A Matter of Life and Death or Something (20 page)

There were also a whole bunch of old pictures on the wall of some beautiful woman. Sometimes she was alone and sometimes she was hugging some other guy. She looked really pretty, and I wondered who she was. She seemed to be in almost all the pictures on the wall. I took my field glasses out of my backpack and took the lens caps off and looked through them at the pictures of the lady. I looked at each one and held my field glasses steady and tried to find clues, because it seemed like the type of place to find them, but I couldn't get the focus right and the pictures looked blurry like I was waking up.

I heard the man's chair moving along the kitchen floor, and I looked over with my field glasses and saw a big blurry version of him rolling himself out of the kitchen slowly with one hand, pushing himself off the door frame and then steering towards me, while somehow holding a tray with a coffee and a chocolate milk in the other hand. I put my field glasses down and stood up, because I wanted to help him, obviously, but he yelled “Sit-sit-sit!” so I sat down again. It didn't make any sense how he rolled over so quick with one hand and put the tray on the table in front of me with the other, so I was kind of sitting there shocked. He drifted over to the woodstove, took a log from the box beside it, opened the hatch and tossed it in the fire, which had been crackling and rumbling the whole time. He was such an expert. He shut the hatch, zoomed over to the turtle tank, opened a container and shook some pellets of food in for the turtles. They flapped up to the surface and chewed at the food while I watched them. I finally got my field glasses focused, and the turtles all grew into full-grown adult sized turtles in my eyes. They kicked their webby green feet and floated at the surface and ate, and I watched them.

When the man rolled back over to the table he had his own pair of field glasses on his lap and he put them up to his eyes and sat there staring at me. I must have looked taller than the tallest tree in the world to him. He put his field glasses on the table and took a sip of his steaming coffee. Then I put my lens caps back on and took a drink of my chocolate milk, which was delicious, and shaved my chocolate moustache. Simon
never
buys chocolate milk.

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“Most welcome.”

He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, which almost matched the couch I was on, because it was kind of lumberjacked too except it was green instead of red. He scratched the front of his crazy grey hair.

“So what brings you here, Mr. Williams?”

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I suppose that's right, isn't it? Francis, first of all.”

He reached across the table and shook my hand and smiled. His hand felt like it weighed a ton, and he squeezed hard.

“Francis,” I said for some reason.

“I know your father,” Francis said.

“You do?”

“Of course of course. Simon Williams, what a man.”

“He's not really my father.”

“Oh yes,” Francis said. One of his curly eyebrows went up and he looked at his knees. “Yes of course, my apology. But you know what I mean. He's a good man though, Simon. Talks about you all the time. You're a lucky little guy, you know. A
great
man... helps me a lot. Anyhow, don't suppose you came over here to chat about him now, am I right?”

“Right.”

“Right.”

Then I didn't remember how to explain exactly why I did come over and my head was a little boggled and I didn't understand how he knew Simon so without thinking about it enough I said:

“Are you a hermit?”

Francis started laughing really hard. “Sorry,” he said in between bunches of laughs and then he kept on laughing even harder. His laugh was amazingly powerful. His eyes squinted and he sounded like some kind of jungle animal roaring or like a squawking bird mixed with a lion, with a big puffy chest and grey hair.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

“What's so funny?” I said.

“No one's ever asked me that.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, they have. They've asked it a million ways, but never like that.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. I felt kind of rude.

“No no no no no. Don't think twice.”

Then I tried to be more professional and get into detective mode better, so I asked “How long has this been your residence?”

Francis laughed again and then said, “Oh, must be fifteen, no... seventeen years. Yes, seventeen.”

“That's longer than my whole life,” I said.

“Wow, would you look at that,” he said. “That's something.”

“It's almost twice as long as my life.”

Francis laughed but not as much and then said “Okay, okay” and I decided to try hard to stop being funny, even though I wasn't trying in the first place.

“So you've been living here all by yourself for seventeen years?”

“Mmm-hmm. That's right.”

“Do you get lonely?”

Francis' big laugh started squawking all over again. “Arthur,” he said, “you're going to be a damn comedian, you know that? Do you know that?”

“No,” I said. I didn't get what was so funny.

“Lonely.” He sighed. “Yes, sometimes. I suppose so. Don't you get lonely sometimes?”

I thought about it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so. But not excruciatingly.”

“Well then me neither.” He smiled and drank some of his coffee.

I was feeling kind of funny about how a hermit had just asked
me
if I was lonely. I decided to try and get back to sticking to the plan. I took Phil out of my backpack and put him on the table. “I found this in the woods by my house,” I said. “Have you ever seen it before?”

Francis picked up Phil and looked him over, front cover and back cover, and his eyebrows slowly lifted. “You found a book!”

“Yeah.”

“In the woods?”

“Yeah.”

“I-see-I-see-I-see. Strange. And you want to know how it got there, eh?”

“Well at first I did, yeah. I wanted to know where it came from, and how it got there, but now... now I just want to know...”

I squinted and looked at the floor. My throat lumped a little, like brown sugar does when it won't come out of the bag into your porridge. I thought about Phil again and I couldn't swallow for a second. I pictured him alone and I didn't really know what I was trying to say and no one else did either. I looked at Francis and he was watching me and nodding and he looked really serious all of the sudden.

“Oh no,” he said.

“What?”

Francis didn't answer me for a second. Then he said:

“Well I better read this, then.” He looked at me. “Yes?”

“Sure,” I said.

He held Phil and stared at his name on the cover for a while, and then he opened it and started reading the first page.

“An investigation,” he said.

I nodded.

“Can't say I know who he
is
though.”

“Nobody does. I asked the whole stupid neighbourhood.”

He read all the way down to the bottom of Page 1 and turned it over. Then he kept reading Page 2. He read with the book on his lap and his body kind of leaned over it like the book tied ropes to him and was pulling him in. His eyes moved back and forth and every once in a while he scratched his hand through his grey jungle hair. When his head turned to the right a little and he was on Page 3, I realized he wasn't kidding around with me. He was going to read the whole thing. No one else had even looked inside it. Well, Simon did, but he wasn't supposed to. But Francis was the first person I interviewed who actually read any of Phil. I didn't even notice that was weird until then. But of course it was weird. How could anyone just not read something like that? I felt a little funny just watching him read. I decided I didn't really want to wait all week for him to finish reading, and I also didn't want to just sit there being useless, so I started explaining. Francis laid Phil down on the table so we could both have a look, and we went through the book together for a long, long time.

“Okay, you have to read
this
page,” I would say.

Francis would read and bite one of his knuckles and say “Ohhh. Ohhh.”

“This part's weird,” I would say.

He would fold his arms together and hunch over and read for a while. “Hmm... Hmm!”

“And this is my favourite part. It's about creating the universe.”

He bent forward even farther like he was looking through a special microscope that was built for looking at Phil.

We sat together like that, reading Phil. We read about when he made a masterpiece in the snow, and when the universe was nothing, and when he believed in God, and when it seemed like he sometimes didn't, and when he built filing cabinets in his brain, and when he became tiny, and when he was a library that didn't make sense, and when everything good that happened to him felt embarrassing, and when E was the love of his life but then she ran away, or their love did, and when his life was amazingly painful and things never got better and he was alone inside a cage, and when he never wanted to exist in the first place.

After we read for a long while I said, “So he just kind of wrote his life down, but he wrote it in all these weird ways. Sometimes it makes me laugh but sometimes it doesn't,” I said. “And then he talks about himself like he's not himself, like he's not really there. Sometimes I wonder if he
wants
to be sad or something.”

Francis nodded.

Then I turned to the next page which was Page 43. My throat lumped again.

“Then there's this page,” I said.

I sat back a little deeper into the red couch. Francis read Page 43 in silence and I felt nervous for him and I listened to the gently roaring woodstove and I looked at all the paths in the carpet. I looked at another photo with the beautiful lady in it where she was wearing a really pretty white dress and sitting under a tree on some grass in a park somewhere. She had the nicest smile, not just the regular kind that means you're happy, but the kind that makes other people happy too. I wondered what kind of smile I had, and if it was that kind or just a regular one. I wondered what kind Phil had. He must have had one. Was it a special kind that made other people sad?

Francis turned over Page 43 and saw that the next two pages were blank. He quickly flipped the rest of the pages which were also all blank. He said that's the last page and I nodded. He closed the book, sat quiet for a second with his eyes looking down, then wheeled himself very slowly to the turtle tank. He stared at the little turtles inside, swimming over and under each other and flapping their green flipper feet, climbing and sitting on the little island, then diving in again. He watched them for a long time. Then he came back to the table.

“So what are you going to do with it now? With the book?”

I shook my head slowly, to say that I had no idea. “I mean, what am I supposed to do? I can't do anything. There's nothing I could do.”

Then Francis said, “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Uhhh, sure,” I said.

“Okay.” He drank his coffee and rubbed his finger in the corner of his eye. “First of all, did you tell Simon about this?”

“About Phil?”

“Yes.”

“No way. I didn't tell him anything, but he sneaked around my room and he found it anyway.”

“Why didn't you tell him?”

I was starting to get a little bit unpatient with Francis because we were changing the subject and also because I felt like he was interviewing
me
instead of the other way around like it was supposed to be.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said.

“Oh, nothing. Maybe nothing. I'm just doing my own investigation over here I guess. It's just that, the very first thing you said about Simon, if I remember correctly, was that he certainly wasn't your real father.”

“Well he's not.”

“Surely. Yes, I know. But the way you said it was as if—”

The tape recorder made a loud click noise because the tape ran out.

“Hold on,” I said, and I popped it open and pulled the tape out, flipped it over and put it back in. I pressed RECORD. Then I picked up my field glasses and held them in my lap to have something to fidget with.

“Okay,” I said.

“As I was saying, the thing about Simon is—”

“I just think Simon's so boring.”

Francis looked at me for a second.

“Why?”

“What?”

“What's so boring about him?”

“He just, well... you don't really know him.”

“I certainly do. Simon's over here quite often. He's a good man.”

I made my face look so confused.

“Surely. When he first moved in, he came right up here to meet me. He sees me, in all my glory, exactly as you see me now, and can you guess what he says?”

“No.”

“He says, ‘If you ever need anything, you've got me.' And you know, I took him up on it too. There're plenty of times when I need something, even just some groceries, what have you, and Sarah's not in town, and sure enough your father, I mean,
your
Simon goes and brings me a roast or a bag of sugar, some small thing. Just last week, he wouldn't even let me
pay
him.”

“He never told me that.”

Francis shook his head and smiled. “He wouldn't. He's not the type of guy to give someone a hand and then go around talking about it. Boring? I can't think of anything farther from it.”

I didn't say anything for a second.

“I know how they feel about me, Arthur. I'm surprised you even made it up my God-awful driveway, first of all.”

“I heard you were insane, and you might be a thief, or a crack dealer, or a murderer, or a cannibal or a vegetarian or...”