The Journey Prize Stories 28 (21 page)

“Two things,” I said.

Nicholas sat down next to me.

“What?”

“Do you think mental illness is hereditary? And does Tina have a secret twin somewhere who could love me?”

Getting on in years as we were, we sometimes talked about genetics and DNA, what sort of fuckedness we'd inherited. The first psychiatrist our mother had seen diagnosed her as manic-depressive, the next called it narcissistic personality disorder. That same year,
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
removed narcissistic personality disorder from its pages. It just ceased to exist. So she went back to schizophrenic.

Sitting against the funeral home, Nicholas and I discussed whether one or both of us would, or already did, suffer from a genetically inherited form of mental illness.

“People whose parents are depressed are something like twice as likely to be depressed,” I said.

“True. But this is circumstantial.” He meant that the trauma Mom probably had experienced as a little girl had been the cause of her instability.

Over the course of our shared childhood, our mother had attempted suicide, stolen cat food from stores, had sex with someone who wasn't our father. Some days she was beautiful, just a gorgeous person, a gorgeous presence in our life. Ukrainian isn't a particularly melodic language, but you would weep to hear her read poems from her homeland.

But there was also the ugliness, the cracks in the fresco that was her also. One time we were even taken out of school by social workers because Mom had crushed up some of her anti-psychotic medication and put it in our orange juice.

Nicholas reached over and put his hand on mine.

“She has a friend,” he said, and at first I mistook his meaning. I thought he meant Mom had a friend. He clarified that Tina had a friend who might be predisposed to liking emotionally damaged adult-children.

“You'd hit it off,” Nicholas said.

“What kind of rear end are we talking about?” I asked. “I'm in the market for asses shaped like globes.”

“The kind that belongs to a woman. That's all you need to know.”

While we were outside, Mom had one of those moments where she left the world of human beings and entered the world of animals. She fell down in the middle of talking to a truck driver who worked with Dad.

The driver said, “He had a picture of you, from when you first met,” and then he showed it to her.

Mom was in a bikini, Dad was without a shirt. Luminescence bounced off them three feet in every direction. Mom's fall was like a crumbling Doric column, just crippled her from the toes
to the shins, up the legs, knees, pelvis, spine, until she was a collection of pieces on the floor, wrapped in that black dress with the makeup smears.

“Can you take her home?” Nicholas asked, and I nodded, buoyed by the moment we'd recently shared outside. I felt my perception change. Instead of being angry that I'd swallowed all of his trauma along with mine, that his life had eclipsed mine in all-important categories, I suddenly saw him as an example for me to follow. I was like a tram that just needed to align myself on the same rails he rode on.

Mom got into the car and I buckled her seat belt.

“I almost married a gay Jew,” she said. “But your father fixed my car and took me away from my world.”

I drove her back to her apartment, the place she hadn't left for weeks before her estranged husband had died, driving a truck.

“Come up,” she said, pressing the elevator button.

She told me she had been seeing the ghost of one of her dead neighbours, that she sometimes thought there was a worm in her ear, inserted via a bloodless surgery by someone malevolent, and which she tried to soak out with Epsom salt baths. By the time we got to her door, I had a glimpse of what it was like to be her, living alone in the apartment.

To even the confessions out, I told her I hadn't been with a woman for three years, and that for a while I had developed a substance-abuse problem.

“Cocaine, mostly,” I said, mentioning that I'd checked myself into a detox facility, where I dreamed I was my brother. “Sometimes I think he dreams he's me. That's for a good laugh.”

We got to her door. I had the sense the words she had spoken to me, and those I had spoken to her, had pressed together like palms.

“I'll visit more,” I said.

She shrugged. “If you think I'm going to commit suicide over this, you're kidding yourself.”

It was shortly after this that I decided to visit my uncle Joseph, probably to kill him, or at least do something irreversibly damaging to his face with my fists.

I tried to enlist my brother, since two nephews are mightier than one.

Nicholas nixed the visit.

“He'll cripple you,” my brother said.

“Not if I cripple him first.”

Joe had spent part of his youth in the Soviet Union, back when the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union. He had been hardened under extreme, politically dangerous circumstances. I was under the impression he'd once killed a man with his bare hands. My brother and I were only the sons of immigrants; the hardness had been lost between generations. Some residual hardness perhaps existed in my brother, which accounted for why people respected him more than they respected me.

Tina also vetoed the decision. I'd wanted to go do this thing together as brothers, in a Shakespearean way.

“Think of it as destiny,” I said.

She shook her head at me.

“Don't ruin things,” she said. “You just want to destroy him the way you destroy yourself.”

Walking me back to the car, Nicholas told me not to take what she said to heart.

“Her hormones are all janky. We're trying to have a baby.”

I stopped.

“You didn't tell me.”

My brother looked at his hands, fiddled with his wedding ring. It shone in a way that was somehow light and sound, a shockingly bright “ting” that made me blink. He seemed to be beaming the reflection from the gold band directly into my retina.

“I didn't want to depress you,” my brother said.

“Depress me? I'm going to be an uncle. How is that depressing?”

I smiled and waited for Nicholas to smile.

“She told me she saw you take the knife.”

I had taken one of their knives, intending to carve a new hole in our uncle.

“Your wife is a liar.”

Nicolas sighed. He could see the outline of the knife against the inside of my pocket. Without looking him in the eye, I handed it to him, pinching the blade and giving up the handle.

I hadn't seen my uncle for years, not since the psychiatrist unearthed the sordid details about him from the Pandora's box of Mom's subconscious. He was, to use a very Nicholas term, a
persona non grata
.

It took a while for me to drive to the apartment complex where he lived. On the way, I wondered to myself whether I would, in the end, be capable of killing someone else. I waffled. At a stoplight, I conceded that breaking my uncle's ribs might
suffice, maybe break a few things of his. “You will vacate your place in my dreams,” I told my dead father, who always appeared to me in my sleep, asking me to avenge all the wrongs committed against my mother.

A tired-looking teenager let me into Joseph's building. Walking down the hall, I noted a piece of the paisley wallpaper curling and, with impotent anger, pulled as much of it off the wall as I could.

I knocked and a woman came to the door.

“Is Joseph here?” I said in English. She looked at me blankly, so I repeated the question in Ukrainian. “I'm his nephew.”

“He's out,” she said. “He should be back soon. How do I know who you are?”

I showed her my licence. She nodded and moved aside. I followed her to the living room, to the television set.

“Are you his girlfriend?” I asked.

Instead of answering, she said, “No smoking in here. We're trying to quit.”

She sat on the couch and turned on the television. I walked to the kitchen and poured some water into a Mason jar I found on the counter. Particles in the water swirled like the flakes in a snow globe.

“That's a very nice suit,” she said when I rejoined her in the living room. I was still wearing my suit from the funeral. “What kind of work do you do?”

I told her I worked in finance, with money.

“It's very lucrative.”

The best revenge I could think of, to enact both on Joseph and a universe that could allow him to exist and do the things my mother said he did, would be to make love to this woman.
The thought was ugly and, for that reason, compelling. I waited for an hour, with her, this woman who had some kind of relationship with a monster.

She switched the channel to something about nature and plants. The odour in the room developed pungency, a mix of both our scents. The program was describing a fungus that took over the brains of ants and brewed an insanity of such magnitude that the ants kill themselves. Excusing myself to go to the bathroom, I took the long way, through the kitchen, even though she'd instructed me on how to get there. I passed by several serious-looking knives, attached to the side of the cupboard by two powerful magnetic strips.

Any one of these would do Joseph in, particularly if he never saw it coming. I decided to wait until after I had pissed to select my weapon. Relieving myself, I thought of the ants, of the fungus, of my brother's unborn baby, with whom I could fashion a version of myself that was utterly unlike my current sense of identity.

I could be funny, make jokes, bring him gifts to win his affection. I could also try to develop a closer relationship to my mother. I finished pissing and made all of these resolutions with an optimism I had no right to have. The woman in the living room didn't get up when I left the apartment. I'm pretty positive I passed Joseph in the hallway. The parking lot had expanded to the extent that it took me a long time to find my car.

My brother's light was on when I drove back. Through the window, I could see dinner in progress. He waved at me. He took the napkin from his collar, all spread out to catch any food that spilled, and folded it with alarming delicacy. Before
he opened the door, I willed myself, on the level of my DNA, to mutate. When the door opened, I believe I became, at least for the moment our lungs swallowed the same square foot of air, a very good thing.

O
ne day a bear got loose in the Royal Oak Hotel. This was in the early years of my employment there, shortly after my discharge, when it hardly felt real to be out in the world. They were using the lobby to shoot a film that featured a grizzly bear attack, and while it could have been done digitally, the director was a blowhard who insisted on bringing a real bear in from the Yukon to preserve the authenticity of the scene. So I guess you could call what transpired poetic justice, if you believe justice ever reads like a poem, or that any true poet would take carnage for a muse.

On the day of the shoot, there must have been a dozen experts and handlers crowded into the palatial main lobby, with tranquilizer guns and cattle prods at the ready. None of it mattered. Three days prior, the bear had been plucked from its surroundings, from the woods and the water and the ambient scent of prey, and herded into a cargo plane for a quick flight across the continent to an urban nightmare. It was just too flabbergasted at the drastic change in its environment to remain docile. As
soon as the klieg lights were turned on it, the bear went berserk, storming around the lobby, mauling two guards and a production intern with running swats that looked tossed-off, just-for-the-hell-of-it, then stampeded the craft services table and knocked out the lights and began doing furious laps in the darkness. In the chaos someone managed to corral it into Banquet Room C and barricade the doors with a sofa, giving everyone some time to attend to the injured and work out what to do next.

They might have ended up resolving the situation rationally if the congressman hadn't been staying at the hotel. He was visiting from down south to gauge support for a pipeline project—a man known for loud suits and louder opinions. As soon as he heard that the grizzly had run amok, he made it his business to intervene. When he stormed into the trashed lobby with his sleeves rolled up, grinning and talking at inspirational volume about “the proper way to deal with this kind of a situation,” it was as though Palm Sunday had come early and here was Christ preaching his way into Jerusalem, vowing to throw the thieves from the temple, a camera crew trailing like the faithful behind him.

The congressman intended to shoot the bear. To a man of his sensibility, he said, it was absurd that the animal should be given consideration; he'd seen what the beast could do (though in fact he hadn't been there for the ruckus) and believed that as long as it was alive, it presented a significant danger to the public, which he simply couldn't permit on his watch. That's when he pulled the vintage Colt single-action .357 Magnum revolver from the holster on his belt and told the cameras that with the expansion bullets he was using, he could drop the bear at twenty paces, no problem.

It was clear right away that the congressman couldn't be allowed to just kick down the banquet room doors and open fire on the bear. Objectors said a game warden was the proper man for the job, or animal control, but they were shouted down; since the congressman had turned it into a news event with political implications about the city's ability to protect its own, it was impossible to deny his request outright. The manager of the hotel stepped in, ostensibly to express outrage, yelling righteously and pointing out that it wasn't even legal for the congressman to carry his gun here. But you could tell there was more to it than that: he felt like he was being upstaged. As manager, he said, it fell to him to make decisions about the bear. Furthermore, the Royal Oak promised the highest-quality luxury hotel experience, and he insisted on taking full personal responsibility for such a gross inconvenience to his guests.

The two men went back and forth for a while, and my attention wandered, as it often did at work. I don't remember how long it took them to decide, but I can remember exactly the moment when I saw the manager turn and point at me.

The manager knew my situation, and enough of my history that I guess I was an obvious choice. I stayed quiet while he explained how he couldn't risk physical harm to himself at such a crucial moment, when so much depended on his being able to coordinate the public response once the inevitable questions started flying. I thought about my sister, all she'd done to land me the job, when he said that the hotel's reputation was at stake, and how of course they couldn't expect an esteemed guest like the congressman to carry the whole burden of this errand on his own. I knew better than to protest when he started talking
to the camera about heroes and casually dropped a reference to Afghanistan, as though it were a dash of exotic spice, something to sprinkle on his speech for flavour.

It was enough; he didn't have to mention the other things—Kandahar and the detainees and the tribunal and my time at the veterans hospital—for me to understand that I wasn't being given a choice.

I remember thinking how this was all just another day to them, as if it were the most sensible thing, as though the hotel lobby was the scene of such spectacles all the time and if they just put their heads together and stayed the course, everything would turn out all right. You could see the fever in their eyes, though, the tremor in their hands—the need to inject the venom they'd created into someone else, distancing themselves from the threat while heightening the drama, making a better story. They needed a soldier, and here I was.

The beginning, at least, was all worked out beforehand. I would accompany the congressman into Banquet Room C as an official representative of the hotel. My role was to cover the congressman while he took down the bear and to intervene only in the event of an emergency. I was issued a shotgun, a Remington 870 pump-action 12 gauge, personally delivered by a VP from the GamePro Outfitters Group of Companies, who wished to provide whatever aid they could to help end the crisis. They put me on camera holding the gun while the GamePro rep joked how it was the fastest, most powerful choice for getting lead into a bear that was coming at you with a chip on its shoulder. I briefly thought about asking for protective clothing but gave up on the idea as soon as the manager stepped in and thanked GamePro for the donation of this
fine weapon, saying how the Royal Oak was a place that appreciated quality, speaking of a long and dignified tradition of service, and insisting I would be perfectly safe if I kept on my bellhop uniform during the mission. After all, the congressman was wearing nothing but a button-down, a bolo tie, a pair of old jeans and calfskin boots, so why should I expect preferential treatment? Taking the cue, I pushed my bellhop's cap to the preferred rakish angle before shaking hands with the manager on camera to seal our contract.

A few media outlets were allowed to stay in the lobby to document the operation, but for obvious safety and insurance reasons, no cameras could accompany us into the room. A yell of “Grizzly down; all clear!” would be the signal that we'd achieved our objective.

The congressman, cowboy-legged, led the approach. I flanked him on the left, and the hotel manager followed to shut the doors behind us. At the threshold, the congressman paused, unholstered his Colt, and gave a little wave and a yip to the cameras. There was some applause.

As soon as we stepped into the banquet room, though, everything got quiet. The scent of the bear was everywhere—smells of piss and shit and fur and woods, of a creature that had no business being within the walls of the hotel, within any walls. The congressman had dropped back so that we were shoulder to shoulder, and I could smell the fear coming off him too—the eggy stink leaching out under his cologne. He was walking in a crouch and holding his gun at a downward angle, as though he'd forgotten it was there, what it was for. If I'd barked at him then, I believe he would have shat himself. Instead, I asked in a low voice if he'd spotted the target.

He looked around blindly, so I pointed to the far corner of the room, to the nook behind the stage drapes, where the bear sat, squat and huge amid the stacks of red plush chairs, pawing at a lectern it had knocked over. Its fur was bristled and greying around the neck, its eyes beady and black. In its size and strength and capacity for damage, it was a monster. But as the congressman remembered the pistol in his hands and raised it to take aim, the thing just looked dumbly back, as though it were embarrassed to find itself in such a stupid predicament, as though it simply wanted fish and couldn't imagine why none were available, or how the river from which it drew its meat had disappeared. From where we stood, the shot was too long, and the congressman knew it. He looked back at me, expectant, and I gestured to stay low and move in toward the bear, to take cover behind the tables left scattered around the room. He nodded, cocked the hammer of his gun, put a grim look on his face.

“Let's show this motherfucker who's boss,” he said, though he was already stammering.

He grunted as he crept forward. I stayed behind him, shotgun ready, wondering how deep the bear's lethargy went, how fast it could spring to life and barrel across the room and break both of our necks with a swipe of its mitt. It stayed put, though, prying splinters from the lectern, shaking its head. We crept from table to table to take up a shielded position around twenty paces from the bear; it didn't so much as snuffle at us. Only when the congressman rose and straightened his back and held out his Colt with both hands—and just stood there, shaking, while the seconds ticked past—did it finally look over, raise a paw to swat at the lectern, and disgorge a stupefied roar.

When the congressman's knees buckled, I knew. He collapsed back behind the table, his whole body quaking. He looked at me and the fear was like jaundice on his face: yellow, inflamed.

“I can't,” he said. “I can't.”

“Have you ever shot anything before, sir?”

“We're not looking at a fucking duck, are we? Goddamnit, son!”

Whatever he summoned then to convince himself of the best path forward must be that quality all men of power possess, which allows them to focus without distraction on the absolute present, their certainty distilled so its purity can't be questioned when others are asked to drink of its cup. That, or it was just the potency of his fear—the same bone-shaking terror I'd known so intimately that this faceoff with a cornered grizzly played like an exercise, a routine chore.

“Look, I'm sure we all understand our roles here tonight,” the congressman said and held out the Colt. I shook my head and gestured at the shotgun, but the congressman waggled the Colt at me and said, “No. It can't go down like that.” I took the heavy old piece from him—the one the congressman was known to say he wouldn't even let his wife touch—and stood to take a bead on the grizzly.

I wanted so much for it to stand up. I wished for it,
willed
it, to get indignant and extend to its full height, flash its teeth and pound its chest and charge me at full run. I took a few steps toward it, sights lined up at its glassy black eye. The damn thing didn't move. The absence of its fellow creatures had cloaked its senses like a burlap cowl; it had become lost among the ghosts of its dead brothers and sisters, fumbling
through phantom woods no more improbable to it than the real ones it had been torn from, and knew it would never again see. The grizzly knew it was alone, and that the creatures who'd brought it here did not wish it well. I would say that's what allowed me to do it, finally: the anger I felt that, after its first burst of terrified rage, this fearsome thing had become so useless, so neutered and disoriented by the environment of the hotel that it stopped knowing how to defend itself. I would say that, except I would have killed it anyway. As it happened, it just took a little less effort.

In fact, I had no trouble at all walking ten paces and planting two quick shots into its face, one into each eye, the expansion bullets taking the whole crown off the head and throwing fur-flecked bone and pink splatter all over the velvet stage curtains. Once the bear had slumped over in its mess, I put another round into its heart, to stop it from twitching. I knew the animal was dead—knew sure enough what dead looked like—but for good measure I leaned over and held my hand in front of its nose to make sure the breath was gone. The smell of sulphur and burnt metal and gamey blood filled my nose, and I thought for a countless time how it was all the same—bears or warriors or children—all just a pulpy tangle of pink meat and brittle bone under a thinness of pleading skin.

Turning from the bear, I saw the congressman standing where I'd left him, hands clutching the lip of the upturned table, looking at me with something like hatred. The ruddy cast had returned to his jaw, his chin had stopped trembling, and righteousness was gathering in his eyes like a thundercloud. He couldn't stand it—the ways in which he needed me, and did not. He couldn't tolerate how expendable I was, how
useful and anonymous and effective. There was still fear in his look too, and I knew that while he hated me, he was also afraid of me, as many others had been, and had been right to be.

We faced each other for a few seconds. I had both guns, and the blood of a dead bear on my uniform. The congressman had nothing on his person but a sweat-thinned Egyptian cotton shirt. Yet he implied, in simply being there in that room, the huge apparatus he carried on his back, the political connections and money, the reputation, the potency of his belief. I didn't even make him ask—what good would it have done? I couldn't imagine my situation being better than it was. My sister had pulled a lot of strings to get me the job, a second chance as a bellhop with the city's best hotel. That was as good as it got for men like me.

I walked over to the congressman and handed him the Colt. “Two in the eyes, and one in the heart,” I said. He took the gun and nodded and gestured for me to take my place behind him on the left. I did so without comment.

“Grizzly down!” he shouted, the confidence returned to his voice, the zeal of the preacher. “All clear!”