Matt quick-peeked down at the girl. Her face was tilted up at the screen, a satellite dish searching for a signal. Scooped out. Scary.
Erin. Was it Erin? Yeah, that’s who the umgirl had been reminding him of all along, his sister. That same toughness suddenly shucked off, that same drawn bow of a body. If you deepened the umgirl’s orange streaks you’d have the orangutan red of Erin’s hair. And that frill of baby fat around the elbows and knees? That survived in Erin too, until the swimming kicked in.
Erin always gets realer as Toronto approaches, her absence more palpable, more appalling. Matt never lived in Toronto without her—he took off for the West as soon as she was gone, as soon as she’d finished wasting herself away. He must have imagined that if he left he’d stop losing her, a screwy bit of sorcery which backfired, you’d have to say, since he’s been losing her ever since. What leaving did was intensify his parents’ grief, which of course cranked up Matt’s guilt. Erin was just shy of twenty-five when she died, which made him twenty-two, half what he is today. Half his life she’s been gone, bizarre. For a long time he came home just once a year, but with the Dadinator alone now it’s twice or three times that. The added bonus of course being his Zane-times, his spirited bullshit sessions with his oldest—in a way his only—true buddy.
Erin, like the umgirl, was into glossy magazines. She loved making fun of them, and she just plain
loved
them, which she hated. Matt fed the habit—he’d filch his mum’s
Glamours
and
Redbooks,
deliver them to Erin’s apartment downtown—hoping to foster any weakness in her, maybe save her from her strength. Matt’s most uncanny keepsake of his sister is a questionnaire—“Are You Too Purrrfect?”—torn from a
Cosmo
or some such and left twisted up in the pocket of her dressing gown at the Toronto General when she died.
Everybody’s going for a crazy swim in the rain, but you’re
a little bloated, so your bikini doesn’t fit quite right. You …
Multiple choice, running the gamut from mellow to maniacal.
Your boss gives you “very good” on your latest evaluation,
but you always get “exceptional.” You …
Your record for multiple orgasms is three. You find out your
best friend’s had seven. You …
Out of a maximum score of one hundred, under fifty was bad, but over seventy-five was even worse. Erin scored a seventy. Perfect.
“Good for you, girl. You care, but you don’t drive yourself nuts!”
Did the editors really not get the irony of this? That the true perfectionists would catch on to the quiz and nail it, know precisely how imperfect to be? Erin may have missed this point too, of course, irony never having been a strong suit of hers. Could this have been the root of all her trouble, an irony deficit, an irony anemia? Couldn’t Matt have found a way to lend her a little, to effect some kind of transfusion? If you can’t be perfect, best to be nothing—such was Erin’s approach. Couldn’t Matt have convinced her that just
doing
nothing would be good enough?
“Gööööghœgh!”
Up ahead of Matt by a couple of rows there was a baby—an Icelandic one, or so Matt imagined—expressing his glee at having come into existence. In hopes of shushing him his mum hoisted him up so’s he could peek, bobble-headed, over the back of his seat. Matt grinned; baby grinned back, lowering dual strands of drool to the breast of his tuxedo-style bib. He blinked and burbled, a wee demented Buddha. Why do we relinquish that, Matt wondered? Wherefore all this trouble?
After his last trip to Toronto Matt had composed a piece (which the cretinous Nagy had nixed, naturally) about the dangers of in-flight movies. In the last five years there’d been some number of incidents (fifty, was it?) caused by fritzy entertainment units on North American routes. Sparks, smoke, fire. In 1998 a Swissair jet had crashed, killing all two hundred and some odd, after its video system had gone kaflooey. Matt figured it was time to try that material again. He’d start his next review with the numbers and he’d pose the question, Is this movie worth dying for?
Next review? Oh, right.
Matt’s seat belt grabs him, jerks him back against his seat. They’re moving again—emergency lights have faded to a faint pulse in the darkening sky out back—and Jat’s in a big rush, all vroom and screech, a brat in a bumper car. “Jatinder, old buddy,” says Matt, “take it a little easy, wouldja?” Oops, did his inner mimic get the better of him for a moment there? Was there a pinch of Mr. Kumar, of Jatinder himself in the clip of those consonants? How to explain that this is a
good
thing, him reaching out?
“Just be a minute,
sir.”
Too late. Nobody gets Matt anymore, how come?
Mumbai. Matt envisions the teeming streets, he and Zane forging through the crowd with backpacks and camera bags. India, that’s where Matt’ll get into gear again. That’s where he’ll get back up to speed on the spiritual thing. The dream of a selfless self, a something sucked back up into Everything—where else would you go to puzzle over this stuff but the land of Krishna, Buddha, all those guys?
Ashram,
that’s the word. That’s where Mariko always wanted to go, was an ashram. “We could go together, Matt. Imagine leaving all this behind”—a game show–girl gesture taking in the whole of their existence—“and letting things go quiet. Just us and that silence, just you and that silence. What are you afraid of?” She really didn’t seem to know.
But maybe with Zane. With Zane maybe he can trick himself into it, and come back to Mariko all spiritual and serene. Why not? When he and Zane have finished with the AIDS thing, got that covered, they’ll repair to an incensey ashram to make everything right again. Hit the Ganges, wash themselves clean in the filthy river.
Matt taps his chest. It’s still there, Zane’s letter stowed in his breast pocket, scrumpled road map–fashion from a few months of folding and unfolding. An actual letter, mail with no
e
in front. Zane’s hand is ludicrously masculine, a parody of maleness—it couldn’t get any more erect without lifting right off the page. Nothing limp there, nosiree.
Dear Matt,
I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but there, I already have. Maybe if I put it into words that will help me get it out of the way. Which is what words are for, isn’t it, mister kritik? To sort stuff out, pass judgment on it and put it behind you?
Please.
I told you last time you were in Toronto (thanks for dins btw, but you should have let me pay) that I wasn’t just HIV slash anymore. I’m AIDS. It’s a technical thing, T cell count and whatnot. For the moment I’m fine, but I’ll feel like fugging hell very shortly. On this point everyone’s exquisitely clear. They want me on the cocktail of course, but here’s the thing. I’m not doing it. I’m just not. I’m telling Nico, and Mercedes, and maybe probably my parents in a while, and nobody else.
Oh, except you. It isn’t fair, is it? It’s asking too much. Maybe that’s what good friends do, they ask too much?
And there’s more to ask, but not yet.
Matt’s already reread the letter once since leaving home, to help kill time in the departure lounge in Vancouver.
Reread
isn’t quite right: he ran his eye over it, the way you run your eye over the lyrics of a song you’re already stuck with, the lines of a prayer that’s long since been rutted into one of the folds, one of the rumples of your brain. Not prayer exactly, but … what’s that word? Mariko was forever brandishing it during her Zen phase, got it from that Roshi guy. It starts with a
k
and it means something that promises to mean something but then doesn’t. A puzzle that possesses and then stymies you, silences your mind and makes way for … something. Some jolt of immanence, of wordless oneness.
Koan. Koan? Koan.
This time, in the cab, he doesn’t even bother peeking, just rewinds and replays the letter in his head.
I can’t explain this decision but I’ll try anyway. I want to live close to the truth, Matt. The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me. Can I know this world while I’m still in it?
And so on, another page and a half of this kind of infuriating swami-speak. Nothing about Shanumi, the Nigerian woman whose long slow drugless death he’d just finished filming. Nothing to suggest that this is in fact the oneness he craves—oneness with the whole damn suffering world. Mercy disguised as monkishness, protest disguised as spiritual surrender …
There, right there. That feeling again, as though Jatinder’s just taken a big bump way too fast. Not a no-feeling but a feeling of nothing, of nauseating absence. An agonized weightlessness that heaves all Matt’s viscera up into the hooped barrel of his chest. This is the sensation that hits him whenever he obsesses too long and too intensely about Zane, about his loopy friend and his loopy plan. This is his body’s way of warning him off, of—
“And here we are, sir.”
Oh, very funny. Cabbie humour at its best. They’re still out in the burbs—a Legoland of grey concrete, the grumble of jets still audible through the cab door as it swings wide—but the portico at which Jatinder’s just pulled up couldn’t get any swankier. Matt glances about, half expecting red carpet, the clamour of paparazzi. A minute later he’s being bellboyed into the hotel’s hushed lobby, having bid Jat a contrite adieu and pressed on him an extra twenty, about half the cash left in his wallet.
Jeezuz aitch. Acres of marble, royalty-ready wing chairs, sprays of big-stamened blossoms, this place is the
definition
of crazy. Matt knows he ought to flee but he can’t seem to do it. He’s been pinned, somehow, nailed to the here and now. He exerts himself to appear unimpressed by the place, to appear, as his dad would put it, swave and deboner. The name? McKay. Matt McKay. The supermodel at the front desk gives him his choice of the last two rooms. Would he prefer the Deluxe, or the even deluxer Exclusive? Much in the manner of a doomed beggar blowing his last few bucks on a bottle of the good stuff, Matt goes Exclusive. Why? Why not? “No, it’s just me tonight, Cheryl.” He grins rakishly, inducing Cheryl to crease ever-so-slightly the confectionery glaze of her lipstick. The moment is lost, though, when she’s obliged to give his non-platinum, nongold credit card a withering glance. If she only knew.
Five minutes later Matt steps into an elevator, and is joined there by a woman who smiles more toothily than she really needs to at Matt’s goofy “Goiiiiiing up!” Matt grins back. He feels even better now, or at least he feels different: his flesh has turned from baggage to buoy. He takes in the woman’s round, curiously symmetrical face, her lobe-length eggplant hair. Big brown eyes, almost buggy—she won’t quit looking surprised. Pretty? Or what they used to call handsome. She’d have been possessed of a tomboy beauty as a kid, which the boys around her would have mistaken for homeliness until it was way too late. She isn’t as much of a sore thumb here as is Matt (the cords, the crumpled collar shirt), but she doesn’t look quite at home either. Her outfit’s smart but not hoity-toity—more along the lines of Holiday Inn, say. She isn’t Matt’s age, maybe Mariko’s? Even younger. She’s bustier than Mariko, and tushier too. Venus of Whatever, the goddess Mariko’s into these days, she’s one of those. She’s short enough—not much taller than tiny Mariko—that Matt can regard his own face over top of hers in the mirrored wall, the two faces stacked as though on a totem pole.
Is he really that
lean?
It’s as though his vertical hold has slipped, elongating him, stretching him like gum on a lifted shoe; it’s as though he’s been sick six months rather than six hours. His is an El Greco face (this thought has struck him many times since his Europe tour with Zane, so many galleries), all beak and cheekbone and deep, doleful eye. Apostle What’s-His-Puss tallying his sins. Beautiful?
The woman says, “Are you with one of the groups?”
“Nope,” says Matt. “Solo.”
“I see.”
“I
applied
to a group. I applied to all of them, actually. Ectomorphs for Christ. Quitters Anonymous. No go.”
Again with the laugh. Is that how you know somebody’s into you, they over-laugh at your jokes? In the old days Mariko laughed till she snorted, which made her laugh till she peed.
Strange day today. A day of strangers. Could you make a new life this way, tell a lie and live it, let it be true? “Manifesting,” Mariko calls it—she uses it to find parking spots. You concentrate long and hard enough on something and it just happens. “What about you?” he says.
“Actually,” says the woman, “I’m … yes, I’m with one of the conferences. Astronomy? Quantum stuff, you know, quarks and photons, the whole … Sorry.”
“No, that’s okay. So like, the Big Bang and all that?”
Not the swavest of pickup lines but look, the woman’s smiling in such a way—lowering her head, leaning in just a little—that Matt finds himself reaching out to steady her, a gesture that turns into a fleeting caress. He cups her shoulder the way a smart shopper might cup a cantaloupe, in search of just the right give.
“Oh,” she says, as though he’s said something she should have thought of herself.
Five minutes after that—or maybe it’s fifteen, twenty—Matt’s braced behind her, pants around his ankles, as she bends over his unmussed bed up on the eighth floor. She’s got her skirt hoisted to her hips. The position was her idea—he’d been agonizing about his maybe virus, his OUZZ or LIKK or DMDM, didn’t want to pass it on by getting all kissy. She put a gentle hand to his forehead, let out a sizzling sound. He said, “This never happens.” She smiled, and she turned …
What Matt ought to be doing right now is he ought to be arriving at Zane’s door.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
…
In the old days the boys could keep this going long enough to drive everybody berserk. Endurance doesn’t seem to be Matt’s strong suit tonight, however. His tipsy exhilaration, his celibate stint on the couch … With this stranger he’s suddenly, ecstatically a stranger to himself. Could this be the whole point of the thing? Another way in, another way out? A teensy suicide, a tiny little surrender?