do you think it makes you older? Having a kid? Or younger?”

“Older. Younger. Speaking of which, loved your
Purple Jesus
review. Thanks for sending that.”

Matt delivers a dismissive guffaw. “I showed Mariko the movie. She thought it was
silly,
can you imagine?”

“Shocking.”

Matt’s last review, for Zane’s eyes only, was of Zane’s very first film. It was actually a combo effort, but Zane got director credit, which meant he got to say “cut” and had to buy the beer. Second year at York. The concept came to the two of them pretty much as one. They were goofy drunk on Purple Jesus—one part grain alcohol, two parts grape Kool-Aid, swirled up together in a giant plastic bucket. The party was all jocks and wannabes, there to get warmed up for a Lions hockey game. Rah-rah-rah till you ralph, kind of thing. Matt and Zane, artsy infiltrators, were there to snicker and sneak free booze. And then, just like that, eureka. The thing happened. They had their first masterpiece.

Zane makes a balloon of his empty muffin bag and pops it. “I’m amazed you didn’t go ahead and publish that one,” he says. “I mean, if you’re going to be a fugging idiot why not be a
complete
fugging idiot?”

“Moron, you mean,” says Matt. “And yeah, I probably would have, too. If Nagy hadn’t nabbed me.” He does a bit of “Crimson and Clover,” thumping his chest to get the tremolo.

Wait. Auto parts, fruit stand, burnt-out barn. And over there, could that be a circle? Impossible to say for sure, the field’s so flat it’s like trying to read a shop’s sign when you’re standing right under it. Something’s definitely taken a divot out of that green, though.

“You think?” says Matt, and he swerves to the shoulder.

They clamber out, stand swaying a moment in the unconditioned air. The car clicks as it cools. A pickup truck dopplers by, making the sacred
om
sound, the syllable that gave rise to the universe.
“Aaaaaooooouuuummmm,”
is how Anirvachaniya says it. The Absolute, the Unknowable.

Zane grunts as he shoulders his gear—Matt grins at the “Shoot Film, Not Bullets” button on one of the bags. He leads the way into the field, effecting a placid breaststroking motion through the nipple-high corn. Slap and tickle.

It’s way out in the centre. Matt thinks of a tattoo at the heart of a back or a buttock. Zane’s puffing before long, then coughing. Shortness of breath, check. That brutal pneumonia you get. Matt relieves him of the bags, presses on more slowly.

And suddenly he’s in the clear. He steps into the circle … and it pops open, a trap door dropping him through all four (all ten?) dimensions into that other circle. Side by side, still, with Zane.

Mid-July, 1977. They’d kicked off their time abroad with England, kind of nice to capiche for a while. The initial nerves were just starting to give way to euphoria, the traveller’s giddy greed for Experience. The boys were busy sorting out their routine, who got the WC first in the morning, all that stuff. Who’d wimp out first when they were glugging Guinness. Who could work the English
what?
most often and most inappropriately into conversation. “How many pee in a quid,
what?”
“What,
what?”

It was a summer day, cool and dingy. They’d just done Stonehenge, a colossal disappointment. All the ancient uncanniness, all the Druidic dread had been leached out of it by the last kajillion visitors. The boys did get a few wicked photos with Zane’s Nikon, arty shots through a stretched Slinky of barbed wire—Matt’s got one blown up in his study at home. Back at the road they stuck out their thumbs. The plan was London and then, tomorrow, on to the continent, try out their French.
“Je suis Canadien, voulez-vous
what’s-the-word-for-picnic
avec moi?”

It took them an hour to score a lift in a minuscule Morris Minor. The packs needed some serious pummelling before they’d consent to be rammed into the trunk, sorry,
boot.
The lifters were a pair of middle-aged guys—Londoners, as it turned out, a stroke of luck. One stop first, though, if that’d be okay? “We’ll surprise you,” and the two shared a conspiratorial chuckle.

Brothers? Buddies? But no, it became clear they were not-so-surreptitiously holding hands up there in the front seat. Matt and Zane shared an oh-gross glance in the back.

“I’m Henry and this is Brad,” said the guy in the passenger seat, swivelling to face them, elbow over the bench seat. “Brad’s a complete flake. Tarot, you name it. Pyramids. Me personally I think it’s all bollocks, but hey, he tags along to the opera. What can I say?”

“Quid pro quo,”
sang Brad in a gushy baritone, as though he were lamenting a lover.

Matt and Zane were made to recite their stories.

“Canada, huh?” said Henry. “Hey, what about your prime minister’s wife? That Margaret …”

“Trudeau.”

“Trudeau. Is she really boffing Mick?”

They puttered through a series of dopey hamlets. Church, pub, bakery. Landscape came in unbreaking waves, exhaustively rectangled into farms. Sheep shuffled about, black and white on green; clouds parted now and then to permit a splash of gold. As they crested one hill, Henry, who’d been noisily navigating, instructed Brad to slow down.

“Look!” he said, but they already were.

An ogre or some other great Celtic critter had been fooling around with his geometry set. There were five circles, a big one with four smaller ones at its cardinal points. An old compass? A Celtic cross? Landing gear, that’s what it looked like, the imprint of some craft that had just vroomed off into the ether. Matt pictured
Apollo
11,
the central pod with its four round feet at the end of jointed bug-legs.

“You call it a quintuplet,” said Brad. “Or a quincunx. Looks like they beat us.”

Cars clotted the road. You could see people milling about in the formation, pacing it like a maze, posing for snaps. The farmer had set up a stand at the edge of his field and was charging two pounds, the price of a movie. Brad paid and the foursome swished through the thigh-high wheat.

Stamped down? Blown down? Stroked down is how the wheat looked, all in one direction. Combed. The four tarried awhile in the central circle. Brad joined a ragged group of dancers—headbands, baggy mullah trousers, a chewed button or two, one imagined, of peyote. Zane joined
him
and the two pranced about hand in hand like a pair of believers on Judgment Day. Hand in hand. How did Matt see no significance in this? Morocco, that revelation, was still six weeks away.