The Canal

By Daniel Morris

http://www.DanielMorris.info

Copyright © 2008 by Daniel Morris.

All rights reserved worldwide.

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>> CHAPTER ONE <<

The things Paul did no longer seemed strange
to him. He was past all that, past the point of strange. Like now,
being in the backyard, aiming water from the hose at the blood on
his lawn. Most people in their life, at some point, will water a
lawn. The trick was to get the crumbs of bone and gristle -- use
the water to push them back towards the fence, so the runoff could
drain into the canal.

It was work he'd almost enjoy if he hadn't
been feeling so sick. It must be the heat. It must be the sun. Or
the air, dense and empty of oxygen. He could barely breathe. The
hose felt too heavy, as if packed with lead. This wasn't like the
usual flu's, fever's and rheumatism's that normally plagued him.
This felt much more final. Much more definitive.

He couldn't remember it ever being this hot.
Part of him though, the old Paul, the Paul of happier days, he
seemed to remember a day as hot as this one. In fact, the old Paul
recalled that he'd been standing here in this very same yard, doing
almost exactly the same thing. Watering. He recalled that he'd
gotten thirsty and had tried drinking from the hose. Paul's wife
Teresa, she had been tending to the small garden that was set
alongside the fence. When she saw him there, his lips out to that
stream of water like he was kissing it, she started screaming.
Outdoor water wasn't clean, she said, waving a pruning shear,
thrusting it menacingly in his direction. There were bugs, she
said...and debris and filth and germs and particulate. But mainly,
her concern was the bugs.

Paul didn't argue. He wasn't the arguing
type. But he didn't see why bugs couldn't be living in other
places, like the kitchen tap for example, from which Teresa drank
deeply and often. Or even bugs on your skin. Hadn't he read that in
the National Geographic? Bugs crawling all over you, all the time?
So small you can't even see?

Really though, Paul wasn't feeling well
enough to be following all these meandering, switchback thoughts.
Which was why he'd gone to so much trouble in the first place, the
trouble of freeing himself from the past -- or more specifically,
of freeing himself from himself, his old self, the old Paul. Yes,
these days he was the vastly improved New Paul. And at this moment
the only thing that mattered, the only thing worth mattering,
wasn't Old Paul's memories, but that there was still plenty of lawn
to clean. And blood could be stubborn, if not devious -- despite
Paul's best efforts with the hose, the blood was doing better than
before, reviving in strength, increasing in wattage, and showing
thick like cherry filling across half the yard.

All that, and Paul still had the porch to
rinse.

And then the living room.

Paul resumed spraying near his feet, until he
finally uncovered the saffron layer of dead grass beneath. He
pointed the hose towards the heart of the whole mess, to a lead
pipe planted in the ground. Paul briefly rinsed it with a flick of
water. The pipe stood about shin high. You could tie things to
it.

*

In most places there wasn't even grass, just
dirt. This was hardly a lawn, more a vegetative hall of shame --
nothing but stink weed, crab grass, wank wood, bummer berry.
Teresa's garden was now a bunker of aggressive foxtails, tangled in
the chain-link fence. And even the fence was doing poorly, all rust
and brittle steel, holding together purely out of habit, some parts
leaning flat to the ground, some parts missing entirely. Nothing in
the yard was fresh or new. It had done a lot of dying since
Teresa's day.

He knew she wouldn't have approved. Teresa
loved plants and anything else that could be grown. Kids, pets too.
As long as it wasn't a bug. In Teresa's eyes, bugs didn't really
grow, not like more palatable life forms. They just sort of
coagulated, materializing in baths of slime, to emerge from places
they had no right being, like hoses, or her tomatoes.

Or the canal, mused New Paul.

Yes, Teresa was definitely the growing kind.
A life giver, a nurturer. She had a green thumb, as they say. Paul
however, he wasn't even close to being a plant man. As it turns
out, his thumb ran a rather different color -- more of a red than a
green.

*

The old him, Old Paul, he used to have a fair
understanding of where he, as a person, started and stopped. It was
rather simple -- there was a man named Paul. Paul had done all the
things that most men of his era and age did, whether they wanted to
or not: school, job, girl, marry, war, work, house, kids, live,
eat. Maybe it didn't seem too impressive in retrospect, maybe a bit
ordinary, but Paul didn't mind. You just did what you did. We all
do. No shame in that.

But then everything got changed around.
First, his daughters died. Then his wife. Then the yard.

*

The old Paul had heard stories about ancient
couples who, after one partner dies, the other follows suit within
hours, or even minutes (apparently they time these things, some guy
bedside, dressed in somber black, with a clipboard and a
stopwatch). The prognosis was simple: broken heart. These were
senile sweethearts who couldn't remember their own names, but they
never forgot the important thing -- that they loved someone. Take
the point of that love away and what else was there?

There was nothing, in Paul's opinion.
Certainly nothing worth living for. And after his wife passed he
figured he was as broken hearted as a man could get. There was no
reason for him to continue on without her. What he wanted was to be
like those old couples -- he would have set a new world record if
he'd been able to, he'd have died within seconds, no, he'd do
better than that, a tenth of a second. Actually, it would be
instant. Simultaneous. Last breath on three. Paul was ready.

But his body wasn't.

This part of his life involved extended
periods of motionlessness. When it became apparent that Paul wasn't
going to die immediately, he decided that he would lie on his
couch, arms folded across his chest, without food or drink -- or
breathing, if he could help it -- until his body expired from
disuse. He'd act dead until he was dead. Or, until death forgot he
was there and casually passed by, at which point Paul would pounce.
Whichever came first. It seemed to make sense at the time -- if he
was already doing all the work, surely death would see him as a
bargain.

It was during these bouts of immobility, and
despite his best efforts to the contrary, that Paul began to do
some thinking. Mainly, he thought about how temporary everything
was. It seemed that given long enough the things you cared about
either changed irrevocably, disappeared, were replaced, or died,
and that this process never ended. For all the life Paul had lived,
and the experiences he had gathered, their sum importance would die
when he did. And so it began to seem to Paul that if nothing ever
lasted, then by design nothing ever mattered. Eventually sins and
good deeds alike all got swept under the rug. So why bother caring
about any of it?

The old Paul, he had bothered. He'd been a
worrier. There was one's personal well-being to consider, not to
mention money, friendships, the playoffs, personal politics, and
world affairs. It had always felt to Paul like things were at
stake, vital things, even if he wasn't always sure what those
things were, or what exactly was hanging in the balance. But what
mattered was that something mattered. There was urgency.

Until eventually, as Paul lay inert,
disappointingly still very much alive, his body following its own
selfish, shadowy agenda -- as he thought about how much he'd lost,
and how much he would continue to lose, he realized that he could
no longer agree with any of that, with all the mattering. And so
instead of dying, Paul was reborn.

There was no grand epiphany, no profound
moment of transformation. It was simple: one minute there was Paul,
in the darkness of grief, drowning in himself (he made for strange
water -- thick, a gravy, foul -- and if he'd thought about it he
might have imagined that this water actually existed, maybe just
down behind his yard, in the canal that the old Paul used to
ignore, repulsed as he was by its back alley ambience of towing
yards and mattress dumps and the barnyard swelter of raw sewage)
and the next minute, a hand, rough and strong and unsympathetic
grabbed him by the neck and was yanking him free. This hand
belonged to a new Paul. And this new Paul was immune to the water,
he moved atop it as if it were sidewalk.

New Paul was different from Old Paul in that
he no longer cared. He didn't care about his wife or his health or
his bills or his daughters or the time or the date or his past or
his future. To the casual observer there wouldn't seem to be much
difference -- after all, Paul still looked like Paul. He still
slept very little, still paced the upstairs hallway at three in the
morning. He still ate while standing over the sink and rubbed his
back against the bedroom doorjamb for a scratch. But inside his
head, there was little to recognize. It was silent, barren. The
evenings came sooner and more often, the shadows lingered for
longer, and never quite disappeared completely. There was no worry,
no concern. For Paul, peace had come at last. And, as he soon
discovered, now that he no longer cared about anything, he was
capable of anything.

*

As New Paul watered, feeling like the weight
of the sky had touched down on his shoulders, pressing him flat,
the old Paul spoke up with a complaint: She would not have
approved.

Meaning Teresa. In these last intervening
years, Old Paul had proven himself to be somewhat tenacious. He'd
been replaced, yet still he rattled around on the fringes, like a
party guest who had yet to leave, even after the hints had been
made, after the others had gone, after the lights had been put
out.

She would not have approved.

New Paul tolerated these outbursts for the
most part. He at least acknowledged that a lifelong personality was
a tough habit to break.

"I thought you'd be happy," said New Paul. "I
recall you wanting this... It feels like I'm dying." And it did.
Each time Paul made another sweep with the hose it felt as if he
were borrowing against reserves of strength that he didn't have.
And the new Paul wasn't as keen on death as his old self had been.
New Paul wasn't so naïve as to think that dying actually solved
anything. Why should death be so generous as to offer relief? Death
didn't owe anyone anything.

Although tonight, Paul could rest. There
would be no need to prepare dinner for his good, dear friend, the
twilight visitor. Tonight Paul would recover, at ease in his home,
with the flies and dust. He'd take a nap, he'd feel better.

When the girls were younger..., insisted Old
Paul.

"I'm becoming bored," said New.

When the girls were younger Paul used to cook
for them during the summer, nearly every night. He had bought a
barbecue, which he still had. Paul cooked average foods with
mediocre results, hamburgers and hot dogs, the kind of food you
felt comfortable with, that reminded you of childhoods and easy
afternoons spent outdoors. But when the girls got older they didn't
want to eat outdoors so much. They wanted little to do with
barbecues. Salads, they said. Of all things, they wanted salads.
And then when they had boyfriends (one of which, in all
truthfulness, worked at the crouton factory) they wanted little to
do with their mother and father as well. They had their own lives
then. They had moved on. Adulthood had taken them from him, his two
little girls. Later they'd be taken again, forever this time, prey
to a careless driver, traveling at irresponsible speed. It was
Teresa who took this the hardest. But it was Paul who began to
change.

New Paul stopped paying attention. The old
Paul had become increasingly sentimental recently. All those
stories that had nothing to do with anything anymore, he'd been
digging them all up. Maybe he sensed what new Paul sensed -- the
looming end. Or maybe he felt a final inventory was in order, one
last tally. Or, most likely, he was searching out Paul's
sympathies, making a rather pathetic, final attempt to remind Paul
of his former compassion and humanity.

But ha ha to all that. There was no sympathy,
compassion, or humanity left. That was the point of New Paul. That
was what had made the years tolerable...

And then it occurred to New Paul that if
nothing mattered, in the grand scheme, then why was he bothering
with the lawn? Especially since this was nothing to be ashamed of,
nothing that shouldn't be on display for others to marvel at. In
fact, he was rather pleased with the whole mess. So, why
bother?