Be Ready for the Lightning, page 11
“We can go back,” I said. “If you want. Or jump again.”
But Annie just stared at me and then looked away, across the cenote.
—
After Mexico, Annie got a new position at her firm. Instead of her engineering work, she put in for a shift to recruitment. She told me about it while we chatted online one day.
It’s great. The money’s about the same. But I get to travel around to all these really top-shelf American universities and schmooze these big brains. They’re going to have me working on the associates soon too, which means I’ll basically be poaching people from other firms. Which means fancier schmoozing.
So you’re a headhunter now?
Sort of. It’s hard to explain. But I’m not stuck in the nerd pen anymore.
Just soliciting nerds.
Not all nerds. Some are business side. Besides, it’s not like I had some great passion for engineering. I just had the marks, and it was on the list of things my parents wouldn’t kill me for doing. You know? Doctor, yes, lawyer, yes, engineer, yes. Go-go dancer, no. International spy, no. Anything fun, no.
But you’re happy?
Annie never wrote back. She often stopped in the middle of conversations, gone to a lunch date with friends or caught up in a show she was watching. I did the same sometimes. We didn’t hassle each other about the disappearances, about the questions and musings left hanging.
After getting back to Vancouver, I had told Ted all about the trip, the cliff jumping, Annie’s divorce. My skin, always darker than Ted’s, looked browner than ever beside his unbaked whiteness.
“I did some cliff jumping, when I was on the ships. It’s fun, eh?”
“I think once was enough for me.”
“Sissy.”
He was sorry to hear about the divorce but seemed confident Annie would be okay. I would have been too, if I hadn’t seen her. I couldn’t explain how she was different now.
It was one of Ted’s warm, steady times, when he was folded neatly together, or perhaps not quite neatly, but well enough. There were other times, though, when he began to come apart, like a slip of paper dropped into a pint of beer. He’d get very busy and distracted and would write songs and do a lot of shows, and he couldn’t see me much, and he knew I understood right? Sometimes this lasted a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks, sometimes longer.
During these times, I felt cold and exposed, like I’d left a door open somewhere. I would get under a lot of blankets and spread books out on my bed, on my legs and feet, and I would put my laptop on my belly and watched movies lying flat on my back. I added to the collection of lines on my legs. Once I went to the animal shelter and asked if they had any very lazy, placid cats and got one that would sit on me for hours without moving, breathing hotly, my fingers furrowed in its soft, indifferent fur. It seemed slightly brain damaged, but I was fond of it. I named it Kit, not for “kitten” but for our old neighbourhood, Kitsilano.
Sometimes I went to bars and ordered shots of vodka, by myself. They tasted like something that had gone stale. People sat beside me at the bar and talked to me, men and women, or the bartender talked to me. People like to tell stories about themselves, and I was good at making a listening noise here and there, in the right places, saying things like That bastard or What else were you supposed to do? It was like going on dates in university, that easy, mindless sort of sympathy that I found it so simple to slip into. I liked to know it was still there, that I could still do it.
Sometimes someone put a hand on me, on my lower back or maybe my ribs. Sometimes I got fast food on the way home. Sometimes the way home was longer and later, after going to someone’s apartment. Sometimes I ended up at the ocean, not sure how I got there, at Jericho Park Beach, or Kits Beach, where we used to go when we were little. Once there was another girl there. She was pretty. We both had our shoes off, were walking into the water and drinking straight out of a bottle. We nodded to each other like city bus drivers passing but didn’t talk. I figured she’d been out doing the same thing as me, probably for more or less the same reasons. Sometimes I was in a crowd instead, surrounded by faces, and once at a bonfire, like in high school, someone’s arms around me.
Sometimes I did The Wiping Away Thing. I thought of these nights as non-times, the static between stations on the radio. If Annie asked me, What did you do this weekend? I wrote back, Nothing much. These nights were like the marks on my legs, the counting. Waiting for Ted to come back to me, again, waiting for Conrad to call me to patch him up.
Other than being irritated if I was tired the next day at work, I didn’t think these times, these nights, had much to do with me. I would go home and get back under blankets and books and Kit. I would still feel cold and tense. I was a person hanging from a bridge by my fingers, waiting for Ted. He had an uncanny, cinematic sense of timing—a James Bond-with-a-laser-inching-up-between-his-legs sense of timing. I would cling, miserable, and then I would fall, the freezing air loud in my ears, like jumping from the cliff in Mexico. I would fall just an inch before Ted’s hands closed around my arms and hauled me up, in the form of a phone call, a visit, a kiss.
Another kind of woman might have enjoyed the cycle itself, would have slapped Ted or thrown drinks at him or channelled it into sex or eventually gotten indignant enough to force his hand, one way or the other. Another kind of woman would have half-enjoyed leaving in a thunderstorm of righteous anger, would have told the story to her friends, said things like Of course I wasn’t going to put up with that shit.
Still another kind of woman would have cried, clung to him, begged him never to go again, told him she’d die without him.
I wanted to be one of those women, but I wasn’t. I composed myself and cleared my throat and said, “I’m so glad to see you,” carefully, every time he came back. I didn’t explain about the bridge or about Kit or the ocean or the bars or ask how his timing was so exact. I asked him about his work and his grandmother and rented good movies and picked up as if no time had passed.
But part of me thought, too, that I was better than these other women, who would have asked too much of Ted, who didn’t understand him. I’d told Annie when Ted came back that I didn’t care about my pride, that I’d take him back anyway. But I was proud—I thought it was powerful to be able to shut myself off. To take my cowardice and make it work for me, freeze me.
“You’re not mad?” Ted would say, half-disbelieving.
And I knew in those moments that he wanted me to be. He wanted the theatrics, wanted his crazy girls whose craziness meant he was worth going crazy for.
“No, baby,” I would say. “I totally get it.” And that was my small revenge—to give him what he said he wanted.
Pristine. Just try to leave a mark.
THIRTEEN
A knocking that didn’t sound like knocking interrupted one of my police shows, a good episode about my favourite kind of killer—a brilliant, insane, careful one. It was just after Christmas, the year I was twenty-nine and Conrad was thirty-one. The day was wet-grey and bone cold.
When I let Conrad in, I saw why the knocking had sounded strange. He must have been using the flat of his hand, because his knuckles were ripped and pulpy.
“Am I too old for you to take care of?” he said, smiling. There was blood on his teeth, but only off to one side, like he’d wiped his mouth and missed some. “I need some classic VedaCare.”
“I’m afraid VedaCare is no longer publicly funded,” I said, though I was already gathering things I had no personal use for but kept in my apartment anyway—gauze, liquid disinfectant, medical tape. On my own, I could have gotten by with Band-Aids and a tube of Polysporin, but that wouldn’t scratch the surface for Conrad. I was nauseated looking at him, thinking of the pain.
“Ice?”
“In my drink or on my face?”
“Both.”
“Both, please.”
I poured him a root beer with ice and handed him the cloth-covered ice pack I kept in the freezer door. He sighed, as he placed it under one eye and held it there.
“Who was it?” I asked, while he sat on the couch and lifted his free hand to be administered to.
“Does it matter? There’s no trouble, no cops.”
“I just don’t get—”
“Come on.”
“Come on what?”
“Come on with that stuff. What do you want me to say? Imagine there was a nuclear explosion and the last question you asked me was something boring that I couldn’t answer. We should only ever have interesting conversations.”
“Like what?”
“Like, what do politicians mean when they say ‘I didn’t inhale’? Like, did they just put a joint on their lips and hold it there? Like a kiss? That seems weirder than just smoking weed. I would rather vote for someone high as fucking balls than some weirdo who goes around suckling at joints like a baby.”
“I think Mom and Dad’s MP is retiring after the next election. You’ve basically got your campaign speech written already.”
“I’d be a great politician. Ow.” He hissed, as I dabbed at a deeper cut on his middle knuckle.
“Sorry.”
“Or how come animals don’t squint when the sun is in their eyes? We’re mammals, and we squint if the sun is bright, but you don’t see dogs and cats squinting when they’re just walking around. Maybe I should make a line of dog sunglasses.”
“The way Vancouver is going, you’d probably make a mint.”
“See,” said Conrad. He patted the back of my head clumsily with his free hand. “Isn’t this better? By next year, I could be an MP with a dog sunglasses empire. We could call them Sundogs. Isn’t that better than talking about something no one wants to talk about?”
And I heard myself say, “I just think you owe me an explanation, after all this time.”
The strange thing was, I wasn’t mad. I’d gotten over being angry at Conrad by then. I’d surprised myself, and I could tell he was surprised too.
“You’re mad,” he said. “Why? Because you have to take care of me, when I fuck up? Or because you worry about me? Or what?”
“You hit people. You hurt them. I don’t get it.”
“It’s not like I’m out there kicking puppies. These guys are dicks. Yeah, okay, I put myself in bad situations, definitely; I’ve hung out in places where you’re bound to meet assholes. And that’s on me. But I don’t get in fights with saints.”
“What about in high school?”
“All teenage boys are assholes. And that school I was at—you didn’t go there, you don’t know what it was like. The shit these guys said was disgusting, and I’ve got you, I’ve got a little sister. I wasn’t going to let them talk like that.”
“It’s just bravado, the stuff boys say.”
“Oh, because you know so much about men.”
“You’ve got an excuse for everything, eh?”
“I don’t know,” said Conrad. “I mean, you want to know why I can’t just walk away? You really want to know? Fuck, so do I. Have you ever been swimming and dove down too deep, you know, misjudged it, and your lungs are just exploding on the way back up? When you’re kicking for the surface, you just need to get there, to breathe. You don’t have a choice. You can’t stop in the water and think, Gee, should I really keep swimming? Is that a responsible choice? That’s as close as I can describe it, I think. And I try. I try not to go out too much. I don’t take the bus; you know I always drive. I try to, you know, reduce the odds.”
“I can understand doing something and not knowing why you did it.” I thought I felt the scars on my thighs tingle for a moment. The strange compulsion to violence, whether tiny or huge. Facing in or facing out. “But I still don’t really get it.”
“Where is this coming from? Is it because you always get stuck taking care of me? I know it’s a dick move, but I honestly didn’t think you minded. You’ve been doing it so long, I mean,” he trailed off, looked at his own knuckles.
“I don’t mind taking care of you,” I said. “I never mind that.”
Conrad smiled and held out his other hand to be disinfected and bandaged. “And I always appreciate it,” he said. “So let’s get back to more interesting stuff, don’t you think?”
—
But it was only a week later, when I was out for drinks with Conrad and Ted, several pints in, that a man bumped past our table. He was wearing a T-shirt that said I don’t need your attitude…I’ve already got one of those. Conrad glared but didn’t get up, following the man with his eyes.
The guy walked right behind the bar, unsteadily bypassed the bartender, and grabbed a bottle of whisky. “Mind if I borrow this, love?” he said, and then he started laughing like he might collapse from the sheer force of his wit.
The bartender’s head whipped around, looking for Security, but the man with the whisky, still giggling to himself, said, “I think your friend stepped outside.”
“Don’t be a dick,” said the bartender. “I’ll have to pay for the whole bottle—just give it back.”
“We’re all just having a good time here. Don’t worry about it, sweetheart, okay?” He stumbled back around the bar and sat down, started messily serving the whisky to the girl he was with.
The sound of Conrad’s chair being pushed back was like a siren.
I said, “Don’t, Connie, seriously, that guy is high or something,” but he was already turning toward the man. “Don’t,” I said again, standing up, and when I put my hand on Conrad’s arm, even his skin was full of it, like a horse that wants to run. I could almost feel it on him, vibrating through the ends of my fingers.
And this was it, the thing that had had so much presence in my life but that I had never actually witnessed.
“I think you’ve had your joke there, friend,” said Conrad to the man, who turned around, still laughing, incredulous that someone was speaking to him.
The man didn’t even respond, just turned away again, but Conrad pulled him by the shoulder, and the man’s chair tipped back, and he stood and staggered back, surprised but willing. It was closer and quieter than I’d expected, and the hits didn’t sound like in the movies or much like anything—there was the sound of dull impacts and a lot of curse words. The man stopped punching and grabbed Conrad by the neck with both hands, squeezing and nearly lifting him off his feet, and Conrad’s hands were on his, pulling, scrabbling, and his face was turning mottled red, his lips standing out darker, veins rising under the skin of his forehead. I could take only one more second, only one more, when Conrad’s eyes started to go off to one side, and I lunged at the man, without a plan, only to be grabbed back by Ted. The man saw me though, and in his surprise, he loosened his grip, and Conrad’s head flopped back and then forward, and then he raised one foot and stomped downwards on the man’s right knee. He howled and let Conrad go, and then Conrad got a handful of the man’s shirt in his left hand and straightened his arm, keeping himself out of range. He curled around, came in with a right hook, not letting go with his left hand, and he came in again and again and again on the same place, right between eye and temple, and the blood on Conrad’s knuckles was his own, my repair work undone.
Then he did let go, and the man went down to his knees, and his girl came rushing over. He flailed and smacked her, and she screamed at Conrad and me. But Conrad was already leaving, hurrying away, and Ted grabbed me and hustled me along after him.
Conrad took off running and was almost around the corner and out of sight, by the time Ted and I got outside. The bartender came out a second later and, without even looking at us, got into a white car, where she took out her phone and called someone. The man and his girlfriend didn’t come out.
Ted said, “Come to my place. This is fucked up. That was so fucked up. Let’s go home.”
But I couldn’t. Ted was upset, and I found myself unwilling to comfort him. To comfort or nurse or repair anybody. My whole body was unwilling, unwilling to do anything, I was sweating and shaking, and my stomach was churning so hard it felt like I was going to vomit and shit all at once. Where was Conrad running to? A news ticker of questions went by in my head—could I follow him, should I, was the bartender calling the police, and if she was, would anything happen?—but I was too tired and sick to answer any of them now, when they needed to be answered. I couldn’t believe that this was it—this was what it was like. Suddenly every time I’d ever tended to Conrad felt dirty and cheap. I’d thought it was something we did, something we had, a unique bond, but this was just trashy and sad, a bad joke-shop T-shirt on someone you’d be embarrassed to know.
At home, I got under the covers without moving the books and magazines out of the way, and I hauled Kit up from where he was sleeping at the foot of the bed and held him a little too hard. He made an angry croaking noise, but he didn’t squirm away. I called Conrad and left him a message saying to call me in the morning. And I fell asleep with the light on and the TV going in the background, Kit in the crook of my arm.
—
All day at work, I waited for Conrad’s call. An old woman whom I was setting up for a test shouted at me that I looked a little wan, a word that reminded me of Ted’s grandmother. She didn’t mean to shout—she had moderate hearing loss, and I’d removed her aids for the test already.
“Just a little blush would do wonders, I hope you don’t mind me saying. You’re a very pretty girl, but you just need a little zhoosh—it’ll make you look so much happier.”
When I hadn’t heard from Conrad by lunch, I called him. There was no answer, so I called Ted.
“Can I come over after work?” I asked.
