The Journey Prize Stories 27 (10 page)

As the phone rang, I could picture my mother taking off the stupid little mask she wore to bed. I could picture her hair coiled around pink plastic cylinders that made bunches of follicles curl.

“He’s a homosexual,” I said when she answered.

“Who is this?”

“Gay. Flaming. So the thing you said about me being a defective woman? Stuff it.”

She recognized my voice and said, “I know he’s a homosexual. Are you all right? Do you need me to come over?”

Slamming the phone down, I reached for the remains of the joint and lit it.

“That must have felt nice,” my husband said, coming up behind me and rubbing my shoulders with weak, skeletal hands. I turned in my chair and buried my face into his stomach.

“Screw you for dying,” I said. His fingers made electricity behind my ears.

“I’m not dead yet,” he said. It occurred to me that what he’d said was true.

Hattie called me up and said that I’d probably be fired from work, since I hadn’t called in to explain my absence. It wasn’t a particularly meaningful job—I worked at a non-profit organizing fundraising events, only I knew the non-profit was covertly for-profit, so its success or failure didn’t faze me.

“I say we fight the bullshit,” Hattie said. “If they fire you, I know a friend of a friend who’s a workplace rights lawyer. We’d gut them real quick.”

I said I didn’t care. We went for lunch and she asked how my terminally ill husband was doing.

“Mostly like shit. He can barely walk, but he puts up a good front.” That morning, he puked on the floor of the bathroom and passed out in it. How he had anything to throw
up was beyond me. Without him knowing, I’d been keeping a diary of his food and fluid intake and found that in the last three days he’d consumed the equivalent of a two-inch cube of cheese, three thumbs of orange juice, and a soggy bowl of cereal.

“I was always jealous,” Hattie said. She picked out a leaf of spinach. “You two always had this thing. I can’t explain it.”

For the last three years, she’d been on a series of hopeless first and second dates that ended short of her expectations. As far as I could tell, she had a lot of sex but felt an emptiness in her gut when she wasn’t in love with someone.

“It’s too bad he wasn’t looking for another woman.” She swallowed the spinach leaf and pursed her eyebrows. “Sorry. I’m a shit.”

“No arguments here.”

I watched as she took the water carafe at the centre of the table and filled up both our glasses. “Have you found a guy for him?”

Stabbing at my own salad, I answered, “Negatory.”

Since the awkward dinner with Alex, I tried to set up one more date, this time with a nice, clearly homosexual man I met at the grocery store. But the man had a boyfriend, and besides, my husband said he wasn’t thinking about screwing men. Jokingly, he said that he wanted to keep his soul pure so that he could gain access to the kingdom of heaven.

“Don’t be an asshole,” I said, picking up one of the pillows we’d designated as a surrogate for him and punching it.

“Oof.” He doubled over, as if I’d just thumped a voodoo doll of him. “Uppercut to the kidneys.”

One day, when he didn’t seem to be dying as much, he took me by the wrist while I was skinning potatoes and brought me to the living room. He was sleeping in there now. Going upstairs took too much out of him. There were scented candles that he lit with as much grace as he could muster and erotic movies with titles like
Love in 49 Positions
and
Having Sex in the City
. I don’t know how he set it all up without me noticing. The couch was pulled out and neatly made, with condoms on a nearby table. My husband took my face and kissed it, transferring an explosion of mint toothpaste into my mouth. The taste went straight inside my body, into my veins. I stepped back slowly, the way they say you should when dealing with angry bears, and said, “What’s going on?”

“I want to have sex with you.” He started unbuttoning my blouse. I was still holding the potato peeler.

“You can’t just tell me you’re gay and then ask to have sex with me.”

“But I’m dying.” This had been our mantra, our reason for doing things like decorating our bedroom with old
Mad Magazine
covers and buying a fish just because neither of us had ever owned one before. “Aren’t I allowed to ask for what I want?”

“You don’t want this.”

“How do you know?”

What should a wife do when she has to argue against her husband and herself? He put his hands under my shirt and said he liked how small my breasts were. I told him I liked how small his penis was and he got that it was a joke right away. I asked him if he wanted me to wear a baseball cap to make me more masculine, if he wanted me to use a tensor bandage to
keep my breasts clamped down. “Do you want me to try to be Ringo again?”

“No, I want to have sex with you.” His pants came off. I joined him under the covers. “Give me a minute,” he said, his hands disappearing below his waist. He started trying to get hard. A glaze of sweat formed on his face. “Almost there,” he said.

“Let’s just sit here a minute and breathe,” I said. At first my husband positioned the parts of his face—nose, eyes, eyebrows—in a scene of frustration. Then he relaxed and after a while, our breathing synchronized without either of us noticing. Kissing him on the forehead, I took the potato peeler back to the kitchen and ran the blade against the vegetable’s ruddy skin.

A lot of animals go off on their own when they’re about to die. When I was eight, our spaniel dug a hole for herself under the house and burrowed there. We found her later that week, serene in her little grave. Apparently elephants do that too. Apparently so do husbands.

I brought his breakfast into the living room on a tray. Usually he drank the milkshake I made and picked a bit at other things. This time he looked at me and said, “I want you to go back to work.”

“And I want a golden toilet. Sometimes we don’t get what we want.”

“I mean it. At least to talk to them about you coming back when things escalate to the point where they can’t escalate anymore.”

The way he said
escalate
made me think of moving stairs, of my beautiful gay husband standing on an escalator and slowly
going to heaven. It was an unnecessary, melancholy thought. “It doesn’t matter if I don’t go back. I’ll find another job.” In fact, head hunters sometimes called the house, so we both knew that was the case. In the end, I told him I’d go. “But only because I need to pick up some more pot on the way.”

As usual, the signs were there. Before digging her own grave, our spaniel seemed unusually calm. Everything she did felt premeditated. On my way out, my husband slapped my ass and told me he loved me. Is it perverse to associate the words
I love you
with entombing? The playful gesture of ass-slapping with sinking submarines filled with men forced to accept their watery fate?

At work, my superior, Vargo, told me a joke. “What’s worse than a paper cut?”

“A lot of things.”

“Don’t ruin it,” Vargo said, and he repeated, “What’s worse than a paper cut?”

“I don’t know, Vargo. What?”

“The Holocaust.” His head tilted back, mouth opening like a Pez dispenser. “Isn’t that bad? I think it’s so bad. Bad, bad, bad.” Because I felt sorry for Vargo, I laughed too. He told me that I could come back to work whenever. He asked about my husband and touched my arm and I remembered that Vargo tried to sleep with me when I first started working at the non-profit.

On the way out, Hattie made her hand into a phone and mouthed the words, “Call me.”

While I was listening to Vargo’s joke, my husband collapsed on the front porch. I sorted out the timing and the exact second Vargo assaulted me with his tasteless punchline,
our neighbour was calling an ambulance. And somewhere on the coast of Brazil, a butterfly flapping its wings had caused all of this.

My husband was still in his bathrobe when I got to the hospital. The nurse at the triage said he’d been acting delirious. He saw me and apologized six or eight times. “I told them not to take me. I even tried to fight back. It’s going to be expensive.” A ludicrous sight that must have been, that bath-robed husband of mine, warding away the rescue attempts with darting punches, a beetle on its carapace.

I asked if it was bad. He shrugged. “It’s been bad since day one.”

The hospital room smelled like vomit. On the other side of the curtains, a woman with a Yankees baseball cap stretched over her head waved at me. I waved back, feeling as though one of us was in a car going someplace, and the other was standing very inert, very still. “I think she tried to eat herself a couple hours ago,” he said. I looked at the woman again and saw the imprints of what could have been teeth on her hand.

We sat in silence as the tubes put things into him and sucked things out. I let him fall asleep, but not before I made him promise not to die on me before I could take him out of this place. All I could think to do was walk around the hospital, looking for someone, anyone, who fulfilled my idea of what a gay person looked like. What did I plan to do when I found him, the perfect man for my husband? In times of crises, your nervous system dilates your pupils, raises your blood pressure, increases your heart rate, parts of your brain shut off, and you can only comprehend survival. It was a simple equation: if I could do this thing, find this man, I could negate so many
other things. The word
cancer
didn’t even occur to me as I tried to find the perfect man for my husband.

My husband wasn’t dead when I came back empty-handed, no potential candidate on my arm. The fact hit me, right then. He probably wouldn’t be getting out of the bed he was curled up in.

“Doctors are like weathermen,” I whispered into the thinning hair of his crown. “They’re wrong about everything. They used to recommend spraying people with DDT.” He grunted a little bit, which made me think what I’d said had entered him through a sort of osmosis.

Crawling into the bed with him, I transformed my body into something like a plaster mould. The space I would make between our bodies would be an imprint, the way you’d make a mask of someone’s face. I told myself if I didn’t move I could keep the shape of him forever, that when this version of him was gone, I could fill the shape up over and over, making a new him when the old one had to go and leave me. My eyes were closed when my husband put his mouth on my ear. Not just on it, around it, as if he were trying to swallow me starting at the place I could hear. After coughing a little, he pulled back a bit and touched my hair and whispered, “There are no monsters here.”

W
hen the sky turned black, I thought of my father.

But that makes no difference to you now. “Where were you when it happened?” you ask, and I say I was at work, in my cubicle, in the centre of the city. Which is not untrue. Hunched over my keyboard, the computers blinked off with a defeated drone, the lights flickered out, and the silence of a city cut from its power rose up from the ground. A quiet more unnerving than darkness, just like Moonman had whispered.

“How did you get out?” you ask, meaning methods, vehicles, escape routes. You want to hear about the path you assume I took west to the wide roads and stiff stalks of corn, whether I knew about the tunnels in advance, and so on, so you can amend your own plans of now-constant preparedness, mental networks fizzing as they rewire.

I don’t tell you that when the black clouds thundered across the sky I didn’t go anywhere, and my first thought was of the man least capable of protecting me from the end of the world.

—

I saw him the way he was, with a mug of red wine and a pack of Player’s Light, on the other side of the screen door that led out to our small backyard. He could sit out there for hours on summer evenings, smoke lingering around his head in varying densities like a dirty halo. He sat and smoked, looking out, facing elsewhere, while Mom dried the plates and glasses with a blue dishtowel and went upstairs to put Alice to bed.

I’d sometimes pretend he was out there on the step listening to a Jays game on the radio, unwinding after work like most dads did. I imagined that if I opened the squeaky screen door he’d shift over to make a spot for me and tell me that there were two out in the top of the fourth, with runners on first and third. We’d sit just listening for a while and, when the game began to drag, he’d talk about stats and trades and the players he watched when he was my age. Near the bottom of the seventh, when the score was 11–2, he’d tell me to grab our gloves from the garage so we could throw the ball around until it was time for bed.

Instead though, like most nights after dinner, I was inside lying on the rug in front of the TV, and he was out there alone sitting quietly on the back step, wishing he were somewhere else.

I was ten when he came home on a Saturday afternoon with a used guitar. He ruffled my hair as he walked across the front porch where I was colouring with Alice, and let the door bang shut behind him. His fingertips left trails on my scalp like swaths cut through a wheat field. I followed him inside and watched from the living room doorway as he leaned the banged-up guitar case against the couch. He grabbed a glass from the cabinet in the dining room and whistled on his way into the kitchen, where he rummaged through a high
cupboard, clinking bottles together until he found the one he was looking for. I’d never heard him whistle. He returned, the glass half-filled with a nectar like dark honey, and stopped when he saw me, his lips still pursed in melody.

“Hey, Simon,” he said. “Wanna hear something, little man?”

I nodded and moved closer as he set his glass down on the coffee table with a clink. He pulled the case onto the couch, clacked open its locks, and lifted the lid to reveal a plush red interior cradling a scratched black guitar. He ran his fingers along its strings before pulling it out and nestling it into his torso. For a couple of minutes he tuned the instrument, his eyes closed, head cocked as though listening for some secret. And when he started to strum, a whole different man took the place of my father.