Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Read online

  Could I get a drink of water?

  Help yourself, princess.

  She really is thirsty, but she also loves the house. It’s so cool. She’s been twice before and this time she goes through the living room to get to the kitchen. There’s a genuine fur rug that she stands on in her bare feet for a second. One wall is filled with a picture, a grey background with a black circle that looks like it was done with a paint roller. She can’t say exactly why she likes the picture, but it makes her feel like painting isn’t that hard. She feels inside the circle. The other wall is a window: dollops of mountain, silver water.

  The kitchen tiles are cold. She takes a glass from the cupboard. They don’t even have ordinary drinking glasses but heavy thick-sided ones that make water look like greenish pop.

  She goes up the carpeted stairs. He’s lying on his bed in shorts and a T-shirt. Cat—the other white meat. It kills her to think he’s been lying for three days in exactly the same position as her, not phoning.

  She goes over to his bookshelf. What did you dream last night?

  What?

  Do you remember your dreams?

  Sometimes. I dreamed once I won the Nobel Prize. I went to collect it and they wouldn’t let me in the building.

  She finds the book, exactly where it was last time, fans the pages to N. It’s here. If you dreamed of winning this prestiggious prize—Prestigious.

  —you are being cautioned against arrogance and reminded of what goes before a fall—

  He lifts his arm off his face. What is that?

  The Dreamer’s Dictionary.

  Did you bring it?

  No. It’s on your shelf. Tell me another.

  Look up fellatio.

  What?

  No. Orgy.

  How do you spell it?

  D-U-H.

  Really.

  O-R-G-Y.

  Orchids. Organ. Orgy. This dream is a warning that your excesses or repressions could get you into trouble.

  Oh please. Repressions.

  I dreamed last night that I was at this, like, incredible party. It was outside, in a garden. She finds the Ps. Everyone was dressed up and there were waiters and everything. It was, like, so cool.

  He sits up, plucks the book out of her hand and, before she can stop him, stuffs it down the side of the bed. She stares at him.

  Get it. Go on.

  He’ll slap her ass. She knows he will. She’s not stupid.

  There’s nothing more boring than listening to someone else’s dreams.

  She looks away, hurt. Takes out lip gloss, daubs her bottom lip. He shoves her down on the bed. When she screams, he claps a hand over her mouth.

  Shut up. We’ve got neighbours, dummy.

  He straddles her, pinning her arms under his knees. His nostrils are two completely different shapes, she sees now, one round, the other a teardrop. You don’t notice head-on. He twists the lip gloss out of her hand.

  Don’t, she says as he digs a finger in the pot. She thrashes her head, but it’s useless. He runs a line down her nose and cheeks, dots her forehead one, two, three.

  Mrs. G and Harrison lie together on the bed, Harrison sucking on the beads. Lulled by the ticking fan, his thickened breaths, she slips into a dream. Harrison stands at the end of a long line of children. You, someone says. And you and you and you and you and you. He is going down the line. Her little sister is gone, but he hasn’t yet reached Harrison when the telephone wakes her.

  Wincenty answers in the kitchen. Stupid. The only person who would phone in the middle of the day is a telemarketer.

  Water drips off his penis. He went to the bathroom and washed her off. She’s hurt until she sees he’s holding something out to her. She sits up. It’s a wad of toilet paper. Oh, she says. That’s so sweet.

  He means for her to wipe her belly with it.

  What’s that? he asks, pointing at the purple leech above her pubic hair. Get your appendix out?

  She wonders about him then. He might actually be younger than she is. This is his parents’ house. She’s figured that out. Don’t you do anything? she asks.

  Oh thank you very much. What do you call what I just did?

  I mean work.

  Work!

  She smiles. She so likes how he talks. He doesn’t say he’s unemployed. He says he’s unemployable.

  Under the heap of clothes on the floor, a trill. He squats and finds his shorts, takes a cellphone from the pocket, flips it open and turns his back, tucking the hand not holding the phone into his armpit. Hello? There’s a small hollow above his buttocks she’s never noticed. That makes two more things she knows about him.

  Nothing, he says. Nothing.

  She squeezes past. She wants to wash the lip gloss off her face.

  Nothing.

  When Harrison wakes, she takes him to the kitchen where Wincenty is eating cherries.

  Take the pits out for him.

  No, says Wincenty.

  She gives the boy his milk and sits down herself. See this tool? Do you know what it’s for? He shakes his head. Watch. She inserts a cherry, depresses the plunger with her thumb. Pop! Out comes the pit!

  The boy laughs.

  She puts the hollowed cherry on a saucer for him. Wincenty eats it. No!

  You pit them for him, you pit them for me.

  Fine. Two little boys, one an old man. She pulls his plate closer and pits one for Wincenty, one for Harrison.

  Afterward she gets up from the table to wash her hands and dump the pits into the garbage. The boy sits with a clown-mouth stain on his frown, staring at Wincenty.

  Why are you doing that?

  What did he say? Wincenty asks.

  He’s asking why you’re doing that.

  What?

  Doing what, Harrison? What is Wincenty doing?

  Opening and closing his eyes.

  I’m blinking! Wincenty roars.

  Then the doorbell rings and Mrs. G’s heart falls to the floor. When the thought crossed her mind, she invested some hope in the girl not ever coming back.

  The old man answers and looks her up and down. He’s disgusting, she thinks. He walks with a cane. He probably can’t even get it up any more, so why does he bother?

  Harrison reeks of perfume when he hugs her. The old lady wears too much and it rubs off. Thank you, she tells Mrs. G, who comes after him with a face cloth.

  Harrison. Let me wipe your face.

  I really appreciate it.

  Not at all. Any time. She gives up with the cloth and waves. Bye Harrison! Bye for now!

  Harrison pushes out the door without acknowledging the farewell. She squeezes the back of his neck until he stiffens. Say thank you to Mrs. G.

  Shrinking down, he mouths it to her feet.

  It’s too hot to fight. She waves to Mrs. G as she leads him away by the hand. When they are through the wire gate, Harrison breaks free and runs.

  It must have been a Christmas or a New Year’s party. She was having the time of her life. A waiter offered her a drink off a tray and a good-looking man put a cigarette in her mouth. Everyone was good-looking and so was she, she assumed, or she wouldn’t have been invited. A dream about a party is a good news/bad news symbol of mixed fortunes and contrary omens. So true! she thinks. One of the other guests asked her a question she couldn’t hear. Yes, she answered. A son. Oh my God! she thought in the dream. I have a son! Where is he? She spent the rest of the party in a panic looking for him.

  She feels sick just thinking about it and stops to light a cigarette. Harrison has run ahead to the corner. He’s looking right at her, purpled mouth and chin, waiting for her to catch up.

  Mama?

  His expression is so sombre, for a second she thinks he’s about to hold her accountable for what happens in her nightmares. What? she asks. What do you want?

  Am I wearing underpants?

  The apartment feels even hotter now that they’ve escaped it for a while. She plugs in the kettle to make him a Mr. Noodle while Har
rison, on the kitchen floor, pries the magnetic numbers off the fridge and lines them up along his arm. She fills the Styrofoam cup halfway with boiling water and when the contents have softened, tops it with cold from the tap.

  Here. She sets it on the table.

  Meow.

  Here’s your supper.

  Meow. I’m a cat.

  She puts the cup on the floor. He gets on all fours and lifts the dripping ringlets out with his mouth.

  She goes to the living room where it’s cooler and lies on the couch. On the ceiling, the smoke detector pants, open-mouthed. Black wire tongue, red wire tongue. Heat. Boredom. Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Harrison, bibbed with soup, comes into the living room. Bun-bun and Paddington are on the floor. Harrison uncouples them and brings her Bun-bun.

  Hello, he says in Paddington’s voice. Hello? Hello? Hello!

  Hello, squeaks a weary Bun-bun.

  How are you today?

  Fine, she says.

  I’m not talking to you! I’m talking to Bun-bun!

  The phone rings. She lunges off the couch though a second earlier she couldn’t imagine ever rising from it again. Don’t you answer that! Time out if you even touch it! Time out for the rest of your life!

  It’s the old woman. It’s Mrs. G saying, There’s something I forgot to tell you. He went to the toilet while he was here and, oh my goodness, produced an enormous portion.

  What she doesn’t tell the girl. What she keeps for herself. Bending over to wipe him, she glanced into the bowl.

  A gold star riding on it.

  She straightened with a gasp, disbelieving her own eyes.

  Miracles, every time he comes.

  Wincenty is still grumbling when she gets off the phone. A tattoo!

  And you, he says. You act like you’re in love.

  Ring ring, says Harrison. Ring ring.

  Spleenless

  During the last days of the supposed millennium Manfred had a dream. A knife. His furry abdomen. The keen point dimpling the flesh, a secondary umbilicus. He watched in horror as the blade, in two violent bloodless pulls, ripped past his pelvic bone, turned sharply (how else?) at his right hip, then carved along his rib cage and around until the jagged circumnavigation of his bowels was complete. Viscera tumbled out and Manfred woke up screaming. Curled and panting on the sheets, wet with sweat, obliterated by pain, he was no longer himself. He was his pain.

  Eventually his thoughts returned from wherever they had scattered, but with each new wave fled again. Each time, a flotsam of memories. His lurid, teenage obsession with gore. (Strangled with his own intestines? Neat!) His Aztec approach to the female heart in later life. Shame redoubled the next agonizing wave, bringing with it Omi, his long-dead granny. Omi and the wiry pad she wore tucked into her hair at the nape. At night it slept in a saucer alongside the German Bible. These were her instruments of terror: Herr Rat and Lutheran excess. Now, at long last, little Manfred was being punished, and justly, for all the hurt he had inflicted in his life. His pain now was the pain he had caused and the pain he had tittered over, boomeranging back.

  He thought of a wild animal crawling into the underbrush to die privately, with dignity. If someone had to be there, it should be the person you really love. Yet here was Susan, panicking in his ear. “Manfred? What’s wrong? Answer me Manfred.”

  Manfred croaked, “Call Annelie.”

  “I’m calling 911!”

  Hell, Omi had said, would be different for each person. For Manfred it turned out to be an eternal middle of the night on a stretcher in a busy hospital corridor, his supplicating groans ignored. Susan made entreaties on his behalf, but they seemed to be backfiring. “He’s dying! Dying!” Well, why else would he be here? They’d met four months ago in a Yaletown gallery. Overhearing her effuse over his particle separator series, he’d sidled right up to her flattery. Nothing as insightful had passed her lips since.

  Susan squatted beside the stretcher. “Honey, I’m trying to get you something for the pain.”

  Her night breath made him writhe. Attuned to the oceanic rhythm of his agony, the changing tides of his throes, Manfred braced for another swell. He was going to die in the arms of a woman he didn’t find interesting.

  “Please,” he mouthed. “My address book. In my desk. Annelie.”

  “I’m not leaving you, Manfred. What’s her last name? I’ll use the phone book.”

  “Stadel.”

  “Stadel? Who is she? Your sister?”

  Shiny white room. Masked faces staring down. Voices far away, deep with reverb. No more pain. Blackness slowly covered him. Feet, knees, thighs. The parts it passed over turned to liquid. Abdomen, chest. Death: a darkroom. He had regrets. And what about his photographs? What would happen to them?

  He woke in sunshine to his very idea of a nurse opening the blue curtain around his bed. Cool fingers played with his pulse. Alive! “In all my fantasies,” said a groggy, elated Manfred, “this is where I pull you down on top of me.”

  “In your fantasies you probably have a spleen.” She handed him a plastic cylinder attached to a cord, like the control on a slide projector, a black button on the end. “This is your morphine. Push here when you need relief.”

  “You trust me to do this?”

  “Manfred! You’re awake.”

  Susan came unsmilingly over and collapsed in the chair by his bed. He tried to push himself up, grimaced and pushed the morphine button instead. “What did we have,” he asked, “a boy or a girl?”

  Her eyes were swagged in dark hammocks of fatigue. Everything else on her normally colourful face had blanched. She spent an hour in the bathroom every morning, carried an extension cord in her makeup kit so she could sit in comfort on the edge of the tub while she blow-dried her hair upside down. Now her hair, dyed rust, looked like it needed a good watering.

  “I wish you’d told me you were married, Manfred.”

  “I’m not married.”

  “You were. I’d think you might have mentioned it.”

  “Who’s the tattle-tale?”

  “Your ex-wife. You got me to phone her, remember?”

  He remembered now and quickly changed the subject. “Check this out, Sue.” He lifted the sheet. “I’ve been fitted with a catheter. This is the life.”

  A Japanese man in a suit came in, made straight for Manfred’s bed and shook his hand.

  “Can I help you?” Manfred asked.

  “I’m Dr. Ito, your surgeon. How are you feeling, Mr. Stadel?”

  “I feel fantastic.”

  “That’s great.” He gestured to Manfred’s nether regions. “May I?”

  “How do I know you’re a doctor?”

  The man produced a stethoscope from his suit pocket.

  “How easy is that to come by?”

  Chuckling, I to unsheeted him. He untaped the rectangular dressing that covered the incision and, after a cursory glance and three painful kneads of Manfred’s abdomen, repackaged him.

  “Imposter,” said Manfred.

  “We’re supposed to leave for Mexico the day after tomorrow,” Susan told the doctor. “We’re going to see in the new millennium on a Yucatán beach.”

  “It’s not actually the millennium,” said Manfred. “She won’t listen.”

  “I hope you have cancellation insurance.”

  “Do I get to take it home in a bottle?”

  “You don’t want to. It wasn’t pretty.”

  After the doctor left, Susan got out of the chair and bent to kiss Manfred. “I’m going home to get some sleep, honey. It’s been a long and terrible ordeal.” She paused in the doorway and looked back. “Oh, Manfred? You’re welcome.”

  Manfred waved. He gave himself a few hits and fell cheerfully asleep, waking later to the ministrations of the nurse who looked even better after he’d topped himself up.

  “Are you going to be the one who takes out my catheter?”

  He fell asleep again and
when he woke, didn’t feel so good. It wasn’t the pain. After his night in hell, the incision hardly ranked. Something was missing. Something had been taken from him. He felt a void greatly out of proportion to the space the pinkie-long sack of blood that had been his spleen would have taken up. Hollow and aching, clutching the morphine dispenser in his fist, he abandoned himself to the meagre consolation of self-pity.

  A different, older nurse came in and offered him a suppository. “How kind,” Manfred sniffed. She turned a crank at the head of the bed, raising him painlessly to a sitting position. Then dinner arrived on wheels under a dull steel dome. Manfred had done his share of food shoots. A monochrome meal won’t taste good because it doesn’t please the eye.

  Meat in gravy, whole wheat bread, chocolate pudding.

  On Manfred’s left the curtain made a partition. In the facing bed an elderly man, dappled with age spots and eager to talk, reached for his dental plate. It was soaking in a water glass on the bedside table beside a can of Poppycock. “Prostate?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Are you here for your prostate?”

  “Spleen.”

  “Where is that anyway?”

  Manfred pointed vaguely.

  “These other fell as are both in for their prostate.” He pointed his chin at the curtains that gave their roommates privacy—from him, Manfred guessed. “I came in with some bad stomach pain but it turned out to be an impacted stool. I’m pretty tickled. For a few hours there it looked like I wasn’t going to make it to the next millennium.”

  “You might not,” said Manfred. “It’s next year.”

  The old man tucked into his own brownish dinner while Manfred only eyed his. Eventually a lank young man appeared in the doorway, interrupting the standoff.

  “Manfred?”

  At first Manfred didn’t recognize the visitor. He hadn’t seen Michel for several years, not since Annelie’s wedding when Manfred, this time a guest not the groom, had gotten drunk and made a cautionary speech. His pale successor hadn’t made much of an impression at the time except that Manfred distinctly remembered hair.

  “Michel. You shaved your head.”

  Michel petted his crown.

  “Come in.” Manfred pointed to the baby strapped to his chest. “What’s that?”