The Dead Are More Visible (20 page)

“Rik, where have you
been?
” Anja’s voice was panicked, chafed raw. “On the plane?”

“I’m here,” he said quietly. “We’re just leaving. How is she?”

“I can’t hear! I’ve been calling and calling!”

“I’m sorry.” He took a few more steps toward the food court. “How’s—”

“What?”

“We’re still in Toronto—we’re about to board.”

“We?”

“Porter’s here.”

“What? Porter’s actually coming?”

“Yes,” he whispered firmly.

Porter’s demand for a divorce was a bitter blow, but Erik had been resigned to it and was even, yes, relieved, as if at last receiving a diagnosis he’d been expecting for years. Through much of the marriage he was unhappy—and yet, toward the end, it grew clearer to him that as someone of little worldly ambition he was just the sort of man cut out for happiness. It was Porter who had actually pointed this out to him—that the ambitious were never truly happy, that time terrified them, while for people like Erik time was no more than the benign, required solvent in which contentment could expand to the full. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” she’d told him, near the end. And while he could not yet feel it, he could sense, waiting beyond the grief he was just starting to surmount, a birthright of serenity and, in time, the large cheerful family he yearned for.

“Didn’t think she’d come,” Anja spat out, as if blaming Porter for something grave, their mother’s condition being the obvious surrogate.

“Well, she keeps her word,” he said, staring at the
back of Porter’s head, his heart thudding, cellphone clamped to his temple.
The longer I keep Anja from saying what I think she has to say
. Each second, for one thing, kept his mother alive a bit longer.

“I’m so angry you didn’t answer. I’m alone here now!”

“We … I’m sorry. I just couldn’t. We’re coming now.”

“It’s too late, Rik.”

He opened his mouth to respond. Said nothing. Stared into the crowded food court. A beefy native man with a grey ponytail rushed two steaming paper cups toward a cashier. His grin was wide and wincing, as if he was enjoying the discomfort of the heat searing his hands.

Erik had told Porter he didn’t want his dying mother to know about the divorce. Spare her that blow. Porter considered this dishonest but chose to make a concession. His mother, Maarit, had loved Porter, admired her. Maarit had been a talented pianist who, in the manner of women of her generation, had set aside her potential career and addressed herself to home and family. Perhaps rightly, she saw Porter’s aloofness and unapologetic drive as the required traits of will that she herself might have deployed. Yet she betrayed no regrets about the conventional path she’d followed; perhaps it was truer to say that Porter’s establishment in the family afforded a sort of proxy completion of her own cancelled journey. And Porter, as if understanding this—accepting, cherishing the role—had answered
Maarit’s affection with unguarded warmth. Porter, flushed and serene of face, holding a wineglass of eggnog, her other bare arm atop the upright piano as Maarit on the bench played “O Holy Night”: Maarit knew the second verse only in Finnish, not in the English she’d begun for her daughter-in-law’s benefit, but now, seamlessly, Porter subbed in with the English words, singing with zest, if off-key. Erik gaped. It wasn’t just that his wife was performing a song, a full
hymn
, which he had no idea she knew—she was also letting herself be seen and very much heard doing something inexpertly. She was more tenor than soprano and fell far shy of the soaring last note that Maarit herself, now singing in Finnish, easily hit, but both women seemed delighted, as if they had just performed a flawless duet on stage at Massey Hall. Erik was delighted too, clearing his eyes, clapping noisily, even as faint qualms of jealousy returned to him.

“Rikky?”

“When did it happen?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“I thought we’d make it.”

“Thank God you’re coming! Jarmo and Gail are flying in from …” Anja’s thin voice buckled. After some moments: “Vancouver. Tonight.”

Erik lowered his face. His torso jerked as if he were taking punches under the heart. He had spent most of the Christmas break at his mother’s side but had meant to be there at the end, too. And he saw that
he’d believed Maarit would hold on until he arrived—the optimism of a youngest child who, as Porter once remarked with undisguised envy, always knew himself to be loved.

He glanced toward her now, expecting the beautiful back of her head. Her face was on him, eyes deciphering. She’d turned in her seat. People around her rising, bustling. A line was forming. He reassembled himself.

“Rik?” Anja said.

“We’re boarding, An. I’ll see you in two hours.”

“I love you,” she said, and his heart seemed to stagger.

“I love you too,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He shoved the cellphone into his pocket and walked straight toward Porter, who was studying him. He supposed she was hoping her journey would not be necessary. She had no time for it, of course. The wasted airfare (he’d insisted on paying her way but she had vetoed that) would be nothing to her. She spent more on business dinners all the time. So he told himself. She stood up, her face a collage of conflicting signals, and embraced him in her new, sisterly manner, firm at the shoulders but distinct at the waist. As their torsos met, the smell of her, bitter cinnamon, clove, wafted in a warm draft from under her charcoal cowl neck. Their bodies would never divorce.

“I’m sorry, Erik.”

He tightened his grip.

“I saw you crying there …”

He accepted her coming erasure from his life, but to have a few more days now—even a few more hours. If she stayed the night in his childhood home, they might make love again, a last time. There would be no stopping it. There never had been. Even now he felt the ambivalence in her embrace: her will’s resistance, her body’s deeper, disputing will.

He said, “It’s just … Anja’s in rough shape. You know how I am.”

She pulled back, studied him with her interrogator’s eyes: shale blue, deeply dubious. “You mean your mother’s not …?”

Say it, say it
.

“We might still get there in time,” he said.

She held his gaze—he didn’t blink either—then winced a strange smile and looked at her bag: “Well, we better get on, then.”

She led him into the line. To hide his face from her, his eyes flooding, he turned to the high plasma screen. Still the news. He couldn’t hear the commentary but he recognized that dark shattered coastline: a view of Superior, the inland sea they would soon be flying over, taken from an aircraft moving out from shore. Completely iced over, it looked like a polar ocean. A few times a century these total freeze-ups occurred, though at the centre of the lake, it was said, a hundred miles out from land, an ice-free inner lake always remained, churning and steaming through winter’s coldest nights.

[ SWALLOW ]

So, a job.

Your parents and many uncles and aunts would not call it a job. To them it would seem you’ve been institutionalized, which of course cannot be allowed to happen. Greek families do not allow such things to happen to their own. Greeks do not go into therapy or get hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis or anorexia nervosa and so on. Greek civilization, having lent those disorders their formidable names, cannot be expected to provide specimens as well. The bloodline is pure. And the community cares for its own—who, therefore, are less likely to need such intervention to begin with. Your father, the priest, often gives homilies on these very matters: inside your head. Inside this same crowded head your mother contributes antiphonally.
It’s years since you’ve attended an actual service. Or a school. After high school you announced that you were taking a year off and moving in with your non-Greek boyfriend. A year off became several. In time, you moved out of Derek’s place but you did not move home, chastened and remorseful, as expected. You’ve become one of those adults whose main contact with her parents is neural; you hear their hectoring voices in your head and, ever on the defensive, you reply (though these days you reply less often) and at times even trade stichomythic barbs with them in your dreams. As for Mega Sister and your younger brother and vast cast of cousins, until recently you saw them often enough and got along with them fine. And you have friends, Greek and non-Greek. Everyone agrees you are a cut-up, a rough treasure, a ready ear. Such a good ear.

Now a vast apathy has snowed you under. Not like an avalanche but a calm, soft, muffling midnight snow … on and on. It’s not quite depression. You’ve been depressed twice before, in your teens. Mega Sister, engaged now, still living at home where she daily consults her secret, porn-like stash of self-help lit (why would a Greek household need such “help”?), explains your state as a “deferred reaction” to your breakup with DeRek Perish (that’s how he spells Derek Parrish since leaving his folk-rock group to become lead singer for Thigh Master) two years ago. It’s not. Greeks don’t have
deferred
reactions, not even you, this inexplicably skinny, dreamy, addled young Greek. When Mega
Sister recites that you didn’t grieve the relationship enough after it ended, you just nod at your cellphone. She knows nothing of your last month. It’s never what people think it is anyway. The guy you’ve been seeing, Charles, tucks his sweaters into his jeans and every slot-lettered sign has a backwards N in it. Doesn’t anyone else see how
exhausting
the world is?

Your new apathy, this inner deadness, isn’t all bad. There’s a sort of relief. A remission from all concern. Like the obliterating fatigue of a sleeping flu. Or heroin? Is this why people crawl into bed with hard opiates and stay there? Let the manic world go on chasing its tail—a yelping, spinning blur—you are in a ravine of stillness, silence.

Your parents and Mega Sister keep leaving messages: Uncle Lambros and Aunt Foula want you to waitress again at the Agora, even if you are too skinny and therefore a poor promotion for your uncle’s excellent food. The messages don’t mention your skinniness. Such references ended some while back, your parents and relatives increasingly concerned. Not that anorexia was ever your problem. You always ate all the food your aunt and uncle would ply you with, before your shift and after—the weight just wouldn’t adhere. A bestiary of barbecued meats, roast potatoes drenched in olive oil, sautéed rice,
boureki, kataifi, galaktoboureko
, volcanic flaming cheeses … The problem was, you were an awful waitress. Forgetful, befuddled, clumsy. Unable to achieve that winning, waitressy charm, somewhere
between aloofly formal and invasively familiar. Oh—and your Greek stunk.

You grope among uncertain objects under the bed for the tiny cellphone, to call your uncle. Lifting it is like hefting a curling rock—another thing you’ve lost interest in doing. Twenty-six messages in all, four from Charles of the tucked-in sweaters and three from Jayla, alleged best friend. You stopped checking email ten days ago.

“
Theo
Lambros,” you say thickly.

“Roddy!” he says in his cigar-smoked, mafia rasp.

“I’m sorry, I …”

“
Ochi, den pirazi, pethi!
You’re going to come back to us? I can give you a shift tonight, one of the girls is got a cold.”

“You know I’m no waitress.”

“You’re evolving! We work at it! The customers like you, also.”

“But you
fired
me.”

“Just my temper,” he says, and you picture him shrugging, big grin, splaying his fat hands. He says, “That man … he was city councillor and the
saganaki
, it’s like napalm. But come back. Your parents worry, you have no idea. You sound so tired. You’re not eating?”

“I’m starting another … I’m starting somewhere else, tomorrow. That’s the thing. But thank you. Could you let them know I’m all right?”

“A new job? Where is this new job? You work in another
restaurant?
”

“You know no other restaurant would give me a job.”

“So, where?”

“It’s … a clinic. A medical institution, of a kind.”

“You’re serving in their cafeteria!” he roars, not in the tone of someone who has cracked a mystery but of someone crushed by betrayal.

“I’m not,” you say, and to pre-empt his next question you tell him, “I’m not working in the kitchen either.”
There are businesses in the world besides the food service industry
, you want to add, but say nothing. This is just so exhausting.

“You’re a nurse, then? But you haven’t gone to school for nurse. Not a
janitor?
”

“Please don’t worry. It’s nothing like that.”

“You haven’t gone to school at
all
yet! Five years now!”

“And they’ll pay me well.”

“Of course! How else to get someone to work for a stranger?” His voice has the pitch of mystified contempt he uses when speaking of the doomed world beyond the frontiers of the Community. “Be careful! Don’t get sick from all the sick people! Are you saving money to go back to school?” (The relatives keep expecting this of you, the best student the family has ever produced; your uncle still informs customers that you’re “taking some time off.”)

“Please tell Mom and Dad I’m fine. I might try to call them when the job is done.”

You set the phone down and sprawl back amid your rancid sheets, spent to the last dram. You don’t think
you’re ill, physically. It’s more that things mattered and now they don’t. You used to read ravenously. Now all curiosity has fled the premises. Your soul has dozed off for the duration. Is it shock, still? Guilt? Sounds like depression, but minus the ripping, visceral pain, the hurtling dread. Instead, a vacancy. Painless paralysis. Hard to believe your skull and ribcage are packed with pink and diligent organs, earnestly and ignorantly toiling, as in a coma victim.

All you want to do these days is sleep.

You might as well be getting paid for it.

The clinic is a hangar-like structure, cinderblocks and green corrugated siding, on the edge of an industrial park in the wind-scavenged steppes of outer Scarborough. At the park’s entrance the bus drops you along with two women in matching peach parkas over grey sweats. A sunny sub-arctic afternoon. No sidewalks. Snowless lawns hard as Astroturf. Up the middle of the road the matched pals tow dark, wheeled suitcases as big as wolfhounds. You have only a daypack, yet they edge ahead, their trainers flashing, heads down, shoulders high and tight—the slapstick, puffin shuffle of Canadians in winter. You don’t mind the wind’s bee-sting assault on your skin. You haven’t felt so awake in weeks. Neither do you mind the industrial park, finding something here that mirrors your inert inner world, so that for now—for a change—you don’t feel out of place.