Three Years with the Rat (7 page)

“You just told me you're struggling. And O.K., I know that shows trust. And I appreciate it. But you'll have to excuse me if I'm not doing this again. I'm not going to do nothing, this time, while somebody close to me falls apart.”

With my right hand I poured the scotch into my mouth, and with my left I waved in a circle, indicating the entire room.

“Look at all this,” I said. “You're living in a museum. A shrine.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I bet that no matter where you turn, you're reminded of her absence.”

“Exactly.”

“Of our failure to help her.”

“No. Of
my
failure.”

Each sip was more tolerable than the last. I finished the scotch, took an ice cube in my mouth and crunched it. My back teeth stung with the cold.

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “We all failed her. You don't get ownership on guilt.”

John straightened his posture and cleared his throat. “That isn't what I meant.”

I waved my hand again, more violently this time. I could feel my belly slosh with heat.

“So what are you going to do about it?” I asked. “About your shrine. Look. Choose to live or choose to remember. But it seems like you can't do both right now.”

John didn't respond. He finished his drink and held the empty glass in his hand, staring at the photos on the wall and Grace's coat rack near the front door. Then he got up and poured us two more drinks, this time without ice. We stood and drank. By now I couldn't taste anything.

We made a game plan. First we made piles of Grace's old things according to vague categories. Next we stuffed them into garbage bags and old boxes John kept under the sink.

“What about in there?” I asked, pointing to the locked door.

He hesitated. Then he unlocked the second bedroom and slipped inside. A moment later he came out with a few small things. He'd entered and exited quickly, didn't turn on a light, so I couldn't see what was on the other side of the door. I stared at him and made it clear I was annoyed.

“I'll show you what I'm working on,” he said, “when it's finished.”

We moved on to the master bedroom. We pulled all her clothes from the closet and crammed all her shawls and scarves and shoes into a laundry basket. We carried the bags and boxes down the stairs into the chilly night air. We filled the trunk and backseat of my car with Grace's possessions, all of it bound for my mother's house.

At the time, I thought he was choosing to live.

John invited me back upstairs for another scotch. I looked at my phone and realized how very, very late I was for dinner with Nicole. I cursed, gave John his customary Toronto man hug, and sprinted home. After the scotches, driving was out of the question.

Nicole wasn't home when I got there but it was clear that she had come and gone. Her work clothes were scattered across the
furniture and her fall jacket was on the floor. She'd torn a sheet of paper from her notebook and left it on the kitchen counter. The note said
Thanks for dinner
and she'd cross-hatched a picture of a chubby bird with long tail feathers. I brushed my teeth, put the kimchi on the counter, and considered having another drink.

“Way to go, you dipshit,” I said to myself. I left the apartment again and dashed to the Cuckoo.

The night air bit into my skin, strikingly cold for September, a warning of the angry winter to come. I buried my hands in my pockets. Through the front window of the Cuckoo, I could see Nicole talking with a group of people, one or two women but mostly young men. She was smiling and it was clear she was having a good time without me around.

I stood at the window watching them drink and laugh, and then I turned and walked home.

JUST LIKE ANY KIDS
, Grace and I sometimes fought, tormented each other, tried out behaviours to see which ones would stick. One summer day, when she was nine and I was six, we went to play in the new subdivision, a construction zone up the hill from our neighbourhood. While we were wandering inside a half-built house, Grace started screaming. I turned around and she had her leg stuck between two planks of wood in the wall, a narrow space that the contractors would one day plaster with drywall. Her plan was obvious, to squeeze through that space and hide on me, only she had gotten stuck on her way through.

I saw my chance, got right in her face and had the last laugh. She cried, no words, only wailing and swatting at me feebly. I wanted her to sweat, so I left her for a satisfying minute and watched with satisfaction.

Once my gloating was over, though, it was clear that something was wrong. She sounded too serious, too hysterical, in too much pain. She was pointing toward the floor. I looked down and was horrified: the problem wasn't that her leg was stuck, but rather that
she'd stepped on a nail. I had no idea how long she had been pointing at her foot.

I remember the nail being huge and rust-coloured, pushed straight through the sole and poking out the top of her shoe. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I started crying, too, and ran home as fast as I could to get help. Our father pulled the station wagon up to the construction zone, grumbling the whole way, yanked Grace off the nail without hesitation. We went straight to the hospital, Grace got shots, and for the rest of the summer she hobbled.

I felt wretched about the incident, an unlovable little brother, but Grace never held it against me. If anything, it was times like these that actually bound us together. And after that day, whenever I saw pain ripple across my sister's face, I recognized it immediately, viscerally.

“You really want to hear this?” Grace asked me.

We were sitting in the Cuckoo at a small table, about a month after I'd arrived in the city. In the middle of our table was a tea light in a glass holder, and on either side of it were two large pint glasses full of amber beer. The bar was dim and most of the other tables were unoccupied. The bartender had put on some faint music and an acoustic guitar flickered around the corners of the empty room. I wasn't sure what day of the week it was. September was almost over but autumn hadn't come, yet.

Grace was shawled, eyeshadowed, a little uneasy. It was the first time I'd noticed long vertical lines around her mouth, the first time I would have used the word
severe
to describe how my sister looked. Her eyes were candlelit green saucers that flicked between her fidgety hands and my face.

“I should at least have an inkling of what you're doing at the university,” I told her. “Need to have something to tell Mom if she calls.”

She cupped her beer and tapped her rings against the glass. There was no rhythm in the sound, only the twitch of anxious energy. “Fuck Mom.”

I shrugged, neutral.

“I'll have to dumb it down for you,” she said. Then she grinned crookedly, amused by her own insult.

I laughed. “Humour your idiot brother.”

The bartender stacked some glasses behind the counter. Grace jumped in her seat. Then she straightened herself and drank some beer using both hands to raise the glass.

“I suppose what we're trying to do is measure and quantify subjective experience,” she said. “Ultimately, we'd like to do it in the absence of objectivity.”

“That's the dumbed-down version?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you make it dumber?”

She was visibly irritated by my use of the word
dumber.
I scored it as a point for myself and gave her a smug look.

She shook her head at me, squinted, and tried again. “Did the universe exist before you were born?”

“What?” I asked. She didn't respond so I thought about her question. “O.K. It existed. So?”

“How can you be sure?” she said.

“Are these trick questions?”

“No. So how can you be sure the universe existed?”

“Well,” I said. And thought again. “I mean, there's evidence. Science. Dinosaur bones and such. But I guess I can't say for sure, without any doubt, that the universe existed. Or that it exists right now. I could be some brain in a jar. Is that what you're getting at?”

“Not really.” She laughed. “But maybe in a roundabout way. You say that all of this”—she swooped one arm in a wide arc—“could just be a figment of your imagination. You could be a brain in a jar and I could just be a creation of your nonconscious bits. That idea, that the only thing that really exists is pure subjectivity, that we're all just figments of your imagination, they call that solipsism. And yet you seem more convinced by dinosaur bones and science, right?”

“I guess it seems more reasonable than being a brain in a jar,” I told her.

“Perfect. Yes. Exactly. ‘Reasonable.' We have a reasonable degree of information that an objective reality really exists, outside of our minds. It's reasonable to think that the tree is still in the woods, even when there isn't someone there to observe it.”

“Oh god,” I said. “You're going to do the tree falling in the woods.”

She scowled, stood, and scuttled to the bar. Her skirt was long and made of a heavy fabric and it swished like a curtain. A minute later she returned with two more pints of beer, though I wasn't nearly finished my first.

“Yes, you asshole,” she said after she'd sat down again, “I'm going to do the tree falling in the woods. Let's say somebody is present, though. The tree falls and causes ripples in air pressure, which in turn are transduced into an electrical signal by specialized cells in your ear. In the end, we hear a sound. What our lab is interested in is the qualitative and quantitative difference between the objective air pressure and the subjective, perceived sounds.”

I tried to envision what she was saying but kept getting stuck on something.

“It's just,” I said. “Shouldn't that be easy? I mean, in a way they're the same. The form is different, air pressure and brain signals, but shouldn't they be…I don't know, parallel? Like a bigger air pressure change would have a larger electrical signal. Or something.”

“In a way, that's true. But there are important differences. For example, Weber's Law: we hear logarithmically rather than linearly.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked. I finished my first beer except for a ring of froth and pushed the glass to the side.

Grace said, “Jesus, it always surprises me how little you know.”

I sat back in my chair and smiled. “Hey, come now. You should know exactly how little I know by this point. Anyway, your problem doesn't seem so hard. It still sounds like an equation, something that's already figured out.”

Her second glass was somehow empty already. She reached across the table, took mine, and drank deeply.

“Well,” she said, “you're right. Somewhat. From air pressure to perception of sound is a relatively trivial problem, although it's hardly ‘figured out.' But here's the thing.”

Grace leaned forward and her hair swooped down the sides of her face. The light of the candle cast her eyes yellow-white and made the shadows on her face all upside-down. “We're not interested in how objective things influence subjective experience. We're interested in subjectivity on its own. And we're starting with subjective time.”

Her last word reminded me. I looked at my phone and said, “Shit. We have to go.”

She got visibly excited. “See? That's exactly what we study.”

I stood and put on my jacket. She picked up the empty pint glasses to stack.

“Like any other dimension,” she said, “objective time can be quantized, quantified. But when you look at subjective time, it seems to speed up and slow down relative to…”

She trailed off. I zipped up my tattered jacket and looked to her. She still held the pint glasses, but her hands were shaking too much to slip the one glass into the other. She had focused all her concentration on the task.

“Hey,” I said gently, coming around to her side of the table to take the glasses.

“I've got it,” she said. “Just give me a second.”

Finally she slotted one glass into the other, though the rattle was loud enough to catch the bartender's attention.

“Easy there on the goods,” he shouted over in a friendly voice. He pretended to baby the pint glass he was drying with a grey towel.

She made a straight line to the bar and dropped the two glasses on the counter. She said something low and deep that I couldn't hear, but the bartender's face soured and Grace made for the exit without looking back at me.

I quickly stacked the remaining two glasses on our table and brought them to the bartender.

“Like I don't have enough bullshit to deal with,” he said.

“Watch it,” I snapped. It came out of me like a reflex. Over my first month in the city, the bartender and I had enjoyed a few good conversations, and so we were both surprised by my reaction. Quieter, I said, “Look. Go easy on her.”

I put a few more dollars on the bar and walked away.

The bartender shouted, “Why should she get special treatment?”

I turned, ready to defend Grace, but he was looking at me kindly, without any intention of a fight. Because she's my sister, I thought. Because she's always been this way. Because I don't know.

I didn't say anything. I walked away.

We struck east toward Nicole's apartment. It was dark and dry and not cold. Grace smoked the end of a joint. Headlights blinded us and lit the pavement as we walked.

“So, should I start calling you Shaky or Grumpy?” I asked.

Grace dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

“I'm serious,” I said. “Well, you know what I mean. What the hell was that?”

“Are you planning on getting an apartment any time soon?” Grace's dismissal of my question was obvious. She aimed the words at my feet. “You've been squatting for a month.”

She was asking me to back off the conversation, and like a good brother, I did.

“Not quite a month,” I told her. “But Nicole has said I'm fine to stay until I find a good place.”

Grace snorted. “And how is our princess?”

“Christ, what's with you? You're the one who introduced us.”

“I didn't think she'd start fucking my brother,” Grace said.

I stopped walking. Grace continued for a few steps. When I didn't follow she stopped and turned to me. “What?”

“Grace,” I said. “Are you all right? What's with all this bullshit?”

Her head was shaking back and forth unhappily,
no, no, no.
The streetlamps blackened out her eyes whenever cars weren't passing us.

“Can we just keep walking?” she said.

I started moving again, all the while keeping my eyes on her. We fell into step and she turned to me, aped my concerned stare and turned her palms upward,
what.
Then she checked her behaviour, face a little ashamed, and looked at the sidewalk again. We were rounding the corner to Nicole's apartment.

“I was just thinking,” she said.

“You were thinking.”

“Maybe you and I could find a place together,” she said.

I stopped in my tracks again.

“Jesus, walk!” she said. “You're the one who's in a rush.”

“And what about John?” I asked, catching up to her. “You two just moved in together.”

“ ‘What about John?' You're supposed to be on my team. I don't love that you two are becoming such fast friends.”

We brought our voices down as we passed the persimmon tree and neared the basement apartment door. The bulb above the door washed out the colour on the siding of the house.