The Fearsome Particles (17 page)

“Gate duty,” said Jayne. “Count on it.”

Legg didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. He held the string out for me with stiff, struggling arms. “Take it here,” he said. “It gets bad higher up.” Behind and high above him the gusting wind was making the orange kite spiral like a fish around a lure and I could see what Legg couldn’t – that the kite fighter was getting anxious.

I reached out tentatively. I didn’t want to take the string, not just because I was worried about getting cut, but because I wanted it all to end right there, with Legg getting what he’d wanted, thanks to me.

But Legg was waiting, insisting, and I didn’t want him to think badly about me. So it didn’t end when it should have. And I reached out for the glittering string.

I can’t describe everything that happened after that. What I mean is, I can’t describe everything at once. Maybe that’s what happens when you try so hard to fence out stuff that means to get in; it still finds a way, but it comes in pieces, different parts at different times.

So as I sit at my computer and watch the cat, in our house on Breere Crescent, what I remember of what happened is the sound.

I hear the moan of the wind to start with, like a groaning over the field and through the remnants of buildings. And then other sounds, one at a time, join in.

I hear Legg trying to egg me on, to get me to grab hold. “Come on, asshole, don’t be a pussy! Put your hands on the fuckin’ thing.”

I hear my own sharp breath, and then shouts, and Legg –

“Aww, fuck! What didja – shit!”

I hear a roll of laughter and cheers from the crowd, that in my memory sound mocking, even angry.

I hear Lieutenant Jayne shouting. “Corporal, get back here!”

I hear the wind and cheers and laughter swirling up together, then rising and fading as another sound enters – a steady wail, painful, coming from a different direction.

I hear my breathing stop, and the laughter disappear, so that only the wail and the wind are left. And over these sounds I hear the boots on my feet, pounding, pounding across the dirt and sand.

And then that sound stops too; there’s only the wail, and the wind, and the hush of blood in my ears.

G
erald drove home that night, after his meeting with Sandy, cataloguing for easier reference the various ways he had failed.

He had failed Bishop, by not staying alert to the slippage in market share percentages. It had been there for him to see, like a gargantuan sinkhole opening up in the highway ahead, a great harrowing blackness, and all he’d needed to do was keep his eyes open and not drive the company straight off the crumbling asphalt edge of it. But that was beyond him, apparently.

He had failed his wife, by assuming she was capable of withstanding the lead-weighted, gilt-edged pressures of her world, whatever they were. All an attentive person needed to do was look at her, at the cloud of her face, to know that pressures were on her, nameless and unknowable, and that something should be done to help. But such responsiveness was suddenly a feature of his past, not his present. Now he just
went merrily along, attending to trivia, while the woman he’d loved and wedded lay right there in bed beside him being crushed.

And he had failed Kyle most of all. Gerald drove through the tunnelling dusk, watching the street lamps overhead flickering to a kind of greenish half-life, not fully lit, not dead, and he thought of Kyle’s eyes. Since he’d arrived home, his son had looked at him with eyes like these street lamps, and whatever had happened in that distant desert place, whatever “off-camp event” had taken his fully lit son and replaced him with a dimmed one, Gerald knew with the faith of the religious that it was no one’s fault but his own.

No amount of calling and hectoring could cajole the facts of what Kyle had undergone out of the military or its pillowy layers of bureaucracy. They shrouded the information as if it were poison, or gold. He had found names of some of the highups, people in Ottawa, and when they’d resisted him, he had gone higher still. An assistant deputy minister of defence, he was told, was the only person who could help him. An assistant deputy minister of defence became, for Gerald, the peak of the mountain he sought to climb. And when he had finally reached one of these rarefied beings, a woman named Neula Van Wick, she told him he had gone too high, and his call should not have been put through.

Gerald had employed language he rarely used to make clear to Ms. Van Wick what little consolation it was. And without insight into the cause of his son’s troubles what was left to him was the bare effect, and that alone had taken him far too long to figure out.

The night before, he had come home from work, knocked on Kyle’s door, and called to him against the hollow, polished wood as he had every night for a week: “How are you doing in there, son?”

And from behind the door, Kyle had said, “I’m up.” And Gerald had been relieved. Because many times over the previous nights, when he’d knocked on Kyle’s door and called into his room the same way, his son had replied, “I’m down.”

The first few times, Gerald hadn’t been overly worried. After enduring a trauma while in the military’s faulty care, after coming home with his wrists bound like a felon, of course his son was down. Oberly had also said something about “grieving,” and though the man had been mistaken, laughably so, in describing his son’s behaviour as “erratic,” Gerald was willing to give “grieving” the benefit of the doubt. And so it had made sense, the first night, when Kyle had said he was down. And the second night too. Three nights of being down were not implausible. Four nights, however, were a concern. The fifth and sixth nights, Gerald had begun to wonder what sort of professional he should call. He’d gone to Vicki and asked her opinion but, of course, Vicki had only said, “I’m not sure.”

And then, last night, came: “I’m up.” And Gerald had nearly punched the door in joy.

“That’s good, son,” he’d called with his palms pressed against the wood. “That’s great!” He’d been so encouraged, he’d done what Kyle had told him never to do: he opened the door without asking. He’d meant only to give his son a hug, a kind of welcome back squeeze. But when he cracked open the door, he saw instantly what Kyle had meant when he’d talked of being “down” and being “up.”

He was gambling.

It was there, on his computer screen: StarfishCasino.com. His son was gripping his mouse and clicking … clicking … clicking the gold
“BET MAX”
button beneath a virtual slot machine of a suburban luau theme with spinning hams and pineapples and cherry colas.

Gerald had inched farther into the room. “What are you doing there, Kyle?” And his son had simply looked around at him with those half-bright eyes until an electronic bell on his computer went
ding
, and then he turned back to the screen.

Gerald had let that
ding
and that look in his son’s eyes roll around in his brain while he scanned the room for other insidious elements. Drugs were on his mind; was Afghanistan not the opium capital of the world? “Now, Kyle,” he’d said, keeping his voice low and approaching his own son the way he’d once seen a television trapper come up on a wounded elephant seal. “I notice you’re clicking on the Bet Max button there. And I was just wondering how much money – is it real money you’re betting, son?”

And his sweet, logical, chemistry-studying son had turned to look at him once more, and this time he spoke.

And it was after that, when he’d been staring at the back of his son’s almond shell hair, trying and rather pathetically failing to make sense of what he’d just heard, that the cat, from somewhere high above, had leapt onto his neck.

Which reminded him, that was another thing he had failed at.

And all of his failures, Gerald told himself as he sped home, were the product of inattention and inaction. He hadn’t lost the ability to prevent these disasters from occurring, he’d lost the impetus and the will. Somehow he had become still, as if anxiety alone were initiative, and by becoming so he had opened his house to blights that had no business coming inside. So tonight he was resolved – he was taking back control, and all the avenues for ills would start being closed.

Gerald saw the highway-side doughnut shop that he passed every night approaching on his right, and as if to make concrete the notion of a material change in his character, he decided to not merely watch the doughnut shop go by and
wish
he had stopped for a Honey Glazed or a Cinnamon Strizzle, but to turn onto the exit ramp and go in. The decision came upon him with such force that he began to twist the wheel and change lanes without signalling, which he realized only when the silver minivan lodged in his blind spot blared a protest that went far beyond what was warranted, in Gerald’s view.

“Don’t sit in someone’s blind spot!” he shouted at the minivan as it passed. It was never satisfying for Gerald to yell at a driver who’d done something stupid; it was a demonstration of
impotence, nothing more. But he yelled it out all the same as he squeezed the wheel and made it across two lanes just in time to catch the ramp.

In the doughnut shop, still bristling, he stood third in line behind a stooped grandmother holding the hand of a small pig-tailed girl about four, her hair sown with plastic daisies, and a man Gerald assumed to be a truck driver by his unshaven face, dark-blue work clothes and astonishing obesity. Unlike the grandmother and child, who seemed to be pointing at and discussing the merits of each variety of doughnut displayed on the pull-out shelves behind the counter, the truck driver seemed to know exactly what he wanted, because he spent his time staring out the window and rummaging in his pants.

Gerald had in mind something with icing. He’d always been an icing-doughnut man, much to the chagrin of Vicki, who for as long as he’d known her had considered doughnuts of any kind, and icing-doughnuts in particular, to be gauche. Anything gauche was, to Vicki, a great malevolence. It was why he’d never stopped at the doughnut shop on his way home from work, because he couldn’t bear the arm’s-length shame, and the thought that he had allowed Vicki’s snooty sensibilities to interfere with his enjoyment of icing-doughnuts all this time made Gerald even more infuriated than before.

With no thought for Vicki’s apparently fragile state or his contrition over the carriage clock skirmish, he pulled out his cell phone and dialled her number. “Vicki,” he said into her voice mail, “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve stopped at the doughnut shop on the way home from work, and I’m having an icing-doughnut.” He made eye contact with one of the women
behind the counter and nodded, just to let them know he was coming and looking forward to it. “Probably a chocolate icing one, if they have them, I can’t see at the moment. But that’s what I’m doing. Really going to enjoy it.” He was about to hang up, but added, “If you’d like me to bring one or two home for you, just give me a call on the cell. It’s” – he checked his watch – “just after eight.”

He folded up the phone and let it slide into the silk sheath of his pants pocket.

The huge truck driver turned and gave Gerald a sheepish look. “My wife and kid are expecting two dozen Boston creams and I can’t find my goddamn sticker card.”

Gerald smiled.

“You collect the stickers?” said the truck driver.

“No,” said Gerald. “But maybe I should.”

“It’s a good deal. After a dozen dozen you get a dozen free.” He was checking his shirt pockets now, rooting around the buttons with parsnip fingers. “Goddamn thing, probably left it on the seat.”

“Going a long way, are you?”

The truck driver, reaching for the wallet in his back pocket, frowned up at him, apparently confused.

“I mean” – Gerald motioned out toward the truck parking area – “are you in the middle of a long run?”

The man sniffed, rifling through his bills and receipts. “I look like I run much to you?”

“No,” said Gerald. “I mean – sorry. I was just thinking of your truck.”

The truck driver knotted his brow. “What truck?”

I am killing myself with assumptions
, thought Gerald.

“Hey listen,” said the large man, “would you mind saving my place in line? I just gotta go back to the car and see if I left that sticker card on the seat.”

“Not at all,” said Gerald, happy to help someone he had mentally damned to a life of trucking. “I’ll wait here.”

The man winked and gave him the thumbs-up. “Be right back.”

Gerald watched the man hurry out the door and across the parking lot as fast as his enormity would allow and toyed with the idea of getting a sticker card for his own family. Kyle wouldn’t object; he ate just about anything. And the horror on Vicki’s face would be priceless.

“Sir?”

Gerald turned to see that the grandmother and child had finally gone, and the counter girl was waiting for him.

“I’m not next,” said Gerald. “There’s someone in front of me.”

A shimmer of bewilderment glided across the girl’s face. “But there’s no one here,” she said.

“He’s just gone to his car; he’ll be right back.”

The girl cast a searching gaze out the window and back at Gerald. “He’s gone to his car?”

“He’s gone for his sticker card. I’m saving his place in line.”

Someone behind Gerald coughed.

“There’s people waiting,” said the girl, whose orange-and-white paper cap sat square on her head, suggestive of someone
who took pride in her work, which Gerald would normally have applauded. She smiled insistently at him and Gerald smiled back.

“He’s just going to be a minute.” Gerald turned and saw three people in line behind him. “It’ll just be a minute,” he repeated.

“What are we waiting for?” said a wind-breakered woman at the end.

“Some jerk gone to his car,” said a middle-aged farmer-type behind Gerald.