Rockets Versus Gravity (12 page)

N
ormally he sleeps right through it, but tonight Keegan Thrush is rattled into consciousness by the noise of the morning train thundering past beneath the window. Atop the bedside table, the digits on the alarm clock glow red:

8:11 a.m.

If she were awake right now, she would get all excited about that. Lately she's moved from astrology to numerology, or whatever. Atop the nightstand on her side of the bed (well, technically
both
sides of the bed belong to
him
) sits the latest
pink-flower
-festooned soft-cover library book she's reading:

Take Control of Your Life

with

NUMEROLOGY!

If she were awake right now, she would tell him that the glowing red LED number eight is like,
oh my gawd
, the infinity sign turned sideways, and eleven is,
like
, the number of balance and change.

Whatever. She's hot. And she's a fucking
maniac
in bed.

As he rolls over, he says, “Hey, baby, it's eight-eleven. Wanna turn sideways? Or maybe you'd like to balance on top of my … hey, where the hell are you?”

She must be in the bathroom. He flips over, and his bare feet touch the cool white-tiled floor.

“Fine,” he says, “I'll come getcha in there.”

On his nightstand is the latest hardcover guidebook for Successful Alpha Male Business Champions, written by an author with an unlikely but somehow authoritative name: Stringfellow Foley. The book's title is embossed on the dust jacket in three-dimensional gold letters:

YOU DESERVE BETTER!

YOU DESERVE MORE!

Rule the Boardroom! Rule the Bedroom! Rule the World!

The red glow of the alarm clock illuminates the small square of lavender-coloured notepaper that she has left behind, neatly centred on the book's front cover.

He reaches for the note, which is written in her tight, ornate script.

I know what you did.

Did you think that I wouldn't find out?

I'll be leaving on a train tomorrow,

and you'll never see me

or touch me

or hear from me again.

Goodbye forever,

Emily

PS I hope you die and go to hell.

His system immediately switches into Crisis Containment mode. He grabs his slick new smartphone and calls her number, his mind racing to invent a believable explanation.

A pre-recorded voice informs him
“The number you have dialled is not in service.”

He grabs the clothes that are lying on the floor, dresses, and sprints for the door. Maybe he can catch her before she leaves, tell her it wasn't what it looked like, that it was all just a big, crazy misunderstanding.

“Fuck that,” he says to his translucent reflection on the
floor-to
-ceiling windows of his condo. There is no “maybe” for men in his position. He lives at the top of the world. He has it all. He
deserves
it all.

From up here, he's got a view of the CN Tower and the Air Canada Centre, where his firm owns platinum season's tickets for the Leafs. He raises both middle fingers and aims them at the Air Canada Centre.

“Fuck you guys!” he says. “I'm better than anyone on your pathetic team.”

Keegan was scouted to play for the Leafs and several other NHL teams, but the scouting reports described him as “tempera­mental,” “inconsistent,” “uncoachable,” and “not a team player,” so his father eventually had to call in a favour and get Keegan a job at an investment firm, where he makes as much money as an NHL all-star anyway.

On a clear day, Keegan can see friggin'
Hamilton
from here. It isn't clear today, though; through the falling rain, the towers that surround him are simple geometric blurs. Today his view reminds him of the prints of Impressionist paintings that she's hung all over his condo, to “give it some life.”

“Be
vital
!” he commands his reflection. “You
will
catch her at the station. You
will
tell her that she's wrong. And you
will
convince her to come back with you. Be
vital.
”

He's about to sprint to the elevator, when something occurs to him. “My ring! My fucking lucky ring!”

When Keegan set the Wheatfield Major Junior Hockey League's (still-unbroken) record for Most Goals Scored in a single game, he and his teammates left the arena immediately to go celebrate at the Ooh La La All-Nude Gentlemen's Club; the stretch limousine, the drinks, and the girls were all paid for by Keegan's father. The next day, when Keegan realized that he had forgotten to claim the puck that hit the twine for his eleventh goal of the game, he raced back to the Faireville Memorial Arena to claim his prize.

By then the puck was long gone, but the arena manager had found a ring on the ice, engraved on the inside with the words
Forever More
. So Keegan claimed that instead.

“Fucking right, Forever More!” he says to himself now. He
does
deserve better. He
does
deserve more. “I am Keegan fucking Thrush, muthafuckahs!”

With his lucky ring in place, Keegan smirks and winks at his reflection again.

“You're the Man in Charge, pal. You're a gunslinger. You're a fucking
gunslinger
.”

He tugs his index fingers from their front-pocket holsters, cocks back his thumbs like hammers, and takes aim at his reflection.

The makeup sex is going to be
insane
.

O
utside his building, Keegan waves frantically for a taxi, but each one passes him by.

“Shit! I'd give my fucking
life
for a cab right now.”

Then, through the hiss of the rain on the pavement, he hears the sore-throat rumble of a V8 engine approaching. As the limousine turns the corner, its engine gets louder, its pitch higher.

He steps onto the road and waves his hand in the air. “Taxi! Taxi!” he shouts.

Inside the car, the driver slumps against the door, his life taken in an instant by a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. His life is over, just like that.

The driver's black suit is crisply pressed, and the bill of his chauffeur's cap shines as brightly as his patent leather shoes. The brass plaque on his lapel reveals that his name was Carl.

The limo veers toward Keegan. He is frozen in place.

The high-beam headlights are like angry eyes. The chrome teeth of the grille are snarling, predatory.

“Get out of the way!” Keegan commands himself, but his body does not obey.

There is the hissing of tires on the wet sidewalk and then a thump, followed by shattering as the limo smashes through the glass-shrouded foyer of the gleaming condominium tower.

And then there is the faint scent of burnt rubber in the thick, damp air. There is the rattle of stray raindrops on the sidewalk, and a sound like fingertips drumming on the metal of the trunk of the car, which protrudes from the building like an undetonated shell.

Some distance from the body of Keegan Thrush, his lucky silver ring jangles on the sidewalk.

S
he is aboard a train bound for somewhere new, her face pressed against the glass. She watches the scenery race past, backlit by the first orange sunlight of the day. The retreating rain clouds are beautiful; they remind her of the prints of Impressionist paintings that she had to leave behind.

Her heartbeat plays counterpoint to the metallic rhythm of the wheels on the tracks, and she repeats her new mantra, which seems to have entered her consciousness from somewhere beyond this mortal plane:

“You deserve better. You deserve more.

“You deserve better. You deserve more.”

She smiles at her reflection in the window, as if she's posing for a new headshot for her portfolio. This photo would be a nice one:
Beautiful Lone Traveller Bravely Begins a New Life.

For a moment, she wonders if he has found her note yet, and if it has shaken him up at all.

Then she turns back to the image of herself in the window.

Escape Velocity

es·cape ve·loc·i·ty

ɪˈskeɪp vǝˈl
s
ɪ
ti

The velocity that a moving body (as a rocket)

must attain to escape from the gravitational field of a celestial body (as the Earth).

J
ames pushes the creaky door open and tiptoes into the foyer of the old house, which is divided from the landlord's domain with nothing but old curtains. The probably senile old guy never remembers James's name, and refers to him as “Priya's repairman.” James supposes that this description is apt enough.

When Sidney first sent him over to help Priya with her apartment renovations, the work was pretty demanding:

• Scraping off decades-old, smoke-yellowed wallpaper, inches at a time.
  
• Patching the holes in the plaster that had been hidden under the decaying wallpaper.
  
• Tearing up the matted, cat-piss-and-puke-stained car­pets to reveal the maple floorboards underneath.
  
• Sanding off a century's worth of paint layers from the mouldings and banisters to get to the wood under­neath, which Priya and James then stained and varnished to its current glorious condition.
  
• Carrying the practically antique kitchen appliances down the narrow staircase to the curbside and, as Priya could afford them, lugging the new appliances up.
  
• Filling in and painting over the damage to the staircase wall caused by lugging appliances up and down.
  
• Painting the walls Priya-style colours: Blackberry-Wine Purple. Spring-Meadow Green. Sangria Red. Ocean Blue.
  

On the one and only occasion that Sidney stopped by to give her Professional Opinion on their progress, she disapproved of Priya's colour choices.

“Good gawd, James, why didn't you stop her? The place looks like a candy store! Or a playground. Yeah, that's what these colours remind me of! Those indoor playgrounds for kids, with the room full of coloured plastic balls.”

The interior of Sidney's North Toronto mansion is finished in neutral, resale-friendly colours: Latte Beige. Hazelnut Beige. Burlap Beige. Wheatfield Beige. Roasted Sesame Seed Beige. Hampton Beige. Butterscotch-Martini Vomit Beige.

(The latter appeared on the bathroom wall after one of Sidney's outings with Roland Baron. James cleaned it up, while Sidney snored “
Rrrrrrroland
…
Rrrrrroland
…” Ah, the power of denial!)

T
he voice of Priya's landlord crackles from behind the faded, musty curtains. “Somebody out there? Somebody come to see me?”

“It's me, sir.”

“Priya's repairman! Wanna sit a spell and chew the fat, son?”

The old guy is nice enough, and normally James would stop to talk with him. But not today. James needs to see Priya right away.

He pulls open the apartment door that he helped paint (he did the rolling, Priya did the details), and James ascends the staircase, which is so narrow that his shoulders brush both walls as he climbs. He turns sideways to avoid bumping the reproductions of paintings by Manet, van Gogh, and Goya, which Priya once found leaning against a Dumpster in an alley; she has the rare ability to find the value in things that others have abandoned, to transform the discarded and devalued into treasures again.

James needs to see Priya.

She is usually there to greet him at the top of the stairs.

“Priya?” James calls out.

There is no reply.

He looks at the 1940s movie posters that hang in the narrow hallway:
Casablanca. Citizen Kane. Notorious. The Maltese Falcon. An Affair to Remember.
James and Priya have watched all of these films together, sneaking out to the local repertory theatre when they were supposed to be scraping, sanding, and painting. Sidney despises such “boring old stuff,” preferring loud, glossy, new Hollywood movies with THX surround sound and CGI and “actors who are still alive.”

“Priya?” James calls out again.

Still no answer.

He examines the painting that Priya bought from an elderly couple's yard sale just up the street. She thought that it was a scene from Old Montreal, but James was pretty sure it was Sacré-Coeur in Paris. Priya decided she liked that explanation better, and she paid the old couple five dollars for it, when they were only asking for one.

“I paid
five times
the asking price, and it's
French
,” she said. “I now officially own a piece of
real art
!”

James had to laugh at that; Priya was making fun of Sidney's sudden expertise in art. All of the paintings in the McMansion were chosen by an interior decorator hired by Sidney on the strong recommendation of Roland Baron. Directly quoting the
three-hundred
-
dollar
-an-hour decorator, Sidney described the two huge new “investment pieces” in her living room as “vibrant abstracts in kinetic teal,” and she scolded James when he referred to the colours as “greeny blue” or “bluey green.” Like the suddenly insufficient diamond in Sidney's engagement ring, the two paintings cost more than James's first three cars combined.

James still likes Priya's five-dollar painting of Sacré-Coeur better.

“Priya?” James calls out again.

No reply.

The landing at the top of the stairs is almost too narrow for James to turn around. He looks to the right, into the tiny, makeshift kitchen. Priya is sometimes in there making tea when he arrives. She isn't there today.

James looks to the left, down the dangerously narrow hallway; dangerous because it runs parallel to the staircase, divided only by a knee-level railing. Once, when they were on their second can of paint and third bottle of cheap Bordeaux, James took a half-step back to admire his work and nearly toppled ass-first over the railing. He and Priya laughed until they couldn't breathe.

“Hey, Priya! Are you here?”

“I'll be out in a minute,” comes Priya's muffled voice from behind the bathroom door. “Make yourself at home.”

She must not have heard him earlier. He hadn't noticed that the door was closed; Priya usually forgets and leaves it wide open. She's become accustomed to living alone.

James kicks off his shoes, which are still damp from the earlier downpour, and he shrugs his almost-dry jacket onto the bannister. As usual, Priya's panties and bras and other lacy underthings are draped over the railing to dry after washing, like decorations around the edges of a pubescent boy's wet dream.

(Sidney, by comparison, washes each of her “intimates” one at a time on the delicate cycle of their
state-of
-
the
-art washing machine, then she gingerly plucks out each slight item between her index finger and thumb, carrying it to the ensuite to blow it dry with her hair dryer. Then she tucks it into its own Ziploc bag, which she files in her dresser, sorted by style and colour.)

James moves through Priya's tight hallway, careful to tuck in his shoulders to miss the mirror surrounded by seashells and the little framed pictures of
white-leather
-jumpsuit Elvis, Henry Winkler as the Fonz, femme fatale Bette Davis, and Marilyn Monroe's famous subway grate scene from
The Seven Year Itch
.

As he passes Priya's open bedroom door, he notices the print of Manet's
Un bar aux Folies Bergère.
He had given it to her
as a housewarming gift. The pendant around the subject's neck reminds James of the kind of thing that Priya would wear herself, and the woman's dark, slightly disappointed-looking eyes could belong to Priya too.

James supposes that she falls asleep looking at the Manet. This makes him smile a little.

Priya's small living room is crammed with knick-knacks: candles, books, vintage cameras, tiny medicine bottles made of green, blue, and brown glass, kerosene lamps, chrome hood ornaments from antique cars, and other colourful, curious objects that caught Priya's eye at garage sales and second-hand stores.

Priya's place has a turntable, an amplifier, and stereo speakers, with hundreds of real vinyl records in “borrowed” green and blue plastic milk crates. Some of the records once belonged to Sidney, back when she still allowed her friends to call her “Sid,” back before she became the “protégée” of Roland Baron.

The music inside Sidney's McMansion comes from a remote-controlled, subscription-service satellite music system; James has never figured out how to convince the system to play the music he actually wants to hear, rather than the “ambient modern trance” that Sidney has selected as the default channel (again on the recommendation of Roland Baron's
three-hundred
-
dollar
-an-hour decorator).

James
does
know how to play records, though, so he gets up to put one on the turntable. He selects The Supremes'
Greatest Hits
, which he and Priya listened to a lot when they were working together on this room.

“Hey!” James calls out. “Are you okay in there?”

Priya, unlike Sidney, is usually in and out of the washroom in under five minutes. Sidney takes over two hours each morning to make herself “perfect.”

James corrects himself: Sidney
took
over two hours each morning. Sidney only exists in the past tense now.

“I'm here,” Priya says.

She had walked in so softly on her bare feet that James didn't hear her enter the room.

James turns away from the turntable to face her.

The whites of her eyes are bloodshot, her eyelids swollen. Strands of her long black hair cling to her wet face.

“Wow,” James says, “what —”

She lunges at him, wraps her arms tightly around his torso, buries her face in the valley between his shoulder and chest, sniffling and sighing.

“You're warming me,” she says. “Don't let go.”

Priya is wearing her purple terry-cloth bathrobe, which James has seen hanging on the knob of her bathroom door, but never on her body. He doesn't let go.

“This morning,” she says, “I felt like there was nothing I couldn't do. I felt like I could change the world today. I felt like I could make it all better.” Five staccato inhalations and then, “Things can change so quickly. What a day.”

“It
was
a bad day,” James says.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

James shrugs. “You first.”

She sighs. “Okay. So, there's this kid at school, Eric, whom I've been counselling for so long … shit! I shouldn't have said his name! Confidentiality! Gawd, what's wrong with me?”

“There's
nothing
wrong with you, Priya,” James, says, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. “Tell me about the kid. I forget his name already.”

“He's creative. He's sensitive. And he's very, very angry.”

She drifts into herself for a moment. James strokes her hair and waits.

“Anyway,” she says, “he's been having trouble with his dad at home, arguing, physical confrontations. His father kicked him out, and he's been couch surfing for the past few weeks. So, I invited them both to my office to talk it over, with me as the mediator.”

She shivers. James pulls her in a bit closer.

“As soon as they both got into my office, before I even got a chance to say a word, they were screaming at each other. And then they started fighting. And I mean full-out,
trying-to
-
kill
-each-other fighting. Punching, kicking,
biting
… it didn't end until the son threw a big ceramic planter at his father's head. He ducked, and the planter smashed through the window on my office door. Then they both took off.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Not physically.”

“Did you say there was
biting
?”

“The kid bit his dad's hand. The Father of the Year bled all over my
Official Conflict Resolution Manual
.”

“He bled all over your
Official Conflict Resolution Manual
?”

“I guess I should order a new one, eh?” She laughs a little. “The dried blood might send the wrong message in other mediations.” She pulls herself closer. “You are so warm.”

All James can think to say is, “You can't fix everything.”

“But I
want
to fix everything.”

James glances around the room, at the dump she's transformed into a home, at the bits of trash she's transformed into treasures.

“I know you do,” he says, kissing her forehead. “That's why I love you so much.”

“Really? You love me so much?”

He nods.

She stands on her tiptoes, bringing her face closer to his. “Thanks. I need someone to love me today.”

She kisses him on the mouth; her body is still shivering, but her lips are warm.

James sucks her upper lip between his, Priya flicks her tongue under his front teeth. Soon their tongues are spiralling together like currents in a whirlpool.

James's hands slip up under her purple bathrobe, up and then down her goosebump-speckled back, gripping the round of her behind.

They fall onto the couch. Priya unties her robe, and James pushes it open, like parting velvet curtains.

Every fantasy he has ever had in the shower about Priya floods through his mind and body. He frantically kisses her neck, her collarbone, sucks her nipples into his mouth, licks into her navel.

Priya arches her back, pulls James's hair, breathes as if she is running for her life.

Then she pushes his face away from her skin.

“Wait!” she cries. “No! We can't.”

“We
can
,” James says.

“But … Sid! I mean
Sidney
. No. We can't.”

James props himself on one knee against the sofa cushion and pushes his fingers into his front pocket, past his aching erection, digging out the note. He unfolds it to show Priya.

Don't forget to go to Priya's place tonight !

DON'T FORGE
T
!