“What do you mean, why? Just to see you.”
“You never come in. The summer.”
“Yeah, but I—”
“Hot here, you know. Heavy rain last week.”
“Crazy stuff, eh?” says Matt. “This global warming thing, it makes you—”
“Such a simple system,” says the old man. “Binary. Rain or no-rain, dot or. Dash.”
“Dot or dash, Dad?”
“Still not so easy to. Decode, though.”
“Decode, Dad?”
It takes some delicate interrogation but in time the picture emerges. Extraterrestrials have been seeding the clouds over Toronto, it would seem, to make them shed rain on certain days and thus to generate a Morse-like pattern. To communicate. The aliens are no great surprise to Matt—they and their souped-up machines have been part of the Dadinator’s universe for some time now—but the rain’s a new wrinkle.
What would Erin make of all this? Why isn’t she here to talk it through, to help Matt parse the grim mystery of their pop? The old guy’s got Erin there at his condo, actually, or so he seems to imagine, in a wooden box about the size of a four-slice toaster. He continues to cling to this object in a way that troubles Matt, even horrifies him. His dad
fetishizes
the urn, is what he does, reveres it like the finger-bone of a saint. Sure, Matt adores his father’s grief—the way it opens and deepens him, creates for them that point of potential contact—but the box of cinders freaks him right out. It’s a thing. Erin is not a thing.
Matt shakes his head, sips his OJ. “Dad, I don’t think you can make clouds rain, can you? Don’t they sort of do that on their own?”
The old man’s laugh is more of a gasping fit nowadays, the kind of respiratory crisis that makes you think Heimlich. When it’s over, “Governments have been doing it on the q.t. for. Decades, Matt. Look at Lynmouth back in the fifties. How many people drowned? You think that just
happened
to be right. After the RAF trials? Two hundred times the normal. Rainfall that year, that sound like a coincidence? And since then South Africa. Israel.”
It was what, four years ago that Mariko helped her father-in-law hook up his first computer, explained about the mouse? Nowadays he’s up and surfing before bran. “Dad, I—”
“Russia. Mexico. US of A. Silver iodide, from a plane or a. Rocket.”
“Dad, is this the same extraterrestrials who make the crop circles?”
“Crops,” says his father. “Weather.” He leaves Matt to connect the dots.
Matt says, “Seeing Uncle Lenny much these days?” One upside, he’s easy to distract.
“Lunch yesterday. He looks good, he’s lost. A few. How’s Mary?”
“Mariko, Dad. Remember? And she’s fine. But Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“There’s something I need to say to you.”
This is
so
not the time to do this. Later in the week maybe, when they’re face to face. Or how about a few years ago, when Mariko first got after him, that would have been the time. “You have to speak your mind, Matt. You have to help him see how deeply he’s wounded you.” To be such banal pop-psych fodder, it didn’t bear thinking. It still doesn’t. She had another crack at him a couple of weeks ago. “Your dad worked with his hands,” she said, “and you admire that, right? But you don’t believe he admires the work
you
do. Not really. Which is why your Zeus energy is all blocked up.”
Zeus energy?
Fricking hell.
“So go ahead,” says the old man.
“Just … I wanted to thank you,” says Matt. “For that book you sent me. About crowds in movies?”
“Oh, okay. Was it good?”
“Yeah. But it made me … Remember back in high school, that guy, Mr. Kumar?”
“Mister …?”
“Kumar. He was a physicist. He was brilliant, but he’d just immigrated from India so he had to be a janitor.”
“That happens. Nothing wrong with—”
“No, I know that. But do you remember what I said to you about him one time?”
“What did you say?”
“I said I wanted to be as good at something as Mr. Kumar was at chess.”
“I see.”
“And do you remember what you said?”
“Why are you. Quizzing me like this?”
“I’m not quizzing you. I just—”
“Have you been. Talking to your mother again?”
Oh, Christ. “Dad, are you—”
“That was a. Joke, son.”
“Right.”
“Think I’m losing my. Mind, do you?”
“No, Dad.”
“Crap. Sorry, tube got snagged. Up there.”
“You okay?”
“Yep.”
“So anyway, what I—”
“Yes, sorry, son.”
“Sorry?”
“You must have work. To do.”
Work? “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I guess I better get at ‘er, Dad. Thanks for the call.”
“But didn’t you. Call me?”
“Right. You’re right.”
“Okeydoke.”
It’s often occurred to Matt that a cool way to classify people would be according to the order in which they open their emails. You’ve got messages from an old buddy, from your new babe or beau, from your boss. Where do you start? Which do you save for last, the pleasure, the pain?
Matt perches on the end of the bed sipping his second OJ. He switches to the main menu. Down at the bottom, just below Movies (Drama, Comedy, Family, Adult), he finds Internet Access. He locates a cordless keyboard next to the Bible in the top drawer of the bedside table. A few clicks and he’s got his server up.
Spam? Nothing too extraordinary today, just the standard catalogue of remedies for impotence, loneliness, obesity, poverty, mortality, for all the things that suck about being alive. “Iraqi Most Wanted Cards—Whole Set!!!” That’s new. Apropos of his dink-focused morning Matt starts with “Men, Add Two Inches In Ten Day!!!” By the time he’s done deleting, his busy-man inbox is down to a pitiable three messages.
The subject line on Mariko’s message is blank, as always. “You don’t put a title on a letter, do you?” The subject line on Nagy’s message is an ominously terse “Stunt.” The subject line on the third message, unfamiliar address, is “egghead with an attitude.” Hm. This is a quotation from Matt’s most recent review, the one that got him sacked. An offended filmmaker? A media flunky? It’s the message Matt most wants to open, so he doesn’t.
He double-clicks instead, with a sense of oddly lighthearted despair—none of this can actually be
happening,
can it?—on the one from Mariko.
hey sweets! hope you got there ok. guess you did if you’re reading this!!!!
Guess so!!!!
got your message, yeah i’ll call the vet. toto says hi. she’s kneading my thigh here right now.
With hubby out from underfoot, Mariko will likely have lugged her laptop to the dining room table, thrown open the funky French doors (Saint Francis and his birds in stained glass) so she can commune with Mother Nature while she works her digital mojo. As Matt squints his mind’s eye, his diminutive wife seats herself in peasant blouse and karate bottoms, folds her bare feet up under her tush, takes a sip from her herbal tea. She bends prayerfully into the glow of her little screen. The tips of her black hair swish across her … blonde hair. The tips of her
blonde
hair swish across her shoulders. Sheesh, Matt’s having a heck of a time getting this new picture into his head. The dye job’s a recent thing, since Sophie. With Mariko’s mostly Japanese features the new hair looks collaged, Photoshopped. It looks trashy too, in a disturbingly hot sort of way.
how’s zane? ya know i admire him more every time i think about what he’s doing. better not tell him that tho!!! or maybe you should?
and i admire you too. how many friends would do this?
the other day you asked me why sophie, and i think i know what you mean. you mean is it sophie because sophie’s a woman or because sophie’s sophie. the thing is, i don’t know. i didn’t used to say that so much did i, i don’t know? that’s you, thanks!!!
listen hon that couple’s coming back to see the place again this aft. ron thinks they’re going to make an offer. i’ll call you at zane’s if something happens. shanti m
Right, that was one more reason (did he really need it?) for Matt to hit the road this week. His home was being sold out from under him.
Not that he’s particularly wild about the place. He wants to be wild about it though, he’s
desperate
to be wild about it—the way his dad would be, for instance, if he ever made it out to the coast—and the fact that he’s failed to feel that way, that he’s proven too weird or wonky to fall for such a “bucolic gem” (Ron’s irritating ad) makes the loss even harder to take. If you aren’t at peace in paradise, then what?
It’s been five years. He and Mariko bought the place on a whim of hers, an infatuation she took, typically, as a sign from the cosmos. They weren’t yet midway through their time together—this was ‘98, so they’d been squished into her Vancouver condo for about two years. Matt still believed he could coerce himself into a Mariko-style moment of faith. If he acted in accordance with a certain belief—in this case the belief that the home into which they’d just peeped was perfect for them, was indeed their destiny—then surely he’d come to
possess
that belief, no?
Well, no. But why not? What’s not to love? It’s the Garden of Eden, or “Lair of Lilith” as Mariko dubbed it, scorching these words into a slab of driftwood at the bottom of the drive, city girl gone über-country. Three acres of tangly new forest, the odd mammoth stump still around to hint at a pre-paleface world, a world in which trees were gods. The house itself isn’t really a house at all but a series of cabins leaned one against another: the draft dodger who settled the place (folks still wax sentimental about the cheeky yet charming buzz produced by his weed) started out with a single room and just kept adding on as his grow op prospered. The place is an architect’s nightmare, the kind of what-next house so many people dream. Its kookiest feature is that it’s made of straw, great stacks of stuccoed bales. Since Matt and Mariko have lived there the place has been written up half a dozen times, in magazines with titles like
Share
and
Home Planet.
The articles never mention the sagging walls, the riotous rodents. They focus instead on the feel of the place, which admittedly is pretty darn good. Being cuckolded has of course complicated things for Matt, but until then he found himself prone, in the Lair, to mystifying bouts of the warm fuzzies.
The thing is though, what are you supposed to do there? Granted it’s always a pleasure to
arrive
in Shangri-La. You sip your caffeinated sludge on the ferry and watch the city shrink astern. You survive the gauntlet of malls and name-brand burger joints and you witness the roadsides gradually greening up around you, thickening until you’re enshrouded in forest, a primeval realm in which various creatures—that deer, for instance, captured mid-leap on the diamond-shaped warning sign—might be imagined to live out their brief lives. Sure, getting there’s a pleasure. The problem is staying put. If you’re Mariko you rejuvenate the gardens, build benches out of burls, fashion Aeolian chimes from old forks. You found a reading group, raise funds for the local halfway house. But what if you
aren’t
Mariko?
Well, you play house. Matt’s a better-than-decent cook, and prides himself on blindsiding his wife with rare flavours and textures. Thursday night, the night before he set out on this little quest, he hit her with a dandy, Squid in Its Own Ink. A trifle tough, but it still got to her.
“Whoa, weird,” she said after her first bite. “I can feel his poor little suckers on my tongue. And what a great name.”
“It’s a metaphor,” said Matt.
“Huh.”
So there’s that. When Mariko isn’t around, Matt also does a little gardening of his own. He does it elf-style, weeding and whatnot in an almost undetectable way. This is a habit he picked up from his mum, who’d do little chores for you—clean the cat box when it was your turn, that sort of thing—without ever letting on. “Elf-love” she’d call it if you busted her. Matt’s so crafty he pretty much never gets caught.
Other than that, though, how do you keep yourself occupied? You sit around, soak it all up. You congratulate yourself on being shrewd enough to buy—okay, to let your wife buy—before prices went crazy. Actually, Matt sank his own cash into the place too. He once calculated that he owns two of the five front steps, plus the entire outdoor shitter. Many mornings he’ll shuffle out to admire this fine, rough-planked structure, maybe roost for a while over its black hole. It’s awfully dark out there though, mushroomy, mossy. The trouble with nature, Matt’s discovered, is that it has all these
trees
in it, and trees turn out to be total sun hogs. Trees, for all the swooning of their bandana-ed huggers, are the ultimate ladder-climbers, great big phallic shrines to ambition. The Lair’s just a couple of hundred yards from the ocean, but between it and that big sky hangs an impenetrable curtain of fir and hemlock. Fuckers.
On a break from whatever “work” he’s doing, Matt will sometimes “play” his cello. This is pleasing for a bit—it’s okay to be bad, that’s kind of the point—but in time it grows painful. Then he’ll take a stroll down to the beach, wobble along for a while on its kiwi-sized stones. Waves will keep coming in and collapsing, each one a wee catastrophe. It’s a great time to think, but about what? His job? His relationship? His life? That isn’t thinking, that’s just fretting, that’s just freaking out.
What he’ll do instead is he’ll imagine it all gone. The beach, the high-end, glass-prowed homes that line it, gone. Swamped, swallowed by the sea which will rise soon, as the planet warms and the glaciers and ice caps revert to their liquid selves. This, at least, is what he’ll strive to imagine. Most times he’ll fail. Matt’s just no good at making things go away. His wife, for instance—she’s flagrantly stepping out on him, yet no part of him will credit the notion that he’ll lose her, that she’ll ultimately slip from his present into his past. The Dadinator is dwindling, yet Matt dismisses the image of himself as an orphan. And as for Zane, as for
that
loss? Dream on.
There’s a faint clamour outside the door of Matt’s suite, a cart creeping past with Starlight-type discretion. Everything’s hushed here, muffled by the inch-thick underlay, the acoustic wizardry of the walls. There may be a couple squabbling or screwing a few feet in any direction, but how would you know? Even the jets angling in and out overhead do so with decorum, their intermittent thunder like distant surf. Canned, the sound could be used for hypnosis, for guided meditation, for white-noising an oncologist’s waiting room.