Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (35 page)

He produces his debit card and offers it to Mr. E-Z, then remembers. He sheepishly returns the card to his wallet, starts rummaging for cash.

A woman in TRACK PANTS and sweat-mottled T-shirt steers her cart into place behind him. She’s opted for dry goods—crackers, chips.

Matt and Zane exchange a glance. Matt moves towards the wall of fridge units at one end of the store, browsing the still-chilled bottles.

He effects a sarcastic arm-sweep, taking in the junky contents of the mart.

He shakes his head, starts for the door. Matt—grinning broadly—squats and peers through the frost-rimed door of the cooler. Close-up of his face as he ponders his choice—pop or juice? what brand? what flavour?—as though the fate of the human race hangs in the balance.

The political debate, reduced to an angry murmur, continues at the till.

Back out on the road the boys sip their root beers.
Root beers?
A retro impulse on Matt’s part, school trips and birthday parties.

“I thought you were going to start a fugging riot,” Matt chuckles. “No wonder you’ve been packing heat.”

“Morons,” says Zane.

In the back seat they’ve stashed two racks of fizzy water, a twelve-pack of squat white candles, E-Z’s last pair of batteries. Matt knuckled under, at the last moment, to the prevailing panic.

But things have already calmed down. By the time Zane got the CBC tuned in they’d ruled out terrorism. Americans are blaming Canadians (a transmission gaffe in Ontario), Canadians are blaming Americans (lightning in New York, fire in Pennsylvania). All’s well.

“People do weird stuff for God though, don’t they?” says Matt.

“Yep.”

“Kill and stuff.”

“Yep.”

“And die. Do you think there’s a God?”

“How should I know?” says Zane. “I think there’s something.”

“Something? Is that what you’re doing this for? Are you doing this for something?”

Zane shrugs.

“If I thought there was something, would I be good too?”

“You are good, Matt.”

“Nah.”

They’re on the superhighway now, everybody howling along at the usual DOA pace. This time Matt’s passing. Eighth floor of a condo, how does that work without power? Matt’s tried his cellphone but it’s dead. That whole system seems to be down. The matrix, the great vibrating web has gone still.

Serena leaves at noon. The Dadinator will be alone. Will he have the wits to switch over from the electric concentrator to the portable oxygen tank? Will he get flustered, make some childish mistake?

“Hey,” says Matt, “if there really is something, do you think it’s a he or a she?”

“I’m not sure it works that way.”

“But say it did, say you had a choice. Male or female.”

“I’m gay,” says Zane. “I’m not stupid.”

“Right. Make it a chick.” Matt weaves over a lane, weaves back. “Mariko’s into the goddess thing, did I mention? She’s even written a screenplay about it.”

“What a woman.”

“Mother Earth and all that. Kind of annoying. Kind of cool.”

“… have declared a state of emergency,” says the radio.

“Are you … This is going to sound strange,” says Zane.

“Okay.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“That what?”

“That it isn’t terrorists. That this isn’t
it.
The relief of that, everything being over.”

“Hm,” says Matt. He scratches at his stubble. “Suffocate or burn to death.”

“What?”

“Get shot or get mauled by a grizzly.”

“Oh,” says Zane. “Like when we were kids, which would you rather.”

“Get stabbed or get suffocated.”

“Get strangled or get brained with a big rock.”

“But the thing is, I don’t think about that anymore.”

Zane gives his pate a pensive rub. “Get bitten by a rattler or get struck by lightning.”

“I don’t think about how
I’m
going to die anymore, I think about how
everybody’s
going to die.”

“Get trampled at a rock concert or get stung by killer bees.”

“I mean bombs? Weather? Plague?”

“Get lynched or get fried in an electric chair.”

“But maybe everybody’s like that,” says Matt. “Remember disaster movies when we were kids? It was a shipwreck or something, maybe a burning building. Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine. Now it’s a meteorite or whatever and the whole world’s done in.”

“Get caught in a wood chipper or get swept over Niagara Falls.”

Matt will be dead before long. Zane may beat him by a few months or years or decades but in the big world—the world Kate conjured for a bit there, the world of big bangs and missing dimensions—that’s
bupkes.
That’s nothing. So what’s the big hairy deal?

“Walk into a helicopter blade,” says Zane, “or choke to death on your own vomit.”

Chances are Matt’ll get stuck with the eulogy.
When I think of Zane today, here in the presence of those he most loved, I recall the time
… Insert epitomizing incident. Another of those early filmmaking crazinesses, maybe?

Matt’s only had to speak at one funeral so far, his mum’s. In Erin’s case the whole ceremony was handled by a minister. Matt recalls stirring briefly from his zomboid state to sob at the expression “lost soul”—a deplorable cliché, a formula made wretched by its ghastly accuracy. When his mum died, his dad asked Matt if he’d be willing to say something on behalf of the family.

Finally, Matt’s way with words was to be of use to somebody. He laboured over those paragraphs on the plane, and in his old bedroom at the McKay house. What did he focus on? His mum’s sly humour, which so few people ever really got. Her painstaking intelligence, which remained almost entirely unexpressed (those twelve years at Timely Temps not quite the career she deserved). Her tenderness in the home, which was twisted out of shape by the loss of her daughter. It was only afterwards that Matt recognized, and lamented, the fact that he’d spoken mostly about what his mum
hadn’t
done, about the life that had never made it out of her body and into the world. He added this blunder to his burden of grief, which threatened to break him right open.

Mariko, that plane trip, was the very next day. Anguish transformed, presto chango, into ardour.

Zane says, “Fall down a well or smack your head on a diving board.”

Or it could go the other way, Matt could be the first one out after all. DROO or FYNC or KSKS could turn out to be a wickedly swift-acting virus. A few days of fever, a few weeks of dormancy and your brains melt, puddle on your pillow. In which case it’ll be Zane who has to dream up something tender yet refreshingly irreverent to say about Matt.

Zane says, “You know what? I’m not actually sure I can do this.”

“That’s okay,” says Matt. “That’s cool. I’ll scoot you straight to your place, then whip back to Dad’s.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean I’m not sure I can
do
this.”

Oh. “Oh. Well, me neither.”

Look, the universe is back tonight. The city-static, the fog of light that normally blots out the night sky has evaporated. Toronto itself seems to have been snuffed out—the blinking beacon of the CN tower, the office blocks with their intricate geometry of lit and unlit windows, the pulsing logos … Poof.

“Oh,
Zane,”
says the Dadinator. He’s just now realized who’s been hanging around his condo these past few hours. “You were the peculiar. One, yes?” Can it be worse already, the breathing?

“That was me.”

Smear of baby barf is right, the Milky Way. It’s beginning to fade now, what with the moon on the rise. The moon has finished its wax since Matt last noticed it—that first night on his way in from the airport—and started its wane. One side’s been squashed, a tennis ball flattening on contact. And could that maybe be Mars, just up and to the right, reddish and not winking? So many lights, so many possible patterns—might there be a message up there, some star-scrawled augury visible just this one night?

“And what do you. Do now?”

“I make movies.”

The Dadinator favours Zane with one of his patented scowls—Toto working at the peanut butter on the roof of her mouth. It’ll likely be the last thing to go, that scowl. Just now the old man looks pretty good though. He’s skinnier of course, but still heftier than Matt if you factor in his swellings back and front, his hunch and his paunch. He’s tricked out in his usual blue track suit, though it’s plenty warm out here on the balcony.

“Two perfectly. Bright kids.” The Dadinator toys glumly with the singed hair on the side of his head. “What a waste.”

It’s been an adventure. The trip into town was slow but surprisingly steady. Civilians played traffic cop here and there, that helped. You thought of London under the Luftwaffe, everybody in it together. Streams of pedestrians headed north out of the city centre, a weird, white-collar exodus. Best image so far: a derelict streetcar, its juice shut off before it could creep for cover.

The radio said to expect at least another day.

At the condo, emergency lights had turned the halls and stairwells sepulchral. Eight flights, Christ. The boys had to stop at every landing, Zane gasping for Matt to go on up alone. By the time they made the Dadinator’s floor Matt had his buddy draped over him, a fireman dragging a last survivor from the fumes and flames.

“Dad?” He and Zane fanned out, room-to-room.
“Dad?”

He looked dead. Matt found him floating face-up in the bathtub, the better part of his head submerged. He had a flashlight burning faintly on the back of the toilet, a tube of oxygen propped up against the tub. When he finally opened his eyes and saw Matt he should have had a fit, some kind of coronary catastrophe, but he didn’t. He rose, weirdly serene—a craggy old Venus or Ursula Andress rising up out of the sea. “Hello, Matthew.”

Matthew. “Hey, hi Dad.”

And he was so tolerant. He permitted Matt to dress him, endured his son’s ministrations with what amounted almost to tenderness. Had Matt ever seen him in the buff before? The odd changing-room glimpse when he was a kid, nothing since. A sight both harrowing and grand, the McKay flesh wearing the impress of going-on ninety years of history.

Serena had left a precooked casserole, so the three of them shared it cold. The fridge clicked and dripped as the freezer unfroze. What would you call the natural light at this time of day?
Gloaming,
good word. Matt scrambled back down to the car for the provisions, and for Zane’s gear. He left Erin locked in the trunk, disturbed to find that this disturbed him. Back upstairs he set up candles in strategic locations throughout the condo—best to save the batteries for late-night trouble. Flames flapped in the breeze coming through the windows, thrown wide for the first time, one imagined, since the place was built.

As for the Dadinator, he was preternaturally well behaved. Nothing overtly critical or quarrelsome, he just kept asking benign questions and nodding at Matt’s replies. The job? Fine and dandy, just got an offer to move into a whole new area. The shack? Looking great, we’ve done a few things. Mary? Mariko, Dad. She sends her love. The blackout was clearly pleasing the guy, serving as proof of some larger pattern unfolding as it should. He’d totter to the window now and again, blink up into the blackness, come back grinning.

And then off to bed. No tube, Matt couldn’t fall off the wagon even if he wanted to. He gave Zane the couch, and jerry-rigged a mattress for himself out of extra cushions. They gabbed awhile.

“Godard,” said Zane at one point. “Truffaut. Some pretty amazing filmmakers were critics first, eh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey, about the fame thing? It’s something you’d really have to be ready for. If you were to do this.”

“Yeah?”

“This would be big, Matt. And it would be yours.”

He seemed to be building towards something, Zane did—a retraction? a reaffirmation?—but then the Dadinator reappeared. He was in his PJs, dragging his oxygen tank on its little trolley. He had his pillow with him, held aloft like a sword or sceptre. The pillow was on fire. The general effect was of a superannuated saint or prophet, flames halo-ing his wispy head. By the time the boys got the pillow tamped out, and soaked down the Dadinator’s smouldering temple (no harm done), the chance for sleep seemed to have passed them all by.

If this were a DVD Matt could try all three endings.

When he finally got through to the airline just after dinner (his finger blistering on his dad’s old rotary phone, the only one that worked) the folks were happy to cancel his ticket for tomorrow. They were happy, too, to hold off on rebooking, since of course a zillion other panicky travellers were trying to get through to check their flights. But it raised the question, what next?

In the theatrical release Matt would stay on for a couple of days, then race home to the west coast. What with Sophie straying, he and Mariko would have another chance. They’d go for the fresh start, take the defib paddles to their arrested love. They’d move back to the big city, back to the way it originally worked for them, save nature for weekends.
He-She?
A hit, Matt and Mariko sharing the Oscar for their sweet yet incisive script. What a pair.

Click here, though, for two alternate endings. In one, the wackiest, Matt heads the other way. He heads east. After sorting out River (Matt’s a virtual black belt, having seen
Billy Jack
five times plus all sixty-odd episodes of
Kung Fu),
he finds Kate and commits himself, willy-nilly, to the new life kindling inside her. His baby? Another man’s? No matter. In this version Matt’s bigger than that. He’s outgrown “mine” and “yours.” He’s everybody’s. Everybody is his.