to call ‘Dad.’ When the doofus used to play with my little brothers, his kids, kiss them and throw them up in the air and that, I’d ask my mom if my dad ever did that to me.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she couldn’t remember.” Not a crow then, just an abandoned boy.
The thought that Clara and Derek might be watching the fathers of other children kissing and throwing them up in the air, and wondering why their father is no longer doing this, agitates the pooling malt in Reese’s gut. Even though they explained the separation to the children, Reese knew it was inexplicable. He said little because he himself didn’t understand how Roberta had come to loathe him so. Roberta’s “Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other anymore” clearly perplexed Clara, who thought that loving someone was forever, like in the storybooks. Derek shrugged, said he’d figured they were going to split up, then stayed in his room, deeply engrossed in cyberspace.
On Reese’s last night in the house, on the futon in the basement, Clara asked him if he would stop loving her when he moved away. Reese said that he could never, ever, stop loving her. “How can you know that for sure?” she asked.
“I just know.”
“Did you know you’d stop loving Mummy?”
“I’m not sure that I have stopped loving Mummy.”
“Then why’re you going away?”
“Because Mummy’s stopped loving me.”
Clara was twirling a lock of her hair in her fingers, a nervous habit she’d only recently developed. “She didn’t think she’d stop loving you when you got married.”
“No.”
“So then you could think you’ll love me forever but you could be wrong.”
“I’m not wrong. I will love you forever.” He knew these words sounded overwrought, that there was nothing he could say that would lessen the betrayal that divorce would bring. He left to prevent war. He is in one anyway. His children are hostages.
The waitress with the lip ring and scarlet hair is poking his shoulder. “Aren’t you that guy who saved the plane?”
“What plane?” Bob asks.
“That plane that had a terrorist on it. That’s the guy who killed the terrorist.”
“Shite, are you kidding me?”
“He’s, like, a total hero.” She alerts the entire bar, including the man with the greasy hair parted in the middle and long fingernails who leans towards Reese for a better look.
“Why did you kill him?” he asks.
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“Tell that to his corpse.”
“Shite,” Bob says, “that is so cool. A frickin’ hero in my bar.”
Soon everyone, even the couples yet to fornicate, are congratulating Reese, slapping him on the shoulder, jostling his exposed nerves. Women press their bodies against him. He feels covered in soot; a body of lies. He considers making a run for it but the mirrors have confused him, as has the beer. He hasn’t felt so devoid of soul since his little sister died. The little sister he forgets to remember, whom he neglected, tormented, and whom he watched as she lost consciousness, her chest heaving as she struggled towards death. For forty-five minutes, she twitched and grasped, until there was a rattling in her chest and an explosive jerk of her body. Her chest arched, the muscles of her neck fluttered. Already her skin was turning to ash. He still didn’t like her, felt only pity, and guilt for not liking her. Betsy sobbed without pause, Bernie stood stiff with grief. The doctor had suggested that they might prefer not to watch the agonal phase. “I’m not leaving my baby!” Betsy had cried. Born seven years after him, Chelsea got all the love in Reese’s opinion. Even now, although Betsy rarely mentions her, Chelsea is the favoured child. Her photos decorate the walls of his mother’s house. She is the child who could have been anything — prime minister, neurosurgeon, movie star, Nobel Prize winner. Reese is the good boy, on call to fix toilets.
Bob pours more beer. Red faces leer and sing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” The long-fingernailed man tells Reese about genetically modified foods, specifically peanuts. “They’re changing the microbes in our stomachs. You change the microbes, you change the organs. You change the organs you get mutants.” He eats a peanut.
“Speech, speech,” Bob shouts.
“No speech,” Reese says.
“How many people were on that plane?”
“I don’t know.”
“Brother, you must sleep well knowing you saved lives.”
“Way to go, dog,” a bald man with no eyebrows tells Reese. “Fucking desert people.”
“Black gold,” the long-fingernailed man says, “will be our ruin.” He’s still holding a newspaper and Reese observes an ad for a pillow sale, feather or fibre, any size, one price. He will need pillows, once he decides on a bed. The scarlet-haired waitress is staring at him, fondling the lip ring with her tongue and sucking on it. Reese has heard that lip rings provide extra stimulation during fellatio. He feels embarrassed with her standing there, a mother of a child in need of dental work, exposing her tongue. He drinks more beer.
There is something wrong with his television. It has begun to bleed red. He watches it anyway because it offers relief from the humming transformer and random thoughts of death and destruction. A documentary on spinal cord injury shows Christopher Reeves bleeding red while being suspended in what looks like an adult Jolly Jumper. Bleeding physiotherapists move his arms and legs. Superman insists that he’s making progress, that a cure for spinal cord injuries will be found within his lifetime. Although Reese pities the Man of Steel, particularly now that he’s dead, he can’t help thinking about the money involved in trying to mend a severed spinal cord. Money that could be sent to seventeen-month-old babies in North Korea or Iraq or Afghanistan, or to Rwanda where rebels are cutting off the hands of thirteen-year-old girls.
Furniture moving begins upstairs then the stereo blares a song Reese hasn’t heard for years, by a band whose name he can’t remember. The song, about red wine and staying close to you and not being able to forget, is a song he danced to with Elena. They would cling to each other in nightclubs, absorbing each other through their clothes. I’m still here listening and you’ve gone away somewhere! It’s not fair that he has been left behind. She is free in his mind. He wants her beside him, to talk about the things they never talked about. He wants the inexplicable explained. The red wine song ends and he is once again completely without her. A less melodious song thumps through the floor and he begins to howl, softly at first but as his lungs, accustomed to bicycling, expand and take in more oxygen, the howls become louder. He pictures a moon because he can’t see one through his window facing the underside of the deck. But in his heart there is a moon, full of displaced passion and woe, and he howls to it. Howls and howls.
Pounding at the door stops him. He considers not answering but the pounding continues and he fears that someone is dead, dying, OD-ing on anti-depressants. He opens it a crack. She’s out there, the witless, arrogant entertainer with the dragon on her thigh.
“What are you doing?” she inquires.
“Howling.”
“Do you think that’s appropriate?”
“For what?”
“For four o’clock in the morning?”
“Do you think it’s appropriate to bump and grind and play loud music and wear cleated shoes at four in the morning?”
She puts her hand on her hip where the skin bulges between her tight jeans and tank top. “What are you talking about?”
“Every night. Noise.”
“You