The Adjustment League (24 page)

“She's gone,” she says. We're close to each other, but still moving.

I stop walking. “When?”

Now she stops too. “Oh, no,” she says. “No, no, no.” She puts a hand into the space between us, as if to touch my arm or chest, though it doesn't make it all the way. For a moment, before she drops it to her side, I see it hanging in the air between us, like a third party that has floated in to take its part, not attached to either of us—this smooth, pinkish hand, which could almost be a girl's, though with dirt under its lacquered nails. “I mean, she's not here. She's left.”

“When? Left for good, you mean?”

“I don't think so. She's always found her way back before. She went to bed early, just after curfew. But she wasn't here at count this morning.” Mrs. Rasmussen looks back at the young man, who hasn't changed his posture. She turns back to me. “She does this sometimes. Goes off her meds. We don't see her for a while.”

“Does she say where she's been when she gets back?”

“Sometimes. Not usually. We assume she's back on the streets. Turning tricks, at least part of the time. She often comes back banged up, though her weight's about the same.”

“What do you do then?”

She looks surprised at the question. Perked up by it somehow, standing straighter, as if it's shifted some of the load off of her. “What else? Get her back on program.”

Sun breaks through the clouds over the house behind her. Full sun still, a couple of hours till setting, it lights up her pink ears, makes them glow, purple veins in their tops, curly hair like thin silver wires around them. I feel it on my face. Clear, golden autumn. Except there are grains in the air—everywhere I look. Not as fine as dust, not as coarse as black pepper—like soot, maybe. They dim the light, float like a veil between my eyes and what they see. It's the same light I see on the stairs, in the rooms underground. It's the sun that makes it obvious. Light that should be clear.

§

Driving back through the city. Judy's home at the moment. A big home. Big and small.

Taking major streets—Bloor, Church, Yonge—for the same reason others avoid them at rush hour: because they're slow. The car a good place to be, to sit in, to see and think about things while barely moving.

Today, though, I feel tension driving. A strange kind of tension—maybe tension isn't the word. It's not a feeling of being strained, stretched hard or tight. It's more like fizzings, or pricklings—many small movements, in many directions at once, that have a sickening sense, something faintly nauseating, about them. I'm a while locating the feeling—it keeps running away from my attention, like beads of dropped mercury—and then I realize it's coming from my chest. My heart, the area around it. Or over it, more precisely. The pocket in my coat.

The USB.

It doesn't feel like what it is: a thin stick of metals and plastics, whatever carefully machined products they compress into this elongated wafer to store digital information. It feels like something primeval. Something nasty and unpredictable. Like a bunch of big red centipedes, the hairy kind with pronounced pincers, scurrying, writhing, trying to get out.

A boy in a schoolyard once set fire to the bottom of a big nest of tent caterpillars in the fork of a sapling. As the flames spread in the cottony lower layers of the whitish, semi-transparent nest, the ball of dark worm-like shapes separated and started to wriggle outward and upward, looking for escape from a structure they'd designed to have none. As the fire broke the nest open, burned bodies dropped to the ground, writhing and twitching. Using whatever legs remained to inch lopsidedly away. Caterpillars from the upper part of the ball, insulated from the flames by the burned bodies of the others, scattered like pinata prizes, scrambling away on small rushing feet. We stamped on them gleefully, turning them to green-black smears.

Nasty, veering sensations. They tell me the other reason I wouldn't carry the sticks with me before. Hid them in the fridge, hid them in the mail to Ken.
Even if someone takes you down, rumbles your pockets, they'll survive
. True—but not the whole truth.

It's also having the images against my chest, next to my heart. Faces and parts of the girls and women come faster to mind, seeping directly through the skin into the bloodstream. Stirring a soup of nasty feelings, of guilt, of dirty dealings, of fear. Faces, bodies, parts of bodies. I see them all, except for the images of Vivian—
why?
In Christmas Music she appears more often, and more nakedly, than any other woman. Its leading lady, in a way. But you've seen her as a person, cold and calculating, damaged and damaging who knows how—but whole. Not just a flesh bit, captured in a hole with a shutter click.

Things happen quickly once you know they have to happen.
Nothing to it but to do it
.

I buy another ExpressPost packet at a postal outlet I've never used before. In the line-up, I look up the postal code for the
Globe and Mail
's address on Front Street, so the clerk can enter the charge. The
Globe
's been lagging far behind the
Star
in the investigative journalism department—analyzing the skulduggery others have uncovered, and editorializing about political morality and public accountability, even the media's (their own) role, while the
Star
keeps on piling up juicy chunks from Hizzoner's dismal ruckus. Give the
Globe
a fighting chance to lead for a change, though I doubt they'll take it.

Pick up the two packages returned by Ken, which are waiting at the other branch. A new branch, it's still open nearing 5:00—showing the Avenue Road crowd it stands behind its banner pledge “to set a new standard for customized financial services.” I don't even have to show any ID—the Face, once seen, is not forgotten. It could be a sight gag in a comedy about the world's worst undercover cop. The manager, still standing by the coffee urn and some picked-over muffins, gives me a half-hearted smile but doesn't offer me a cup and a nibble. His memory is perfect too, clocking me as a low-roller and a future-phobe.

Back at home, I slit the taped flaps of the addressed envelopes, just to check that the USBs haven't been damaged or exchanged for others in transit. Any trip through a chain of hands is a descent into Wonderland, with every kind of distortion and substitution possible. Nested inside their folded paper and bubble pack, however, the sticks look perfect, shiny and damning. Dollarama self-adhesive labels in the centers, Max's name and office address printed on them.

I re-seal the
Star
's, and then, as I'm about to do the same to the one to the police, inspiration strikes. Take that stick and transfer it to the new envelope, the one going to the
Globe
. For the one to the police, I'll use the stick that's been giving me heart trouble—the one crawling with nasty centipedes. And I've got a better address label than the Dollarama white sticker.

A few minutes later, it's ready. Max's gold-and-black address label from the envelope with his Mother's Day card. Sliced off carefully from the corner where Gwen attached it, centered under clear tape on the third stick.

At 6 p.m., when I'm sure the last pickup has come and gone, I drop the three envelopes in the mailbox outside Shoppers. ExpressPost delivery is next-day within the city, so starting from tomorrow morning, I've got till Thursday to make something happen with Max. That seems unlikely, though, and at the moment I haven't a clue as to how I might proceed. It's peaceful, all the same, to watch the red mouth swallow the three packets and close with a metallic gulp.

Goodbye, Judy's brother
.

§

The white dog isn't there, but a glance at the railing where he gets tied reminds me that Sandor is my next stop. He checks in at the Queen's Arms in less than half an hour. Hard to believe it's been a week since our last tête-à-tête. Seems like yesterday, seems like a year ago. Time in a closing window behaves like Silly Putty, stretching and squishing. Like an Eglinton Avenue mini-verse, Big-Banging out, Big-Crunching back.

After only a couple of blocks, though, I slow and then turn back. I don't have a plan with Sandor. What's more, I suspect—it's been dawning on me all along—that, while he's more interesting than the principal players, in terms of this adjustment, he's peripheral.

All the questions I had for him fall out of my head. Leave swirling vacuum behind.

§

Time in Big Empty is nasty tonight. Wrapped in the sleeping bag, I know I'm not asleep, and know equally I'm not really awake—and not being either place a human being is supposed to live, and knowing it, feels horrible. I sit up at times to give my state a cause, but it doesn't work. Sitting helps explain why I'm not asleep, but it doesn't explain why I can't wake up.

Even worse, I'm utterly alone for the first time in a while. No matter how still I lie, breathing deeply with my eyes closed, I can't meet the milling people, dead and alive, on the first floor down. Much less the Empress in her niche on the stairs below. Or the shyer, unseen shapes sensed even deeper. I can't find any stairs at all, or any means of descent. Not even an Ugly Dream.

I might as well be a flagpole sitter, perched above my life.

To escape it, I head out again. It's just after one. Closing Time. My feet take me towards the Queen's Arms without a plan or even the ghost of one. Empty Mind—nirvana, supposedly, if you're trained for it. Chinese water torture if you're not.

Follow him if he's on foot. Get a fix on one more Wyvern, at least
.

But there's no fix on their kind of refrigerator, I realize on another mental track. On any refrigerator. It's either open, displaying what's spoiling slowly, puffing cold breaths out at you… or closed and sealed, a smooth white humming. Spotting it in a corner tells you jack.

Leaning against the wall of the Petro-Can across the street, I see Sandor emerge at 1:25. Right behind him, the blonde and her husband. That's a surprise, on a Tuesday. Don't any
of these people have to get up for work? None of the other writing group members emerge, it was a mini-session. One of the groups within the group—the core one, I'm gathering.

As they pause outside the door, the blonde links arms with the men on either side of her. The streetlight catches her upturned face as she laughs at something Sandor says, leans her head briefly against his shoulder, her husband smiling along. Lynette? TAL Lynette? Even allowing for plastic surgery and diets and gyms and whatever other transformations twenty years can permit, there's no way I can make it work. Can't match this stunner tossing her hair with my chronic ward weeper.

I follow them as they cross Avenue and stroll west on Eglinton. No sign of a car.
A local job. Local at every turn
.

No sign of the white dog either. Whole families might subsist, and probably do, on dog-sitting wages in this neighbourhood.

I keep well back and on the other side of the street. The Face perched on six and a half bony feet draped in shabby commando—an illustration for Do Not in the undercover manual.

When they turn up Castle Knock, I have to cross over, but I stay at least two blocks back. They're engrossed in conversation. Have been every time I've seen them.

They turn left on Crestview, and just when I reach the corner to pick them up again, they stop. Brief hugs from Sandor, who heads off right up Shields Avenue toward Roselawn. The couple keep going west on Crestview. Holding hands now, which they weren't before.

On impulse, I decide to follow them instead. Telling myself I can always find a drunk—but really, it's because it's the first clear impulse I've had in hours, and it's a joy just to obey.

The blonde has a narrow waist and generous hips below her short plaid jacket. A languid rocking in her gait. Following her, I am suddenly somewhere else. Sometime else. Padding in sock feet after wide slow hips in a plaid housecoat as she shuffles in fluffy slippers down a corridor smelling of overnight disinfectant to the breakfast room. My eyes on her hips lust's fading silhouette, seeking solid flesh to become body again, to live on Earth. Lynette no more than the nearest, faintest chance.

Somewhere in the afterlife of crazy, Brad is doing a Putin riff to celebrate.

And then—just as suddenly—I'm back. Tracking two strangers down an empty autumn street smelling of cinnamon and damp. Knowing there's no meaning in the vision that just snared me—used to strange news from my head, especially in a closing window. But worn out from just that: the meaninglessness. Being in a blender that whirls and whirls, making nothing. It's why crazy at sixty feels like ninety.

They don't go far. Two streets on, at Castlewood, they take a right, following a parallel path to Sandor's, up a gentle rise toward Roselawn.
Castle
and
Rose
parts of a lot of place names in the neighbourhood—in a lot of wealthy neighbourhoods, I imagine.
Shields
fits in there too somehow.

They stop on the sidewalk in front of a house a few down from Roselawn. A trim brick bungalow with Tudor-ish mullioned windows that would set you back, with agents' fees, a million dollars.
But why stopping?
Why not heading in?

I get close to the side of a helpful maple, stand in its deeper shade, a hand on its cool bark.

They have what looks, from a block away, like one of those earnest couple palavers which are necessary to decide how many people are going to go down the driveway and in the front door. Without hearing a word, the negotiations are as clear to me as if I'm taking part in them.

The comfortable closeness of their bodies, combined with a certain weariness in their postures, a slumping seriousness I associate with health food stores and passport offices, tells me this is not a new couple debating, with fear and excitement, whether to go through the door for the first time, but an old couple deciding, in spite of history, whether to go through it yet again.