Racket Page 3

  At home Nate is stoned and watching TV and marking papers. He asks if I want to play chess. He will slot me into the line-up. I go to bed instead and read. A few pages in and Rachel wakes up in the other room and starts wailing, so I grab her, settle in with her and read the same line of The Meditations over and over again. I think therefore I am. I think. I think. Descartes was looking for one thing that he couldn’t doubt and decided it was thinking. So he decided he must at least be a thing that thinks. Which means he must exist.

  Isn’t that a bit of a leap? I ask Rachel. From thinking to being? Rachel smiles at me with her pink gums.

  I think about how I want sun. I want a bath. In the bath, I want Calgon to take me away, like those commercials from the eighties.

  The idea that everything is probably futile starts to sink me in the morning. I don’t resist. I wade into it while I drink my coffee. I’m surrounded.

  Later, a new friend wants to come in and visit Anna in the hospital. It’s a mistake, even though the friend means well. It’s awkward. Anna won’t touch most of the food, suggests they are certainly trying to poison her. She’ll eat green foods only. Green foods are OK. The salad. The Jell-O. Anna eyes my friend and asks if she’s ever seen Planet of the Apes. My friend nods her head no and Anna eyes her even more suspiciously. Anna’s constant-care nurse is a big, gentle young man with soft, light brown hair. She trusts him. When she finishes lunch he puts his hand on her arm.

  Come on, my dear, he says. Come now, we goes.

  A shift later that night at the bar and it’s busy. A regular at the end of the bar, a local playwright and heavy drinker, yells about hating Americans. Is always the last one to leave. Nate had wanted to see one of his plays. We needed a night out together. A one-man play called Drinking:A Love Story.The set was a replica of the bar. The actor looked a lot like a younger version of the playwright. He wore the same kind of clothes and yelled about hating Americans for almost the whole first half of the play.

  Two hours into the shift and my breasts are so hard and full of milk I have to go into the bar bathroom and sort of shoot some of it out into the toilet. It hits the water in the bowl in a cloudy line. It pings off the cold ceramic, and some of it, warm, pools in my hand.

  At the end of the night my clothes stink of cigarette smoke, so I remove them just inside the front door and walk up to the bathroom and throw them in the washer. In my underwear I walk past the living room and Nate is still up. He’s sitting in the red velvet armchair and a group of students lounge at his feet, smoking and staring at him in wonder. The baby cries and he looks up.

  Nate has this habit of using my name as a whole sentence. As in: Jane. Pause. I’m going to do the laundry, or Jane. Pause. It’s your turn to do the dishes. Sometimes I call him Tarzan. Mostly because it goes with Jane. He has soft hands. He may not survive in the wild.

  I’ll be in in a minute, he says.

  I’m going to sleep, Tarzan. I’m beat.

  The students on the floor all say goodnight in unison and it’s kind of creepy. I scoop Rachel out of her crib and make a nest for her next to me in bed.

  My sister’s fiancé is back from his business trip and he comes in to visit her. Her gorilla walk is new to him and, frankly, it’s freaking him out. He’s a good guy. He’s supportive.They’ve been together for about year. He fell for her right away because she’s so smart and gorgeous. He asks why she isn’t wearing her ring. She says keep me away from children.

  A Polish man is selling red roses at the café and he tells me he’s saving up to buy a stereo for his daughter for Christmas. His daughter lives in Poland and she’s coming for Christmas and she’ll stay with him in the room he lives in on Duckworth Street. It has a shared bathroom but it’s clean enough, and they’ll make it work and he hopes she’ll be able to stay in Canada with him and get a job. He only needs to sell ten more roses and I buy them, a dollar each.

  Things seem less futile today. Today it’s OK that there’s no enduring contentment. There’s only buying your daughter a stereo for Christmas. Or making sure she doesn’t choke or fall down the stairs.There’s reading.There’s wondering what there is that you can’t doubt and thinking it’s probably not just thinking. There’s making love. There’s music. There’s reading a line of poetry or listening to another person talk and thinking I have felt that way before. That’s what we have. Anna doesn’t always have that. She loses the thread of what some things mean. Or she picks up a very different thread. It occurs to me that sometimes her thread is just as good or in fact better than any other thread.

  The man sitting at the table next to me leans in and says I bet he doesn’t even have a daughter.

  I bring the roses to Anna. She’s on the phone when I get there. She seems better. For example, she’s wearing shoes. The thing is that now she’s headed for a dark period where she’ll be very down for a long time. She won’t want to get out of bed for a month, maybe.

  She’s got the horoscopes open on her lap.

  Brainstorm and aim high. Mercury is in Sagittarius today. It’s OK to conjure up grand ideas.

  Thanks. In fact, I’m conjuring right now.

  What are you conjuring?

  Grand ideas.

  Such as?

  Such as you should come stay at my place for a little bit.

  Anna doesn’t like to stay at my place because she doesn’t like Nate. But her fiancé is out of town again. Besides, Anna had said yesterday that her fiancé is off the hook. I had tried to be light about it and said off the hook as in off the hook and made sort of really uncool rap hand gestures, but she said no, not off the hook in a good way.

  The doctor wants to let you come home, but he says you can’t be on your own right now.

  Will you make risotto?

  Yes, I say.

  Anna links her arm in my arm.

  I take Anna home with me and make mushroom risotto for everyone, me and Nate and Anna. Rachel is down for her nap. The pan is too thin on the bottom so I have to stand there and stir it for a long time so it doesn’t burn, but it burns anyway so I scrape off the top layer. The burnt taste is still all through it.

  Nate asks how are you feeling. Nate has eaten all the risotto on his plate even though it tastes like burn, which is kind.

  Don’t let little things take on more significance than they deserve, Anna says.

  OK, I’ll keep that in mind.

  Anna tells us that our cells regenerate every seven years so it’s like we’re a totally new person. She talks about that small monkey found wearing a little beige seventies coat in an Ikea store in Edmonton. She describes it at the window as if it’s waiting for someone to pick it up and take it on a road trip to get stoned and play the guitar and blow this pop stand.

  Anna and I go for a walk downtown, take Rachel in the stroller. We walk by a huge round condo and we can make out a dog barking inside. The barking sounds like it’s coming from the very center of the condo. Anna makes up a headline: Barking Dog Trapped in Center of Round Building Goes Barking Mad. She seems to be skipping the dark this time. She’s going straight to the joking about it. We cut through the graveyard on Cathedral Street, holding our breath, like we did when we were kids.

  I know I’m a strain on your relationship with Nate.

  Yeah.You are.

  So why don’t you tell me to take a hike.

  You mean I’m off the hook?

  Yeah.You’re off the hook.

  I like being on the hook.

  Yeah?

  Yeah, pretty much.

  Anna does her gorilla walk across the street and I follow her, pushing the stroller, and I call after her.

  Hairless Talking Gorilla Loose Near Water Street!

  Anna lumbers up the hill. She gives me a thumbs-up, with her gorilla thumb.

  Crossbeams

  Iain McCurdy

  SHE CAME OUT of nowhere, and so did I.We met at a birthday party in April. It was a setup right from the beginning, except not with her. I was in the kitchen
making conversation when the woman I was to meet came through and left again with but a passing glance. I found myself leaning against a wall, watching a production, the rumble of throat sounds in a room. Then there she was and she stopped, but didn’t, if you know what I mean. She stopped so we could keep going.

  There are unstoppable forces in the world; you can try and stop them, or you can become one. Sometimes out of nowhere, you can be going along minding your own business and something will happen, and another thing will happen, and a string of things that all had to happen, just so, impossibly, take you somewhere, unexpectedly. Magically the stars line up for your every step, and you can never be sure it’ll ever happen again. It happens though; there are many stars. But it’s another thing altogether, rarer still by manyfold, when moons align.

  It’s like getting on the biggest rollercoaster you’ve ever been on.You’re in the line-up and looking up at this towering thing, and there’s a twist in your stomach.You’re excited. It’s bigger by a lot than any you’ve ever been on. And it’s wooden. The biggest wooden rollercoaster in the world. The people in the line-up are saying it has a seventy-eight-degree drop. You’re nervous and excited. And this guy comes around measuring people for maximum height, which I thought it was that you had to be this tall to get on the ride, but for this rollercoaster there’s a maximum height for some reason, and this guy has a cigarette dangling out of the side of his mouth and he’s measuring people with a stick that has a piece of metal sticking off the top that he’s measuring with and he gives you the up and down, your head poking above the rest in the line-up, and he shuffles over and plunks the stick down next to you and you can feel your hair brush up against the piece of metal and the cigarette smoke seems to orbit the guy as if it’d be there whether he was smoking or not, and he grunts and jerks his head in one of those upward nods and he shuffles along again, the orbit of smoke following him, and the line-up makes another leap forward and you finally get to the front and you sit in the front row and you’re waiting and then the gate and the clickclickclickclickclick up the hill and it’s really steep and still clickclickclickclickclick and the cresting at the top and it’s pulling hard right and your shoulder’s yanked up against the side of the chair and you’re hanging over nothing, quickly, and you remember the conversation about the seventy-eight-degree drop which now looks like a ninety-one-degree drop and you’re hanging over this drop and you’re about to start hurtling straight down toward the tiny distant land below, and it’s all over but the crying now, and the rest of the train is pushing you forward and you drop and fall and, accelerating terminally, the wheels catch and simultaneous to the wheels catching you catch sight and now in slow motion watch the wooden crossbeam coming toward your forehead. And you think back to the guy with the smoke halo measuring for maximum height and you’d thought it was weird to measure for maximum height but obviously enormous wooden rollercoasters—this mammoth twisting labyrinthian craw of wood plunging chthonically down and inbetween the abysses on either side, of course it needs crossbeams to keep it steady. It still creaks, by the way, loudly. And you remember that the guy with the stick didn’t exactly check to see how level the ground was and you don’t want to be all uptight about the whole thing but for the fraction of space you weren’t too tall by and this crossbeam coming at your forehead, in slow motion, while you’re at terminal acceleration and you don’t even know whose mercy you seek at this point as it whooshes over your ducking head and the car hits the bottom of the drop and swings up and your heart’s at your throat and you’re yanked a bank left turn and another beam whooshes over your head and you didn’t have time to duck and your head is still intact and right at that moment, that moment when you’re tingling everywhere, eyes wide, excited that you survived and excited for what’s to come and this feeling of exhilarated peace surrounds you—at top speed—in that moment of that, whatever that is, well, I feel like that all the time when I’m with you, is what I told her.

  She said I’ll see you tomorrow at midnight and was gone.

  My room was too small for what was going through it so I got in the car and picked up a package of cigarettes and drove up to a secluded peak and got out and looked out at the ocean under the full moon and got back in the car and rolled down my window and finished the dart, flicked it, and rolling up the window again noticed that through the glass I could see the moon’s light refracted through the window into two beams shining outward like an orbit, like they were encircling the whole earth, and though I could only see a tiny fraction of the celestial halo in that moment I was quite sure the rest of it was certainly there in the sky, neither pointing nor directing, but embracing, swaddling me in its nighttime glow.

  I drove home under the phosphorescent stars. I sat at the kitchen table and ate cream crackers and the last scraps of cheese out of the barren fridge and crawled into my bed and slept, dreaming of a distant imaginary land in which she wasn’t married, and I woke up wanting to believe in possibilities.

  She texted me in the morning anyway and we went for a drive along the coast without plan or destination. Beaches and lookouts and rocks and fog and graffiti and garbage. Having assured me she did not have a license and had only driven twice before in her life, I let her drive along the winding back road that connected the coast to civilization. We spent half the time on the shoulder and the other half laughing as the car bounced from pothole to pothole. Instead of taking the quick and easy back to the house I got her to turn right and asked her if she was okay to keep going but down a busier road and she nodded and so we went. Cars and trucks whizzed by and she kept ducking oncoming traffic, little swerves off to the right, slowing down for peripheral non-obstacles, anxiety the only thing in between us and a clear road in front, and the line of cars behind us grew and so I suggested we turn off at an upcoming side road, and she slowed a little, and turned a little, but not enough of either, and we drove straight toward the ditch and I looked at the ditch and it hit me that we were headed there and I yelled “Brake!” and I grabbed the wheel and yanked it right and she slammed the brakes and we skidded to a stop, the front bumper hanging over the edge.

  Her eyes were wide and I kissed her again and again, and she apologized and I asked her not to and she kissed me and I asked her if she would keep driving because I trusted her and she trusted me that it was okay and we turned around and kept going down the winding road. I went to bed and slept, dreaming of waves and sand, and woke up rejecting the idea of possibilities.

  Things just are.

  She got depressed around Christmas. I just figured the cold was setting in, away from home for the holidays and all of that. Figured we could change it up and make it work. You can’t keep the cold from seeping in around here, but you can make yourself so busy you don’t have time to think about it. It was February by the time I realized that hadn’t worked. I had been coming home late, keeping myself busy. And then one night in the middle of a snowstorm, in a wall of mute snow I came home and she ran out the door. Came back a few hours later with the better part of a half-case gone. The second time it happened I knew it was happening but I figured if I ran after her she’d know she could use it to get my attention. So I stayed home, kept the heat going, kept a light on, hoping she’d make it back. It’s hard watching someone walk out the door, not knowing if they’re going to live through the night.

  It was probably around then that possibilities crept back in. That either she’d make it back or she wouldn’t.The doctors were giving her pills, but she was spiralling faster than the pills were working. I came home to an empty prescription bottle on the counter, and she was passed out cold junk on the couch. I started shaking her frantically, needing her eyes to open and trying to remember how many pills had been in the bottle.

  She woke up.

  I realize it’s been so long I can’t even tell what love is anymore. I forgot that there are crossbeams. And when you’re hurtling toward them you just have to believe you’re not going to lose your head to it. She had been the
one withstanding the crossbeams. I was the one who jumped out of the way.

  In front of the computer I open a writing notebook, absentmindedly clicking a retractable ballpoint pen. Clickclickclickclickclick.

  Holes

  Melissa Barbeau

  WATER SLUICES DOWN the drains on the sides of the road. It is Saturday night and it is raining a thick, heavy, viscous rain. A river runs over the steps that lead down onto George Street. Boys fashion boats from empty cigarette packs and set them a sail on the muddy water, watching them tumble over the rapids and torrents, while girls in little dresses wait shivering, their hair clotted around them like seaweed.

  Inside the bar the heat is tropical. Bodies are sweating as music pumps out of the speakers and the walls sweat too, they are wet to the touch. The room smells of animals. The door is propped open. A cool breeze slithers around our ankles like a snake but no one tries to escape. The music is hypnotic and so loud the room is vibrating and everyone is drunk and someone later telling the story will say people moved like one body but that isn’t true. It is more like when you see something moving in a back alley and think there’s an animal there, a cat or a rat, but really it’s a thousand maggots separately squirming and fighting for their bite of rotten meat and it’s only an illusion that they’re moving in concert.

  It is somewhere around the middle of the night and someone, a man, leans in and puts his mouth close to my ear and asks if I want a drink. All night he has eeled his way around the room, brushing up against a brunette with heavy bangs and a blonde with tippy heels that sway one way and then the other until she finally falls into a solid looking guy with armfuls of tattoos and the faintest suggestion of a long-repaired harelip. I say yes to the drink and we dance and he introduces me to his friends as if we’ve known each other for years, as if we know each other’s last names, touching my hip to make sure I still exist alongside him. The blood beneath the spot he has touched spits and fizzes like champagne bubbles. He puts his hand on the small of my back and smiles at me over the rim of his glass and I cannot see his mouth but in the light that pulses from red to green to blue his eyes are dark and bottomless.