Fragments
Apple Notes 2018-2023
One of the reasons I started this blog thing is because I felt my sense of self and sense of art was pulling apart. Should I write about one or the other? Every time I sat down to write fiction, it turned into memoir. If I fiddled with memoir, I wanted to make things up. Art/Life. Two sides of the same … process.
It has worked, more or less. I feel more cohesive to myself. Also, I’m okay with Art/Life. More, anyway. I’ve lost the need to choose. I hope I’ve also lost the need to search for a unifying theory. The bits are bits, the bobs are bobs. It’s all good.
So, I came to be looking through my Notes app on my phone, and I found a number of fragments, false starts, notes, whatever I made between 2018-23, and I’m going to post them all below. Some are Life. Some are Art. (For this blog, I gotta choose which, and I’m going with Art.)
These roses are from my garden. They’re a symbol here of pause, be in the moment.
Has it ever smelled as sweet?
All I’m going to say about the fragments, is the first one is the first one I encountered, and I knew it was a false start to a story never written, but it also seemed complete. Not all of the fragments below have that sense. Some probably have no sense. They are what they are. I’m okay with that.
*
THE FRAGMENTS
*
Dean got a job on a film. That’s how it started. He got a job and he was gone, suddenly, sometimes forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours or more.
“This is my chance,” he said, the first time he came back in the middle of the night, not to sleep, or even to talk to us, just to grab a bag full of clothes and a toothbrush.
It was his second chance, we knew, so we didn’t ask any questions. It was his dream, and he’d been so happy that first time, three years earlier, when his friend, Tom, had gotten him a job on set. We were never sure what it was, but he was gone only four, eight, six hours at a time, and he would come back because Gloria wouldn’t stop texting him.
Gloria. No one knows what happened to her after that last time she was in hospital.
*
Scenes
Bring three books home
Mindfulness class
Mexico
Sunny book waiting room 9 hrs, art book
Sunnybrook emerg
Final Sunnybrook
I don’t think we had outrageous expectations. We wanted to live, you know. Just live. Carry on what we had been doing, but together now. Nothing elaborate.
*
We drank a lot in those days, and I regret it, but the world was ending, and it didn’t matter that the prescription bottles said, “Avoid alcohol when taking this medication,” or “Alcohol enhances the effects of this medication,” or other such warnings. It didn’t matter. She was dying, and she died. The world ended. The alcohol didn’t stop that. Nor did the hydromorphine or the Percocets that preceded that. Nor did the radiation or the chemotherapy or the mastectomy or the mindfulness medication or the enhanced nutritional diet. The booze seemed to help, though. So did holding hands and butterflies and casting for sunfish off the dock.
*
Ninety per cent of life was negotiating the male ego. The other 50 per cent was dealing with female disappointment.
*
We drank too much in those days. I know it. I knew it then. I tried to talk to her about it, but it wasn’t something she could talk about. Alcohol, it was her comfort, her crutch, and it had been for a long time. She wanted to live her best life, and alcohol was part of that, made it possible, in many ways, or it felt that way, though it wasn’t true.
why do I have to deal with everything all at the same time? (maybe easier)
Book club drinking, delivered late, slept in bathroom, missed psyche appointment, MB called doctor, didn’t tell KO, then next meeting ... explosion
I can quit any time I want - will for two weeks - not asking you to - just saying do less, you and me, together, but it wasn’t a together thing - next day called me at work, could I pick up something at the LCBO? Yes
The die cast
What’s it going to do? Kill me? (Give me cancer?) maybe did, impossible to say
*
Memoir
Lying on a bed in Mexico
Lying on a bed of Mexico
Stop
Marriage, the need to be gentle with each other, I can’t do anymore I don’t expect any more from you I love you
I know that I disappoint you but you did not disappoint me, this whole experience is too much for both of us
The cancer is your experience, but this whole experience belongs to us and it is terrible tragedy to our marriage
I know you want to focus on the moment but I have to plan for the future without you and all of the conflicts that are going to come, you know that I am a planner that we are planners and I can’t wait until the last minute
When the last-minute came there was no time for any of those things it was too late and she apologized to me
*
On February 14, 2012, Valentine’s Day, I was lying on a bed in Mexico, and telling myself I was lying on a bed in Mexico. I told my self this over and over like a mantra because it was a mantra. My wife and I were learning how to practice mindfulness meditation and I was putting it, I thought, into practice. Here I was, lying on a bed in Mexico, but my thoughts were far away, in the future, where my wife was dead and I was alone and living through many difficulties I was doing my best to anticipate, but we were in Mexico to get away from all of that, from her cancer and Everything associated with that. This vacation was our last gasp attempt to live a normal life, well past the time when our lives had stopped being normal. It was Valentine’s Day and we did not make love. I will remember that forever and I don’t know why we did not. For I loved her undiminished, but I was scared and I was tired and I was deeply deeply sad and it was affecting our intimacy and it was affecting my ability to feel close to her and also the cancer was in her spine and it was hard for her to move and I didn’t want to hurt her anymore than she was hurting already.
She died in May and we did have sex again but it became more and more difficult. Later her oncologist asked us when we were in the clinic if we were still having intercourse and it was painful to admit that we were not bad by then she was taking heavy doses of painkillers and physically changing dramatically
Or year or so after she died I had a dream where I asked her as I often ask myself is what is there anything else I could’ve done for you, and she said “yes, you could have asked me how can I give you pleasure? “And I woke up laughing because it was true that is something I could have done and didn’t think of, but it is the only thing that I have since she died thought of, everything else I could’ve done or thought or imagined or attempted I tried
*
Story fiction
She squinted and I knew that she was trying to decide if what I was saying was true, if she found me persuasive
I was just talking, not trying to persuade her, just telling her the story of my life using words that made the most sense to me, and I didn’t want to think about Whether I was persuasive or not
I hope she found the story interesting but I wasn’t interested in arguing but I could see she was sceptical and I didn’t know what to do about it
*
Land Acknowledgement
Story
*
Dream
A woman tasked me with finding someone she could marry. Sort of a dare - e.g., you cannot find anyone I would commit to for life. Long deadline. Lots of looking, lots of thinking. Who could it be, what would it take. Little known about this woman. She is real and identified, but also surrounded by mystery. Must be more to the story. Deadline approaching. Becoming clear that the only person, is me — and is this the answer to the riddle? Would I be able to identify myself? I prepare to identify myself, but first ask this woman — who are you? Is it Kate? As dream ends, it’s unclear.
*
My mother hates Germans. I learned this many years ago when I suggested we take a trip. One of those bus trips of multiple European countries. Or maybe it was a cruise down the Rhein. That part of the story I don’t remember clearly. What I remember is understanding immediately that she had a strong aversion to visiting Germany.
“You haven’t forgiven them,” I said, before I could think about what I was saying.
She was suddenly embarrassed, but she agreed. “No.”
I told this story to a friend recently. We were talking about memoir writing and our respective families. I was thinking about writing about my family, but I felt like I had many fragments of stories and no way to bring them together.
He asked for an example, and I told him, “My mother hates Germans.”
“Why?”
“They tried to kill her. Well, they tried to kill a lot of people. They bombed her.”
“They succeeded in killing a lot of people.”
“True. But she’s never forgiven them, and she never will.”
Later, I thought her anger at the Germans was related the end of her parents’ marriage. The Germans broke up her parents, because they were separated by the war, and they never property reconnected after the end of hostilities.
The hostilities never ended, really. They just became domestic.
It was a child’s logic, but in the 1940s she was a child. And who could say she was wrong?
*
*
“She had needs, but — I don’t know —“
She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.
*
I made a mistake. It’s the one everybody makes. It was a risk, and I knew it, and I did it anyway, and later the doctor said, “You were lucky. Don’t do it again.” And I haven’t. Haven’t even thought about it, until suddenly I thought about it. The whole episode, but one moment specifically. I get these flashbacks frequently, spontaneously. Daily. This time it was that moment when I called my wife, my darling wife, and told her that I wouldn’t be coming home directly from work because I had blood in my ear. I’d discovered it on the subway and immediately disembarked at the next station and jumped in a cab, giving directions to the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. It seems to me now that that was ten years ago, give or take. I had cleaned my ear that morning with a Q-tip, and I’d ripped something, which had bled and scarred over during the day. On the subway on my homebound trip, I’d felt an irritation and picked at it with my finger, removing the scar and unleashing a fresh flow of blood. I still remember the shock I felt: “This is not good!” The Emergency Room doctor scolded me, and I admitted that I knew better. I was lucky. I felt relieved. I called my wife and told her: “I’m going to be okay. It’s all okay. I was lucky.” This is the moment I remembered, the moment at the heart of my flashback. My call to my wife, my most amazing and now deeply missed late wife. Kate. It is now seven years since the cancer took her, and what is a little blood in the ear? What is the point of a story about a mistake everyone makes and an admonition to be more careful in the future? It is the simplicity of the intimacy that I miss. Having someone to call. Having someone waiting at home, keeping supper warm, sharing the triumph that luck has held, even though I had done what no one should do, and everyone knows better to avoid, even though they do it anyway.
That right there is love, and I had it, and — here’s the point — it persists.
I had this flashback, and my heart swelled. Just for a moment, a fraction of a second, but I felt it, and I said, “Katie, I know you’re here. I feel you.”
I do that sometimes, speak out loud to her.
I used to have flashbacks about gory moments, like sitting with her in the hospital waiting room, waiting, always waiting, for the doctor, the nurse, the results of the blood test to see if she was well enough for them to poison her.
Lately, though, different memories are visiting me. Memories of intimacy. Small moments of comfort and connection, like the small moment that followed the revelation of my stupid ear-bleeding mistake.
tomato photo
Soup making
Crab patties
Hamburger making
Lying in bed last night, trying to get to sleep, mind drifting, I catch myself having a conversation with Kate. This is not uncommon, and the subject is not uncommon either. But what is the subject? The exact words are lost to me, but I remember that it was about the end, the last three months, what was happening to her, and what was happening to me. In real time, we talked about this some, but not much. What was happening to her, everyone focused on. What was happening to me, a few people asked about, but it wasn’t my time; it was Kate’s time; I would have time later to sort it out. That time is now, and, even seven years later, I’m still sorting.
Is this normal?
caregiver support group
psychiatrist
Dr Warr - live life three months at a time
KO - nope
but now I wish we had prepared
It’s where we became disengaged
I want a letter from her, wish she had left receipts
But of course she did, and lots
I want to walk down the street naked screaming: What and Why?!
Another of the Columbine kids committed suicide - the long legs of trauma
Dr Warr said, “Live your life three months at a time.” He did not say, “Prepare to die,” but he didn’t need to. We understood what he meant, and Kate was not prepared to accept it. Dr Warr said he couldn’t recommend any further treatment. He said there were options, if we wanted to pursue them, but he couldn’t recommend any, because none of them had sufficient evidence to support them. He stressed that he couldn’t say how long Kate would live, but take it three months at a time. He’d seen people in her condition live 15 months, or only three. It was impossible to say.
Kate said, Fuck that.
Bone scan - spine, results
What people want to know is, are you good? As in, “How are you doing? Are you good?” “Yeah, I’m good.” “Awesome.”
Is good as good as it gets?
No. Sometimes I feel better than good.
But good contains multitudes, and multitudes isn’t what people want.
Imagine, “Are you good?” “I have a rainbow of feelings.” “Um,...”
I decided when I was a teenager that I would not have children because life was hard and it would be wrong to perpetuate it.
*
“Ninety per cent of what a parent can give a child is provided in the first seven years of life,” the doctor said. The psychiatrist. We sat beside each other, Kate and I, in his office on one of the upper floors at Princess Margaret Hospital, the palliative care department. He was a young man, Irish, and it showed in the lilt of his language. He was younger than us, anyway, probably in his early thirties. He had a calm, professional demeanour, and he had just asked Kate what she worried about most. She was the one who was dying, but he was my doctor. She had called the hospital and arranged for him to be my doctor. She wanted me to be looked after, and she knew she couldn’t do it. For a year-an-a-half, she had been surrounded by doctors, and for a while we thought it was going to work out, she would live, but then it became clear that she wouldn’t. What did she worry about?
“My kids.”
They were then seven and eleven.
The doctor cited the latest child development research. The parent’s job is ninety per cent over by the time the child is seven.
On another visit, when we were alone, he asked me what I worried about.
“What is going to happen when she dies.”
“What do you mean?”
“I try to imagine it, and I can’t imagine it, and I worry I will be paralyzed.”
I told him that I kept imagine the funeral, and not knowing what I would say. I said I knew this was a pointless line of thinking, and I tried to push it away, but it kept returning.
He advised me to pull out a pen and paper the next time I found myself having those thoughts.
“The thoughts keep coming back because they’re incomplete. If you complete the thought by writing out something, really anything, then there’s a good chance that thought will leave you alone.”
So I did, and it did, but when I told Kate about it, she said, angrily, “Why are you thinking about that? I’m not dead yet.”
There was a lot between us unspoken. She was focused on living, and increasingly I was finding myself consumed with what would happen at the end. How would we survive that rupture, that transition, that horrible, horrible shock.
Kate couldn’t see it as an ending. She thought there must be more, and that she was going to a place where there would be other dead people, her ancestors and lost friends. Not heaven, exactly, but another dimension, but that’s not a word she used. It was just another place, a different place, and believing in it was useful to her, but I knew where I was going to be, and it was the same place where I was, with her, except she wouldn’t be there, and that would make all of the difference.
*
Mother - on regretting she couldn’t convince her mother to come to Canada
M - don’t you think she would have been miserable?
B - no
*
Sam Bryson story about the Squire - reflected through regret about immigration and what might have been back home.....
*
The Mall
That Saturday...
A shift from living in the moment to living across all moments
The mall isn’t what it used to be.
Hey Joe, where you goin’ —
—
Where you goin’ —
Don’t —
—
She stopped. Turned. Careful Josephine.
Frankie, she said. How many times —
—
And you —
The man pulled at his fraying grey beard, a wide grin exposing not more than a handful of teeth.
I’m not sorry —
She didn’t expect him to be, and this time at least he didn’t have his hand down his pants, but still she would expel him.
You’re banned, Frankie, remember? Two weeks. I don’t want to see your face. If I have to walk you out, it will be three weeks, starting today.
Or?
Five more days, she said.
Four —
Six —
Where you going with that gun, Joe?
That grin again.
I’ll give you three seconds to get moving, she said. One —
—
Two —
Okay, okay —
But he didn’t move.
Two-and-a-half —
He stood and took three steps toward the door, then paused as if considering his options, his head drooped, heavy. A shuffle step, then another.
Okay, okay, he said, walking now, his eyes on the floor.
She watched him
Looked down - cup full of urine.
*
Fear Not the Eternal Taboo
At the age of 43, I whispered in my wife’s ear that I loved her, I would always love her, we would be okay, and it was okay for her to go. I repeated these words on a cycle as life released her. She took her final breaths in a hospital bed laid out in what had been, only a week earlier, a living room at the back of our house. She had breast cancer for twenty-one months earlier, and it ravaged our lives.
And yet, it also taught us to focus on what was essential and live intensely — often happily — day-to-day. Or hour-to-hour, or minute-to-minute. “You remember to enjoy every sandwich,” Warren Zevon told David Letterman, when the talk show host asked him what it was like to have terminal cancer. This became the spirit of our lives, too, as death approached, and we learned to accept it, so we could remain emotionally present for each other as the disease became increasingly cruel.
Something Stephen Jenkinson, a palliative specialist, said in an online interview was especially helpful. Accepting death is like falling in love, he said. There is much fear of the unknown, and trepidation about whether to move deeper into the experience or not. But when one is open to the experience, the fear melts away. And you are able to be fully present in the moment.
Five years later, my father passed away at the age of 79 after spending less than a week in the Toronto East General Hospital’s palliative care unit. As he lay dying, I found myself talking about my wife’s final days, over and over. Her death was the reference point for my experience of dying, but it was also more than that.
Walking with her towards the edge of the abyss, then watching her disappear into it, I experienced death as a process rather than as an event and acquired the special knowledge that comes from accepting death on its own terms.
How about a personal essay on the rewards I acquired, unexpectedly, after I came to accept the process of dying?
*
Raising Boys
“What did you think he was going to do with it?”
Frank bit the end off another carrot. In the old days beer bottles would have littered the table. “Black Label, remember that? When was that, late-80s? They had this noir branding. They were cool shit, right? You were cool shit when you drank that shit?”
Now they shared a bowl of almonds and a bag of carrots.
Sam’s wife, Jill, was out with their daughter, Gloria, shopping for a prom dress. On the counter the kettle began to boil. Sam opened the cupboard and took down the tea pot.
He lifted the lid and threw in two teabags — green tea — decaffeinated.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “Nothing really. I thought it was important to him as a symbol.”
“A deadly symbol.”
“A symbol of danger. A symbol of power.”
“You weren’t afraid?”
“No.”
“You didn’t consider —“
“No.”
Crunch. Frank reached for another carrot.
*
A week earlier Frank’s son, Tim, had stabbed a boy. Another white boy, like him, thankfully. Non-lethally, thankfully. Not with the hunting knife Frank had bought him, thankfully.
Lucy, Frank’s ex-wife, called him with the news.
“‘Find lawyer, find a good one, find one fast,’ is what she said,” Frank told Sam.
She also said it better not have been with that knife. Frank didn’t tell Sam that. Or much else, initially. Details, immediately, had been scarce. The school had called Lucy. “An incident,” they said. What happened? They wouldn’t tell her. A call had been placed. An ambulance had come and gone. Police, too, taking Tim with them. Where was he now? No one knew.
Sam asked later. About the knife. That knife. It had been no secret. That knife, now in the back of a filing cabinet in Frank’s office in the dark corner of the Canadian Tire auto bay. Outside his door read, a grease-stained sign: auto parts manager.
“Why didn’t you throw it out?” Sam asked.
Frank said, “You can’t just throw out something like that.”
“Why not?”
“It was mine.” Everyone who knew about the knife, knew this.
“And?”
“I just couldn’t. Maybe later, but right then, I just couldn’t.”
They were out of carrots and down to 10 almonds. Sam’s phone buzzed, and he glanced at it, then showed Frank. Jill in her prom dress, sky blue, silky, simple, her left leg folded out the slit, her phone held at arm’s length, obscuring her face, all to capture the shining dress hugging her curves, her body.
“Wow,” said Frank. “Stunning.”
Sam turned the phone face down on the table. “We’re so fucking old, man. So fucking fucking old.”
*
I went to get my hair cut because I needed to get out of the house and because Kate, my wife, was going to die. The house was full of people, her family, my family. Days earlier, we’d had a hospital bed delivered and set up in our back room off the kitchen, beside the windows that looked over our backyard and Kate’s garden, her special place. I squeezed her hand and told her I would be back soon. I was just going out to get my hair cut. I was thinking about the upcoming funeral. I would need to look nice. I wanted to get out of the house, to clear my head, but I also didn’t want to have to get the hair cut later. I wanted to pretend it was a normal thing, because it was a normal thing, and through months and months of abnormal things, Kate had insisted, always, that we would continue to live our lives, normally.
An hour, maybe 90 minutes later, I returned home, and she beamed at me as if I had been gone a week, or a month. I don’t remember if she said anything, but her face lit up with pleasure, and a feeling stabbed me, a shock I will feel forever. The love she had for me was so raw and direct, more pure in that moment than it had ever been. Over the past week, she had become ever more ill, worse with each passing day, and I knew this was the approach of death, but it was not here yet, and we would not admit it until the final moment came. We would remain together, connected, until the instant, the second, we weren’t.
*
I don’t know why I always order the burger, he thought. They’re always terrible.
*
Surgery story - start chapter
The orderly came at 6:00 a.m. Thursday morning and said, “You can’t bring your glasses.”
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“Do you have anything else?”
“My mother came and took everything yesterday, but I need my glasses.”
“Isn’t anyone coming this morning?”
“No, my mother came yesterday—“
I expected to be transferred to a new stretcher, but the orderly had pulled me out into the hallway in front of the nurses’ station on the stretcher that had been my bed for the past five days. I’d been tucked away in a private room on the short-stay ward because the hospital had nowhere else to put me, and I was considered too at-risk to go home.
My heart was unstable. I had chest pains.
The orderly’s job was to take me to the operating room so doctors could split my chest open and a triple coronary bypass, but I couldn’t bring anything with me.
Even my glasses.
“Give them here,” a nurse said.
I took my glasses off and slipped them into the case I’d concealed under the sheets. I handed her the package.
She said, “Tell you mother she can pick them up here later.”
She printed off a label with my particulars on it, slapped it on the case, and indicated it would be kept safe at the nursing station for me.
“Good luck, Mr. Bryson,” she beamed.
I looked down the hallway. A number of nurses were looking at me. They waved. I waved back.
The short stay ward wasn’t meant to have overnight patients. I’d arrived there the previous Friday, the point of departure to and return from the operating room, where I was to have stents placed in the blocked arteries of my heart.
But things hadn’t gone as planned.
*
Three questions
There are three questions. Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? Collective questions. The story of us, together, our bonds, our dreams, our hopes, our fears. The foundation of us, what makes us possible. The risks and powers that would break it all down, threaten us, distract us, impede us, destroy us.
*
Fragment from a Novel Unwritten
“But you were never a heavy drinker,” Steve said, setting free a conspiratorial laugh. “You never had a problem.”
It was after midnight now, and the cats continued to circle. Why wasn’t he in bed? They wanted to settle down, but instead he sat on the couch, earbuds plugged into the sides of his head, iPhone on his lap, his eyes unfocused in the shadowy darkness. Steve was in Seattle and his voice came through, but the video feed didn’t. His iPhone displayed a message saying the network lacked connective power. Steve said the problem was at his end. It didn’t matter. They could still talk, catch up.
Over 30 years earlier they had been roommates during their undergraduate years. Their contact since then had been haphazard. They hadn’t attended, or even been invited to each others’ weddings. They couldn’t name each others’ spouses or children. Had never visited each others’ houses. Steve hadn’t attended his wife’s funeral. Had never even known she existed until after she didn’t. Hadn’t known about his heart surgery until after he’d rehabbed. But in the past five years they had made an attempt to meet at least once a year, usually around Christmas for an after hours drink or three, to catch up and remember.
In 2020, year of the pandemic, no social gatherings, or even Zoom meetings, were arranged. Then he received an email from Steve, asking if he had an iPhone. Could they FaceTime? He did. They could. Steve was in Seattle now, three hours earlier than Eastern Standard Time. When was he free? Suggest some dates. Any day, really. He sent an email summarizing his life. Home alone with two cats. Hardly leaving the house. His step-children living full-time now with their dad, though they video called frequently. To survive the pandemic, he’d settled into a well-managed routine. Daily exercise. Reduction of alcohol to near zero. Reduction of meat eating to near zero. Regular office hours, though now working out of what used to be his step-son’s bedroom. He’d gained 10 pounds after the initial lockdown, but now had lost all of that, plus five more.
Seattle? Steve had a new job at Facebook, and he felt conflicted.
Two days later, at an hour past his bed time, they connected.
“So what’s up man?”
*
An age
He had reached an age where he looked back on his marriage and thought, “We were kids. What were we doing? Playing house.” But it wasn’t so. He was 38 when they married, and she was 39, marrying for the second time. They were both bruised and battle hardened, but now he didn’t see that. What he sees now is a simplicity and an optimism he cannot recognize. Youth, he thinks, for he has no other word for it. The last vestiges of it, anyway. A belief that they would remake their worlds, re-order their lives as they saw best. Set up a house for themselves and her children. And it came to pass, and then it fell apart. At 44 she died, and that was nine years ago now, and he is now 53, and that was a million years ago, except it wasn’t, and it isn’t multiple times a day, still, it feels like it was only yesterday, but not even yesterday, this morning, ten minutes ago, happening right here, right now, he is back in the middle of it, and it has never ended. Fuck cancer. Say it again, fuck cancer. It doesn’t last long, usually. It comes out of nowhere, but he can turn it off, usually. He has a mantra now. CBT-trained, he gives himself replacement thoughts. “We did our best. We were together to the end. No regrets.” Breathe. Focus on the diaphragm. Deep breaths for the stomach. It’s worse at night, his head on the pillow, spinning. The thoughts just go and go, without end. At least he stopped drinking. That’s a good thing, but he misses it. Drunk every day, surfing on sadness, never touching down. Now he can be in the moment. Now he can be real, but who cares? Does he? Remake your world? Re-order your life? What horseshit. Likes flies to wanton gods are we, they play us for their sport. They made their plans, they fell apart. Now he is present, marinated in his suffering, alert to death, no longer young, withdrawn from the body’s insistent demands, even the impulses of desire that began in his pre-teens has disappeared, mostly, or is swiftly addressed, and what remains of himself is the molten core. That’s how he thinks of it. What remains is his core, and what remains of his life will be improvised.
Every day is a new day. Is it, though? He wakes up where he fell asleep, the same place he woke up yesterday—and the day before that. He used to have ambition, but that ended, too. For a while, if he was honest with himself, his ambition was to die. To be with her. But, no. He wanted to live, so he gave up even the idea of ambition. There was today, and presumably there would be tomorrow, but right now there was today. Take advantage of the immediate. Manage the routine. All this, too, would pass. For now, accept, enjoy, take that next step, then another. He had become that guy. Disconnected. Locked into an alternate reality. Some sort of bubble person, and he had long given up any expectation the film would pop. He was the fish out of water, the alien, the stranger in a strange land. Friends had drifted away, giving up hope he would return, no longer recognizing him except as someone gripped by something they could not see. He didn’t blame them. He couldn’t explain it, either, hadn’t predicted it, and he had fought it, poking and twisting to escape, and later just waited for it to expire, fade away, but he knew now it wouldn’t. What was was what was. What had been his life was a moonscape. His life now had richness galore, deep bands of colour and feeling, but he alone seemed to experience them. And each new day began as the previous one had ended. The past was never past. It didn’t recur, it simply never went away, it colonized everything, even the future.
A pillow. She said she needed a pillow. Not a big one, not one to sleep on, more like a small throw pillow you’d put on the end of the couch. But where would we get one? he asked. Here, he meant. Los Cabos, Mexico.
*
That year, a sadness settled on the town. No one knows how long it had been there. Sadness was not new to the town folk. Sadness had always been there, but this was different.
*
The New Furnace
It started the way you would expect. It was cold.
Isn’t there somebody they could call? Jaime wanted to know. Her dad maybe.
“Your dad’s in Florida.”
“He’ll know what to do.”
“We need to call a furnace repair guy.”
But Jaime didn’t trust them.
“They always try to upsell you.”
Her dad said call a furnace repair guy. “I’m going golfing.”
It was seventy-six degrees in Florida and sunny.
Jaime asked, “What’s that?”
Google said: 24.444 Celsius.
“Nice.”
The first furnace guy didn’t pick up. Jim let it ring twenty times, no one answered.
“Who does that?” he wanted to know. “Who has no machine?”
It’s like it’s not even real, Jaime laughed.
It was still funny then, their situation. An adventure, a challenge. They were in it together. She liked to watch Jim sort things out. It was minus fifteen outside and still over fifteen inside. She’d located the camping stove and was setting it up on the kitchen table.
“You have to take that outside.”
“It’s cold out there.”
“You’ll poison us if you turn it on in here.”
Right. Bad idea. But she wanted her coffee.
The second furnace guy had no appointments that day and suggested they needed someone right away, before the pipes freeze.
“Loosen your taps so that there’s at least a slow drip.”
Right. Water flow. Jim couldn’t believe he’d forgotten.
“My dad didn’t mention that,” Jaime said. “The tub too?”
Yep.
The second guy recommended the third guy, who couldn’t come to the phone. His wife answered and said he had COVID, but his colleague would call them back, which he did two hours later. By then they’d already called the fourth, fifth, and sixth guys and fried half the eggs in the fridge and a whole package of bacon. The temperature in the house was down to nine degrees.
“You can go to your sister’s,” Jim said. “I can wait for the guy.”
One for all and all for one, Jaime said. “I’m staying.”
“Too bad we don’t have an electric heater,” Jim said.
Jaime reached for the car keys.
“Canadian Tire got them?”
“For sure. And swing by Timmy’s on your way back?”
Brave post!