Is this what bombs sound like too, when they come angling in? At the Baghdad Hilton, say, is this what you’d hear? These jets
are
bombs in a way, bio-bombs detonating on impact, sapiens sharding off in all directions. At least one of those folks is bound to have picked up some ingenious new strain of something and before long you’ll have it too, some madly mutating little mother that’ll flood your lungs, make your heart beat backwards, trick you into rejecting your own spleen. We’re all connected now. We’re all going to die of the same thing …
What’s with this new fixation, this ecstatic fear? It seems to have arrived with the fever, with Matt’s heightened awareness of his own body. Finite. Fated. Or maybe it’s like this: the fever
is
fear. His wonky new life, the twisted rescue mission into which he’s pressed himself, these things are broiling him alive. Mid-snooze Zane was there again, so Matt went at him with his words. None of them worked, partly because they were in some foreign tongue (Hindi maybe, but with a Québécois accent?) which neither of them understood. Matt kept sidling closer—they were in the woods out back of the Lair—until he was pouring his nonsense directly into Zane’s ear. At a certain point the whispering transformed itself into a kiss. A chaste kiss, yes, lips to cheek, but painfully hot. By the time Matt drew back Zane was wrecked, whittled down to the body of the disease itself …
Matt shoves himself out of bed, shuffles over to the coffee table. He glugs the remaining glass of tepid OJ, chances a nibble of cold toast. Then he sets about poking through his suitcase, its vicious scarring of zippered pouches. He’ll need his cellphone for this one—Zane and Mercedes have call display, and this has to look long distance.
“Yup.”
“Oh, hi, Mercedes.” Cripes. This is the risk you run when you ring up Zane. “Matt here.”
“Matt. What’s new?”
“Not much. Well actually, this might interest you. Looks like my wife’s gone gay on me.”
A gratified chuckle from Mercedes. “Zane mentioned. Good for her.”
“Yeah, thanks. What about you?”
“I’m still a dyke.”
“Right. Hey, I don’t suppose Zane’s—”
“Did you hear Bush today?”
“Yeah, about Schwarzenegger.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Freedom and peace my ass. Grab the oil before the Chinese get it, more like.”
“Yeah, really.”
“Hey, funny you calling today,” says Mercedes. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
“I know,” says Matt. “I’m psychic.”
“Mmm, I don’t think so,” says Mercedes.
“I’m
psychic, so I’d know.”
Lordy. It’s always like this with Mercedes, the painfully jovial sparring. “Busted. Guess you’ll have to describe your fantasy for me, then. Is it the usual? You, me, a bucket of Cool Whip?”
“Whip being the operative word?” She faux-guffaws.
A couple of years back, when Zane first announced his plan to shack up with Mercedes, Matt was volubly broad-minded about it. Really though, how nutty could the guy get. Zane had only met her a few months before, while he was cinematographer for
Slap,
a documentary on the S/M subculture in Toronto. He’d described it as one of those instant recognition things—they were mother and child in a past life, or brother and sister, master and slave. In this life they were both looking to buy a house, but were nervous about mixing real estate with the already fraught business of romance. Zane was between men—between Nico and Nico, off-again between two on-agains—and Mercedes was between women. They found a brick semi-detached off the Danforth and snapped it up. So’s not to be living in sin (is there
no
limit to Zane’s capacity for irony?) they got married. A complete ceremony in synagogue, despite Mercedes being unchosen. And then the bouquet, the garter belt, the whole kit and caboodle.
Their place, too, is insanely straight. On a movie set it would serve as home to the blandest of yuppie couples. The kitchen’s all brushed steel and dimmered pot light, the living room oak and ochre. There are
GQ
and
House and Garden
mags fanned out on the smoked-glass coffee table, which Siegfried, the neutered cocker spaniel, adorably whaps with his tail whenever he passes through. The walls are dominated by photographs, tasteful (read unaroused) male nudes. “Emasculated Mapplethorpes,” Zane calls them. These were snapped by Mercedes’s ex, a woman so fascinated by men that she finally became one, Lilly to Larry—at which point Mercedes gave him the heave-ho.
There’s only one decorating choice that isn’t consonant with the bourgeois contentment of the whole place. On the landing between the second floor and the third, where Mercedes has set up her dungeon, there’s a museum-like display of the tools of her trade. One of her trades, anyway—not the romance writing, and not the dog walking either, though of course she uses leashes for that too. Alongside the leashes are whips, straps, crops, canes, handcuffs, paddles, masks. Even more unnerving, perhaps, are the ordinary items—a stuffed alligator, a woollen mitten, a spiral-bound ledger book, a universal remote—mixed in with the more predictable accoutrements. On hangers there’s an array of leather garb, designed, it would seem, to break the body down, flay it into strips and strands of flesh. All strangely inert, this gear—a set of Civil War revolvers you can’t imagine anybody actually using. But she does, if you ask her nicely and pay her a fortune. Zane, too, has lucked into a woman with some serious dough.
“Dream on, sweetums,” says Mercedes. “No, the reason I was thinking of you, Zane showed me your review. The phony one?
House of Straw.
”
“Right. Hey, I don’t suppose he’s around, is he?”
“No, he’s with Nico. This project he’s working on.”
“Wait, hold it,” says Matt. “You
knew
my review was a fake? How did you know that?”
“Have you read it, Matt? Siegfried,
no.
Plus Zane told me.”
“Son of a bitch. I specifically—”
“Oh, settle down. I make my living keeping secrets, remember?”
Matt got to shack up with Zane for a little while once too. Film school, third year. He and Zane and the Unholy Trinity, Trish, Tracy, Trina, three business school types. A shabby townhouse of which he and Zane shared the third floor. Now and then Meg stayed over, but Zane was single, so most nights it was just the two of them shooting ouzo or whatever horrible concoction they’d scrounged up, waxing brilliant about their favourite director of the day, Vigo or Murnau or De Sica. On the turntable might be Zappa, Beefheart; between songs you’d hear the thump and moan from downstairs, one of the girls getting it on with one of the boneheaded boyfriends. Good times.
“Hey, by the way,” says Mercedes, “there’s something I wanted to tell you.”
“Yeah?” The sparring seems to have fizzled here, something different’s going on.
“I offered to pay.”
“Pay?”
“The drugs, anything Zane needs. I just wanted you to know.”
“Know?”
“It isn’t
me.
I’m not pushing him to do this.”
“Oh, hey, I never imagined you were.” Though come to think of it. Mercedes with her big dark ideas, Mercedes with her jubilant nihilism, her blissed-out rage—this has obviously been part of the appeal for Zane. Hanging with somebody who’s more radical than he is for a change.
“But I’m not trying to stop him either. I think it’s fucking brilliant, what he’s doing, what my man’s doing.”
My man.
“This is coming from
inside
him, Matt. It isn’t our place to bottle it up. It isn’t my place, and it isn’t yours.”
“Inside?” This must be true, in some sense. You can’t force somebody to be a martyr, can you? A martyr has to choose to be a martyr or he isn’t a martyr at all, he’s just another loser like the rest of us.
“Zane’s fucked up,” says Mercedes, “why shouldn’t he be? Why shouldn’t everybody? Why shouldn’t you?”
“Oh, hey, Mercedes. I am.”
But not fucked up enough, perhaps. Is that the trouble? People who do stuff, people who make heroic gestures are so often damaged in some fundamental way. It makes sense. If you aren’t too short or too fat, if you don’t have a limp or a learning disability, why would it ever occur to you to climb Everest or write a symphony or discover penicillin?
“Yeah,” says Mercedes. “Yeah, of course you are. Sorry.”
If he loses Zane, will that do it? Will that push Matt over some threshold, damage him deeply enough that he’ll be compelled to do something too? “Listen,” he says, “that’ll be Mariko on the other line. I’m supposed to pick her up at the ferry.” Or what about
almost
losing Zane, would that suffice? “Tell the big dunce I said fuggoff, will you? And tell him no need to call back, I’ll try him another day.”
“You will? Promise?”
“Yeah. Why, what do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just, I’m not sure you get how important this is. You are.”
“Ah.”
“You’ve got to be a good friend, Matt. A really good friend. He’s going to need you.”
“I know.”
“But more than you think.”
“How so?”
“Just … When’s the last time you really
talked
to him?”
“You know what, Mercedes? You’re right. I suck at this. Too. I suck at this too.”
An impatient
phooph
of air from the far end. “Okay, good, you go ahead and hate yourself. I’m so impressed, Matt. Hating yourself, that’s just bound to fucking help.”
And she hung up hard.
Grand piano. Plaid-vested barkeep. Row upon glinting row of rare single malt. Matt doesn’t have a regular watering hole, but if he did it’d be nothing like this, like the Starlight Lounge.
It’s been an hour or so since he got done with Mercedes. He topped up his Jacuzzi, set the timer for twenty minutes, lowered his shaky frame into the froth of bubbles. “Juniper Breeze,” fresh as all get-out. The jets prodded and pummelled him from every angle, the motor hypnotized him with its Tibetan-monk drone. As he crawled out he managed to steer clear of the shaving mirror, its nightmare microscoping of pores and follicles. No escape, though, from the flat mega-mirror over the sink.
Oh dear. His virtually pigmentless, night-of-the-living-dead skin had gone all patchy, lobstered here and there by the bath. A decent crop of hair (black with the odd grey squiggle) graced one pec, but the other was almost pubescent in its sparsity. Virtually everything about him—he’d never really noticed this before—was lopsided. Look at the eyebrows, one arched, one level, lending him an expression of aggrieved puzzlement. Look at the cockeyed prick, leaning inelegantly to the right. Matt had gleaned from a nature show once that babies, indeed animals of all kinds, are attracted to symmetry. Symmetry signifies life, sets the organic apart from the inorganic—the lion’s face apart from the rubble of rock, say. It makes sense, then, that you’d go crookeder and crookeder as you age, as you commence your transit from animate to inanimate, from living to that other thing.
Nail clippers? It was all he had. He went at the whorl of hair on the right side of his chest like a topiarist with the teensiest possible pair of garden shears. After about five minutes he’d evened things up, though the right side looked ravaged more than trimmed. He spent the next few minutes practising his skeptical and surprised looks in the mirror, trying to get his two eyebrows to go up in tandem. Which just left his dick—a longer-term project, presumably. His
package,
that was the expression. What if he carried it on the other side of the seam for the next few months? Could it be trained, vinelike, to lean the other way?
Matt’s on the first swig of his second pint of microbrewed I.P.A. when Karen wanders in. He’s just finished shifting his package, thank Christ. Karen does a brisk pan of the lounge, hunting her gang presumably, her fellow geniuses. Genii? “Hey Karen, over here!” What the hell.
She squints, picks him out of the clinky gloom.
Should have gone with the blazer. It was a little rumpled after a day balled up in the bottom of his bag, but without it this khakis-and-crewneck rig is pretty dull. Karen’s look is jacket and slightly funky blouse, knee-length skirt with an unexpected belt—the more-than-meets-the-eye thing. She’s in orangey reds again, goldy browns, a fluster of falling leaves. Toronto about a month from now, when it too starts dying.
“Hi, sweetheart.” She bends over him—gape of breasts going udderish, teatlike with gravity—and plants a slow kiss on his forehead. “Am I ever glad to see you! I was starting to think maybe you’d had second thoughts!” She laughs. Has he heard her laugh yet? It’s more petite than you’d expect, a piccolo note from a flute body.
“Yeah, well,” says Matt. Second thoughts?
“I called you earlier, but I guess you were out.” She catches the bartender’s eye, mouths, “Perrier? Lime?” pantomiming the squeeze.
Matt says, “Not your people?” He tilts his head to indicate the far end of the lounge, where a conference or convention group is settling in. Folks muscle marble tables together, muster extra chairs from here and there.
“Sorry?” says Karen. “Oh, no. No, our sessions are …” She waves her hand vaguely about. “Holiday Inn. I always stay someplace else, these things get kind of, you know, incestuous. Thanks.” She sips her high-toned water. “So, you really meant it then?”
“Well see, the thing is …”
Meant
it?
Karen looks stricken.
“I’m not saying no, it’s just that sometimes in the heat of—”
Ah. So this is her real laugh. It’s bigger, richer—somewhere between an oboe and a bassoon. “Very funny,” says Matt. “You had me going there. Wedding bells.” He takes a rueful pull at his pint. “Anyway, shall we start again?” Time’s all jumbled up here, they’re shooting their scenes out of order, the get-to-know-you scene after the climactic sex scene.
“Gone With the Wind?”
he says. “The very first scene they shot? Atlanta already up in flames.”
“How about that!” says Karen.
“Sorry, I … I’m in movies.”
Those big eyes.
“Matt McKay.” He sticks out his hand. Though maybe he should be keeping it anonymous, nameless.
Last Tango in Toronto?