Best Canadian Stories 2020 Page 12

  Ben has caught up to his family. He runs, then stops hard, skidding until he knocks Sammy into Winston. Louise expects Sammy to turn and yell at him, but instead they all laugh. There is an acid pain in Louise’s chest. They are recklessly cheerful. Most adults over the age of thirty have experienced some great loss in their lives. But you wouldn’t know it, walking around on any weekday evening, watching people’s vapid faces as they pay their bus fare and post their letters, as if nothing bad has ever happened to anyone.

  Louise walks down to the edge of the pond. Ice crystals cluster around the dirt. Even if there wasn’t a treacherous mass of water below, it still seems counter-intuitive to walk on an unpredictable, bone-breaking surface. She can’t bring herself to make the necessary great leap. She tries bending her knees experimentally.

  She has to go and say goodbye. She could just leave, but that would draw attention and require explanation. It will look as if she’s mad. She has tried so hard to be inconspicuous. She thought she’d been doing a good job of it, even when it was trying, but she now she sees she was wrong. When she had hoped to be supportive she’d made things worse.

  The day Chuck died, Ben asked her to come to the hospital to bring home Chuck’s things: scarves and table cloths that Joy used to cover every light and every surface, sweaters tenderised by time and wear, a book of Far Side comics, a copy of Gitanjali, mugs. But the nurses were off schedule and when Louise got there, Chuck’s body was still there. It was plainly inappropriate for her to be in the room, so she went to the visitors’ lounge. But something in Louise was twisting. A parade of distant relatives had come through in the past week to cry for Chuck and his family. But there was nothing tragic about dying at sixty-five, in a palliative care ward with prize-winning decor and free ice cream and special chairs for visitors, swaddled in love. That was just nature. What happened to Joanne was not. Louise left the visitors’ lounge and walked in the corridor until she had a view into Chuck’s room, and she continued to feel enraged until she saw the nurses tie Chuck’s hands and feet together before they put him in the body bag. Something about that upset her severely; either the fact that he was tied up or the fact he had no idea he was tied up. She cried but she held her breath so no one would hear her. She went back into the visitors’ lounge and faced away from the room, towards the blizzard exploding in white powder against the windows.

  With a stern step Louise gets one foot down on the ice, then quickly brings the other to join in. As soon as she steps down, it’s like there’s cotton wool in her ears. The snow on ice absorbs the sounds of everything around her: the philosophy students on the bench talking Hegel, the mothers cajoling their resistant children, the squirrels who opted against hibernation, jibbering in the snow. A memory comes to her like it’s been conducted through the ice. Her five-year-old ankles in her skates were ugly and turned in, the opposite of Joanne’s perfect ankles. You just need to tighten your laces, Joanne said, and Louise wanted Joanne to do it.

  Stupidness, nonsense. Louise keeps moving her stiff feet, one two, away from the memory, closer and closer to where Ben stands with Joy and Sammy and Winston. The coated ice muffles her footfalls and they can’t hear her approach, even when she is right behind them. But she can hear what they are saying, their voices strangely filtered by the wind.

  “No no,” Sammy is saying. “Of course she’s nice. Just . . . odd.”

  “Be more specific,” Ben says.

  “Well last night—you told me she doesn’t have any siblings? But last night she told me that she had a sister, a sister who died. I think she was trying to make me feel better . . . but is she, like, does she tell stories about her life that aren’t true?”

  If Louise tells people about Joanne, she loses control. She will not be able to control when other people speak of Joanne, and they will speak of her without warning, thoughtless, profane.

  Sammy laughs. Something bursts out of Louise and she is powerless to stop it. Her arms shoot up in front of her, and she grabs the back of Sammy’s jacket, and shoves as violently as she can.

  But Sammy has Olympic reflexes. She jerks hard to the side and Louise watches as her own arms go wide, she has too much momentum to stop, and now she is flailing forward, desperately trying to twist away from the ground, the ice one long stretch of colourlessness.

  She can’t see anything but the blank of the sky. For a moment, she’s the only person in the world. And then the throbbing in her side and her ankle bring her back.

  Louise puts both hands over her face. Someone tugs gently at her elbows. The tugging becomes more and more insistent but Louise rolls away from it, powdering herself in snow.

  She crawls to her feet. They are lined up in a row, staring at her with their matching cheeks and warm faces, with the exact same look of hurt confusion that asks, how could anyone possibly behave so badly, how could there possibly be any excuse?

  Louise shouts at them. She screams.

  “There should be a city by-law! There should be a law! How can they let people walk on the ice? It’s just so incredibly, irresponsibly unsafe!”

  She makes for the bank.

  *

  Louise hears Ben calling her name but she doesn’t turn back. When she reaches the knoll she’d like to keep going, but the pain in her ankle is intense and she collapses. Her phone buzzes again. She pulls it out of her pocket and throws it in the snow. She drags herself up onto the bank and sits in the muck. She picks up the phone and puts it back in her pocket. She gets to her feet. Her gait is demented and she stumbles off the path and starts to walk the perimeter of the pond, inside the bald shrubbery, hiding from view like a child. Snow splatters on the non-waterproof uppers of her boots. She has a five in her pocket. She could get the streetcar home. She left her funeral clothes and some make-up at Ben’s but she will just have to forfeit them. Her butt is all wet and when she finally gets to where the pond meets the highway, she can’t decide if she should get on the streetcar or wait until her pants dry. She doesn’t know if her seat will dry in this weather. Are clothes slower to dry in humid or dry air? She just stands there, making sure to stay concealed by the rim of bushes, watching the cars go by, trying to think what to do. She shudders from cold.

  Joanne will always be dead. Nothing is changed by Louise thinking about her. Thought fragments break through anyway. Against her will they struggle to trace just how Joanne’s body gave up. They never come in response to cues Louise can predict and steel herself for—like an Erykah Badu song or a TV show Joanne liked. Instead they come when she’s on a phone conference at work explaining best practices; when she’s trying to navigate a cranky rush-hour intersection on a bike. Yesterday, in the awful basement crematorium of a big church on Parliament Street, Ben’s family, his family friends, his family friends’ cousins, and Louise crushed together and waited for Joy to flip the incinerator switch. It was supposed to have been just Ben, Joy and Sammy, but no one was up to the uncomfortable task of turning the rabble away. The room was a cacophony of tiny sounds, throat clearing, nose-blowing, wiping tears on sleeves. Louise stood behind a pillar and tried to focus on the floor tiles. But instead her mind went to a Joanne she had tried to forget. She pictured Joanne alone in her horrible apartment with yellowed stucco and the dirty carpet, knowing she was dying and that she’d never have children, knowing she was dying and it wasn’t a sunny day, knowing she was dying and she couldn’t reach the phone. Louise’s mother has put away all the photos of Joanne, save for one: Joanne is a baby with a bow taped to her sparse hair, full of gummy joy, before everything.

  Louise hears Ben say her name. She can make him out, twenty feet away, only slivers of his back through the snarl of branches. She has to stare for a moment to be sure it’s really him. Louise, she hears him say. He says it a second time, not like a curse but like a question. She imagines herself bursting out of the bushes, her hair wild with twigs, big enough to speak.

  The Saturday that
Ben undid her buttons, they met for lunch at a pho restaurant, and he’d had to take his glasses off to eat his noodles so the steam didn’t fog up his vision. There was something intimate about his face without them, and she’d had to work not to reach for his cheek. After the server took their plates, Ben removed the bottles of sauce and seasoning from the middle of the table one by one, lining them up against the edge. She worried this meant he was the compulsive type, but then he reached across the space he’d made, and took her hands in his.

  He is such a nice man, and all she has done is sap his grief. He recedes through the park.

  She watches him go.

  Her phone is ringing. This time, she picks it up.

  “I made chicken wings,” Louise’s mother says. She starts to cry. Joanne and Louise’s mother is a very composed person, the kind who wears a bra even when she’s home alone. Through her tears she tells Louise she’s found a new marinade recipe.

  “It is just perfect,” she sobs.

  Across the highway, Louise sees the red of the streetcar. If she catches it, she can make the 1:43. There is a break in the traffic and she staggers for it. She clanks up the steps and uses her five-dollar bill to pay almost twice the fare, not making eye contact with anyone, on account of the wetness of her pants. The window by her is open, though it is so cold, and as the streetcar pulls out of the stop, the trees thin and she sees Ben and the others far away, across the highway and that giant floe, four dots together.

  They are doing t’ai chi in a row, standing with their faces to the sun. They know the sequence off by heart, always sure of which curled arm, which gliding foot, which steady hand comes next. Like a gym class on ice, they follow each other’s movements in snail-paced unison.

  Louise sticks her arm out the window and cranes her neck to watch them, until they disappear behind the trees. Her phone is still in her hand and though the wind blisters her fingers as the streetcar gains speed, she doesn’t pull her arm back in. She feels the freezing air rush into those spaces between her phone and palm, and she imagines what it would feel like to let it go.

  Phoenix

  Alex Leslie

  We sit in this office by the front entrance, Dom and I, and a nurse goes in and out restless with the need to be useful. Dom’s the front desk guy and he never takes a day off. I’m the support worker, which means I’m jack-of-all-trades for the endless minutiae of needs of the people who live in this hotel. A spreadsheet pinned to the wall shows the list of the residents in Dom’s shaky hand-drawn lines. In careful columns: who’s woken up in the past eight hours; for how long; who’s passed the eighteen-hour mark of continuous sleep, in which case they need to be roused with the bell Dom keeps hanging on the hook above his desk. I often wonder where he got that bell—a fat battered thing like a ship captain’s bell. I go with Dom to the doors of the red-flagged sleepers and he clangs that goddamn bell until the person in the room rolls over twice. The nurse crouches and checks for breaths, fingers held to the side of the neck.

  I can’t figure Dom out. He’s worked at the hotel since forever, since before this was just another place for sleepers, since before the public health emergency was declared, before the poster campaigns on all the busses, before I took the support worker job here because catering got unbearable, walking around conference halls holding spoons of cold turmeric-yellow soup like a metaphor for opulent uselessness. Now I can’t make myself quit, because when a sleeper wakes up and looks me right in the eyes, I see a world orbiting in their pupils, and for a moment I feel what it would be to never panic again. When our first sleeper died—a sweet Dutch guy who used to run a bike repair shop before he got ALS—Dom shrugged and said, “Water runs downhill,” and I watched him, waiting for the rebound smirk that never came. Sometimes he’s just like that, blunt and inscrutable. His black hair is gelled and combed straight back, and his eyes are hooped in purple like a flower in bloom on the Adriatic at twilight. I can’t tell how old he is. “I know why they don’t want to wake back up,” he’s said to me a few times, and I just nodded. I dodge invitations to his backstory. I think that he protects the sleepers because he wishes he could be one.

  I work in one of those hotels full of the sleepers over on Clark Street. Not one of the nicer private ones, just one of those places where the people are curled on mats or hospital beds in rooms like stacked shoeboxes. We watch them on the tiny monitor in the office—every now and then they raise their heads and look around. We see their eyes in the static, the half-darkness of a failing celestial connection. In our daily afternoon meetings, we discuss the sleepers in batches, triaged according to acuity. The nurse speaks bluntly of a young woman who told her yesterday that she wished she could just fall asleep forever. “Suicidal ideation,” the nurse intones. “Evolving acute sleep disorder.” I nod. I’ve accepted that these terms are her way of dealing with the sleepers, their remote limbs, unreachable minds. The nurse won’t come apart and she can’t give up quite yet, so she hovers in clinical language like a wasp hovering over the deathly sweetness in a bottle. “Monitor for signs of progression,” she says. “Blood pressure, temperature. Blood samples for iron deficiency if she’s agreeable. Regular bed checks.”

  Dom’s eyes glaze. “I’ll talk to her,” he says.

  The nurse nods. She knows she cannot rescue, only maintain.

  Next, we discuss the heat.

  In the summertime, the hotel stifles, a grimy hand pressed to my mouth. There’s routine housekeeping, sort of, but it’s like dirty water is being dumped on top of the dirty floors and just sort of being sloshed around and it’s impossible to tell what colour the floor is supposed to be. The inside of this place is the colour of exhaustion, the plate at the bottom of the sink left there for years.

  Dom tells the nurse that he’s heard from higher-ups that there might be funding for some industrial fans.

  The nurse asks if there’s a timeline on that and Dom says, “Medium range expectations.”

  I’m always surprised by Dom’s dismissiveness of the hierarchy and his contradictory loyalty, the way he widens his eyes into a smile and makes pronouncements like “Medium range expectations” as if he has just swallowed a master-key to the infrastructure, or like he’s making fun of us all, walking on the ceiling of our abjection. He spent a few years on the street before this job, before he “figured it all out,” he told me.

  Since the sleeper crisis rocketed and families have started doing newspaper interviews about sleepers in their homes and the slow exile to hotels like this one (and for those who can afford it, private buildings with more nursing staff), the government has started to put some money into the hotels. Once in a while, one of our sleepers leaves for a treatment facility—this is rare, not just because there are only a handful facilities in the country, but because the seduction of the sleep is so strong. Very rarely, someone goes into remission.

  We tell them: please don’t visit. Not this place. You need to be out there, in the world of eye contact and rainstorms and birds firing radar pulses through the sky.

  Hans, a guy in his fifties on the fourth floor, has a gorgeous set of false teeth. “I got a mouth full of re-birth stones,” he told me when I started working here. He tried to explain the sleep to me once, back when I thought it was helpful to ask clarifying questions. I was like a cross between Siri and your most memorable seventh grade teacher.

  Hans asked me three questions: if I’d ever shot up, if I’d ever been in a car accident, if I’d ever been in love. No, no, no, I answered, his directness tearing strips off my ability to think on my feet.

  Then he roared in my face: “This is like trying to explain fucking to a virgin.” Then he took pity on me. “OK, kiddo, OK. Tell me about a time you felt totally . . . aaaaaahh . . . just free . . . you know . . . just out there . . . like nobody could ever find you.”

  I shook my head, whitebread and useless.

  “The best you can do is be harmles
s,” Hans said to me, and walked off, swinging his dog Ulysses’s sparkly purple leash in his hand.

  I stood there, an imposter beside a door that said EAT PUSSY DIE YOUNG. I went back to the office, like I always did in those days, to hide.

  *

  When a sleeper goes, the paramedics come and perform their ballet, bag the sleeper like a fresh peach. I like the paramedics—their driven efficiency so united and cordial, footsteps as coordinated as thieves. Their starched uniforms and wide-eyed regard: “Are you the one who called?” They give dose after dose of the medicine that revives some sleepers, most of the time, after the third or fourth dose, but sometimes it takes seven or eight. The medicine is administered in a mist pressed down through a funnel placed over the mouth and nose. It was developed and released six months into the crisis; thousands had already died. Whether the person returns to consciousness is all in the timing, the course of the sleep, and little flickering coin-flips in the bloodstream, how cells gape their throats or do not, how a person’s lizard-brain lurches for the surface or does not and I sit in the office at the front entrance and I sort the mail and press my feet to the floor and feel the floating-away knowledge that another one of our residents fell asleep forever today like so many others who have been lost to the sleep this year, and that there will be many more, and I feel that we are in the midst of a tide with no visible limits. A vast surge and keening.

  I had lied to Hans. Yes, I’d been in love. A woman in my senior anthropology seminar, like a truck swerving toward me out of morning river-fog. I did nothing about it.

  Hans’s three questions had been a challenge issued to me: If you could write a catalogue of moments of weightlessness in our life, what would they be? How precious were they to you, and what would you do to make that feeling continue?

  *

  The public health emergency was declared over a year ago now.