The Gum Thief - cropped Page 18

  More advice: Don't give a rat's ass what your dim-wit co-workers think of any of this. All they care about is which ring tone they should select for their cellphones. They're inconsequential.

  And it's good that you're getting into physical activity; you're making me ashamed of my slug lifestyle. Yesterday I went to the corner store for orange juice then to a coffee shop to steal a morning paper. Calories expended: thirty-seven. I'm a coronary statistic in waiting.

  You've been asking how I'm feeling. The answer is not too great, but it's best not to go into it. I'm actually glad to be out of Staples, and I had a great afternoon with Zoe last week skating on the lake up Grouse Mountain. It was very Charlie Brown Christmas. What's making me feel marooned inside my own life is not knowing what I'm going to do next, but I think that happens to folks my age even when their lives are still on the rails. I hang in there.

  So, my friend, go easy on yourself. You have people in your life who care about you. Not everyone can say that. I spoke with Steve and Gloria this afternoon, and they both recommend that you keep a diary-you'll treasure it one day.

  Roger

  Glove Pond: Brittany

  Brittany's night walk was lit by a scrim of stars and serenaded by muffled suburban noises-a barking dog; a teenager burning out in a blue Honda; transformers humming atop telephone poles. She couldn't remember the last time she'd walked for the sake of walking. She always had to have a reason for walking; some productivity had to be involved: endless brains in need of surgery, galas in need of overachieving attendees. How novel it was merely to roam! To breathe! To (should she want to) sing!

  Tonight was the first night in which living things were starting to freeze. She recalled, a few months back, walking across the neurosurgery wing's well-manicured lawn-the end of August?-and she remembered the sensation that her lungs and the air outside were the same temperature. So was the grass. So were the robins darting about the grass and the cicadas chirping in the shrubs. All of these living creatures mingling and coexisting and sharing the world. And then Brittany thought of her own DNA and the DNA of all the creatures surrounding her-quintillions of cells, all of them loaded with DNA, and all of that spiral DNA rotating as mechanically and passionlessly as a car's odometer.

  Suddenly, she felt surrounded by billions of little odometers, a universe of churning and grinding and drilling and digging. She felt like her body was turning inside out. She felt her body foaming from within like cumulus clouds. She felt odometers grinding away inside her teeth and bones and flesh.

  And now, walking through Steve and Gloria's suburb, she felt life shutting down around her, all of the little odometers slowing down from the cold, yet she was so vibrantly warm and alive-so different from the rest of the world. She felt there was a message she was supposed to be receiving: instructions, clues. And all she could think to do was to continue walking through the world, waiting for whatever it was that was supposed to happen next.

  Brittany thought of Steve and she thought of Gloria. She remembered the way Gloria had been massaging her spleen all night. Dear God-Gloria has spleen cancer. The diagnosis came to her like that.

  She thought some more about Gloria. Gloria has Alzheimer's. That's why she can't remember her lines.

  And then Brittany thought about herself, and suddenly it came to her: I'm no longer a child. It happened to me when 1wasn't looking.

  Shawn

  To: Blair From: Shawn Paxton Time: Three hours ago

  Blair, you won't believe what happened today amid the Christmas craziness here at the store. (Once again, consider yourself lucky for being canned from this hovel.) I told you that Cruella De Vil came home with her tail between her legs after her big trip to Europe with StudBoy? Well, she got royally dumped (as if it was ever going to last) and then she came back here part-time, which is okay because we all need shift replacements, but she's like a ghost of what she used to be and it's spooky having her around. Like she wasn't already spooky enough, but she's lost all the Goth crap she used to wear and she's trying to be all healthy, which is such a laugh because she's, like, a blimp, and she wears terry socks with the nubbly side on the outside. Clueless.

  So it's late afternoon and Cruella is out back, colour sorting file folders. Then, after six weeks away, StudBoy enters the store, and he's with this totally foxy, hot UK bitch. And so everybody's happy to see Kyle again, and we all blow off our customers to go talk to him, and Miss England opens her mouth and she sounds like a Cockney chainsaw, which is a riot, and then everybody has the same thought at the same time, which is, Can't wait to see Cruel/a's face when she sees her. And then Eliza Doolittle says, "So, where's Whatshername?" and with perfect timing Cruella strolls down Aisle 3-South and sees everybody standing there. Then foxy bitch's face collapses and you can tell she's suddenly pissed at StudBoy. She storms out of the place and into the parking lot, where it's dumping rain, and StudBoy follows her, and the moment they get outside, someone's grandma in a Cadillac plows right into the back of the FedEx van, but the ho and StudBoy don't even blink. She's shouting words to the effect of, "You dated her? You put me and her in the same league?"

  Blair, let me tell you, it is truly fun to watch people have a shit fit in the rain beside a car crash. It's like a really good drug that makes time fly. Everybody in the store staff and customers alike-came out to view the fun, but if anybody was smart, they should have been inside the store, shoplifting the brains out of the place. You could have walked out with an office chair stashed under your jacket and we wouldn't have noticed.

  Anyway, I have to say I felt a little bit sorry for poor Cruella, but she looked like the drama didn't bug her, and within a minute she was back to sorting folders again. It's hard to imagine her having much of an inner life. The Goth thing was total bulls hit.

  Break time is over.

  Are you coming to the lame-o company party this year?

  S

  Bethany

  Roger, I have to write to you or I'll go nuts. The last few days it feels like real life and my dream life are joining together and I can't tell which is which. Out of nowhere, I see pictures of burning houses and people being thrown violently around rooms. Cars falling from the sky and crushing pizza parlours. Drowned teenagers walking out of the sea. Homeless men in parking lots having fist fights and battling for control of stolen souls. A tornado will come down from above and suck away both the earth and the sky. Crazy shit. And the more I try not to think about it, the more it hap pens. So then I try to think of the opposite of these scary pictures. I try to think of a perfect city where it's always -bright and where people don't die a place where you can have turkey dinners or read good books any time you want and where there's always new space on your arm for a cool tattoo but those pictures never click, and instead I wonder if I'm awake or asleep, and whether I should stab myself "with a fork to see which one it is: reality or dream.

  Kyle is back in town, and he brought his ho to the store-and if I ever wondered what it feels like to be a bacterium under a microscope's lens, I now know. It was so stupid and cruel of him. So cruel. What was he hoping to gain by it? And all eyes were on me, just waiting, waiting, waiting for me to create a scene, but I wouldn't give them that satisfaction.

  Roger, this past month has been so hard, and your being fired was almost too much for me. In my head there was always the fact Before that, when life was horrible I could always tell myself, Yes, well at least Roger's in this with me.

  Oh God, I'm sitting here and my inner voice won't shut up. Do you ever get that? All you crave is silence, but instead you sit there and, against your wishes, nag yourself at full volume? Money! Loneliness! Failure! Sex! Body! Enemies! Regrets!

  And everybody's doing the same thing-friends, family, that lady at the gas station till, your favourite movie star-everyone's skull is buzzing with me, me, me, me, me, and nobody knows how to shut it off. We're a planet of selfish me-robots. I hate it. I try to turn it off. The only thing that works is if I try to imagine what it
's like to be inside someone else's head, try to imagine what their inner nagging is. It cools my brain. That's what I liked about Glove Pond, Roger, that you were being someone else. And it's what I liked a few months back, when you pretended you were me. I suppose it's what makes Greg so funny, that he's thinking the same crazy, self-centred bullshit as everybody else, but with him we get to hear it with the volume turned up.

  God, I'm so sick of myself.

  Oh, Roger, I truly wish I'd had religion growing up, because believing in something might shut off my inner voice-and maybe also so that I could feel like I shared something with my family, a common vision. All I got from my family is death, divorce and desertion. Please come up with ideas to share with Zoe. She'll probably hate you until she's twenty-one, but after that she'll thank you forever. You're so lucky to have the chance to not screw somebody up.

  You know, I was at the gym an hour ago, using a bench press, and my head was upside down and I was looking out the windows and there were thousands of crows flying east, out to their roost by the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, this endless stream of crows. And then the stream stopped and I stood up, and the blood rushed out of my head a bit, and I looked out at the parking lot and there were no people and no birds-not a breeze-all of this lifeless stuff cars and litter, like the end of the world. I'm not going to the gym any more.

  My weight thing? My body obsession? It scares me too, and I don't understand it. I think I thought that if I messed with my body enough my brain would change too, and that would shut off my interior monologue. Maybe I'd become one of those scrawny, sunburnt people in cargo shorts, a nylon windbreaker and hiking boots-those people who go camping for three weeks and eat nothing more than wild cranberries and wild mushrooms-a person who can go out into the wilderness and not freak out about being alone. I used to think Kyle was one of those people, but I don't think that any more.

  Him.

  I want to stop thinking about this stuff, Roger. I'm so tired. I can't look at Europe on a weather map without feeling carsick. And there was this nutsa guy in that grim Parisian hostel, a real religious nut from Belgium, who kept on saying that we each inhabit two worlds-the real world and the end of the world. I can't help but wonder what he meant. It's so lame, yet I can't get that out of my head.

  Roger, why is it that people wait until the end of a relationship before they say all the meanest shit to each other?

  Why do people stockpile their grudges like ammunition? Why does it always have to end so badly?

  Bethany

  PS: I quit Staples.

  PPS: In summation, I enclose a buttering. Bye, Roger.

  A Slice of Small-Town Life

  Karen Slice felt snug within her housecoat, its comfortable, forgiving flannel smelling of spilled tea, yesterday's bowl of lilies so perfectly arranged in her grandmother's vase, and the yeasty aroma of her two sleeping children, Melba and Crouton. Outside the sink window, still gritty from a long winter (I must wash it soon-so many small details to remember in even the smallest, quietest lives!), Karen witnessed spring's blessed spectacle: gentle dandelions giggling with yellow, cumulus clouds like chunks of raw butter and, sadly, a pair of crows nesting in the linden tree, their black, greedy beaks like the Jaws of Life, except in this case they were the Jaws of Death.

  Uh-oh ... yet another year in which I won't be able to venture outside.

  On the counter were two Pyrex bowls in which her soon-to-be-born new children were rising, and they filled the space with a warm, nurturing, floury aroma. Karen Slice felt safe in the kitchen, a room that never made the newspapers, perhaps, but one in which some gentle and important thinking took place. Karen heard Melba's delicate baby snores down the hallway. Soon, Melba would be up and full of beans, as would little Crouton-a crusty devil if ever there was one, so much like his father.

  Outside a crow cawed, and Karen shuddered.

  Why does death always have to make its presence felt? Can't we take a holiday from death, if only for a day?

  She looked at the rising dough-her babies to be-and was shot with a pang of almost Zen energy, an awareness that death and life were folded together in a complex origami of existence. But what shape would the origami take? A tree, perhaps ... or a goose! Karen had seen documentaries on TV of geese in municipal lagoons greedily inhaling entire bread loaves in genocidal frenzies; swans were even worse. No, the complex origami of life would have to be shaped like ... an oven. Without ovens there would be no life. She went to the bowls to test her unborns for firmness. She felt like ... like ... like a wheel within a wheel within a wheel.

  Karen realized she needed a buttering. Getting old is so difficult. The staleness; the lost elasticity of youth. One blinks, and before one knows it, it's onions, sage, perhaps a bit of sausage and a turkey's greasy carcass.

  She caught sight of herself in the microwave's black glass. Karen Slice, there's still a bit of vim left in you. And don't forget you've got two children, a husband who cares for you and, shortly, some buns in the oven. Count your blessings.

  She heard the crows cawing outside. They'd seen her through the window and were gathering in the trees and shrubs in an act of menace, but Karen had long ago learned to meet their taunts with indifference.

  She was about to brew some tea when she heard a noise that made her crust freeze-the sound of baby Crouton scampering down the rear hallway, followed by the back screen door's gentle thwacking sound.

  He'd gone outside. Crouton!

  She ran to the door to see Crouton in the backyard, the crows above in a frenzy, swarming in from the east.

  "Crouton! Come in!"

  "No!"

  Karen ran into the yard, screaming, "Crouton, hurry, the crows will eat you! You must go back into the house!"

  Crouton ran farther away, into the base of a forsythia shrub in full bloom, a place where the crows wouldn't go.

  Karen followed him a moment later and they stood there together; catching their breath. "Crouton, what were you thinking? You can't stay out here in the yard." "But Mother I can't stay inside the house forever." "But you have to, Crouton, or else the crows will eat you. You'll die." "But Mother, staying inside the house forever that’s not really life, is it?" Karen had no choice but to say the following

  words: "No. You're right-it isn't."

  They both shivered. It was cold out.

  "Come inside, Crouton. I'll butter you."

  "Yes, Mother."

  Roger

  Bethany, Bethany, Bethany ...

  You know what I was doing when I found out what you'd done to yourself? I was sitting in a chair in my place. Wayne was in the kitchen, and I was looking out the back window, at a patch of sky in between the front of my landlord's snowmobile and the remains of his above-ground swimming pool. It was almost dark out, but not quite we’re so close to the shortest day of the year-and I was watching that last little bit of blue turn colourless. And then I heard footsteps coming down the driveway towards my door. It was your mother-yes, your mother. Lately she's been bringing me food, and I've been her sounding board for her worries about, well, you. Until tonight I've been hiding from the door's knock and we've been swapping notes, but tonight something inside me changed, as if some frozen lake inside me had thawed-I felt life returning to me-and so instead of heading into my room to avoid the door, I went to answer it. Yes, it was indeed your mother and in her left hand she was holding a clear plastic produce bag containing a twelve-pack of Juicy Fruit gum and several airline-sized mini Scotch bottles. In her right hand she was holding a cellphone on which she'd just heard news from the hospital about you. I didn't know this. But there was your mother, and she was in shock and so worried she was making squeaking noises. Wayne, sensing something wrong, bolted towards us, with me trying to keep your mom steady, prying the gum and Scotch from her hands and bringing her into my apartment to calm her down and find out what the heck was going on.

  Bethany, Bethany, Bethany. What were you thinking!

  Okay, Roger ...
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  . . . take a breath.

  You're asleep. Your mother is back at your place, fetching some things and, I hope, trying to get some sleep herself, but I doubt she will. This hospital room smells like old magazines. I hate this place, and I hate it even more because there's all this depressing Christmas crap all over the place, and you'll love this: You know what I'm thinking about right now? I'm thinking about that joke you made last summer back at the store when we opened a carton and found a thousand Christmas-themed mouse pads-you asked how it was that everything the Italians do using their national red, green and white colours looks Italian, but when we non-Italians use them, all they ever look is Christmassy. A random memory from the Bethany File.

  Okay, here's something else from the Bethany File, triggered by some kerfuffle I just heard out in the hallway: Wouldn't it be funny if someone had Tourette's syndrome, but it was a low-grade case? They'd walk around all day saying Sugar! Sugar! Heck! Heck! and bystanders wouldn't have a clue what was going on.

  Ha ha. That's not a funny joke, and chances are somebody on the planet has made it before. But I'm not in a funny mood!

  How could I be? Bethany! What the hell! I asked your mom why, and she said she didn't know-the poor woman is terrified. And it's not like I know either-geez! Puck! All your mom said was that when the bus driver found you at the back of the bus you were barely coherent but that you said you were sick of being you-that you didn't like who you'd become.

  Bethany, nobody knows who they are when they're young-nobody! You're not a full person yet! You're liquid! You're lava! You're a larva! You're molten plastic! And don't take that the wrong way. I mean, it's not like it gets much better as you get older, but when you get older and you will-you'll at least figure out who you are a little bit. Not much, but some. And when it happens, you might not be too thrilled with who it is you are, but at least you'll know. But right now? At your age? Again, don't take any of this personally, but no!