Hellgoing (7 page)

“For food's sake,” I repeat, hands still.

She nods, smiles. I smile as well.

“Well, I think we should ask the doctor,” I say as I move around Hilary. She follows me to his office without a word.

In a moment of what I am certain must have been boredom, Catherine once asked me why I became a nun. I asked did she want the long version or the short version.

“Short version,” the thing replied. Not a moment's hesitation.

The short version was this. I was nineteen and sitting having a beer in the sun with my friend Dell Mercer. She was not my best friend or even a particularly good friend, but more one of those inevitable friends — someone you've known since preschool who is as much of a fixture in your life as a parent or a pet. In fact I remember it was Grade two when Dell decided she wanted people to call her Dell instead of Adela. I was the reason. She thought it sounded too much like my name. But was she sorry by Grade Three, because everyone started chanting “The Farmer in the Dell” at her in the playground, and I think she blamed me for it right up until Grade Seven or so.

But since this was the short version, I didn't tell
Catherine
all that.

I just told her I was nineteen and sitting having a beer in the sun with my friend Dell Mercer. It was summer and we were both home from school — she nursing, me teaching. We were in her parents' backyard overlooking the wharf, watching tourists bob around in their sailboats, and she announced she was getting married. I squealed and pretended to fumble my beer and did and said all the things girls are supposed to on these occasions. Of course I asked to see her ring.

Dell told me, “We haven't got it yet. Terry's got to save up for a while. I want a real rock. I've always had nice things, and you only get married once, so I feel like I deserve a real rock. I've waited a long time to get married. So I told him, Terry, I want a rock. Nothing else will stand.”

She kept saying, rock. A real rock, over and over. Beer in the sun, sun on the water, water under sailboats. I thought
I think I'll be a nun
after that.

Catherine of course could be counted upon to find this story idiotic.

I didn't tell her my secret reason. The other, the story of the rock, was my official reason, and it's true that Dell going on and on like that very much clinched the deal for me. But there was another story I'd never tell Catherine. It happened when I was her age, wandering around in the fields at my grandparents' place in Margaree. It was summer then also, but late, long-shadowed and hot. No ocean nearby with a breeze off the water to cool things off. The high grass had turned gold, dead from heat. I was listening to the silence, the strange hot buzz of nothing — just sky and dry grass. I bumped against a stinking willie, which nodded at me, and as I passed I glimpsed an enormous bumblebee nodding along with it. I jumped — I'd had a terror of bees ever since one of my stupider brothers took to a hive with a rake. But the big bee wasn't perturbed. It just rode the nodding flower, not budging or moving its wings. I bent over and nudged the stinking willy again, ready to run. The bee still didn't move. I must have watched it forever before finally extending a finger and actually poking the bee. Nothing. It was frozen, somehow.

And then, panic. Like the world had stopped, and the hot buzz of nothing in every direction.

Something like,
Help me i'm alone
.

“BODY OF CHRIST.”

Dr. Pat just stands there. I catch his eye over the priest's shoulder and mouth a big
amen
.

“Oh!” exclaims Dr. Pat. “Amen.” The priest gazes at him with indulgence, raises the host mouth-level. Dr. Pat stares at it. Oh, I am going to start laughing if someone doesn't do something.

“Open your mouth to receive the host,” encourages the priest in church tones.

Dr. Pat appears horrified, and I must say it unnerves me as well, the idea of him standing before the priest just opening his mouth like the rest of us, waiting. Him not even Catholic, but a doctor. We didn't tell the priest because Catherine was so insistent — Dr. Pat had to receive too, or else she wouldn't. Guilt. My fingertips tingle, my palms seep with it. And I keep wanting to laugh.

I only wish Catherine had insisted on Hilary receiving as well. Hilary is the one who needs to be here with her mouth hanging open. She would know the responses, the amens, when to stand and when to kneel. She would know it like a baby knows to suck, and be infuriated. Thanks be to God. The words would fly from her mouth, her mouth would hang open, her tongue would pop out of its own accord, welcoming the host. Not a thing the social worker could do about it. She knows, and that's why she hasn't come. “I want nothing to do with this,” she said in Dr. Pat's office. Her face went red to match her hair. She's very cool, Hilary, but her face betrays her. If it weren't for that fair complexion and those telltale blotches that say
I would like to choke you, Sister Anita
,
you'd suppose butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

Dr. Pat kept yanking on his telephone cord in the face of Hilary's reproach. He held it with both hands and kept pulling the curls apart and then gently letting them
sproing
together again. For a moment I thought he was going to start chewing on the thing.

“I just want to make sure we're doing everything we can,” he said to the cord. “I want to leave no stone unturned — for Catherine's sake.”

“Then have her committed,” said Hilary. “Send her to Halifax. Get her the professional care that she needs, don't participate in this fantasy.”

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Her fantasy,” repeated Hilary. “The thing that is making her sick.”

I decided I didn't need to answer. I just sat back in my chair, relaxing.

“Catherine is running this,” said Hilary. “She's — she's in the director's chair.”

I tittered then, Hilary's blotches deepening. I don't know why. Catherine in her nightdress shouting
Action!

“Body of Christ,” to me. Open your mouth and close your eyes.

Then he turns to Catherine. She gets to stay in bed.

“Body of Christ.”

“Amen.” Catherine sticks her tongue out. It's as white as the host itself. White as the blood of the lamb and all that.

And it's over already. As the priest blows out the communion candle, we all watch Catherine close her mouth and swallow. I suppose it's a bit anticlimactic. He turns to shake hands with Dr. Pat, and then there is a noise — a big one. We all twitch and look at each other for explanation before we think to look at Catherine again. She's sitting there with a face of mild surprise, hands lightly resting on her stomach. It makes the noise again, but louder.

“There's a demon down there,” she remarks.

“It certainly sounds like it,” admits Dr. Pat. He moves toward her, reaching for his stethoscope. But she grabs his hand before it gets to his pocket. She grabs it and places it on her belly.

“Feel,” she tells him.

And he does, he stands there feeling. I want to snap at him to cut it out, and I look around for the priest, who is mumbling dazedly to himself in the corner, packing away his communion things. Old. As Catherine has already pointed out.

“I'm going to be sick,” she announces, and starts to clamber out of bed. Whereupon of course she collapses. Dr. Pat must pick her up. Dr. Pat gathers her into his arms like kindling.

And for God's sake, her gown has not been tied in the back and now it slips right off the creature, skin melting off bones. The poor priest is a white-robed dervish, whirling from the darkened room.

IT OCCURS TO
me that I haven't visited Sylvia in a while and she is probably wondering what's gotten into me. Well,
Sylvia
, I will tell her. I just got so wrapped up in that little girl down the hall. Yes — the one who doesn't eat. Wouldn't swallow her own spit if she had her druthers. Would want to know how many calories it had in it. Well, baby steps, Sylvia. We got her to take the host, and that's a beginning, now, isn't it? You could do a lot worse now, couldn't you, Sylvia, than the Body of Christ? I'll say.

And we will laugh quietly — Sylvia wheezily — at my near-irreverence. Sylvia enjoys those kind of jokes, the ones that take a run at blasphemy, swerving away at the last dangerous moment, like kids playing chicken.

Sylvia's room is darkened too — maybe everyone on the floor is taking communion today, the traumatized priest shambling from room to room:
B-b-b-body of Christ. B-body. Body.
Stuffing the wafer distractedly down everyone's throat.
Take this and eat it
.

I will tell the story to Sylvia sometime. Not today, but when I'm feeling a bit more collected and can joke about the hapless Dr. Pat and the muttering priest. Sylvia will enjoy hearing me make fun of the priest and the doctor, the men she depends on to such an unthinkable extent. I imagine you have to hate them a little. Need to see them ridiculed at times — it brings relief. I can do that for Sylvia.

But Ducky's in there and the room is hazy, rank. His flannelled back is to me, a third wall, and from behind it come low, private giggles. Surreptitious wheezings. Snatches of song from Ducky.

Yooooo doooooo

something

to me

He is hamming up the Yooooo dooooo's, drawing them out forever. Sylvia coughs voluptuously and Ducky turns his head in a deliberate, aristocratic sort of gesture. A gesture that plays at luxury and indulgence. I see his blunt woodsman's profile outlined in the dark — the scar that dents his cheek.

Yoooooooo doooooooo.

Here is what he's doing. He's inhaling, and then letting the smoke pour out as he sings. It cascades from his face and swirls heavenward, enveloping them both as he extends the cigarette to his wife. A more honest gesture, now, a gesture like the nurses when they feed her, only loving.

And then of course he takes a look around, a guilty boy. As he has probably been doing intermittently throughout this performance.

And if they think I am going to stand here denouncing this and that, they are not smart. If they think I'm going to slap my palm against the light switch and start hollering for doctors and nurses and the pope, they don't have to concern themselves. If they suppose I could possibly bother with any such nonsense, let them turn around and get on with what they're doing. Let them do as they please, the whole bunch of them. Eat and smoke and starve and stand on your head as far as I'm concerned. Live and die and do what you want all over the place. I won't be the one to say a word.

AN OTHERWORLD

F
alling down the stairs, Erin's only thought was:
Goddamn Sean!
Because she knew he would take this as proof that he'd been right about her bicycle accident three months ago, which proved she had some kind of a psychological problem.

You hurt yourself when you're upset about something, Sean had said.

There was a speed bump, she repeated at him. On the bike path. On the hill! It wasn't even marked.

I went to get your bike, said Sean, and there was a big sign. Speed bump, it said.

There was no sign!

There was a sign.

I am calling the city, Erin said, and I'm going to complain that there wasn't a sign.

There was a sign, said Sean. Go check.

Without telling him, once the black eyes from her broken nose had dwindled to under-eye smudges and people no longer gave her appalled looks when she appeared on the street, she slipped into the river valley to visit the scene of the accident. Just walking down the same hill made her stomach roil — provoked a visceral remembrance of sailing over her handlebars during the long, doomed
oh-no
time warp that hitting the speed bump had triggered. She had been playing a lot of computer games that month and, after crunching face-first to the ground, her instinct was to wonder:
When did I last hit save?
I can go back.
It was that feeling of losing, of having screwed up badly in the game and just wanting to quit in disgust and start over.

Then she stood up. No problem. Bounced to her feet.
I'm okay
, she thought,
I'm fine.
Blood started getting everywhere at that point and an over-tanned man who'd been leaving the pitch-and-putt with his preteen daughter re-parked his car and rushed over to offer assistance, the grossed-out twelve-year-old wincing in his wake.

In the stairwell, she landed against her outstretched hand, the same hand she had outstretched to slow herself down after having flown over the handlebars, the hand with all the subsequent soft tissue damage, which had kept her from doing yoga for three months and was only now starting to get better.

Motherfucker, said Erin in the stairwell — the word echoed in noisy layers. She took advantage of the privacy and crumpled up there for a while, cradling her hand.

Then she bounced to her feet just the same way she had on the bike path, put her shoe back on and finished moaning quickly. She was already late for the welcome reception.

Everyone except Erin had arrived by the time she got there, and her dad waggled his eyebrows at her, faux-­jocular. He extended his arm, the better to herd her toward his new accountant and also new best friend and business partner, Frank. Blank-minded and smiling, Erin held out her freshly damaged hand to Frank and next she was shrieking on her knees as Frank staggered backward, staring at his palm as if it pulsed with electricity.

Motherfucker, Erin said again. It was something she didn't often say in front of her parents. Cock, shouted Erin. Sean rushed to pick her up and sit her down somewhere.

THE STAIRWELL, SHE
said to Sean back in their room, was very poorly lit.

Don't even start that, Erin, said Sean.

No, I'm just saying, putting aside your theory for a minute, a person can't really see where they're going in there.

Especially when a person is hurling herself down the stairs.

They were in Belize. They were at this ridiculous resort on Ambergris Caye. Nobody else was at the resort except for the wedding party, even though the place was huge. If not for the resort staff, it would feel like some kind of post-apocalyptic celebration — all other humans vaporized. They had it to themselves because Frank was the owner and because it was off-season, and because her father was Frank's biggest investor.

Did you notice, she said to Sean, how Frank wears a diamond in either ear? He looks like a lunatic.

He is a lunatic, agreed Sean, allowing her to change the subject. Talk to him. Whole other planet. Did you talk to him?

No, said Erin. I didn't get a chance to talk to him after he hurt me.

Which was a stupid thing to say because it led them directly back to the topic at hand.

This was Erin, Sean had come to understand. This was what Erin did. Help me; get away from me; ow that hurt; come here.

SEAN DIDN'T THINK
it was that she didn't want to be getting married to him. He had his theories, but he didn't think that was it. He thought it could be attributed to how her father was running the wedding like one of his golf weekends, and also relationship issues leftover from Ames.

Ames was the man with whom Erin had spent her twenties “being hippies together,” as she described it. It had been such an obvious move of rebellion against her father it was embarrassing — Erin herself said that. Listening to Erin talk about her past, you would think she was the most self-aware person on the planet. Which is to say, not someone prone to hurling herself down flights of stairs and blaming it on the lighting. So she and Ames lived in a cabin on the Sunshine Coast, grew vegetables and kept bees. They weren't dropouts, they told themselves, dropping out was negative, a turning away, and this was a turning toward. They wanted to live authentically, like Henry David Thoreau, whom Ames was very into. Ames kept journals like Thoreau did, and made money working up and down the coast doing carpentry for his fellow authentic-­livers, often getting paid in loaves of bread and baskets of blackberries that he could have picked himself in about twenty minutes basically anywhere on the coast.

He called himself a “woodworker,” never a carpenter. This was Erin's scornful joke. She'd had a lot of grim fun, in the two years Sean had known her, at Ames's expense. Erin told Sean that, authentic living aside, Ames had nurtured ambitions to be an actor. Ha ha. He thought Hollywood was bullshit, as you do, but great acting, like woodworking, was a marriage of craft and art. Ha. And, okay, the truth was, acting was not an entirely unreasonable ambition for Ames. He was, Erin admitted, “beautiful,” all rangy limbs and the obligatory mid-nineties shaggy dis­habille, a look that still made Erin a little giddy, like when she came across old photos of Kurt Cobain or the Soundgarden guy. Every once in a while Ames would take the ferry to Vancouver to audition for something or another, but all he got was extra work and the occasional gay come-on. Gays loved Ames, confided Erin. I mean, of course they're going to love a good-looking guy, but there was something about Ames, they just
adored
him.

It went to Ames's head, long story short. He finally met, claimed Erin, one too many people who just
adored
him. There was an agent who promised to get him modelling work, and actually accomplished this. Ames returned to the coast one day with a pair of $400 sunglasses holding back his hair.

We have to move the hives, Erin told him, the bear is back.

God, said Ames, removing the sunglasses and gathering his hair into a ponytail at the back of his skull. It was a gesture meant to get across great depths of torment. I can't deal with the
hives
anymore. I mean, Jesus, Erin. As if the hives were her fault.

Then Ames sat Erin down and described all the ways he had become unhappy with her.

It was embarrassing because of how Erin had renounced everything for Ames and his sinews and the vegetables and bees and their lame voluntary-simplicity cliché. Erin remembered being twenty-two and telling her father she pitied him in response to his telling her she was being slutty and throwing her life away. Then her father decided to say what he did, and she said what she said in response. It was one of those detonator moments — a conversation that implodes time and space and opens up a kind of portal, like in video games. You pick up a coin or open a chest; you say the right thing, or say the wrong thing. And next thing you know the world around you shudders and gives way, depositing you into a completely new dimension, an otherworld.

What happened was that Erin's father, Ron, decided to impart to his daughter the axiom about no one wanting to buy a cow that gives its milk away for free.

Maybe, Erin told him — vibrating like a kettle on the boil — maybe the cow just wants to get milked.

You have to know Erin's family to understand how a comment like this would land.

You are never going to understand anything about real life, Erin told her father in the strangled, white-lipped silence that followed. It was a silence that would endure and thicken between them for the next five years — that was the portal she had tipped them into. The portal to a silent world. You are so caught up in your traditionalist dogmas, she said to dumbstruck Ron.

Tra-
dish
-onalist
dawg
-mas, Erin said to Sean, that was my big phrase back then. I thought it was just so clever. When Erin described herself saying things like this now, she did it as a parody. She adopted her “lumpy granola” voice, a grating singsong delivery, nasal with self-­righteousness — as if every sentence she uttered should end with an emphatic “man” or “dude.” Sean found it a little ruthless. Stop it, he laughed. You can't beat yourself up for being young.

You
weren't being an idiot when you were in your twenties, Erin accused.

I was being my own special kind of idiot, answered Sean. In fact, at the start of his twenties, Sean worked at a UPS call centre that had opened the very spring he graduated from university, and counted himself lucky. He banked his paycheques and rented a studio apartment in a concrete high-rise and took the bus to work. He applied for promotions within the company and bought mutual funds and had his first house by the time he was twenty-six, just in time to get married to a woman from his office to whom he now referred by no other name except “The Beast.” Later, after he divorced and went back to school, he met people like Erin, people who structured their twenties around snowboarding trips and the obtainment and usage of pot and had gone to Burning Man and had multiple sex partners and had taught in Japan and volunteered in Africa and sailed in sailboats around the Gulf Islands, and that's when he started feeling like his own special kind of idiot. Now he was forty-two.

By their second year of living together, Sean was spending every weekend tricking out their basement dungeon. It was his engagement present to Erin. But from the moment he set it up, he found the busywork of tinkering around down there gave him almost as much pleasure as the purpose it was intended for. He liked puttering and experimenting in his time off, looking up stuff online, inventing new things for them to try. Erin started calling it Satan's Workshop. He'd ordered plans for bondage furniture and so far had built his own whipping chair, and he'd also bought an old church confessional pew from the antique mall and sanded and stained it, drilled holes and added hooks and straps and turned it into a kind of sicko kneeling structure which Erin, with her Catholic background, loved. Now he'd moved on to a Saint Andrew's Cross, which was the biggest thing he'd ever done. He'd held off on this project for a while because the dungeon had metastasized to such a degree after Erin moved in, and was getting harder to pack up whenever they had friends over wanting their inevitable tour of the house. The last time Erin's parents had come to visit, it had taken all weekend to find a hiding place for everything. Her father had insisted on seeing Sean's “workshop” and then laughed at Sean as he looked around at the pristine tools hanging on their hooks.

This place is immaculate, Ron said. Give me a break, please, Sean. You don't so much as lift a hammer down here.

Sean had no idea what he would do with the Saint Andrew's Cross when the time came. Likely he would just end up throwing a tarp over it and hoping no one got curious.

DID YOU AND
Ames ever do this kind of stuff? Sean wanted to know after Erin moved in.

Ames and I had twenty-something sex, she said. Where you do it constantly and think you must be having a blast.

You weren't enjoying it? You don't have to say that, you know.

You think you're enjoying it, said Erin. There isn't a lot of difference, at that age, between thinking you're enjoying something and actually enjoying it.

Then how do you know the difference? said Sean.

You know later, once you're
really
enjoying it.

Then how do you know you're ever
really
enjoying it? They were lying in bed, having one of the lazy, pointless conversations of which they had so many early in their relationship. Where the actual subject under discussion didn't matter because all they really wanted was to feel each other's voices buzzing in their bodies.

How do you know you don't still just think you are enjoying it? said Sean. Like right now?

Because of having an orgasm, said Erin.

But, come on. You had orgasms!

Erin stretched then, sending her limbs in all directions like the da Vinci drawing. I didn't even know what an orgasm
was
in those days.

Sean understood she wasn't being literal. He knew he was paying more attention to the conversation than Erin was; than it really merited. But he wondered: Is this a compliment? Or what is it?

OKAY, STOP STOP
stop, said Erin. They were celebrating one year of being engaged and it was their first time using the basement in a serious way. Sean could tell that she meant it. They didn't have a safe word, because that made it seem too hardcore. Too much like people who dressed up in masks and rubber, who said mean things to each other, like in movies.

Mother
fucker
, said Erin. Whoo.

Sean looked at the cane in his hand. I didn't do it hard, like at all, he said.

Whoo. It really hurt, said Erin.

They had just bought it. Erin read about it online. It was fancy and expensive — rattan with a leather grip. Sean had offered to slap together something similar in his workshop, but Erin said it couldn't just be some stick from out in the yard; it had to be rattan.