“They shouldn’t die,” said Zane. “Butch and Sundance, they should shoot their way out at the end.”
“Next time for sure,” said Matt. This was a bit of wiseassery in which they indulged every time they saw the movie, three-four-five times so far. The funny fantasy that things could be different, that you wouldn’t always end up at that same place, two friends going down together in a blizzard of bullets.
There were creaky footsteps from up above—Matt’s dad in the living room, freshening his highball. Fussing with the rabbit ears no doubt, switching from news to news, from Knowlton Nash to Walter Cronkite and back. The boys tracked the sound from their lair in the basement rumpus room, set to jimmy themselves apart and look busy with the mini–pool cues. Matt’s mum—a real mum, brisk and unbeautiful—would be in the kitchen tossing salad, imparting a geometry of bacon to the TV-shaped face of the meatloaf. Erin would be in her bedroom curlicueing in her diary, or maybe she’d have a friend up there with her, Penny or Sharon or Sue, and they’d be modelling for one another, searching out the most becoming poses for their new, mini-bazoonga-ed bodies.
Matt sighed, stirred. Beneath him Zane wriggled, maximizing contact.
“They’ll be on the surface in, um, twenty-four hours, not even,” said Matt. “Sea of Tranquillity.”
“Fuggoff,” said Zane. “Dad says the whole thing’s nuts. He says they won’t make it down, or if they do make it down they won’t make it back up, or if they do make it back up they won’t make it home, they’ll burn—”
“You
fuggoff,” said Matt. “They will so make it. And after the moon, Mars. Then Jupiter. Then …”
They’d have had on the Monkees—“Daydream Believer,” most likely—at a scritchy whisper. No point inviting the old man to galumph on down there. “My mistake,” he’d smoker’s-croak, “I thought you rascals had some
music
on.” Big laugh, the laugh that made you feel so small, so safe. He’d tug his comb from his hip pocket, drag it through his wet-shiny hair. Then he’d launch into one of his rants, one of his routines. There’d have been some galling item on the six o’clock, a goddam Beatle in bed in Montreal, a riot at some fagotty club in New York.
Or no, that particular night it would have been liftoff, we have liftoff. “How’d you like to be on that launch pad, boys? Feel all that power building up under your ass?” For Matt’s dad—an airplane mechanic turned supervisor, then supervisor-supervisor—it was all about the machine, the moon just a handy target. Matt tried to feel that way but couldn’t, kept imagining the moon’s sooty surface and then the earth from up there, a little greeny blue ball spinning in black. This flaw—Matt’s ongoing failure to care about the right things—was maybe his second-dirtiest secret.
“Picture it, boys. You’ve got your hand on the stick and everything’s a go. T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six …”
But no. The boys were alone that day. They pursued their practice in peace. At a certain point the friction got too intense for Matt, tangled up as it was with that discombobulating image of Zane’s mum. He went to peel himself away. Erin must have been there by this time, in the shadows at the base of the shagged basement stairs.
“Five,” said Matt. “Four. Three.”
Zane grabbed fistfuls of Matt’s T-shirt, strove to hold him down. They tussled. The old couch—paisley, once pink—emitted a cough of dust and shed skin.
Matt thrashed. “Two. One. Zero. Ignition.”
“Fugg
off,”
said Zane.
“You fuggoff,” said Matt—and turned, and saw his sister as she fled.
The weird thing is that she never used it on him. She knew the word
fuck,
so presumably she knew the word
fag
too. Why did she hold back? They weren’t even brother and sister anymore, not technically.
Adopted,
that was the word their parents had taught them that summer. Adopted. What did that even mean? Matt pictured his mum and dad browsing at the church rummage sale, selecting a swaddled baby Erin from amongst the mugs and the dog-eared magazines.
Whatever the word meant to Erin it made her even more tender with Matt, even more patient and protective than before. Years later, when she was well on her way to dying, Matt reminded her of that day and she said, “Love, Matt. There’s nothing bizarrer than love.”
Jeezuz aitch. The phone, the phones—there seem to be about seven of them scattered strategically about the suite’s alarming acreage, and they’re all ringing. Matt could reach the closest of them (the clunky kind of thing Garbo might have snatched up in, say,
Grand Hotel
) without budging from his command-centre of a commode.
Karen? Nobody else knows he’s here. Mariko assumes he’s with Zane, Zane and the old man assume he’s with Mariko. The Matt they know has disappeared, wandered witlessly offscreen. New Matt stares at the phone. Answering it would mean what? That something’s over? That something’s begun? Matt reaches … and the phone quits ringing. He picks it up anyway, calls down to room service.
Yeah, big shot.
Twin. Double. Queen. King. Then what, Emperor, maybe? Matt’s never seen, let alone slept in, a bed this big before. On the floor he discovers a robe, a monogrammed gown of bleached terry which must have slithered off the shimmery bedspread during the night. He slips into it, dizzying briefly as he straightens, and plonks himself on the end of the bed. The bedspread feels like rough silk, a bit of nubble to it, fabric fine enough to be flawed. Extruded by worms raised on organic arugula, one imagines, spinning to piped-in Pachelbel. This place, it’s the un-Lair, the very opposite of home.
The TV’s got tai chi now. A young Chinese woman pushes through incense-tangled air, naming her moves as she executes them. Jade Lady Works Shuttles. Wave Hands Through Clouds. Mariko went through a tai chi phase a couple of years ago, did this same little dance out on the Lair’s back deck. Exquisite. Matt watches for a while, hunched there like an incubus worn out after a long night’s haunting. Then—what the heck—he hoists himself to his feet. Why not join in for once? As the image moves, Matt moves too. Maybe a little of it will leak in through his eyes, the tranquility, the grace. Who knows? Apparent Closure. Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. The television urges him to centre his being in his belly, so he does. Grasp Sparrow’s Tail. Step Back and Repulse Monkey. Why didn’t he join in when Mariko was doing this? He’d have been shitty at it, but so what? Maybe if he’d—
Cripes, that was quick. The knock is studied, astute. Matt tai chis his way over to the door, inventing new moves at will. Sad Lady Bids Farewell. Reach Out and Comfort Gnu …
The room service guy bears a tray laden with three large glasses of orange juice (Mariko’s forever on at him about vitamin C) and a couple of quartered slices of toast. With tip, this spartan breakfast costs Matt roughly what he and Mariko used to spend on their special-occasion blowouts at Bravissimo. Old Matt would have freaked out at the ludicrous figure. New Matt? New Matt can’t afford to. New Matt has to get miserly with his panic, hoard it for the days ahead.
What to do? He isn’t going anywhere near the sickie or the old man, not for now. He feels a touch steadier than he did last night, but his body still hasn’t got its thermostat set right. It continues to toggle, every few minutes, between sweats and chills.
WWZD? This is a question Matt will often pose himself when he’s feeling lost or bemused. What Would Zane Do? He’s considered having a bracelet made up, like the Jesus people. WWJD? It wouldn’t hurt to know that too, of course.
But Zane, what would he do? He’d call Zane, wouldn’t he? You can’t save somebody without at least speaking to them, can you? Fine, good. But what would Zane
say
to Zane?
It’s a poser. Matt’s been puzzling over it ever since his last call a few weeks back. His angle that time went something like this: What if Zane isn’t actually good at all? What if he’s just clever—clever enough to give his compulsion a purpose? You get a big ugly sweater from your mother-in-law for Christmas. It’s yellow, the yellow of a smoker’s fingers, and festooned with quasi-floral patterns in lime green and salmon. It’s stippled like a plucked chicken. You wear the hideous thing to your mother-in-law’s once and then you donate it to the Sally Ann. Sure, it’ll keep some poor soul warm on a winter’s night, but that isn’t going to get you into heaven, is it? You’re just
ditching
the damn thing.
So what if Zane’s just ditching his life? What if the whole Gandhi bit’s a ruse, a virtuous-looking way to let him live with his own death? How would you counteract that impulse?
You’d be reduced, Matt figured, to some sort of life’s-worth-living schtick, some
carpe diem
routine. Seize the damn day. This was the approach he settled on. He settled on it at midnight one night, three in the morning Zane’s time. Out of consideration for his friend (the guy certainly needed his immunity sleep) Matt stayed up till three
his
time, finally too frantic to wait any longer.
“‘Lo?” said Zane that morning. Six his time, still a little dopey.
“Up and at ‘em, sport.”
Hack.
“The hell?”
“Rise and shine there, buddy ol’ pal.”
“You must be joking.”
Tricky fellow that he was, Matt led with Zane’s side of the debate, a catalogue of reasons life
wasn’t
worth living. Having so recently psyched up for his own suicide he was well prepared.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, “so the planet’s pretty much trashed. Pollution, terrorism, fundamentalism, bigotry, bird flu, blah blah blah.”
“Matt, did I … have I never explained to you about the time difference? Just the three hours, right? See, the earth turns on its—”
“And sure, okay, humans are brutal, they’re ignorant. They let you down. They abandon you, they rip your fugging heart out. Boo hoo.”
“Can you at least hang on a sec while I pee?”
“There’s no escape from them, and even worse than that there’s no escape from
you.
What the dickens did you drink last night, anyway?”
From the far end came the silly, seemingly interminable splash of pee in a toilet bowl. It wavered in pitch—Matt pictured Zane swaying in the breeze of his own fusty fatigue, fighting that up-too-soon nausea. Sleepy dink in one hand, walk-around phone in the other.
“And okay, even when things are good they aren’t
really
good, are they? You know they’ll go bad any minute, and they’re already bad for almost everybody else.”
Another
hack
or two and then the toilet flushed.
“And since we’re going to die anyway there’s obviously no
point
to this.”
“Speaking of point, Matt.” Zane could be heard whacking his pillows, groaning back into bed.
“But you can’t just die, no. That’d be too easy. You have to fall apart first, you have to deteriorate one—”
“I love you too,” said Zane. “Now really.”
“Oh, okay. Um, sleep tight?”
Click.
So Matt never did get to the good bit, the
but
bit. Why Zane should live, what Matt was going to do to make him want to. The odd thing was that he felt better anyway, Matt did (hard to say about Zane, of course). Weirdly, wildly elated. He sneakypeted down the hall and crawled in with Mariko. He hadn’t been in their bed since the big night, the night she broke her news.
“Hm?” She squirmed as Matt slipped in between the sheets, but let herself stay sleepy. She snuggled up to him, hitched one leg over his thigh, just the way she used to do. They cuddled a bit, Mariko gradually rising to the surface, getting detectably aroused. Finally, with the halting complicity of a very first time, they brought each other off through flannel jammies.
Once they’d come they cried, not a stoic tear or two but the real thing. Matt’s bawling, always an embarrassment to him, is really more like laughing, a hillbilly’s
hyuck-hyuck-hyuck—
Erin used to do a dead-on imitation of it when she thought he needed sorting out. His grief sounded especially ludicrous in the sex-scented room that night, moonlight draping itself artfully from the skylight. To be fair, Mariko’s weeping was almost as absurd, her usual whinny reaching what seemed to Matt to be extraordinary heights. He pictured the raccoons out in the night, silencing their own uncanny screams to listen to this new human call.
In the morning Mariko was gone. Lying there alone in the marital bed Matt felt, for the first time, the full pulverizing weight of his solitude, of all the solo nights he’d already spent down the hall, and had yet to spend before something inside or outside of him might turn, might return. Quick calculation: he’d never passed so many consecutive nights alone since he’d left his parents’ home. Surely this ordeal was good for him in some way, was already precipitating in him a subtle sea change, a slow seismic shift in direction. Was there any way to speed it up?
“Hey, Dad.”
Start with the easy call, build up to the tough one. That isn’t wimpy, that’s just sensible. Besides, it won’t be such a cakewalk, putting the old man to rights.
“Oh, hello there, lad.”
Lad.
See, this is new too, the old-time tenderness.
“How are things?”
“Okay.”
“What’s up today?” Matt’s flaked out on the suite’s overstuffed couch, a glass of juice balanced on the tray of his tummy.
“Serena’s just left.” Serena, the Dadinator’s home-care worker. She’s been coming half days since all the widows—all the Pegs and Dots and Darlenes who swarmed the old man when his wife died—finally fled the scene, died themselves or were otherwise rendered helpless. Serena’s your basic bully of a saint, jollying the old guy along as though he’s some giant irascible infant.
“She taking good care of you, Dad?”
“Look at that,” the old man huffs. “She’s left the deck. Door open again.”
Dammit. Those lungs just keep getting worse. The Dadinator routinely runs out of wind mid-sentence these days, this despite the ever-present oxygen tube, its clear plastic horns poking up his great grey-haired nostrils.
“So Dad, I was thinking about maybe coming for a visit one of these days.”
“Why?”