The
Uninvited Guest
A Novel
John Degen
NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS
Copyright © John Degen, 2006
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Though certain names and details in this book are historically accurate, the characters in this novel are the product of fancy; any resemblance, in whole or in part, to any person, living or dead, is unintentional.
Nightwood Editions
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Edited by Silas White
Cover photo: Katie West, www.katiewest.ca
Author photo by Julia Colyar
Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts and the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council, for its publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Degen, John
The uninvited guest / John Degen.
ISBN 978-0-88971-216-4 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-88971-269-0 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8557.E368U58 2006 C813'.6 C2006-901488-4
for all the Nicolaes
He holds him with his skinny hand,
‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.
‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
When you are playing for the national championship, it’s not a matter of life or death. It’s more important than that.
—Duffy Daugherty, coach of Michigan State University’s football team between 1954 and 1972. As a player at Syracuse University in 1938, Daugherty broke his neck on the field, and played the rest of the season wearing a protective collar.
In Montreal, on a summer evening, a young man named Tony sits with a dead man named Stan in a room growing slowly darker as the day finishes itself outside the windows. The air of the city is breezy and warm, inviting. The room is clean and decorated so as not to offend. It contains several chairs, a small couch, some tables for flowers, and a casket on a skirted, wheeled trolley. There is a distant hiss of air conditioning.
Tony is waiting to be asked to leave. He knows Stan. He’s worked with him for a number of years, has drunk beer by his side on bar stools in this very city.
Tony wonders about his duty to stay in the room with the corpse of his friend. He’d like to ask someone what he should do. He’d like to ask Stan, since Stan always seemed to know what to do in these situations, always had a reasonable plan for getting the job done. There is a driver waiting outside, and there is the question of storage. There is no one to ask. The funeral director had told Tony he could wait in this room, but he isn’t sure if that means he must wait in this room. He waits for the funeral director to return and tell him to leave.
“Stan,” Tony says, surprising himself. “Stan, what should I do here? You’re dead, after all, and I haven’t eaten anything all day. I’m tired Stan, and we have a long drive ahead of us tomorrow.”
The dead man says nothing.
“It doesn’t feel right leaving you here like this, Stan,” Tony continues, feeling again the weight of the situation, the solitude of being someone in charge of a dead man.
“If you were alive, you know, we’d make a night of it—any way you’d like. We could do the bars if you wanted, or just play cards in the room. But this is a whole different situation now. I’ve got to call the League, Stan. I’ve got to report that I have you stored away safely, and the Cup, you know. They’ll want to know.”
He takes a turn around the room. Through the window he watches the taxis on Ontario Street. It’s a Thursday evening, and all the cabs contain young people, people Tony’s age dressed for the clubs and no doubt smelling nice. He catches a face in each cab going by, a smiling, laughing face, a face telling the story of the evening to come. There are ivies on the windowsill. He sees now they are not plastic as he’d assumed, but real and climbing in behind the heavy curtains and up the latticed panes. All living things want out of this room, Tony thinks.
“I think everyone out there is going to get laid tonight, Stan. I think they’re all on their way.”
A small table by the door holds the guest book with his solitary name inscribed on the top line of the first page. There had been no need to sign it. He’d seen the weary look of impatience on the funeral director’s face as he scratched his name on the page. No one else would visit, and tomorrow Stan would be on his way back to Toronto to be buried alone in a plot paid for by the League. Still, Tony had seen the empty book on his way in. He’d stopped and signed it with the pen on the chain. Now, in the table’s one drawer he finds four identical guest books, all empty, and nine new pens waiting to be attached to chains. He signs each book on the top line of the first page and returns them to their hiding place in the drawer.
“I wish I was getting laid tonight, Stan,” Tony says. “Tonight especially. Something about being here with you makes a man want to be with a woman. No offence.”
Something will have to be decided soon. He knows the driver is becoming impatient outside. He’s sure the funeral director is somewhere in the building, waiting for him to leave, perhaps even watching him pace the room on some hidden camera. Tony knows at some point soon he will have to leave this room, leave Stan to wait out the first night of his death alone. “Stan, did I ever tell you the story of my middle name? You know the middle name is the one that contains the secrets. Did I ever tell you about mine? Probably. Let me tell you again.”
One
Late in the season of 1951, Stan Cooper kept time at the arena in Toronto. Seated behind glass at the centre line, he watched the game peripherally, seeing only the referee and linesmen. The sound of a whistle was electric to him, and he responded by flicking the switch to cut the clock. He worked the rhythms of a game, feeling for the next shrill sound. If the action went past three minutes uninterrupted he felt it in his chest as a growing tension. The puck skipped over the glass, a goalie covered up, exhausted wingers fell in the corners. Stan’s finger hummed in the half-second before