The Adjustment League (12 page)

Today, though, I see a book on the front table of publishers' overruns.
More Than Memory: What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Alzheimer's
. Hardbound, new. Sixteen bucks, even at half price. Another phantom groan from Ken.

Still, I have to pick it up. Have to know just what it is—besides suicidal urges that make you step in front of cars—that the Wyverns can't stand looking at.

“Not to pry, but I hope it helps.” The guy behind me at the cash, fiftyish, fit-looking. “Despite all the talk, it's hard to get straight information. But I've heard good things about that one.”

“You're going through this?”

“I was until last March. It took five years to see Dad through to the end, but it aged me fifteen. I'd catch sight of myself in slivers of glass and think, ‘Who's that poor old bastard?'”

“It's not for me. It's for a family I know.”

“Let me guess. They just got the word.”

“That's right. Just yesterday.”

“On a Sunday? Well, they've got a decent doctor, that's something. Do they have any idea what they're up against?”

“They're beginning to, I think.”

“Well, good luck to them. They're going to need it.”

“Yes they are.”

§

I'm too full from lunch to bother with dinner. The stomach trained to do a ten-hour stretch, now bloated with samosas. One missed meal a sop at least to Ken, a toonie tossed back in the pot.
Sitting in the armchair with a mug of Luck Yu, hearing rush hour crest below, I think of the story of Diogenes breaking his last possession, his wooden begging bowl. “At last,” he cries, “I'm free!” Probably apocryphal, though with good stories what does it matter?

The chair under my ass annoys me. The cushion behind my back. The sofa. The low, scratched table I set my mug on. Even the mug. I wish I could find a spring of lukewarm tea, cup my hands under it when thirst comes over me. To most people's eyes, the meagre furnishings here would look like someone just moving in or almost finished moving out. But sometimes—often—I look at them and see the crap heap of the world. An attic stuffed with clutter I can't move or think straight in. I long to make it all vanish. And come close to doing it sometimes, step right up to the edge of free, feel the cold rushing air I long to let go and topple into—when practical consideration, like a strong hand, grabs me by the belt and pulls me back, just as I'm closing my eyes and leaning.

What floor-sitting does to a body your age. To a body with multiply broken bones and dislocated joints…

The Diogenes itch. It gets stronger in hyper-time. Stronger still during an adjustment. I feel, like a pillow clamped over my face, the space taken up by the spoons in my drawer, the kettle crouching like a mutant mushroom on the counter, the box spring and the pegs that keep it off the floor, giving dust a home. By every concept and assumption heaped in my head, turning it into a sluggard's crammed garage. How the crap I'm hanging on to, buried under, makes me stupid. Makes me dull. Makes it that much harder to think a clear thought, feel a strong feeling. The crowdedness. The clutter. You don't live with it. You force a dribble of living through it.

How the mind mourns—the greedy whining child in it—but the chest expands, the spirit rinses off its crud, with each thing you break, lose, give away, dump overboard. The boat rises just that fraction. Divest, divest! And the practical proofs, every time. Feeling myself become a better reader without the fallback of books at hand, knowing I know only what I carry in my head.
So many proofs, so few solutions
.

And wanting to vaporize everything I see.

A half hour before Jared and Lucy arrive, I spend some time in Big Empty. I don't know what they make of the door that's always closed during their visit. I don't care, I wouldn't open it for the Chief of Police. It belonged to Megan, it belongs to me. Jared's never asked about it, which says a lot for a curious kid with poor impulse control. The mystery door is probably one of the reasons Lucy stays close by during the lesson, humming Andean melodies while she spices her stew.

I take a walk around Maude's talismans, but I don't need to sit or lie among them to know they're still mute, they haven't found their voice, or maybe their alphabet, their language, yet. Or they're chattering like magpies and I haven't grown ears to hear them.

Dumb objects.

Dumb animal staring at them.

It's weird, but even Big Empty feels cluttered tonight. Like the air isn't molecules of innocent gases, but a million cheesy hotel paintings, the contents of the world's Walmarts and Dollaramas, miniaturized and hanging in space, filling it without a crack to slide a hair through.

I can't make it empty enough to speak to me
.

A thought that makes me weary to the bone, worse than a dozen sleepless nights. And makes my stomach coil around samosa vapours, a queasy wrench that has nothing to do with hunger.

I know—roughly—what happens next. That sense, as hyper-black accelerates and the window smears to close, of being pushed from room to room in search of progressively emptier space. From bedroom to couch—that's already happened. From couch to sleeping bag in Big Empty. Finally, to the place I give no name. Which is the final destination, but is by invitation only.

Terrible to know
almost
all of a trip. Better to know some, or little, or nothing. But to know the path to an inn, the inn, the innkeeper—everything but the innkeeper's face, which until the last second remains a fizzing white oval. No voice—since he has no mouth yet—just the possibility of sound, a spectrum from silence to screech. Until the lips begin to form.

“Is it… do you want to kill yourself?” An early psychiatrist—no, a school psychologist. One of the last, not long before you quit. Two chairs, a room behind Counselling.

A good question and you wanted to answer it, answer him, where seconds ago you'd burned to smash his face, your fists tingling with it. Thinking a long time with your head down, which must have primed him for the whispered
yes.

“No. It's not nothing I want. It's just less. Much less.”

“Less. I'm sorry, I'm not following. Less than… Can you…?” The poor bastard couldn't have looked more lost if they'd handed him the wrong exam and a broken pencil.

And no answer for him then. Not even the start of one for myself.

You reach a certain point where vagrancy is required. Since only a certain limited amount can be accomplished from a home. A fixed address.

But there's that tricky period before you can cancel your mail, dump your gear and shove off.

Isn't there, though?

§

Lucy squeezes past me with her bag of ingredients and the big, brown-stained pot she always cooks in. Says it's part of every recipe and “adds to the flavour.” I hear her running water. Jared sets up his things—books and dictionary, notebook, pencils. We had a tense moment early on, which felt like it could go either way, when I told him I wouldn't read with him without a dictionary. He dug in his heels, ended up shedding a few tears. Later, Lucy came to my door to thank me. Her eyes were misty too. What the hell just happened? I thought as I closed the door.

Lucius has come too, for some reason. He stands outside the door, looking uneasy. Making no move to enter, though I stand aside. A very meek, infinitely capable man who makes me wonder about the soul of a gardener. Merging through sundial hours with the plants he raises, transplants, and cuts. He must get short-changed a lot—soft fingers sliding late, light envelopes out back doors, along with another demand and
Thanks so much!
How much, exactly? When
thank you
bloats, look out.

“Is it 305?”

“No, no problem. Some bumps and bangs. Getting ready to move, I think. I'm just wonder… how is your car?”

My car. From the blank in my head, I realize I've been driving without being aware of it. It might be sluggish or it might not, I haven't paid any attention to it. It's still moving is all.

“No worse. About the same, I'd say. I'll keep a closer eye on it tomorrow.”

Lucius frowns, the prelude to an apology. Today's gray chill has brought more calls for burlap. Wasp nest removals.

“Take your time.”

§

Jared's a wonder reader. Same as I was. Maybe all kids are. I never felt enough connection to my peers to learn their normal, except to know it wasn't mine. But when I turned, early on, from kid to adult books, I skimmed to find the passages that would pummel me with awe. The sensation of being stunned, my head socked with disbelief as it would later be by fists, was my earliest delight. Delight, and the search for it, were divorced from moral judgement, from any judgement whatsoever. My foster-father when I became a serious reader was a history buff, at least in the rich field of World War II. And my first impression of
The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
was a squirmy relish at its sheer preposterousness. The homeless vet and ex-con clawing his way up to become absolute ruler in ten years. The idea of exterminating millions, drawing up the plans and carrying them out—the stupefying sickness of it, like a banquet of vomit, made my head swim. And the Bunker scenes: issuing crazed orders while Zhukov's giant guns pulverized Berlin, tantrums in the diesel-rank air, his appalling breath, single-vegetable dinners, unsleeping monologues on
King Kong
while even the faithful slipped away or discreetly dozed… What a fantastic story!
Ringworld
, a million miles wide and the area of three million Earths, was the natural next phase in my search for the incredible, and for several years I was a sci-fi freak. Then happened upon
The Mind of
a Mnemonist
and came home to human beings who yielded nothing to the fantasists in the realms of the stupendous.

Jared, too, asks only to be thunderstruck. He's still got last week's
Planet Danger
, renewed a second time, along with
Extinct
and
The Amazing Body
, all of which deliver precisely what their titles promise. He flips to whatever's currently blowing his mind and we read the passage together, him stopping frequently to ask me questions. What I can't answer, he takes home as a research project, bringing back next week what he's found online. Lucy raises her eyebrows at some of the titles, but this haphazard tour of the spectacular has gone much better than
Charlotte's Web
or
Tuck Everlasting
, which only made him surly and wilfully obtuse.

“Mosquitoes!” he announces gleefully, when I fail several times to guess the world's deadliest animal. The omnipresent little shits carry off two million people a year, making sharks and cobras and tigers look like dilettantes.

Sitting side by side on the couch, bent over the coffee table studying a blow-up of the Ebola virus, we present almost comically contrasting body types to the casual eye. Jared short and slight for his age, with a little pot belly from the snack-food bingeing he does after bullying sessions, a child's smooth skin and careless flop of hair—and me, stretched and hollowed and inscribed by a Torquemada-Kafka machine. But look a little closer—Jared's worry creases, premature etchings around his eyes and down his forehead, and his small ears, pointed as if snipped at the vet's—and someone might get a sense they couldn't quite name, some shadow of shared deformity, oddness at least, deviation from the norm.

And shared orientations, similar skews of thought, would make the likeness sharper. With the passenger pigeon chapter in
Extinct
, Jared went, as I would, past the mass murder itself, or else inside it, to more speaking details. Miracle hunting. Audobon in 1813, riding through western Kentucky, recording a migrating flock that darkened the sky like an eclipse, dung falling from it like snow, and did not stop for three days—which the naturalist calculated at 1.1 billion members. “It passeth credit,” a New Englander had written two hundred years earlier, “but the truth should be written.” “Passeth” gives Jared no pause—to the stumbling reader, the alien-archaic no harder than the alien-contemporary. Other scenes he fastens on are of Martha, the last of her kind, trembling with old age in a zoo in Cincinnati. Zoogoers tossing sand at her to make her move. After her death, roughly coincident with the start of World War I, her fifteen-inch-long body frozen into a three-hundred-pound block of ice for shipment to the Smithsonian.

“Wow.” It could be Jared. It could be me.
Wow
the essence of our hunt.

Lately he has begun touching me gently. With a glance back to make sure his mom is occupied, he puts out fingertips—so light I barely feel them—to the large, zigzagging veins on my hand and forearm. “Like snakes,” he says. “I can feel something moving.” And draws his fingers back. I search, but can't find a reason to oppose it. It is more than a child's appalled wonder at the aging body, turning itself inside out with such garish drama, all its inner workings rising to the surface to declare themselves. I sense he is also worried—a worry he can't name or acknowledge—that I will pass away. That I will be encased in a block of ice and shipped somewhere, his knocks on my door unanswered. When a recent digression led us to haemophilia—a paper cut that never stops bleeding, imagine!—he looked everywhere but at my face.

The writing part starts poorly. I pick up the pen, rest it on the Hilroy notebook. Jared perches on the edge of the couch, his body tense, almost quivering. Excited to think his weightless thoughts have a secretary waiting, an adult with no other purpose but to scribe his musings in blue ink.

“How was school?” I start—as per usual, probably stupidly. And listen to the usual misery chant: wanting to burn it down, wishing for a flood that would engulf it, overflowing toilets…”I'd like to put some people in a dungeon.” His eyes intent, focused on something far away.