Read The Answer to Everything Online
Authors: Elyse Friedman
The Answer to Everything (9 page)
“What is this?” he said, fiddling with the camera buttons, breathing hard. I stopped moving. “What the fuck is this?” he screamed. “Are you out of your mind?” He threw the camera across the room and as it sailed by my head I flinched and pulled the cake against me. It slid to the floor and Thomas started wailing.
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK.” I tried to go to him but Paul blocked me. “No, it’s not OK!” he shouted. “It’s not fucking OK!” I’d never seen him so enraged. “What are you trying to do? Are you out of your head?” Thomas was screaming for me and trying to get to me, but Paul snatched him up and carried him upstairs. I chased after them, but Paul slammed and locked the bathroom door before I could get there. I heard Thomas shrieking and Paul yelling at him to hold still. I pounded on the door and said I was calling the police. I ran to our bedroom, grabbed the cordless and ran back to the hall. I was dialling 9-1-1 when Paul came out of the bathroom and knocked the phone out of my hand. He was holding the big scissors.
“Where is it?” he said, dragging me toward Thomas’s room. He’s a big man and I’m a tiny woman, but I scratched and bit my way free and ran back to the bathroom, where I saw my sweet child on the floor, sobbing, covered in all the hair that Paul had chopped from her head.
“It’s OK,” I said. “It will grow back.” I just almost had my hands on her when Paul grabbed me from behind and pulled me away.
“No. It won’t grow back! You have defied the doctor and you have defied me! YOU ARE DONE WITH MY SON!”
I think this is what scared Emily most. It wasn’t that Paul forced me to reveal where the dress and shoes were. It wasn’t that he took those things and burned them in the fireplace just hours after Emily was finally allowed to possess them. No. It was the idea that Daddy was taking over and what that meant. Clearly, Daddy was in charge and Mommy was powerless to do anything about it. Daddy was strong. Mommy was weak. Daddy put Thomas in his room and wouldn’t let him out, or Mommy in. When Mommy kept trying and trying to get in, Daddy picked up Mommy like a rag doll and threw her into her bedroom and wouldn’t let her out either. We were prisoners. And Daddy was the guard who patrolled the hallway, at least until three in the morning, which is when Mommy finally gave up and cried herself to sleep.
It was just after six when I woke with a sick, jumpy feeling in my body. I think I half expected Paul to still be standing in the hallway. I listened at the door and didn’t hear anything, so I opened it a crack and saw him asleep outside Thomas’s room, with sheets and towels from the linen closet as a makeshift bed and all the phones in the house gathered up and tucked around his neck and chest. Paul was the world’s soundest sleeper, especially when he’d only been out a few hours, so I knew I could walk by him into Thomas’s room without rousing him. And I did. It was the scream that woke him up.
A blast of freezing air. The bed empty. The window open and the screen pushed through.
I knew even before I looked outside that my life was over.
The autopsy report said it was blunt force trauma to the head—a contusion and hemorrhage caused by the jump to icy concrete. But I know what it really was. It was a tyrant father and a feeble mother.
It was my child risking everything in an attempt to save me, when it should have been the other way around.
My biggest mistake of all.
So here I am in the underworld. Too ashamed to live and too scared to commit another major sin.
Emily is with me. I insisted on that and no one dared argue. Her ashes are here on my bedside table. I picked the prettiest marble urn I could find.
A pink one.
The people were broken but full of hope.
I remember the first gathering. John called it a social. Amy made party sandwiches. Pinwheels and lemonade. They moved their tables onto the rooftop patio.
It was grey that morning. Overcast and cool. But as the guests began to arrive the sun burned through the clouds and lit everything bright and yellow. There was a tremendous warmth then. And that’s what I remember most. The warmth. The handshakes, the smiles, the happiness of the people coming together on a fine autumn day, sharing thoughts, connecting, finding common ground.
I had doubted John to that point. I doubted his vision and the website and the party. At times, I confess, I even doubted his motives. Most of all, though, I doubted his confidence in me. I didn’t think I could be the conduit for God’s wisdom and love and assistance—not on any scale that went beyond the tiny and personal. But as I moved through the crowd, meeting old friends from the park and greeting new ones who had found us through the website, I felt an overpowering warmth from without and within. I felt that whatever John’s ideas or motives were, God had guided him. A plan was unfurling.
There was sadness too on the patio that day. I could feel it below the cheer and the warmth. A subterranean pain. But there was hope. The people were broken, but they wanted to be fixed. Despairing and hopeful. Beautiful in disrepair. I felt God’s love flow through me, and I knew for certain that what was occurring was correct. For the first time in my life, I sensed that my destiny was beginning to unfold as intended. I no longer had that vague tug of a feeling that I was waiting for something to start or to happen.
It was happening on the patio that day. It was starting.
~
The journo gods work in mysterious ways.
They giveth: One of the Answer Institute victims used to live in my rooming house. Drew Woollings. A sad little fucker from Brampton. Pimply. Pale. Passive aggressive. We shared a bathroom for nine months before he ran off to join his cult.
And they taketh away: Woollings, one of a small number of Institute survivors (and the key to my story/success) was now in hospital in a coma and largely unresponsive.
My source could not be tapped. Not immediately anyway.
Still, I was lucky. While my former classmates were toiling as unpaid interns in circulation departments, selling the odd tidbit for a pittance to
Exclaim!
or giving it all away to the Huff Post, I had been offered five grand for my first piece. A cover story, no less, in
T.O. Magazine
. A glossy piece. A long one.
My ex-instructor was floored when he found out. Impressed and, I suspect, a little jealous. “If you get this right,” he said, swallowing hard, trying to look delighted, “they may put you up for a National Magazine Award.” Then he said the beers were on me. What a cock. I had this one shot (plus a mountainous student loan), while he had a steady teaching gig and summers off to make even more money with his thoroughly-competent-but-entirely-boring
compositions. Whatevs. I was planning to pay anyway, since I’d invited him out. After that he kept checking in on me, offering to read and give feedback. I told him thanks but no thanks. I didn’t need his nicotine-stained fingers in my pie. I told him it was under control. I didn’t tell him that the editor was working me like a fucking mule, that I’d rewritten the first third of the piece five times and was still receiving copious, and what I considered condescending, notes. I think the editor disliked me. I think he would’ve turfed my ass if I didn’t have an angle. But I did have one, a sweet one—an insider’s view of the life of a dupe in the months leading up to disaster. Yup. The journo gods were smiling when they made Drew Woollings my housemate. Who would have guessed that enduring nine months of Post-it Note tsk-tsks on various bathroom surfaces, and a seemingly endless John Mayer soundtrack, was going to be worthwhile?
But there I was, fresh out of J-school, birthing a five-thousand-word feature about Drew and the demise of his cult. Of course, the editor demanded an exclusive, eyewitness account of the tragic night in question, and wanted select details about the leaders, which meant that buddy boy would have to wake up and spill to me and only me. I called the hospital daily and visited regularly, but he just lay there, eyes wide shut (open on occasion, but not processing). He scored an eight on the Glasgow Coma Scale. Not hopeless, but not exactly peachy either. I would have to wait. And so would the editor.
I thought it would be prudent to get Drew’s massive mom on my side, and it was easy to do. Doreen fucking loved me after about five minutes. Of course, she didn’t know I was a journalist. You should have heard her rip into the “jackals” who
kept trying to get at her and Drew. I found her anti-CBC rants particularly hilarious. I just went with what she assumed—that I was nothing more than her son’s old roommate from 262 Jarvis. His buddy Griffin. The only pal who cared enough to visit him in hospital. The guy who was such a true friend, he actually went to the trouble of doing research on comas (I had to figure out if Drew had a chance of ever coming around). So who do you think he was going to open up to when/if he managed to communicate again? The ravening reporters in the hall, the dreaded CBC lefties he’d probably heard Mommy whinge about his entire life—or his former housemate, the guy who brought Mama Bear her coffee and Timbits and Best Beach Bodies in the Universe magazines, the dude who literally held her slab of a hand during more than one tearful bedside vigil, and taught her all about coma stimulation therapy?
I had it worked out.
The only hitch would be if the poor bastard never woke up. Or if he woke up too fried to even blink me a story. Time is the enemy of the coma patient. The longer they make like an end table, the less likely they are to reanimate and recover. It had only been four weeks for Drew, but the clock was ticking hard. And not just for him. Time was the enemy of the newbie journalist too.
If I had any hope of filling those shiny pages with my words, I had to get the story going, pronto.
John
I set up a website. Nothing fancy, just a little tool to kick-start my experiment and get Eldrich’s tosh to the wider world. I made it interactive so that Eleanor Rigby and her ilk could make contact if they wanted to. Amy figured I’d get plenty of digital silence or maybe some guff from bored teens, but I suspected that if I put out just the right kind of signal, just the right kind of individual would pick up on it. Like a dog whistle, if you know what I mean.
It worked.
We started to get hits. At first just one or two a day, but then a few more. And people began to post things. Bizarre things. Hilarious things. Shameful and heartbreaking things. You couldn’t make the stuff up if you tried. Amy and I would lie in bed and read through it together. Then we’d fool around. Eat. Read some more, respond to missives, maybe formulate new Eldrichy spiritual messages. I have to say it was a truly interesting period. One of the most pleasurable ever.
I remember feeling that Amy and I had gone deep, fast. She had nothing to do with the art world but was surprisingly simpatico with me. More enjoyable than any woman I’d been with, actually. She loved to loaf. She was a great cook. Smart.
Funny. Expressive in bed. And while I was initially put off by her bony angles, I grew to really appreciate them. There was an odd grace in her thinness—like a giraffe with stick legs and stretched neck, striding across the Serengeti. I loved to watch her move. Elongated and pale. Everything she did looked good. She’d Swiffer the living room and it was modern dance. She had this apple-green scarf she used to wear a lot. The colour combo of the orange hair, the blue eyes and that bright green silk around her throat is something I won’t forget. Generally speaking, it was a superb interlude. I was well-fucked and -fed, and art installations were exploding like popcorn in my brain. One post that really stuck with me from the early days came from a hoser who accidentally killed his mother’s dog when he was a kid. The unlucky bugger was still tortured by it twenty years later, still dreamed about the pooch every night. I could envision snippets of text from his confession on the gallery wall, then a line of police-style Polaroids of the event stretched out under the words, or circling a video screen with a Guy Maddinesque interpretation of our man’s guilty dog dream playing in a loop (black and white, murky, ethereal doggie ghost, etc.), and maybe some artifacts spread out across the gallery floor: the mutt’s collar, the ugly bathmat he expired on, the mother’s tear-stained hanky. I was itching to make it. But it would have been hugely unethical.
When I set up the website, it wasn’t to fish for stories. I didn’t want to exploit people. Not in a highly personal way anyway. I just figured we could attract a bit of extra cash and maybe a few more casseroles each week, which would free me to work on MAMA. Eldrich was the sharing kind. If he
was benefiting, I would benefit. I wasn’t trying to generate material. I was actually against that idea. There was an artist I knew who placed a personal ad in the dating section of the paper and then had a confederate secretly record her café meetings with potential partners. Unbeknownst to these unfortunates, she displayed the whole thing in an Ossington gallery—emails, photos, video, the works, and all the hipsters gathered to chuckle. I hated it. I hated her for doing it. I didn’t want to be the smug jackass who would do anything like that. So I decided to detach from the personal tales. They were too creatively distracting. I wanted to make MAMA. That’s what I had to focus on. I needed to control the experiment but not become an integral part of it.
I asked Amy to take over the correspondence. I jokingly appointed her director of communications for what I began to refer to as “the Institute” and asked her to print out and file any posts that came in. I would review them at some later date. She pretended to be all concerned with the morality of the endeavour but at the same time embraced her enhanced role with zeal. She was constantly checking the site. She couldn’t stop checking it. It was the first thing she did in the morning and the last thing she did at night. I would find her, in the hours in which she usually vegged in front of the tube, online, absorbed, corresponding with the flock. I know it was more fun when we were reading together, and Amy still wanted to, but I had to disengage. Whenever she tried to share, I told her I didn’t want the stories or the details, just the numbers. I was aiming to invite roughly forty individuals to the first social—hoping for twenty to actually show, and then for ten of those
to “stick.” Eldrich already had about a dozen followers, so I told Amy to let me know when we had a solid thirty online. It didn’t take long. It took hardly any time at all.