Ken Sparling

Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

PRAISE FOR DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL

Back in 1996, Ken Sparling published a novel that was unlike any novel I had ever read before and I was amazed by what he had done. That novel was Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall. It’s years later now and I’m still amazed by the book every time I re-read it.

— Michael Kimball, author of Us and Big Ray

Ken Sparling’s 1996 classic might have been out of print for almost a decade and a half, but its virtuosities have hardly been forgotten and have hardly gone unloved to death. What a joy it is, though, to see this piercingly funny, nervous, and thrillingly sad novel-in-fragments available at last for a new generation of readers to discover its loopy domestic lyricism of the shifting lonelinesses and companionate spells at the heart of contemporary marriage. I envy anyone reading Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall for the first time.

— Gary Lutz, author of Divorcer and I Looked Alive

When I first read it as a young writer, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall was my bible. I read it, reread it, and even read it to other people. It felt like a revelation, a master’s class in writing. It taught me it was still possible to create a kind of literature that was utterly new, and all these years later it still stands alone as a novel unlike any I’ve ever read. Dad Says rips the veil off our most private thoughts and gives voice to the feelings we spend most of our lives trying to repress or just plain ignore. With economy, tenderness, and great humour, Sparling not only lays to waste our notions about what a novel can be, but also what being in the world can be. This is a brutal book.

— Jonathan Goldstein, author of Lenny Bruce Is Dead

~ ~ ~

FOR TUTTI

When someone asked me what Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall was about, it felt like I’d seen a beautiful tree and struggled to describe it to someone, only to have that someone say: “Yes, but what is the tree about?” You wouldn’t know how to answer that question. It isn’t the right question. The tree wasn’t ever about anything. It was just beautiful.

I always start out with nothing but intent when I go to make a book. I always already want to make a book long before I have any words written to go in the book. I never have any idea what I want the book to be about before I make the book. And I continue to have no idea what I want the book to be about until I am finished making the book; and even then, when I am finished making the book, I still don’t know what I want the book to be about.

For me, making a book is the same as trying to find out what the book will be about.

Making a book is the same as trying to find out what it means to make a book.

~

You can feel intent without having a specific intention. You can be intent without knowing what you intend.

In making a book, I am exploring the implications of my intentions within the context of creating a novel. What are the implications of attempting to bend raw, empty, intent, utterly devoid of content, into form? I begin in intention. But intention crumbles. In the face of the world around me, intention falters. It flounders. It fills with faults.

Only a feeling can be whole, and only by assigning meaning to that wholeness do we disrupt that wholeness long enough to understand it as a whole. Intention begins as a feeling of wholeness, the way only an empty feeling can feel whole. Nothing remains whole insofar as nothing remains entirely empty of anything; as long as it remains nothing, it remains whole.

As soon as we assign something to nothing, as soon as we attach meaning, words, implications, decisions to the nothing we feel initially in our intentions, our intentions seem to fall apart.

My intentions lose their feeling of wholeness in the push and pull of the world’s intentions. All around me, in what might be perceived as the intentions of god or of fate or of blind fortune or of misfortune, are the fragments of story that attach themselves to the feeling of intent I begin with.

The wholeness of intent doesn’t disintegrate into fragments, it pulls fragments to it like iron filings to a magnet, until the weight of the fragments pulls the wholeness of intention down and kills it.

This is what a novel is: the struggle to defeat the death of intent; the on-going struggle to rescue, to preserve, to maintain the wholeness of intent even as it gathers the fragments of story to it, so that the wholeness of intent shines through every fragment of story the novel gathers. Intent, not story, holds the novel together; intent is the struggle to remain whole in spite of story.

~

How does a system of organization where making is the same as finding out how to make keep from collapsing in upon itself? How does a writer move forward within a system that seeks to stay where it is, as a means of determining what it means to move forward?

I’ve never been very good at planning in any traditional sense and a lot of what we do in this world involves planning. This sort of pisses me off. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on the idea of planning, just that it pisses me off that I seem to have no choice but to plan.

Not being very good at planning has forced me to think hard and constantly about what it means to plan. And, while all this thinking about planning might not have made me any better at planning, I think that I have come to embody in my writing a system of organization. Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall is the foundation of that system.

Some might say that my novels are not organized at all; but if the work I do in developing a book involves an enormous amount of reflection on the idea of planning, even if that reflection is evoked through a kind of anger about having to make plans, then I think that what some might call a lack of organization is more likely a different manner of being organized.

A person who is good at planning will always look conventionally organized; that is, organized in a manner that is authorized by convention, by repeated exposure to its own manner. Convention shelters a shared manner of being. Like pop music, the melody may be new, but the structure that shelters the melody (rhythm, timbre, harmony, etc.) remains stubbornly consistent.

Conventional organization will never question or attempt to influence the nature of organization, because as soon as the plan falls into question, it begins to look less organized to anyone who understands organization as a manner of sheltering within the authority of a plan.

Those who seek organization in a plan know when something is organized because it looks like it is organized. Strange as this may sound, it is what we do. We root our understanding of organization in what we have already come to understand as organized.

But truly being organized means the same as truly being anything. It means truly being. It means existing as an example of what it means to be.

~

Our goal in organizing our project of addressing a book is to get to where we are hoping to be at the end of our project, but without, at any given point throughout the project, knowing where we are hoping to be at the end of our project.

We hope for an outcome in order to experience hope. The outcome we hope for in experiencing hope is no outcome at all, for the outcome of hope comes always at the end of hoping for that outcome, and so comes to be the end of hope.

The writer who is able to aim for the end of the project without ever knowing what that end will be, opens to the reader the moment of intention hidden within the fragments of the story, offering the reader an opportunity to experience a wholeness of intention unavailable in the incremental manner of organization embodied in the story.

If you are hoping that I know where I want you to be at the end of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, you need to think some more about where you want to be at the end of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall. You need to wonder about where you want to be in a way that will allow you to understand wonder, as itself, a place you might want to be.

Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall is about thinking about where you want to be at the end of thinking about where you want to be.

At the end of thinking about where I want to be, I want to be thinking still about where I want to be.

Thinking about wanting to be means wanting to be that thought that wants to be in the moment it wants to be.

DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL

1

AT NIGHT, I am at home. And before I am even home, I am walking home.

~

To me, that street looked perfect. It was a perfect street. In my mind, how I remember it, everything was perfect. The curb in front of our house, for example.

If I went back there today, back to that street, and I looked at that street, I don’t think that street could compare, in sheer perfection, to the street I remember.

~

We got a magazine in at the library this morning. On the cover it said: Don’t Date Until You Read This. I was going to read it, but before I got a chance, one of the women who works here took the magazine to the lunchroom and read it while she ate her lunch.

~

The girl was twelve. She was standing in her driveway. Her legs were skinny. They looked like storks’ legs. She was holding onto the handles of her bicycle.

~

I worked at a grocery store and they paid us in cash every week. I would just stick the money in my pocket and never go to the bank. I bought Tutti a giant stuffed animal, a Mickey Mouse telephone, sheets and pillowcases with cats wearing running shoes on them, and I bought a kit and made her a Christmas stocking with her name on it. I can’t remember what else I bought. Anytime I saw something, I bought it. This past year was our eleventh Christmas together, and I bought her a plastic rack for inside the kitchen pantry door, where she can put her rolls of food wrap.

She is lying in bed beside me right now, with her back to me. I think she has finally gone to sleep. I came back from a meeting where I had just been elected to the board of directors and I came home in the rain, and there she was, on the couch, watching TV.

Now we are up here in bed and I am wide awake. I think she’s asleep. But she might just be pretending to be asleep so she doesn’t have to listen to me anymore. She might, at some point, have said to herself, “I can’t listen to this anymore,” closed her eyes, and pretended to be asleep.

I don’t think she’s pretending. I really don’t.

But, the thing is, it occurred to me. There was a time when something like this would never have entered my head.

~

There were layers of trikes feathered out behind us, lined up against the wall. They were lined up in rows, with spaces in between them, and they were all, each and every one of them, red. Each trike was a red moment, separated from other red moments by something skinny and breathtaking. I felt short.

~

The wife came over to the bed and bent her face down close to the husband’s toenail. While she was bent over like that, she started pulling off her pants. She got her pants down over her feet, tossed them into a corner, and then stayed bent down like that, looking at the husband’s toenail.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the husband said.

The wife stood there in her underwear.

“It looks like a thread from a pair of my pantyhose,” the wife said.

The husband went on looking at his toe.

When the wife was gone, the husband sat up and pulled the thread out of his toenail. He held it with his fingers and kept it there, close to his face.

~

There was this girl who used to take me over to a park near my house and make me take my clothes off. I always got a boner. What I am talking about here is a boner. A real boner. Exactly what you might picture in your head when you hear the word “boner.” I was not even six at the time. I was four. Maybe. Or five. Because I was six when my parents split up and my mom and my sister and I moved to a different neighborhood. So it had to be before I turned six that I sometimes went to that park with that girl and took off my clothes.

I guess I wanted to take off my clothes. I must have wanted to. This girl, she wasn’t holding me down or anything, or threatening me in any way. She just said something like, “Take your clothes off.”

I must have wanted to. I must have enjoyed taking my clothes off. I think I liked getting that boner. It was new to me, that boner. But I didn’t get the boner because I had all my clothes off and I was with a girl. Being with a girl had nothing to do with getting the boner. I was getting the boner from being out in the park like that, out in the open that way. It was having the boner that gave me the boner.

She made me sit on a swing and swing in the park, with my clothes off, with that boner of mine. As far as I know, she just watched me. She never took her own clothes off. I think I wanted her to take her clothes off. I think I must have asked her, at some point, if she, too, would be taking her clothes off. But she must have said no. She must have liked seeing me naked like that. A little boy like that with the little boner I had. She must have liked that.

It was not because I wanted to see her naked that I asked her to take her clothes off. That was not why I asked her. I asked her because I had my clothes off, and I did not want to have my clothes off and then not have her have her clothes off. It was a matter of having.

I think she must have told me she would take her clothes off. She must have told me if I took my clothes off, she would take her clothes off. In order to get me to take my clothes off, I think she must, at some point, have told me she, too, would be taking her clothes off. Now that I think about it, I think she must have left me there, swinging on that swing with my clothes off, and her running off, away from the park, leaving me there with my clothes off, swinging on the swing like that, with my boner poking in the air.

And it wasn’t a park. It was somebody’s backyard. It was a big backyard. More of a forest, really. It must have been some kind of estate, with a swing on a tree back there, and you could not even see the house that the backyard was a backyard of.

~

Sometimes when I sit at my desk at home I’ll just sit there with some papers in front of me, but I won’t really be looking at the papers. Tutti will come up behind me and touch my shoulders. She will stand behind me for a moment with my shoulders in her hands. Maybe she thinks I’m looking at those papers.

~

There was so much love. I think it forced us to eat that way. I think it forced us to eat like there was no way to get at all that love that there was. We couldn’t stand up, there was so much love. It was like all that love was right there over our heads. We were afraid to stand up. All we could do was keep sitting there, eating.

2

AT EIGHT weeks it’s the size of a lima bean,” Tutti says. “By eight months it’s like a basketball full of puppies.”

I look up from the book I’m reading. I’m outside the story, which is only a swamp after all, and a swamp that’s a long way off, with the surface look of a solid stretch of land. Something you could walk over without sinking in. Just five hundred pages, you could say.

“Positive pain,” Tutti says. “Pain with a purpose.” She grunts.

The apartment building speaks. The walls speak. It’s this apartment we are living in that’s telling our story, and we are deep inside it, hardly listening.

~

This is me leaving the house. This is me not looking at the door when I’m home, and here I am not looking back when the other side of the door is behind me. Here is me not thinking much about the door.

Here I am lifting up off the bed, hearing my thoughts drift away, falling suddenly when they reach a certain radius of existence.

I was either inside the house, or on my way to being inside the house. I kept track of my time inside the house.

~

I died. I went to heaven. After a couple of weeks, I was given an apartment.

3

THE WOMAN who sits at the desk across from me was typing something on her computer. She would type something on her computer and then she would stand up and do some kind of a little dance. Then she would sit back down and start typing again. Each time she did the dance, she did it a little different. She would wiggle her hips a different way. Or put her feet on a different part of the floor.

~

We were all sitting in the car. There was Harold, who could not hear out of his right ear since his father hammered him in the head one night when Harold was asleep in his bed. There was Ronnie, the mechanic, who could fix any car and never charged anyone for his work. There was Bill, who had no car of his own and would ride around in anyone else’s car any chance he got and who always talked about how any day now the deal was going to come through and he would have a car of his own. The guy in the driver’s seat was J.B. It was J.B.’s car. He had had the car for three weeks, but so far he had not been able to scrape together enough money to put gas in it. So we all just sat around in J.B.’s car, parked in J.B.’s driveway.

~

Tutti and I used to watch Star Trek reruns together every night. We got them on video from a guy at my work. This guy videotapes all the new Star Trek episodes, numbers the tapes, and indexes them on his home computer. I would bring home three tapes, with five or six episodes on each, and then a week later I would bring them back and get three more. This was during the winter. We were working our way back to tape number one.

~

Is it my imagination, or did we all, at one time or another, spell “center” the same? The Americans and the Canadians I am talking about now. Was there not, at one time, a single spelling for the word “center,” just as there was, at one time, only one God? I am thinking now of grade three. Did we not all spell “center” the same in grade three?

~

She used to go up and down the aisles not looking at anyone, just going up and down the aisles, past everyone’s desk, telling everyone how to spell certain words, like “gravity,” and “pulse.”

~

She wasn’t a beautiful girl. He didn’t think she was beautiful. She had acne and acne scars from old acne, but from a distance you didn’t notice the acne because her skin was very dark. Her hair was dark also. She wore a black skirt and a yellow blouse and her legs were bare. He felt as though he were walking with someone who had no clothes on. He could smell her skin and feel her breath and he saw the way she let her arms fall, as though she were through with them forever. But then she would hold them up again at the last minute, just a little, and he would wait. When she blinked, her eyelids fell like torn rags in the wind.

~

Dad took the bike out of the car and set it down in the parking lot, and I put my leg over the bar, but I couldn’t reach the pedals. So Dad picked up the bike and put it back in the car.

The next week he did the same thing. He drove over to the mall, got the bike out of the car, and set it down in the parking lot. Only this time he brought some wooden blocks, and he strapped the blocks onto the pedals so I could reach.

4

WHEN WE first got married, Tutti bought us a queen-size bed and now everybody is out in the hall and all the lights are off and I am lying alone in the queen-size bed and all I can see are the red lights on the clock radio.

~

“You see that space in the clouds?” he said.

“What space?” she said.

“That one,” he said, “shaped like a rabbit.”

“I don’t see it.”

They were sitting on the couch.

“Right there,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” she said.

“It’s shaped like a rabbit.”

“It looks like a warship to me,” she said. “A Nazi warship.”

“A Nazi warship?” he said.

“There’s the swastika.”

He looked out the window. “But look at the ears,” he said. “One of the ears is flopped over.”

“Those are anti-aircraft guns,” she said. “And see those little ridges?” She moved her finger back and forth across the air. “Those are little lifeboats.”

They stared out the window for a while. The space changed shape and eventually disappeared. Now the sky was solid cloud, and the wind was picking up. She went back to her book. He kept staring out the window at the sky.

5

IT WAS dark. Mom was running the back end of her car into the trees. I could see the taillights of her car as she backed up and then stopped, and then backed up a little more.

Sammy won’t let me come into his room anymore at night. It’s as though we are involved in a great, big, dangerous experiment. My idea is, you can’t give them enough. You have to give them everything.

When Mom was getting ready to leave, she said, “I can’t find my keys.” She had been standing on the beach, looking at the sky, as though this was everything she ever wanted to see in the world.

Sometimes my mom says to my sister, “Don’t touch my stuff.” She will have all her stuff out of her purse — her little pack of Kleenex, her wallet, her pack of gum — and she will say, “Do not touch my stuff.”

~

Tutti said, “I never ate my salad. I got it out and put dressing on it, but I never ate it.”

“Where is it?” I said.

“I looked at it, but I couldn’t eat it,” Tutti said.

“Where is the salad now?”

“It’s in the fridge.”

“You put dressing on it?”

“I couldn’t eat it. It’s in the fridge.”

~

Like a bedroom at night, with the lights down low, maybe just the television on. Your eyes glow, you can feel them, little coals of warmth.

She’s in the bed beside me. I can feel her there, feel the rise and fall of her chest. I can see the shape of her body, the line of the covers. Beyond that, I can see the world. The world is waiting for me. She’s asleep.

That winter was hell. You couldn’t get out, it was so cold. The car wouldn’t start. Sometimes you would get to work, put in your hours. You couldn’t go for a walk after dinner.

We would do the dishes. She would maybe throw one at me, a plate, usually Corning. She knew it wouldn’t break.

I would get her down on the floor. She would scream. She would bite. She would end up giggling. As I was tickling, I would have to hold back. My hands were like aliens. I had to tame them again and again, and still I would never know.

~

I have never wanted to hang myself, or slit my wrists, if that’s what you are thinking. There are certain ways of talking — sometimes I am capable of this — where everyone shuts up and listens. I don’t know why they do this.

6

I ALWAYS paint my dad as a boor. I always tell people, “My dad says he saw you at the mall today. He thinks you dress funny.”

People never take anything I say seriously. People say, “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t mean a thing he says.” This always surprises me. The fact is, I mean everything I say.

~

My sister used to stay in her room. She would take a piece of toast in there and she would eat her toast and read until Mom came and got her to take her to school. This was nineteen years ago.

~

We were on holiday at a campground and we were having a pretty bad day, so we all went over to the camp store to buy some chocolate bars. At one point we bought some chips. Tutti said they were the lousiest chips she ever ate, and she wished she had gone ahead and spent the big bucks and got a decent brand of chips. How the chips tasted to me was, it was as though someone had taken regular chips and decided at the last minute to sprinkle them with sour cream and onion flavoring, but then they ran out of sour cream and onion flavoring and said, Oh well. Tutti said she thought they would have at least been rippled.

~

I wrote what I thought I could understand. Like the tunnel your foot makes when it drops through the air.

7

I’D LIKE to put my fingers into his beard and believe that that is all there is. His beard, with its silver streaked deep toward the skin. I’d like to believe it never makes it deeper than the skin.

~

I eat chocolate from a bag of chocolates Tutti and I bought and put on the couch beside me when I was sitting on the couch, trying to read my magazines. I have five magazines. Each magazine has an article on a certain subject, and I read them as the wind blows outside, and the waves crash on the beach. Some of the magazines have pictures. One of the pictures is a picture of a sunset over a lake.

~

The only one who has died so far in my life is my cat, Foufou. After she died, we put her in a Xerox box and drove up to my mom’s place in the country. We dug a hole. When Tutti wanted to put a cross on the grave, I took one of the shoelaces out of my work boots and used it to lash two sticks together. Then we threw dirt on the Xerox box and Tutti and I started to cry.

~

They have a waterfall here, with a wooden walkway going out over the water, so you can get a better look at the waterfall, but without causing the kind of erosion thousands of tourists a year tend to cause. Right after we looked at the waterfall, we went over to the store to get the chocolate bars.

~

Things ground into the carpet here include cigarette butts, just plain dirt, oil, wood chips, dead bugs, urine maybe, beer, possibly semen.

~

Dad meditates. He has been meditating for some time now. He says it brings him peace of mind. Lately he has been saying it also stops crime.

~

I may be wrong, but back then, at the time I was sixteen, I think maybe there was talk going on, talk amongst members of my family, and this talk made me think I was somehow central to something, but right now, looking back, I can’t think what.

~

Sometimes I will go out to the porch and just stand there wearing her sweater. I smell Eau de Lauren. I see dogs.

~

I felt there had to be somebody else. There had to be another person, some other person, in some capacity, perhaps at the bank, someone in some position of authority, who was going to be looking at Mom’s checkbook, and Mom was keeping this person in mind whenever she went to fill in that section of her checkbook where she kept track of the things she was spending money on.

What I think is, I think the way she wrote in that section of her checkbook, I think this handwriting of hers had something to do with the divorce. I am not saying I think Mom’s handwriting caused her to have a divorce, or her having a divorce caused her to write things down that way in that section of her checkbook. I am not saying that.

What I am saying is, I am saying I was six years old. I thought there might be somebody else.

~

People really don’t have any point to their life, I thought. I saw some other people who seemed to have no point. Everyone was walking along slowly, not looking for anything to happen. Nothing will happen, they seemed to be saying. But then I saw a young fellow, in a trench coat, which hung open around the suit he was wearing. The fellow had black hair. He was smiling, laughing, talking to some girls.

I see, I thought. That fellow has some point. He wants to talk to those girls. The girls were laughing and the fellow grew more and more animated. Then I went down into the subway.

~

I was driving. Just out for a drive one day. Driving along some road or another, stopping at stop signs without really noticing houses along the way, or vacant lots, or parks, or dogs. I turned a corner and looked in the rearview mirror and saw a woman I had never seen.

~

I might stand out here all night, and people will drive by, laughing at me, saying to each other, “Is that guy waiting for the local bus?”

8

HIS HAIR was caught in the wind. The wind was making his hair into things his hair had never been. He thought he would just lean his head against the seat in front of him for a moment. He was riding the bus and the window was open and things were happening to his hair. He thought if he could just lean forward for a moment and put his head against the seat in front of him everything would be okay. Everything he had accomplished was coming out through his skin, as though his skin were stitched together loosely and everything was coming out.

~

Dad kept coming back down the gravel driveway in his boots. He came back like something big. When Mom moved us kids and herself into another place, Dad came back one more time. He stood at the end of the driveway of our new place with the snow getting on his shoulders. First just his shoulders. Then his hair. I was thinking, He won’t come in. He won’t come in because he is too big. That man is too big for our new house.

~

Some of us used to go there when we were teenagers. Most of the time we went to this other place, but sometimes we went there. And there was this other place downtown. They were always having this guy named Lorne Lofsky, who played the guitar. The place was called Somebody’s Spaghetti House. I can’t remember whose. You didn’t have to eat spaghetti.

~

The young lad with the red tie says, “I would rather not be here.”

The old man in the bowler cap says, “You’re here, aren’t you.”

~

I remember coming down Tunnel Mountain, hearing the girls’ laughter. And then later, being in a shop with them in Banff, hearing them talk about their life at home. I wanted to run.

~

It makes you think they have had their mouths in places their mouths should not have been. They are so busy trying to keep their lips down over their teeth and, at the same time, they are wanting to go ahead and smile. It makes you think there is something in there, in their mouth, that they do not want you to see.

What she did was, she sucked on each one, one at a time. She got one of them in her mouth, and she pulled it into her mouth, and then she ran her tongue over it and sucked on it and pushed it back out, and then she got the other one in there. It was like she was trying to tell me something.

Clearinghouse is what she was saying, but it was her teeth I was looking at. Clearinghouse was in there in her mouth, but it was something else I was trying to see.

She gets me in her mouth and she starts going up and down and up and down, and I keep thinking I should stop her before something goes in her mouth she might not want to have in her mouth. I keep thinking I should tap her on the shoulder. I should tell her something might be getting in her mouth that maybe she thinks is something that should not be a thing that gets into a person’s mouth.

~

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,” I always say.

Or, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.”

Or just, “One, two, three, four.”

Or, “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”

One time I said, “Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate?”

~

There were stretches of several days at a time when I never saw Tutti. I would call her from a donut shop when I was ahead on my run. She would ask me to pick something up. Butter or eggs or milk, and I would put these things in the fridge when I got home.

Sometimes a train would stop directly behind our building. This might happen at four o’clock in the morning. If it was summer, and the windows were open, I would wake up in a fright. No matter how many times this happened, it always felt as though the world was ending.

I understood what Roy meant when he claimed there was some advantage to be had in selling a house that was right next to the railroad tracks.

For seven years I drove a transit bus. Most mornings I had coffee with Roy. Every morning he talked about his house. For seven years he was working on the finishing touches — putting in baseboards, or painting the ceilings. He would do a job and then realize he had done it wrong. Then he would do it over again. He had never built a house before, he told me. He had no idea what he was doing. He was learning from his mistakes.

His intention was to finish the house to a certain point. He would not decorate. He would leave that for the people who bought the house. That would be a point in his favor. That and the railroad tracks. He would find a young couple, newly married, who wanted to decorate their own home, and who wanted to have railroad tracks nearby.

I think there are reasons for wanting to be near the railroad tracks. I think there are places a person can go just sitting by the window, watching the trains. And I think a newly married person might find a need to go to these places.

It has been years now since I drove a bus. I have a job in a library now. Every morning I come in and sit down at my computer terminal. I tap away at the keys. Sometimes I go to meetings. At five o’clock I go home. The other day Roy came to see me. He said he had heard I was working in a library and wanted to come and see how I was doing. I told him I was doing fine. Things were fine, I said. Tutti was fine. Sammy was fine. What else could I tell him?

Roy’s intention, at one time, had been to move up north. He said he wanted to buy a piece of property on a lake and retire up there. Maybe drive a local bus part-time. Maybe cut other people’s grass. Start a landscaping company. He was going to do this as soon as he sold his house.

~

The only time I looked back was one time last summer, just after baseball season. I have felt this sorry feeling ever since. I keep feeling for change in my pockets, and when there isn’t any, I reach inside my shirt and rub the hair on my belly.

I only looked back once, and a guy yells, “Turn back or we’ll blow your nuts off!”

He said, we, as if there were thousands of them.

What do I know? Maybe this whole goddam thing was a mistake. I keep getting this sinking feeling, but all I can do is rub my eyes and go on eating toast.

~

The lady who baby-sits comes out in pink and blue. She could keep on walking, become part of the sunset, never even knowing it was there.

~

One thing was, Tutti was walking slow. I couldn’t stay beside her, she was going so slow. She was driving me crazy, the way she was walking so slow. I tried slowing down until we were side by side, but it only made me madder. So I walked ten feet in front of her. That was okay. I don’t think she wanted me walking beside her anyway.

We got to the beach and she stood at the edge of the water with her shirt on. I went in and swam. I must have swam around for twenty minutes while she stood at the edge of the water with her shirt on.

After twenty minutes I said, “Let’s go.”

On the way home Tutti wore her white sunglasses that make her look like Elton John. I kept saying things. “Look at those horses.” “Look at those cows.” “Look at those pigs.” I even honked my horn at a bunch of cows. Usually this makes the cows look up and Tutti laughs. But today the cows just went on eating grass.

Tutti said, “Don’t honk your horn. Other cars will think you’re honking at them.”

The old lady in the car next to me was wearing those white gloves you see old ladies wear, with lace up to their elbows, and she was looking over at me.

~

Sammy wanted to watch some videos. I told him, “No way. We’re not watching any videos.”

Sometimes he’ll scream when you tell him he can’t watch videos. He’s too short to reach the VCR, so what he does is, he gets the videos and he puts them on top of the stereo. He pushes all the buttons on the stereo, and then he runs over to the couch and gets his blanket.

“Hurry, Daddy,” he calls. “You’re missing it.”

I come into the living room.

“Look, Daddy,” he says. He’s sitting on the floor with his blanket pushed up under his nose. He points at the TV. “It’s Tigger,” he says.

“Hi, Tigger,” I say.

“Hi, Daddy,” Sammy says.

~

At night, when she was in bed, she fell into caverns. These were not dreams she was having. She was falling into her own history, now and then resurfacing long enough to catch her breath.

~

“Three out of twenty people in this room will be dead in the next five years,” she said. “In five years, some of the people in this room will be dead.” She paused to gaze around the classroom, looking each of us directly in the eye. “Five years later, more of you will be dead.” Another pause. “Eventually, all of you will be dead.”

This was grade three. I was getting pretty nervous. I looked around the class to see how other people were taking this. Barton Smiley looked as though he was about to die right now, at his desk. He looked pale, as though he was going to faint. The kids at the back were tipping their chairs back, sniggering together and whispering things.

“Maybe you think I am going to be the first to go,” the teacher said. “But that is not necessarily the case.” She looked straight at the kids at the back. “Some of you will die horrible deaths,” she said. “Not all of you are going to die of natural causes. Some of you will be stricken down by disease. Some of you will die in traffic accidents. Some of you will break out in pustules that will cause you terrible pain and, eventually, kill you.”

I looked over at Barton Smiley. He was slumped down in his chair, his head tipped back, his mouth wide open. His eyes were closed. I looked around the room. The kids at the back were still sniggering. The teacher didn’t seem to notice Barton. I raised my hand.

“Yes, Mr. Sparling,” the teacher said.

“I think Barton is dead,” I said.

The teacher looked at Barton. She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh my,” she said. The kids at the back tipped their chairs upright and leaned forward in their desks.

“Barton,” the teacher called weakly. She came out from behind her desk.

“You killed Barton,” Wiley Pocock said. Everyone looked at Wiley.

“My god,” the teacher said.

She walked quickly over to Barton’s desk, her hand sill over her mouth. “Barton,” she said. She touched him on the shoulder. Barton opened one eye. He opened the other eye. He moved his eyes from one side to the other. He lifted his head.

“Barton,” the teacher said. “My god, Barton.” Barton smiled.

The teacher walked back up the aisle, past the desks, back up to the front of the class. She went around behind her desk and stood for a long moment with her back to the classroom, touching her hair with her hands and smoothing her skirt.

9

THERE’S NEVER any jelly in these donuts,” she said, crossing her eyes, trying to see the donut as it entered her mouth.

“All the jelly is on your chin,” he said.

She turned her eyes down and tried to look at her chin. Then she put her hand up and started feeling around on her chin for the glob of jelly. When she found the glob of jelly, she wiped it off with her index finger.

He tried not to look at her big, bare legs, which looked especially big against the black vinyl seats of the car. When one or the other of them spoke, their voice fell out and joined the hum of the wind on the other side of the window.

Driving down a long gradual hill in a small town where neither of them knew the actual name of the town, he opened the window and put his arm out into the cool rush of air.

“I could live in this town,” he said. Some dogs were standing in a group of trees in a park farther down the road. The car drove past an old man pushing a wheelbarrow with some groceries in it.

“Could you close the window?” she said.

He pulled his arm in and closed the window. He put his hand on the gear shift knob and told her to quit using her toe to pop the cassettes in and out of the tape deck.

It was Sunday and the air smelled of rivers.

~

Tutti says, if your Achilles tendon snaps, your foot just hangs there. We are out running and Tutti keeps stopping to stretch her Achilles tendon. “It’s stiff,” she says.

“Maybe we should go back,” I say.

“No,” she says.

“Don’t snap your Achilles tendon,” I say.

“Don’t be an asshole,” she says.

10

MOTHER IS trying to bake loaves of bread, but they come out hard, like rocks. She tells me to get the hell out to the parking lot and bring in the car battery.

I go into bars with windows. In between loud songs you can hear the sound of dogs.

Some trees have poked themselves up at the sky where the snow has stopped a moment before.

No one gets away from whatever it is that is holding them back.

The black-haired girl goes out to the road and looks up as far as she can see. “Come here,” she says.

My mother and I used to have long conversations where I wanted to run out of the house and scream. She would look up at me, her eyes all baggy and red because of how late it was. The kitchen light hung above us.

~

We were in Quebec one time before we got married. We were walking along the street in whatever city we were in and we were getting ready to go to the bank to get some money, because we were running low on money, and Tutti was practicing what she was going to say to the bank teller.

“Parlez-vous ling-long?” Tutti said.

I laughed.

“Isn’t that right?” she said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“No it isn’t,” she said.

~

Okay, here is a list of the guys who have died this week. Write it down, okay, because I’m not going to say it twice. Bob Simpson’s father died three weeks ago, but I didn’t hear about it until yesterday. Just shut up and write it down. I don’t know what his occupation was, but I do know they cremated him and Bob has the ashes in an urn in his living room. Bob’s in-laws will not come into the house anymore because they believe cremation is evil.

There is only one other one who died this week and she is not actually dead yet. She is only dying. Normally this doesn’t count, but don’t question my judgment, okay? Just write it down. She could be dead anytime now. Anytime. Okay? So don’t question my judgment.

~

I was blowing on the campfire, trying to get some flames to come out of it so Tutti would quit telling me how fucking cold she was. It was almost time to go to bed.

~

She drank coffee and stayed up late, watching TV. She watched old sitcoms. He watched documentaries. He watched them during the day. He watched National Geographic films about whales, or Australia, and these films rose up between him and certain consequences of the way he lived that he felt blowing toward him inevitably.

“I’d like to go to Australia sometime,” he told her. “I’d like to see whales.” They would drink coffee and talk about the films he had seen that day. But she said almost nothing.

The day after he went to get the cream, he could not believe how quiet it was. There were gulls spiraling in the air above the parking lot. There were red and blue and gray cars with no one in them. Inside the grocery store the cashiers stood idle, twirling their hair with their fingers, or tying and untying their aprons.

He was a large lumbering man who moved slowly. Once inside a store, he liked to stop and pick up a piece of merchandise and turn it over and over in his hands, considering the possible uses he might put it to.

She would grab a cart and hurry up and down the aisles, now and then coming back to collect him, to bring him along, to show him something.

~

“What do you want?” I said. It was Tutti. She was calling from work. “Did you call just to bug me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “There’s no one here.”

“You want me to come down?”

“No,” she said. “I have appointments at three and four.”

“Did you think I was coming down earlier to get those papers you copied?”

“No,” she said. “I just called to tell you they were ready. You sounded like you wanted them so bad.”

“I did. But now I don’t care.”

“You going to go now?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “See you.”

“See you,” I said. I hung up.

The phone rang.

“Hello,” I said. No one answered. “Hello.” I stayed on the line for a moment. I was thinking Tutti was playing a joke on me. I stayed on the line until I heard the dial tone and then I hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi.” It was Tutti.

“Did you just phone and hang up?”

“Yes,” she said. “I thought I had the wrong number. I called to tell you you hung up too fast.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, you shouldn’t have hung up so fast after we said goodbye. You should have waited a minute.”

Tutti and I used to do that when we were dating. I would say goodbye and she would say goodbye and then neither of us would hang up.

“I’m going now,” Tutti said.

“Okay,” I said.

“All right,” Tutti said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you,” I said.

“See you,” she said.

“Goodbye,” I said.

Neither of us hung up.

“That’s better,” Tutti said. “You can go now. You’ve done your job.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye.” I still didn’t hang up.

“You can hang up now,” Tutti said.

“Why don’t you hang up first?” I said.

“I like to hold onto the phone a little longer,” Tutti said.

“You hang up first.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye,” I said. I went to hang up but then I stopped. I put the phone back to my ear. “Tutti?”

“Why didn’t you hang up?” she asked.

“I almost did. But then I pulled the phone back.”

“I’ve got to go,” Tutti said. She hung up.

~

He decides to go out for a bicycle ride. For a long while he rides along keeping his head down, not noticing anything. When he looks up, a strange thing has happened. He finds himself in a foreign country, possibly Italy. He thinks he recognizes the bridge he is crossing from a book his mother used to read to him as a child.

11

IT WAS the beginning of spring and all the girls were going around with bare legs, and there was a girl with bare legs on the subway and she was reading a magazine and I said to her, “What are you reading?” and without looking up at me she crossed her legs.

~

The universe keeps striking the same note. I suddenly realize there has only ever been one note. The difference is, I used to wait to hear the other notes. They’re coming, I thought. There was this wonderful sense of possibility.

I am saying, it was always only the one note. The cosmos has no imagination. Look at this macaroni dinner I am trying to eat.

~

Once, I was camping in a trailer park and an old lady made me breakfast. She cooked it for me, but she couldn’t come out and give it to me. She was too old. There was something wrong with her legs.

She sent her husband out. He handed me a paper plate with breakfast on it. There was a napkin with a plastic fork and knife tucked inside.

“My wife made this for you,” the husband says. “She thinks you look lonely.”

He went back to the trailer. He walked through the forest as though it were a cathedral, and it was going to take him the rest of his life to get back to the trailer. I could see the old lady’s face in the trailer window.

~

Tutti and I were living in that apartment where you couldn’t put anything in the freezer because of all the ice forming on the freezer walls. I saw my whole life in that freezer. I saw a guy with hairy legs, living in a cave, eating frozen fish-sticks. I saw God in that freezer.

~

I went out the door, into the heat. I stopped. I went back into the building. I saw Lisa. “It’s a wall of heat out there,” I said. Lisa looked at me. I imagined she was saying to herself, There, but for the grace of God, go I.

I went back out into the heat.

12

IS THAT something you can do?” was one thing someone in class had said. Plus this: “We learned in our other class that you can’t do that.” Another thing people said was: “How will you be grading us?”

I wanted to get at what was most important in my life. Cut to the quick, so to speak. Get to the point. Say what had to be said and be done with it. I didn’t want to fuck around too much anymore.

I had a story already written down. It was about beans. I decided my project would be to cut out all the nonessential crap in my story about beans. Then I would have it. I would have what I was looking for, what I had been looking for all my life, more or less. No doubt people would want to read what I had written this time, since it represented the culmination of a lifetime of searching.

But when I read it over, I saw that it represented nothing. It was just this story where a guy goes over to his uncle’s place and finds all these beans in the cupboard.

You see what I was trying to do, though, don’t you? The beans were supposed to represent something. Having all those beans. More beans than you could ever consume.

There was one moment where the uncle opens the cupboard and looks at all the beans and shakes his head in disbelief, as if he can’t understand how all those beans got in there, how this could be what his life had come to. You know the kind of moment I’m talking about. The epiphanic moment. The moment of revelation. The moment where some little, mundane thing shows us how little and mundane our lives have really been.

Only I guess the uncle already knew how little and mundane his life was, and the revelation was not all that revealing. I don’t think it could have been a revelation at all. More of a confirmation maybe. Like when you see a documentary on TV and you find out kangaroos have no backbones or something. That sort of thing.

~

When the kid came home for the first time, the grandparents said, “Is he warm enough? What are those spots on his face?” The grandfather put his face very close to the baby’s face and looked at the spots.

Pretty soon the mother and the father got in their car and took the baby home. The father mentioned that the baby had no eyebrows. The mother said she thought the baby was an elf, because he had soft fuzz all over his ears. At night, they put rubbing alcohol on the baby’s navel. All of this happened in June, and the summer was another hot one.

~

Tutti went downstairs and put some clothes in the dryer. I was in the kitchen. I could see a guy in a white shirt standing out in the road, looking at various units in the condominium complex. He walked up and down the street, looking at various units in the complex. He stopped in front of our unit and looked at our unit for a while. Someone, somewhere, had their stereo going and I could hear the bass and drums. I was thinking it would be nice, for once, to be able to buy the ten-pound bag of apples and not have half of them shrivel up and rot before we got a chance to eat them.

13

I THINK we have reached a turning point with Sammy. He is starting to hear the sadness in everything that happens. Last night he had a tantrum because I brought him a Kleenex. This was deep into the night. I was tired. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. It scared me.

~

Do you know what it’s like to sleep with another boy? With Rita, that’s what I thought. I thought, This is my chance to sleep with a boy without actually having to sleep with a boy, and all the kinds of things you have to listen to people say when you’re sleeping with boys.

What I am saying is, now that she’s gone, this is when I start thinking this thing about boys, about sleeping with boys.

I’ll tell you something, though. If you could have heard her talk. If you could have heard her talk through her cigarette that way. She would point her eyes down at the cigarette just long enough to get the thing lit. Then she would point her eyes up at me, and she would talk to me through her cigarette.

When she talked, her cigarette bounced.

~

The guy from the Neighborhood Watch comes to the community center and we all go over there and sit in the meeting room and listen to him talk about how to prevent crime. He shows us some things you can only get from a locksmith. Long striker plates, with silver screws designed to be driven deep into your door frame. He tells us if we don’t put the right type of deadbolt on our doors, we might as well leave our doors unlocked.

The meeting room has the smell of a classroom. The smell of years of children being frightened into submission.

~

I had the book in my hand. I took it across the darkness of the bar. Twice I almost dropped it. The second time I thought, Why am I living this way?

I took the book and handed it to an old man and said, “Maybe you want to read this.”

~

You couldn’t put a quarter into a video game in Athens. You would have to use some form of Greek currency. After that, the differences stop, and you encounter things that give us a common existence on this planet. Most involve frightening premonitions of sudden death.

~

Sometimes I can’t tell my wife, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law apart. They all have the same eyes.

I sit in that chair my in-laws had reupholstered a couple of years ago, because the cat had ripped the stuffing out. Now, whenever the cat goes to scratch the chair, my mother-in-law runs over and tries to hit it.

My father-in-law, Jack, mutters, “Goddam cat.”

It was my sister-in-law, Coco, who brought the cat home, about seven years ago. Jack said he didn’t want a goddam cat in the house. He said he was allergic to fleas.

For a while, he collected fleas. He kept them in a plastic pill bottle. He stuck the fleas between pieces of Scotch tape and put them in a bottle. Tutti showed it to me once.

Sometimes I’ll look up from reading and say, “Hey, honey,” and then experience a moment of panic. I’ll look right at Tutti’s face and wonder, is it Tutti, or Dora, or Coco?

I was reading Chekhov one Sunday afternoon, and I saw Tutti out of the corner of my eye. I looked up. Tutti was looking at me. For a long moment I felt lost.

I wonder if Tutti will one day be exactly like her mother. Every year Dora tries to get Tutti and me to go to the Binder Twine Festival to help park cars. If you help park cars, you get free hot dogs. As many as you can eat. Dora and Jack go every year. They direct traffic and eat hot dogs.

Will that be how it is when I get older? Will I look at Tutti and wonder who she is? And will I go on wondering for a long time, until I cannot remember at all? Will I have moments of clarity, moments just long enough to understand where I am and what is happening to me?

~

I was thinking about Horseheads, which is this place Tutti and I used to go in New York, and I was thinking about the big highways down there, about how they curve off into space and then dump you suddenly in some little town, and I was thinking about how the air feels when you get out of the car to stretch your legs in some parking lot somewhere, how fresh and cool the air always feels when you get out of the car in Horseheads.

~

I was at the bicycle shop and there were these two guys in the back who were supposed to be fixing the bikes and my bike was back there waiting to get fixed and I couldn’t hear what the two guys were saying, but then I heard the one guy say, “I found out something you can do with smokers,” and then I couldn’t hear what they were saying again for a while and then I heard the same guy say, “You have to do it for at least two minutes.”

~

When I was a child, I would sit and stare at the television screen. This would be about four o’clock in the afternoon, light flooding in the front window, making it difficult to see the figures on the screen. But I could hear what they were saying. I felt I understood them perfectly, these people on the television. They never spoke to me directly.

~

I would get him down on the floor in a headlock and tell him, “Shut up, you bastard!”

Remember the time we were back by that door? It had just fallen off. I had your dad in a headlock. “Shut up!” I said. All of a sudden it started to rain. It rained into the house.

~

There was a long pause in which everything was a photograph of something that had happened before. Then there was another long pause in which everything was a movie version of the book. After that, we came out on video, only it was the director’s cut, in which Jane washed more dishes.

~

Some days I wanted my name to be a phone number, so when people called me I would ring. I thought ringing would be the most eloquent of responses. The old-fashioned ringing of those black phones that used to be the only phones you could get.

I learned the truth about Touch-Tone when I was nine. The buttons on the keypad lit up on the phone in my grandma’s bedroom.

I wish Grandma could come back so I could cradle her like a phone, take back everything I am, make myself that one, single gesture, retroactive to September 14959.

15

I PUT Sammy in his crib and went out of the room. I closed the door. Sammy started to scream. I went into our room and lay down on the bed. I was waiting for Sammy to stop screaming.

After a while, I got off the bed and started reading things. I read the spines of books on my bookshelf. I went down to the kitchen and read the side of a cereal box. The cereal box was still on the kitchen table from breakfast.

When I went back upstairs, Sammy was still screaming.

~

“Any ideas about dinner?” I yell.

“Fish cakes,” Tutti yells.

“Don’t like fish cakes,” Sammy says.

“Sammy says he doesn’t like fish cakes,” I yell.

“Don’t do it,” Sammy says.

“Don’t do what?” I say.

“Don’t do it, Daddy,” Sammy says.

“What did you say?” Tutti says.

“I said Sammy says he doesn’t like fish cakes.”

“He’s never had fish cakes,” Tutti yells.

“You’ve never had fish cakes,” I tell Sammy.

“Don’t like fish cakes,” Sammy says.

Tutti comes down wearing earrings and perfume and makeup.

“I can’t get up,” I say.

“Set the oven for four-fifty,” Tutti says. “Give him milk. You have what you want. Slice up some potatoes and fry them in oil. Give him some ketchup, but don’t let him have the bottle.”

“Can I use the machine to do the potatoes?”

“Yes,” Tutti says. “Use the slicing wheel.”

“Okay.”

I follow Tutti along the hall to the front door and stand there while she laces her boots.

“Do you think your sister might drop by?” I say.

“No,” Tutti says. She straightens up. “Look at your hair,” she says.

I touch my head.

Tutti looks at me for a minute, then does that rolling thing where disgust comes shooting out of her eyes.

I touch the front of my shirt and look down at my hands.

“I’ll be home around 9:30,” Tutti says. She goes out the door.

Sammy comes wandering up with his thumb in his mouth and his blanket dragging behind him.

“Don’t want dinner,” he says.

I think it’s the sound of it, “fish cakes,” and the way dinner comes along every night, relentlessly, like a bomb.

~

They do look pretty happy. I have to admit. I had heard they looked pretty happy, but I would never have guessed how really very happy they actually looked.

I heard it from Cleo. She called to tell me. She said it made her sick to see it, the way they looked so happy. It just made her sick.

I told her it made me sick, too, but the truth is, I was just saying it. I hadn’t even seen it. I was just saying. Cleo wasn’t listening anyway. She was too busy saying how sick it made her.

Finally, I said, “Well, it’s just one picture, Cleo. It’s easy to look happy for just one picture. Who knows what it’s like when they’re at home. Their home life is probably no different from yours and mine. It’s probably no different. It’s probably worse.”

“Well, it makes me sick,” Cleo says. “The whole thing makes me sick.”

~

Late in the day, I fall asleep on the couch. Tutti starts giving Sammy hell because she has to clean up all his videos. She keeps telling him to be quiet. “Be quiet,” she says. “Daddy’s sleeping.” She puts all the videocassettes back in their cases. Every time she puts one back, she clicks it shut and it wakes me up again.

~

She slams the door and I can hear her in there calling the dog. I can hear her saying, “Fido. Come here Fido. Here Fido. Here boy.”

Then I hear her telling the dog to get the hell over and eat his supper before she wallops him.

Then I hear her call him, “Fucking Fido.”

That dog is a good retriever, though. He’ll retrieve anything. He was just a puppy, and we had him in the front hall and one of us said, “Let’s call him Fido.”

~

Sammy says he thinks the light on his ceiling looks like a bear. He says if he lies at the bottom of his bed and looks up at the ceiling, his light looks like a bear. He tells me to come down and lie beside him at the bottom of the bed and look at the light.

I tell him it looks like a light.

He tells me to try lying at the top of the bed. He says when he lies at the top of his bed the light looks like an owl. A scary owl. I lie at the top of the bed with him. I tell him the light looks like a light. I tell him to quit talking and go to sleep. I get up off the bed and go out in the hall. I stand in the hall.

“Daddy,” he calls.

“Go to sleep,” I say.

“Can I get a drink?”

“Go to sleep.”

I go downstairs and put some water in a cup. When I get back upstairs with the cup, Sammy is asleep.

~

Sometimes I think nothing matters but getting a boner. There are times when this is what I think. But there are other times when getting a boner doesn’t seem so important. There are times when I can’t see what the big deal of getting a boner is. Then, the next thing you know, I’m getting one. And once I’m getting one, it seems as though nothing else matters.

Back then I didn’t even know what getting a boner was. I hated it when I got a boner. No one else in my house ever got a boner. Even the cats didn’t get boners.

~

You know that story about Achilles? About how he was invincible, except for one small spot on his heel? I think that story is a lie. I think a bunch of fucking Greeks — ancient fucking Greeks — got drunk one night and made that story up. What I am seeing here is Greeks with bare chests shining in the firelight, sitting around, drinking nectar of the gods from pewter mugs.

That whole story makes me sick. The mother dipping the kid in the river Styx. The kid going on to become a hero and all the Greeks looking up to him, worshipping him, and then they turn him into an idol, and they still talk about him, right up to this very day. And then this guy — Penis, I think was his name — this guy Penis comes along and nails him in the heel and kills him. Jesus.

~

I need a haircut. There’s no question. It’s just one of those things. To tell the truth, I look like a pig. This is pig’s work though. I should not be doing this work. But there you go. Life deals its blows.

When I finish here I’m going up to redo a drawer. I don’t know what’s wrong with the drawer. I can speculate of course. The handle may have come off. There’s been a rash of that around here lately. Handles coming off. Last month it was door locks.

In this particular case, it may not be the handle at all. The whole drawer may have come off its sliders. It could be any one of a thousand different things.

~

What I did today, what I accomplished, what I survived.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem so bad out here on the balcony tonight with the whole day behind me.

16

I WOKE up, got out of bed, went downstairs, hailed a cab, and took the lid off a cup of coffee.

~

After they’d been married a few years, they went out and got a dog. The dog was there every night when they came home from work. When they’d had the dog for three years it ran out into the street one afternoon and got hit by a car.

He sat beside it on the street until she brought the car around to pick them up. The dog had a name, but that hardly seems to matter.

~

It breaks my heart to think about my father. So I don’t think about my father. I think about my mother. It breaks my heart to think about my mother, too.

~

There were separate things happening.

My mind was thinking, I’ll be a star, I’ll be famous, I’ll be a star, and going through all the usual posturing involved in being a star. My mind was actually doing interviews with itself. “How did you get started?” “What color is your hair?” “Did you feel you were selling out when you did the promotional campaign for Coke?”

My body was walking. That’s about all. My heart was beating and my lungs were filling up with air and the blood was coursing through my veins. I suppose the blood was coursing through my veins. I suppose the old eyes were darting this way and that. And the ears were hearing and the nose was sniffing. All the usual stuff a body does, with the added activity of walking from the car to the donut shop.

I think I was talking to myself, too. Muttering really. “Introducing — da da da da — Ken Sparling.” “Who is Ken Sparling?” “Ken Sparling is … ” That sort of thing.

When I got to the counter in the donut shop I stopped walking.

I stopped muttering.

I stopped thinking.

I had to get coffee.

I had to order it.

I had to open my mouth and say, “Two coffees please. Small. Just cream.”

On the other side of the counter, behind the apple fritters and the bran muffins and the plastic cups of fruit cocktail, was a good-looking girl with broken front teeth.

I said, “Two coffees please. Small. Just cream.”

Here was a coordinated effort. Nothing separate here. Mind, body, mouth — everything getting in on the act and the world beginning to take on an aura of chaos.

My mind was thinking, Good-looking, heavyset girl.

My mouth was saying the thing about coffee please.

The girl was smiling, saying something in a heavy accent. “Cream?” she was saying.

“Just cream,” I said. “Two.” I held up two fingers. “Small.” I pinched the air with my thumb and forefinger to show her small.

The girl turned her beautiful back to me and poured two coffees. I gave her $16.20.

“You want bag?” she asked.

“No bag,” I said, shaking my head, holding up the coffee.

On my way back to the car my heart was beating. My brain kept repeating, You want bag? You want bag?

~

There was this guy who used to take us down into the ravine across from the apartment where we moved after Mom and Dad split up. He used to take us down to walk along the railroad tracks. He must have liked Mom. I think he used to drink wine with Mom. I don’t know what ever happened to him. It was a terrible place to live. Mom used to say the ravine was the only good thing about living there.

Now we live in the town house, and I’ve got this cold I can’t get rid of, and I’ve been sleeping all day. Sammy is off at some birthday party. He’s been gone all day. When he’s here and I’m sick, I just lie there and try to get the energy to do something with him. Now, when he’s gone, I wish I would never have to wake up again.

~

Sometimes the guy across the street burns his leaves in his backyard just to get the neighbors angry. They stare out their windows, watch the smoke curl up from behind the guy’s house. Somebody always calls the fire department.

~

I kept saying: “You cannot have more ketchup, Sammy.” The tree outside the front window was blowing in the breeze.

Sammy wanted more ketchup for his potato puffs.

Tutti phoned. After I finished talking to Tutti I hung up the phone and put more ketchup on Sammy’s plate.

~

Travis and I are the caretakers of this place. What a life we have. We drive into the parking lot early in the morning in our brown cars. It’s so quiet, you can hear the gravel squeak under our tires.

No matter how fast I pick up the garbage, there is always more.

Travis says: “The whole of civilization lies out there in the parking lot. It’s all right there.”

My insides will not support my needs anymore. I am trying to structure the silence under my eyes. Sometimes you are lucky enough to have your hopes dashed in the moment of their conception.

~

When he would get the boot was long beyond him. Out there in a space he pictured out by the clouds somewhere. Partially, it was him that put it there, after he mulled it over, temporarily allowing it space in his thinking.

~

I get messages taped to my mail tray. They are written on pink slips of paper. Phone home right away, these messages say.

I go to the nearest phone, whichever phone is nearest when I read the message, I go over to that phone and I phone home from there.

“Hi, Tutti, it’s me,” I say.

“Dad found a train ride,” Tutti says. “We were over at the mall and Dad found a train ride for Sammy.”

My grandmother died on the weekend. She was blind and senile and then she got pneumonia. So Mom and I went to the funeral in Chicago. We drove to Chicago. It’s a ten-hour drive. When we got to Chicago, I phoned Tutti.

“We’re in Chicago,” I told her. “We’re at the motel.”

Tutti told me the story of how her dad took Sammy to Perry’s Pony Farm. Perry’s Pony Farm is this place in the country run by a midget named Perry. There are some mud fields, some half-dead ponies, and some chickens. I used to go to Perry’s Pony Farm when I was a kid. Perry always had this awful smile on his face.

“You should take Sammy to Perry’s Pony Farm sometime,” Tutti tells me. “He had a great time there with Dad.”

She tells me this while I’m sitting there on the bed, in the motel room in Chicago, with my suit on, waiting to go to Grandma’s funeral.

~

She used to say it, uk-you-lay-lee. We were in bars and she would say, “Is that the uk-you-lay-lee that guy is playing? I love the uk-you-lay-lee.”

I liked to hear her say that, so I never corrected her.

~

Some days I felt like I wanted war.

Or at least a little rain.

17

HE WOULD go home and sit in the big green corduroy chair and hold his hands out in front of him. He would turn his hands back and forth and look at them. He would laugh.

“I’m forgetting something,” he would say. He would say things to himself and laugh.

He would turn on the TV but then forget he had turned it on. He would go into the kitchen and look in the fridge, forgetting he had turned the TV on and that it was still on.

There was a woman living with him.

“You’re beautiful,” he said to her one day.

She laughed. “You know you left the TV on in there again,” she said.

He looked at his hands. He looked at the woman. She was beautiful.

“Is there anyone as beautiful as you?” he said.

She was fat around the middle, and her blouse hung out of her pants. Her face was swollen and her hair stuck out.

“Is there anyone as beautiful as you?” he said.

One day she took him to the beach. He found his penis growing stiff at the sight of her lying on the sand.

Later, he drank milk and went to sleep.

When he woke up, the fat woman was there, on the side of the bed, with no clothes on.

“I have to go out now,” he said. He whispered it. “I have to get a newspaper. When I get back, will you be gone?”

~

If the weather was lousy, we would go buy groceries. Me, Tutti, and Sammy. We would get Sammy a cookie, sit him down in the cart, his legs hanging out the holes, and then we would go around the store filling up the cart. We would fill the cart with things we didn’t need. We would go to the front of the store, pay for the stuff, and then go and load the stuff into the car. Then we would get in the car and sit in the car for a while with the engine running, gazing straight ahead.

~

I own five pairs of shorts, two of which no longer fit. I keep hoping for cooler weather. I watch the Weather Network.

Tutti comes and sits down beside me on the couch. She has coffee in her hand. We both sit on the couch and look at the TV screen.

Tutti has dark hair, cut short, and dark eyes I hardly ever look at anymore. The room is long, like two arms joined in a handshake. Light ribbons through the vertical blinds. The air is wide open.

~

Last night Sammy said he had to poo. So we sat him down on the toilet, and he sat there on the toilet for a long time, trying to poo, but the poo would not come out. If you lifted him up off the toilet and set him down on the floor, you could see the tip of the poo sticking out of his bum, but then, when you put him back on the toilet, the poo would not come out. I ran around the house trying to find something that would help. Then I ran out of the house and got in the car and went to the grocery store. I bought a box of bran and some prune juice. When I got home, Sammy and Tutti were sitting on the couch, smiling and watching TV.

~

I think after a certain point in your life things are never the same. For years you try to figure out what went wrong. You try to come up with reasons. Any reasons.

~

First of all, there is this great clamor about getting some of those posts with ropes, or chains strung between them, the kind you see in banks all the time. Everyone on staff wants to get a bunch of these posts with chains and start stringing them up all around the library.

“Let’s get as many as we can,” someone says.

This all sounds perfectly rational. Like having staplers on all the desks, or getting better office chairs for everyone.

But then, at the staff meeting, when, once again, the matter of the posts arises, something occurs. People want to put the posts in every conceivable location in the library. “We can put them up,” someone says, “and if we find they aren’t working in certain locations, we can take them down again.”

Around the time the talk about the posts is reaching its climax, the microwave in the staff kitchen stops working. We must now keep constant vigil over our coffees, lest they grow cold and there be no way to heat them up again.

Cups of cold coffee begin to appear on every flat surface in the workroom, abandoned, forgotten. The most disturbing occurrence, however, involves the Ping-Pong table on the fourth floor. Some people who don’t work at the library, people who merely rent space on the fourth floor, have begun playing Ping-Pong on their lunch hour. So a couple of the boys on staff here head upstairs, vigilante-style, and try to put locks on the doors to the room where the Ping-Pong table is. Only problem is, none of these guys really knows what the hell they are doing. They start moving locks from one door to another, and, before you know it, they’ve locked themselves out of the cleaner’s closet. They can’t get in. They’ve closed and locked the door, and now they can’t get back in. So they spend the entire afternoon up there on the fourth floor, desperately trying to break into the cleaner’s closet. They try paper clips, kitchen knives, screwdrivers.

That night I go into the house and show Tutti a bag of almonds I have just bought. “Almonds are good for you,” I tell her. I hold the bag of almonds in front of her face. I point to the spot on the bag where the regular price has been crossed off and $1.99 is written in black Magic Marker.

“They’re good roughage,” I say.

I hold the bag in front of Tutti’s face for a moment.

Tutti looks at the bag there in front of her face. She is sitting at the kitchen table with her sewing machine in front of her, with the little light on over the needle.

~

Sammy calls me up at work. He tells me the kids in the neighborhood were laughing at him. He says they were chasing him around the playground, laughing at him. He says he was crying and they thought it was funny to chase him around and laugh at him. He says he hates them and never wants to play with any of them again.

“I hate them, too,” I tell him.

~

They’ve drained all the swamps in Florida, just so you can sit by a pool and look at other people’s towels.

On the way home it rains. We have to drive through Ohio.

I hate Ohio.

~

Let us think about what brought him here, to where he is right now, as a product of everything that has gone before, as though everything that has gone before has been squeezed into a single moment, and from the pressure of all his life pressed together into a single moment he is popping out into the next moment, a moment destined to be so devoid of motion as to be the perfect replication of death.

~

One of the things I had to start doing was, I had to start wearing those rubber things on my feet.

I touched her back. There was some dirt on her back. “There was some dirt on your back,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

She said, “Thank you,” as though she had practiced saying it. Had stood in front of the mirror and watched her lips and said, “Thank you.” And then she had said it again, “Thank you,” only this time she was watching her eyes. Then she would maybe pat her hair. It was the kind of hair you could pat. She would look into the mirror, watch her lips and pat her hair. “Thank you,” she would say. She would say it over and over again.

What I hated about those rubber things was having anyone see that I had them on. I would take them off in the car and then run into the office, trying to dodge the puddles, landing on my toes, trying to make the least amount of shoe as possible touch the ground.

It stuck out, but it stuck out in such a way that it made you think it was not sticking out. She must have used a lot of hair spray, some kind of hair spray that makes it look as though you didn’t use any hair spray.

What I wanted to touch was the backs of her arms. The backs of her arms looked soft. It looked as though the skin on the backs of her arms was going to fall off. I wanted to touch those arms and say, “There,” and then wait to hear her say, “Thank you.”

I think they can make hair spray where it looks as though there is no hair spray. I think it’s just a matter of cost. I think it’s just a matter of the cost of the thing they want to do, and if they want to make hair spray where it looks as though there is no hair spray, it’s just a matter of cost.

I wanted to get the best deal I could on those rubber things.

You thought you could smell it, the smell of the stubble coming out, dark like that, when she lifted her arm. It made you want to taste it. You wanted to taste the smell. Just seeing the stubble, and the bra, the way the bra looked, dark where you could see it at the edge, just seeing the bra and the stubble when she lifted her arm, you got the feeling you wanted to taste the smell.

I wanted her to say it as though I had slipped her something, and what I had slipped her made her eyes grow wide. Only it would be as though her eyes had not grown wide at all. This is how practiced I think she was.

She said, “Thank you,” as if she was sorry for me. As if she wanted to give me something. Like opening her eyes wide. That was what she could have given me. Her eyes, wide open, and me seeing her eyes, wide open like that.

They try to make those rubber things look like real shoes, but if you ask me, it doesn’t work. I don’t know. Maybe if I spent more money. I tried to get the cheapest ones I could find. They raise the rubber on top to try to make it look like laces, but who are they trying to kid? I try to look at those rubber things with an open mind. I really do. But please, who are they trying to kid?

~

You can only get the money in factors of twenty. Sometimes the machine will give you more money than you have in your account.

The question on the machine was: Which account? Press a green button.

~

Before I left, I made him pancakes.

Then I went around the corner, out of the kitchen, and he went, “Daaaddy,” and started to cry.

So I went back in the kitchen.

I had on one shoe.

I turned his high chair around to face the window. I wanted him to look out and blow me kisses when I got out in the driveway. There were still some pieces of pancake in his bowl.

I find empty rooms to sit in. Then I listen to footsteps outside. I wait for the footsteps to stop. I listen for the door to open. This is it, I think.

I turn his chair around and I say, “You wave bye-bye to Daddy. Blow kisses,” and I walk out the front door.

When I was a little guy, my dad used to tie our sled to the back of his car and drive us around the streets in our neighborhood, my sister and I dressed up in our coats and boots, propped up like little dolls, the snow white and clean around us.

18

TOM GOES across the parking lot in the early morning light. He goes into the mall and meets up with the other guys, who are all hanging about by the railing on the overlook. All the guys, hair stiff with gel, are smiling and they all have wonderful gray complexions. Tom has this lick of hair which falls over his forehead. For a while he stays near the guys, listening to their jokes. Eventually, though, he drifts away to buy a coffee at Druxy’s. He stands at the condiment stand, stirring his coffee. He watches the lady behind the counter in the way fellows named Tom do.

Tom goes back out into the parking lot and buys a paper. He tucks the paper under his arm and carries it back across the parking lot to the office building where he works. He goes in. Rhonda is there, sitting at her desk, staring off into nowhere, with her red hair and freckles.

“You’re in early,” Tom says.

“I was over near here, so I thought I might as well just come on over here and be here. So here I am.” Rhonda often talks like this, especially early in the morning.

Her hair is especially red today, Tom thinks.

“Did you dye your hair?” Tom says.

“No,” Rhonda says.

Tom takes sips of his coffee. He keeps taking sips until all the coffee is gone. He closes one eye and squints the other so he can look into the little hole of the takeout cup.

“I think I have some kind of perceptual problem,” Tom says. “I think there’s something going wrong with me. I keep cutting my fingers, for example.” He holds up his hands to show Rhonda he has two Band-Aids on one hand and one on the other. “I think there’s something really going wrong with me.”

“You should see a doctor,” Rhonda says.

Anyway, that’s it for Tom. Thanks again.

19

ONE TIME, Wiley Pocock wrote this long, convoluted poem and read it to the class. This was in grade three. It was the assignment. It didn’t have to be a long poem. Some of the kids wrote short ones. One kid, whose name was Chuck, wrote a poem two lines long, with the word “time” at the end of the first line and the word “lime” at the end of the second. At recess, after Chuck read his poem to the class, he went outside and beat up a bunch of kids in the school yard. He went around the school yard for fifteen minutes beating up kids.

~

I used to drive a school bus in the summer, taking kids to a camp in the city. I picked up kids in the High Park area. It was always warm and humid, even early in the morning. I would go down to pick up the kids and I would have the door of the bus open to get air into the bus to cool me down. The area where I picked up the kids was the same area where I one day wanted to live. I would drive down early, park the bus in front of the school where I made the first pickup, and then I would get out of the bus and walk around, looking for someplace where I could buy a coffee. There was a girl, Sarah, and a guy, Brett, who were counselors at the camp and who were in love. Sometimes they came to the bus stop early and sat together against a wall of the school. Sarah was like summer, because she looked warm and swollen and ready for anything.

~

The other day I took Tutti and Sammy to Guelph. I told them Guelph might be a good town to live in. Tutti wants to live in another town. I had heard about some parks in Guelph that were supposed to be fun for kids, so we went to look at these parks to see if Sammy would have fun playing in these parks. While we were there in Guelph walking in one of the parks, Tutti got poison oak. A couple of days later, Sammy got it, too.

~

Say I knocked, though, and Tutti would not open the door. Say she had the baby in her arms and she was saying, “Hush, that’s your daddy out there. Hush now, and don’t make a sound.”

~

Somebody has been ripping out the pages with naked pictures of Madonna on them. This is happening with all the magazines, including the Greek ones, which always have pictures of naked women in them. Just so you understand, what we are talking about here is every single article with naked pictures of Madonna, in every single magazine we have here.

The other thing you ought to know is, someone is randomly deleting people’s reserves for the book where the naked pictures of Madonna are coming from. We are talking about an employee here, someone inside the system, someone who is going into the computer, calling up the reserve list for the Madonna book, and telling the computer to delete people’s reserves. We don’t know who it is, but whoever it is is deleting vast sections of the reserve list. Management has come out with a strong statement concerning the seriousness of this crime. In the statement there is no mention of the missing naked pictures.

There are two theories amongst us members of the staff here. Number one, someone on staff wants to get to the top of the reserve list so they can have the book and see the naked pictures of Madonna sooner. Number two, someone thinks they’re doing people a favor by not letting them see the book with the naked pictures of Madonna in it. In other words, for this second one, we are talking about censorship.

Finally, after much searching, I’m able to find one magazine with a picture of Madonna, naked. This is one of the Greek ones where I find it. When I first pick it up, I have no reason to believe it will be any different from the others. Like the others, there is a picture of Madonna on the cover. The picture on the cover is not a naked picture. Most of the article is gone, along with the pictures. But for some reason, whoever did it did not rip out the first page of the article. It is the picture where Madonna is in leather and her nipples are coming out through the leather bra she is wearing. On the page facing the picture it says, Let me teach you how to fuck.

~

I hate McDonald’s coffee, but when McDonald’s starts giving away Batman pogs with every drink purchase, I go over on my lunch hour and buy a coffee and three packs of pogs. That night I give the pogs to Sammy and he kisses me and tells me he loves me.

The next morning I’m at work and Sammy calls me. He can’t find some of the pogs I got him. He starts to cry while he’s talking to me on the phone. I can picture him standing there with the phone by his ear. I can see the way his little chin goes when he cries. I tell him not to cry. I tell him I’ll find the pogs when I get home from work.

I know what Tutti is thinking while I’m saying these things to Sammy over the phone. Tutti is standing there in the kitchen listening to what Sammy is saying, listening to him cry, thinking the way I deal with Sammy is turning him into a baby. This, I realize, is the danger in everything I do with Sammy.

In my heart, though, I cannot believe Sammy will ever turn out to be less than perfect. In my heart, the way my heart feels, I know that Sammy will always be as perfect as the little boy I’ve been dreaming into existence since the day I first saw him come out of his mother.

~

A friend of mine at work eats this French-Canadian stuff called Bdoings (pronounced like “boing”), which is curly noodles with cheese sauce on them. One time when she brought in Bdoings, I wanted to see them to see what they looked like, but I came into the lunchroom too late. My friend had already eaten her Bdoings. I picked up her Tupperware container and pulled off the lid. There was something in there which seemed like a tomato she had chewed up and spit out. All the librarians were there, having their lunch, so I go, “Never look inside a person’s used Tupperware container.”

My friend says, “It’s not Tupperware.”

So I say, “You can use Tupperware generically now.”

“You can?” Librarians love this shit. She says she is going to look “Tupperware” up in The Dictionary of New Words.

I tell her, “You look it up.”

Then my friend looks on the lid of her container and finds out what she has is called Lustroware. All the other librarians start looking to see what their containers are. One of them has a container that actually is Tupperware. Another has a Frig-O-Seal.

~

When I get home from work, Sammy locks himself in the bathroom and refuses to talk to me. I go outside and look at the flowers in the garden. When I come back in, Tutti is sitting at the kitchen table looking at the grocery flyers. I tell Tutti I have to go out. She says we should all go out. She says we can walk. She goes over to the bathroom and talks to Sammy though the door. “Sammy,” she says. She holds her head sideways so her ear is near the door. “They have Batman cornflakes on sale at Kmart.” Sammy comes out of the bathroom. He goes over to Tutti. He stands there with Tutti for a moment. Then he goes back to the bathroom because he forgot to turn the light off.

~

Picture a man. Any man you want. Picture two men if you want. Picture your dad. Picture anyone you want. Or don’t picture anyone at all. Picture whatever you want. Just don’t expect me to give you all the details. Because the truth is, I don’t even know what this guy looks like, and as long as we’re on the subject, I don’t care. Picture yoursef if you want.

And another thing, while we are on the subject. If you’re looking for one of those things where they give you the weather every five pages or so — it was a cold, but dazzlingly brilliant winter day, that sort of thing — go somewhere else. Because listen. I am not the weatherman. You want the weather? Watch the Weather Network. Okay? I am not he fucking weatherman.

~

I kept thinking I should write Mom a letter. I made some coffee. I opened the back door and went out onto the patio. For days we had had this terrible heat, but now it was cold, and I was standing on the patio thinking I should write Mom a letter.

This was when Mom was living near the beach. She was living near my sister, out near the beach. I’m talking about the beach we used to go to when we were kids. For some reason everybody has ended up living near the beach.

~

Then one day people with ink spots on their shirt pockets start gravitating toward me.

20

I THINK it is this: I am not sure if I am coming in or going out. This is what I think it is. But I am not sure. I have the key in the door. I don’t know whether to turn it to the left or the right. I think it’s because I don’t know whether I am coming or going. Lately things have been that way. I can’t tell if I am coming or going.

~

A dog is waiting by the back door of our apartment building. Tutti says, “Whose dog is that?” We sit in the car for a while, looking at the dog. Tutti doesn’t want to get out of the car.

I drive around to the front of the building and let Tutti out there. I tell her to meet me at the elevator.

“This is stupid,” she says. She gets out of the car and closes the door. She looks around to make sure the dog has not followed us. Then she walks across the sidewalk and goes in the front door of the building.

I drive the car back around to the parking lot and park in our spot. The dog is still there, sitting by the back door. He comes over to me when I get out of the car. He follows me as I walk around to the front of the building. When I get to the front door I say, “Go away.”

Tutti and I go up to our apartment. As soon as we get inside, Tutti goes over to the window to see if she can see the dog.

~

This is the paradox at the heart of my troubles. Somewhere, deep inside me I suspect, lurks a bowler. This is the dangerous edge I fear will cut into my being, my speech, my table manners.

~

“What did you do down there?” He wanted to know.

“I picked up garbage outside a library in North York,” I told Him. “And also, I plunged toilets.”

“Where is North York?” He asked.

I showed Him on the little globe He kept on a pole by His desk. He went over to the window.

“Shouldn’t you know where North York is?” I asked.

“I know where North York is,” He said to me. He stayed where He was, His back to me, looking out the window.

“The mafia kingpin for the Toronto area used to live in North York. He wore lime green safari suits. This was late in his life, when he was old. He went over to the mall in these awful-looking suits.

“He fell in love with beautiful women whose pictures he saw in fashion magazines. He would show pictures of these women to his sons. He sat in the kitchen of the big house where he lived, and smoked. His sons would go out and find the beautiful women and bring them home and the old man would marry them.

“By this time the old man had only one lime green safari suit he was willing to wear, and he wore it all the time. It was very dirty, and it was crumpled, and he came to his weddings in this suit, and the beautiful women he was marrying, who were always there against their will in the first place, were disgusted by this smelly old man in the ugly suit, but the sons were there with submachine guns, so the women could not leave.

“The sons buried these women in the woods behind the house.”

~

When we first got married, Tutti used to come home with canned goods. She would come home with bags of canned goods, and she would bring the bags into the kitchen and set them down on the kitchen counter. She would stand there in the kitchen, in her coat, with the keys still in her hand and the smell of the outside still on her. “How was your day?” she would ask.

~

There are places in the middle of the city where a sort of silence settles, like snow, and all the noise seems far away, coming toward you like clouds.

~

Headlights kept hitting the backs of her legs. Her legs were white and formless, and they disappeared, eventually, into a pair of white shorts. It was dark enough now that I was losing sight of her. The headlights of cars coming toward her lit up the hair on her arms so she glowed around the edges. Then the headlights got past her and blinded me so I lost sight of her momentarily. When the headlights got past me, I could see her again, but it was growing darker and she was harder to see. What I saw now was mainly motion.

~

I knew him when he could stand up. He can’t stand up anymore.

It’s their heads that I notice.

Okay, who’s the guy who keeps saying maybe, and who’s the guy who keeps saying no? Who are all these guys?

~

Tutti says there is a God because of this Brad Pitt guy, who is the biggest honey of all time, if you listen to what Tutti has to say. Tutti says she doesn’t even know what the movie was about, she was too busy thanking God, because as far as she is concerned, yes, Robert Redford is still the god of gods when it comes to honeys, and, yes, he has still got what it takes, but, she’s sorry, a thing of that nature cannot go on forever. Eventually a person has to pass the crown and, up to now, as far as Tutti was concerned, there were no contenders.

The weird thing is, this Brad Pitt guy even smiles like Robert Redford.

“It’s his son,” Tutti says. “It’s Robert Redford’s son.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not. I saw it on TV that it’s not Robert Redford’s son.”

“It’s got to be his son. I don’t care what they say on TV.”

Tutti is cutting out patterns for her sewing projects. We have this movie with Brad Pitt going on the VCR. Whenever Brad Pitt comes on the screen, Tutti gets down on her hands and knees and starts to howl at the screen.

I get the clicker and turn up the volume. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying,” I say.

“Who cares what they’re saying,” Tutti says.

“I care.”

The next morning, at breakfast, we’re both feeling rough. The movie was a long one. When it was finally over, Tutti lay beside me in bed going, “There is a God. There is a God.” Normally, I can go to sleep in an instant when Tutti is talking to me. As a matter of fact, this is a bone of contention between me and Tutti, because Tutti will be talking to me and right in the middle of a sentence, I’ll just go to sleep.

But with this Brad Pitt thing, things are different. Every time Tutti says, “There is a God,” I flinch.

So at breakfast, we both feel it. I feel swollen is what I feel. I feel as though there is water trapped beneath my skin. My cornflakes are going soggy.

“I’m sorry,” Tutti says, “but if that Brad Pitt guy asked me to sleep with him, I’d have to do it. I hope you could forgive me.”

I look at Tutti with her hair going out in fifteen different directions, and her eyes puffed out. She’s wearing her bathrobe that makes her look like a blue lamb.

~

Can anyone tell me where this area on the map is in the actual building?

21

IF YOU look at a book about Casa Loma, you will see that it originally had three bowling alleys. This was in 1914, the year construction on the castle ended.

When Tutti first learned she was pregnant, we went looking for a house. I’m not as naïve as I once was. I understand now why a guy might want to build a castle in the middle of a big city. And why he might want to put three bowling alleys in.

~

Tutti and Sammy are standing in the middle of the driveway when I get home from work. The two of them standing there. I stop the car and look out the front windshield. Sammy waves.

~

I’ll tell you something which used to keep happening to me, which is, I used to keep thinking I was going to remember something. I kept getting this feeling, as though something was about to come back to me. What I used to do whenever this happened was, I would get all nervous and try to remember everything as fast as I could, and if there was anyone around me who was making a lot of racket, I would think to myself, Fuck, and that would be the end of it.

~

He lifts his face and there are marks on his face that were not there before. No one says anything. The angle of his head shears off the possibility of speech.

~

I was sitting at my desk, writing up an order for blue ballpoint pens. Outside my window large snowflakes were falling out of the sky like white spiders coming down to earth.

~

The sun was shining. Sometimes you might see a dog. The yards were empty squares. There were fences, and pictures of people having adventures. Things went by fast. Girls were screaming.

22

I NEVER wanted to go to dinner with her. I never wanted to put myself inside her, feel her taking things away. I only wanted to go to sleep, take everything with me into sleep, and keep it there with me, alone with me, in sleep.

~

“You know what he does?” Tutti says. “He puts three or four kinds of cereal into a bowl. Then he puts milk on it and walks around the house waiting for the cereal to get soggy.”

This is what Tutti is saying to my sister. They are downstairs talking about me, and I can hear their voices coming up the stairs, but I can’t hear what they are saying, except for the thing Tutti says about the way I eat my cereal.

~

I wanted to see big old houses, big old mansions. I wanted to see the people who lived in them, people whose lives were coming home from work.

~

“Stay off my desk,” I tell Foufou. I go to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. I come back to the bedroom and sit down at the desk and stare at the wall.

Foufou jumps up on the desk. She gets her paw up in the air and knocks the pen out of my hand. It lands on the floor and rolls under the bed.

“Get off,” I tell her. I get down on the floor and get the pen out from under the bed. I pick up my coffee and go into the kitchen. I look in the fridge. Foufou comes in and starts rubbing my legs.

“Get lost,” I tell her. I push her away with my foot.

At 3:30 I go over to pick Tutti up at work. She’s waiting outside the front door. She’s wearing her blue terry-cloth shorts set. She’s smiling and waving. She climbs into the car. “How was your day?” she says.

~

A guy from work says this to me: “I bought these things in China.” He holds the things he bought in China up to my face. I hear the far edge of his voice slip away, sliced off by the things he is holding.

~

I keep my hair short. I have had several different jobs. I brush my teeth. I live in a small apartment. Sometimes Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door. I take the pamphlets they give me and put them in the kitchen. One time a minister called me up. He said his wife’s name was Jewel. He said he was not at all sorry.

~

The guy was looking for a truck manual.

“I need to fix my truck,” he said. He rubbed his hands together and squinted. “I can’t work those computer things,” he said. He was wearing a white T-shirt with the hair on his belly showing through and a dark spot down toward his groin.

That would be his navel, I thought.

“It’s a pickup truck,” he said.

~

Once in a long while I can feel myself spilling out through my eyes. Climbing down over my cheeks. These are the best times. The worst times are all the rest.

~

You know what I think? I think when Tutti calls me at work it just makes me lonelier. I think there is something in my brain, some tiny relay, a switch, only pretty small, which gets tripped by certain combinations of light, making it seem as though there are things, for instance, a TV, in the room here with me.

It sounds as if Tutti is in a phone booth in a foreign airport when she calls me at work. Then she puts Sammy on, and it’s this same foreign airport thing.

~

There’s no way I can know for sure if my sister-in-law is falling asleep on the couch every day out there in Edmonton. How could I know that? I would never ask her. And I don’t think she would ever send us a letter: Falling asleep daily, Yours truly, Coco. Probably, if I found out, I would find out by accident, like her boyfriend would make some remark, some joke.

Say I really wanted to know, though. For my own peace of mind or something. Say it was something I just had to know. For instance … I don’t know … say I couldn’t fall asleep. This sounds crazy, but just for the sake of argument, even though I realize it is crazy, but say I worried about my sister-in-law getting enough sleep out there in Edmonton. Say I suspected she was not getting enough sleep.

And she sends us letters, assuring us she is okay. Telling us, don’t worry. Don’t be such a pair of worriers, you two crazy people.

But say I’m still suspicious. Say I detect something in her letters, in the tone of her letters. She’s keeping something from us. She doesn’t want us to worry.

So I lie awake at night, worrying.

What I could do is, I could insist she send me a videotape of her sleeping on the couch. Not just for a minute or two. For at least twenty minutes, so I know she’s not faking. Then I could be assured. Even if they don’t own a video camera, they could rent one. I’m sure you could rent a video camera in Edmonton. They must videotape things out there.

~

All I can hear is the wind outside. I don’t care. I feel all right, except that I have to take a piss and I don’t feel like getting back out of bed.

Somewhere in the Bible it says you are supposed to stop talking to the people in your family forever.

When the wind is like this, I find it hard to sleep. It was worse when we were in the apartment. I would lie awake in bed and imagine all my stuff out on the balcony blowing away.

23

SOME BIRDS went by the window. Seagulls.

“It’s going to rain,” Tutti said.

I went over to the window.

~

There is this really weird paper you have to get for the machine at work that photocopies the microfilm. This paper is shiny on one side, and sort of yellowy on the other. You have to put the paper in the paper tray with the yellowy side up. If you don’t do it this way, the paper gets jammed in the microfilm machine. Much of my day is spent traveling to and from the microfilm room, unjamming the microfilm machine because someone put the paper in wrong.

~

Someplace along the way I stopped wanting to lie to people anymore. I wanted to tell the truth. But you try telling the truth. Just try it sometime. Maybe you think you are already doing it.

But I’ll tell you something. I learned a lot along the way, looking at all the other liars.

What? That thing about the house? Forget it. Lies. Not particularly true, anyway. Although I do remember the light of it. But I don’t think I stepped out. I think I was pushed.

I learned you are doomed. But I couldn’t quite get the lesson deep enough. I couldn’t get the consequences to give themselves up to me.

So. Here I am. Here is the state of affairs. This is it.

~

I heard my grandma was dead. Before she died, she had a heart attack and went to live in the St. John’s Rehabilitation Centre for a while. She lived a few more years. She even went home to her apartment some of the time. When she died, she left me her car. My sister got the silver.

~

The first book I ever bought was about the red-tailed hawk. I still have the book. I just remembered it when a little girl came up to me at the reference desk and asked for a book about the red-tailed hawk. At first I thought she said, “I need a book about the red-tailed cock.” But then I realized it was the red-tailed hawk. The girl was about six years old.

We didn’t have any books about the red-tailed hawk. There were citations in some of the encyclopedias, but she needed something she could take home. She said she wanted to cut out some pictures. I told her she shouldn’t cut the pictures out of library books. I told her, “Don’t cut the pictures out of library books. Okay, honey?” I called her honey.

~

Tutti and Sammy are in the living room watching Bambi. They want me to turn off the radio so they can hear the movie better. I’m in the kitchen frying bacon. Tutti calls from the living room, “Can you shut that thing off? We can’t hear Bambi.”

I can hear Bambi. I can hear Bambi from out here in the kitchen. I can hear Thumper, too. I can hear all the little fuckers of the forest.

~

If I had more of those tiny decorative magnets, Hammersmith concluded, I could put up more pictures of my wife. He was writing down things he wanted to have for dinner: liverwurst, steak tartare, Filipino bean sprouts.

~

I probably shouldn’t be in charge of putting Sammy to bed. I always put him to bed too late and in the morning he’s tired. He calls me at work to tell me Mommy won’t let him do something. I can hear Tutti in the background telling Sammy to give her the phone. She gets on the phone and tells me I have to get him to bed earlier at night or else I won’t be allowed to put him to bed anymore.

~

I know you don’t respect me for this. But I don’t care.

I live with it.

You try living with it.

24

SAMMY GETS his blue stool and carries it over to the toilet. We have one of those plastic things to put on top of the toilet to keep Sammy from falling in. I help Sammy get his pants down.

When he’s got himself sitting down on the toilet, I ask him if he’s okay there all by himself. I tell him I’m going back to have my dinner. If he needs me, I tell him, he should call.

He’s in there singing Christmas carols. We have a Christmas tape going in the living room. Sammy is sitting on the toilet, singing along to the Christmas tape playing on the tape machine in the living room. I wanted to tell you about this, because I wanted you to know something. Sammy is alone in there. He is in there alone in that bathroom, sitting there on that toilet, and he is singing.

~

Dad goes, “Where are the clips? The wind is blowing the tablecloth off the table.”

Dad’s second wife, Gretchen, says, “You were supposed to bring out the clips.”

“No,” Dad says. “I was supposed to bring out the wine and the salad. The person who brings out the tablecloth is supposed to bring out the clips.”

“Dad,” I call. “I just dropped your burger into the barbecue. You got another one in there?”

“No,” Dad says. “That was the last one.”

Dad eats these special burgers. They are called veggie burgers. They come in a powder. You just add water and then put them in the frying pan. After that you can barbecue them if you want, according to the box. From my limited experience, I find they tend to fall apart and drop between the bars of the grill, into the coals of the barbecue. So far tonight I have lost one hot dog and Dad’s veggie burger in the coals of the barbecue.

“That’s it,” Dad says. “I guess I’m not eating tonight.”

“You could have some salad, Dad,” I say.

“I don’t want any fucking salad,” Dad says. “I hate salad.” He stands at the picnic table, looking down at his plate. He’s holding his fork in his hand. He looks very tall standing there by the table. Everyone else is sitting down, but Dad is standing. I’m over by the barbecue.

“I was going to propose a toast tonight,” Dad says. “I guess there’s not much point in that now.” Dad steps away from the picnic table and goes into the cottage. “Fuck it,” he says.

“Can you get the clips and bring them out as long as you’re in there?” Gretchen calls. But the door slams in the middle of her sentence and Dad never comes back out with the clips.

~

I could have said “Hi.” Just “Hi.” She might have answered. She might have said “Hi” back.

What else could I have said, though? “Nice shorts?” “Nice white legs?”

I think she was trying to look as if she had someplace to go. I’ve seen Tutti walk that way. I know that walk. I knew the moment that woman got beside me that she was trying to walk that walk that Tutti walks. I knew that woman was afraid. I don’t know where she came from. She seemed so small beside me.

~

In the end it’s just him and me at the kitchen table with all the lights out and the blinds closed because it’s so hot. All I can see are his eyes and the way his lips curve.

What I hear is something from a long time ago, a word, or a series of words, leading like crystal to the end of everything.

Before I take him to the airport Sammy stands in front of him with his hands together and says, “You’re going to the airport now.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Bye,” Sammy says. He goes around the corner and out the front door.

~

It’s not that I’m young or naïve or anything. But it seems to me all the stories people tell me these days are one line long and begin with: “I bought these things.”

25

ONE DAY Betty bought a cactus. It was a lovely little cactus, emerald green with tiny white spikes, like sewing needles. It was globe shaped. Betty thought it looked like a little green head. She thought this must be what a Martian head would look like. You wouldn’t want to mess with a Martian, Betty thought, because he would only have to knock his head against you for you to be impaled on all those tiny, needle-like spikes. Betty laughed to herself as she put the cactus in a planter and set it on the windowsill above the kitchen sink.

“This is the nicest little cactus there ever was,” Betty said to herself as she stood in the doorway of the kitchen, admiring it.

In truth, her cactus was much like a thousand other cacti in a thousand other homes across the country, and Betty was nothing but a deluded lonely housewife whose husband no longer came home Thursday nights.

~

Excuse me. I’m sorry. Just a minute. Could you excuse me for a minute?

~

Battle Cat was this kitten we had for a while. We couldn’t keep him because we already had a cat. For two weeks, Tutti and I tried to find a home for Battle Cat. Mornings, while Tutti and I were trying to get ready for work, Battle Cat would chase us around the apartment, attacking our ankles. He would grab on to our socks and hold on as though he wanted to try to keep us there.

Finally, Tutti found a home for him. We loaded Battle Cat and his little dish and his litter box into the car and we drove downtown to an apartment building. We took Battle Cat up the elevator and gave him to this old lady who lived in the apartment. On the way back down in the elevator Tutti cried.

~

I’m trying to tie my shoe. I’m bent down. My cheek is pressed against the top of my desk. I’m groping around under the desk, trying to grab my left shoelace. I can’t find it. “Fuck,” I say. Just then someone comes up beside my desk. I’ve just got my hands on my shoelace. I try to move my head around to see who it is who is standing beside my desk, but my face is locked to the desk. I form a loop on one side of the lace and wrap the other side around.

“Who is that beside my desk?” I say.

“Rebecca,” a voice says. “The new girl.”

“Could you come back in five minutes, Rebecca?” I say.

“I’m pretty busy right now.”

“That’s okay,” Rebecca says. “I just wanted to meet you. I’m introducing myself to everyone in the office.”

“Glad to meet you, Rebecca,” I say. I slip the one loop under the other loop and pull on the ends of both loops and right away I can tell I’ve done it. I’ve tied a bow under my desk. I pull my cheek up off the desk and realize I’ve been sweating and my face is stuck a little. It makes a popping sound when I lift it off.

“I did it,” I say out loud. Some of the bozos at the desks in front of me turn around to see what I’ve done.

~

Tutti is sitting beside me, stuffing this stuffed cat she is making.

Tutti made one of these stuffed cats before. I watch her stuff the stuffing in.

The last time Tutti made one of these stuffed cats, she gave it to my sister. This one is for Tutti’s sister.

“Do you think we’ll be here for the rest of our lives?” Tutti asks.

“You mean here here or here anywhere?” I say.

“I don’t know what I mean,” Tutti says.

~

One day, I go to work and my desk is gone. There’s a space on the floor where it used to be. The chair is gone, too, and so is my picture of Tutti.

All my pens are gone, my paper, my coffee mug with the picture of Gandhi on it, which I got from Texaco, my Big Mac coupons, my naked-lady letter opener, gone. All of it. Gone.

I go into the washroom, turn on the water, roll out some paper towels, blow my nose, flush the urinal, pace around, look up at the ceiling, look down at my toes, wring my hands, lock myself in the stall, and begin to weep.

After I have my little weep, I go back out to the workroom and do what work I can without my desk, which is no work. The manager calls me into her office and fires me, so I go home, have a lemonade, and sit at the kitchen table reading grocery flyers. I kick off my shoes and put on some music. I daydream about this one time, years ago, when I was a rock star and people wanted important things, like my autograph, or a piece of my underwear.

~

I was thinking about Dad and suddenly I started trying to think about what it would be like to think about Dad if it was not Dad I was thinking about.

26

ONCE A small boy went into a convenience store and bought a cherry popsicle. He took the popsicle out to the parking lot of the convenience store and ate it, sitting on the cement parking abutment. When the popsicle was gone, he stuck the popsicle sticks in his pocket. Then he went back into the convenience store and bought another cherry popsicle. He went back out to the parking lot and ate this cherry popsicle, too. He kept on doing this all night, until he felt like a bag of shit. At seven in the morning, with the sun coming up, he looked like a bag of shit, too. He was a fat kid, with not very many friends, and his pocket linings were stuck to the skin on his legs from all the cherry popsicle sticks he had stuck in there. He looked as if he had been shot in the legs, and he sort of walked that way as well, from how gross it felt having the skin ripped off his legs as he walked along.

When the fat boy got home, he dumped all his popsicle sticks on the table in the living room. He went and got a tube of white glue and started gluing. His parents were upstairs in their bedroom, asleep. When they came down, they found their tubby son asleep on the couch with his pants off. Nearby, a bunch of popsicle sticks were glued together to form what looked like an abandoned shack in the Ozark Mountains.

The tubby boy took the shack in for show-and-tell at school. Nobody liked him anyway. Girls stuck their finger in their throat when they saw him coming. He took his shack up to the front of the class and set it on the teacher’s desk. He stood there at the front of the class, grinning.

27

I AM having these thoughts about what the waitress is maybe thinking about all these crumpled napkins on the table, and all these little ketchup packets torn open with the little corners torn off and sitting in little clusters in various places on the table, leaking. I keep asking the waitress for more of these little packets of ketchup. The waitress keeps bringing me more coffee and I keep opening the little packets of cream, trying to see where I can put these little packets of cream on the table once they are empty. Sammy keeps saying, “I’m Sammy. I’m two.” Every time the waitress comes to our table, she smiles and gives me more coffee. I am holding on to one of these little packets of cream, which is empty now because I have put the cream into my coffee, and I am trying to see some place on the table where I can put the little packet down where the waitress will not come by and look at the table and say to herself, “Oh my god!” Sammy is dipping his sleeve in the ketchup and I am trying to wipe the ketchup off with napkins and pretty soon the napkins are all crumpled up and lying on the table, covered in ketchup, and I am getting napkins off of other tables where no one is sitting and there are so many napkins and they all have ketchup all over them and I am trying to think where to put this empty packet of cream.

~

Whenever Sammy slept, I would go outside quick, before he woke up. I felt that terrible power that flies out of you as soon as it gathers. Sammy liked to get a stick and smash it into the bushes in front of the house. We live in a town house, so we share the front bushes with the people who live next door. He felt love for his children. We would know it, that it was enough for people in this world to feel love for their children and that this would be enough. I would tell Sammy to stop smashing the bushes and he would stop. He would start smashing the tree out front, which we also share, and the bark would come showering off. You didn’t have to do anything. Consequently, I came to believe there wasn’t any such thing as love. I said, “Don’t you want to keep things nice?” Secretly, I was glad he was doing it. I thought that love was a thing that could exist only beyond itself, in the moments that generate it, and that the moments that generate love themselves obliterate it.

~

I was trying to write a poem. It was going to be about everything. Just a simple description of everything in my life. Some of the things I have been watching on TV, for instance.

I have to go to work now.

~

Jane was alone, washing the dishes, and she turned around and looked at me.

“Everyone is gone,” she said. “They left me to do the dishes.”

“I’m going home,” I said.

28

THEY GAVE her this job where she carried the wooden A-frame up the wheelchair ramp and set it in front of the theater entrance. Then she went back down the ramp and got the sign and carried it up the ramp and put it on the A-frame. There was a guy at the top of the ramp who kept looking at her. He kept looking at her tits. She never said anything to him.

29

I HATE these bastards. You know? Can you hear this? Listen. Look at this. You see that space there? That’s the guy’s mouth. The guy in the painting, on the bridge, with the mouth. Do you know that one? I use that same mouth, the “o” mouth, on the ghosts I hang in the front tree for Sammy on Halloween.

~

First, Tutti tells me I should take the eggs out of the pot and put them in a bowl.

Then she tells me I should put the eggs in the fridge.

Then she starts telling me about some fat kid she knows who she says drinks too much pop.

I tell her to quit telling me how to make egg salad sandwiches.

I tell her, “Leave me alone. I can make egg salad sandwiches myself.”

“I don’t want mayonnaise,” Tutti says. “I want Miracle Whip.”

I get the Miracle Whip out of the fridge. I get a fork and stick it in the middle of the Miracle Whip.

~

I decided to go over and see this woman. I wanted to see how she lived. I wanted to see what she ate for breakfast.

I decided to go over right away. I walked.

On the way over I saw signs. I looked in the trees and in the bushes, in the clouds, in my shoelaces. I saw a sign in a section of sidewalk on Walnut Grove Boulevard.

~

In the morning, he comes down the stairs and he wants me to play with him. He says, “Can we play, Daddy?”

I tell him I have to go to work.

He tries to think of ways to make me stay and play with him. He says, “Just a tiny bit.”

I tell him I have to have my breakfast and then I have to go to work.

But I shouldn’t have my breakfast, should I? Why should I have my breakfast? On the day I die, when I look back on this, and I remember choosing breakfast over playing with Sammy, how is this going to make me feel?

~

God was sitting in a movie theater. It was the early show. The guy sitting next to God was eating popcorn.

~

My theory was it was the O-ring which had gone, so I took apart the cartridge. The O-ring looked fine. But you can never tell with an O-ring. Sometimes they will look fine, but then there is a tiny fissure in them which will render them useless. O-rings cost ninety-nine cents for a package of two.

That night I dreamed I was ninety-three years old and the woman at the desk next to mine at work was calling the paramedics.

30

PETRA, WHO works with me supervising the part-timers, likes to tell me stories about how she and her husband bought this old house in the country and fixed it up. I like to sit and listen to these stories, because Petra really knows how to tell them. Petra calls them decorating stories, because they are all about how she and her husband are decorating their house.

One day Petra has this idea where the part-timers will sign out their elevator keys in pencil. You have to have an elevator key to get on the elevator here. If the part-timers sign out their elevator keys in pencil, we can erase the slips of paper they sign them out on and then use them again. Petra wants to help the environment.

At the part-timers’ meeting we tell all the part-timers we want them using pencil to sign the little slips of paper they sign to get their keys out, and when they turn their keys back in, they should give the slips of paper back to us and we will erase them. We tell them we are doing this for the environment.

I think this is an idea you could only get from Petra. This is what I like about this idea. I have no desire to erase the little slips of paper.

But then one of the managers says she doesn’t like the idea. She says she wants the kids to sign their keys out in pen because she thinks pen will foster a sense of responsibility in the kids. At the next part-timers’ meeting, we tell the kids to go back to signing the little slips of paper in pen.

~

Tutti gives me a piece of paper which lists all the food groups on it. We are sitting up in bed. Tutti writes down all the food groups and then draws a bunch of little squares beside each of the food groups. She draws the squares fast, and then hands the piece of paper to me.

“Each time you eat something from one of the food groups,” she says, “you check off one of the squares.” She reaches over and puts her finger on some of the squares. “When you run out of squares,” she says, “you can’t eat anything from that food group anymore.”

I look at the piece of paper. I put it on the bedside table, on top of the clock radio.

~

The day my mom came to live with us was the same day they came to cut the grass. The guy with the gray hair rode around on the little tractor. The younger guy went around with the weed-eater. It was cool and windy, like autumn, only it was only the first day of August. They drove the tractor up the retractable ramp onto the pickup truck. The weed-eater went off. Everything was quiet. All you could hear was the wind in the trees. Mom was downstairs, unpacking boxes.

~

Don’t lay this trip on me. Like it’s all my doing. Okay? As if you have nothing to do with it.

What I’m talking about is anything like a vase, in the sense that a vase is the last thing you would want to see.

31

ONE DAY we drive out to the country to see Petra’s house. Tutti and Sammy and me. Petra lives in a town about an hour away from where we live. She has a boy the same age as Sammy, so we figure they can play together. We figure we can take them to the park. Petra says there’s a wading pool at the park, and a train ride.

We get to the town where Petra lives, and we get on the street it says to go on in the directions Petra gave me. We pass the gas station Petra said we would pass.

What I am picturing as we go along is this big house with big corners jutting out where the roof comes down, and a big front porch and a screen door that slams. This is the picture I get from all the stories Petra has told me about the house they live in. Instead, what it is is this small house with a hole in the ceiling in the kitchen and people next door who work on their car all day Sunday with the radio going.

~

I go in the bathroom and try to get Sammy to pee, but Sammy just cries and hangs there over the toilet with his little eyes still shut and his blanket clutched up around his nose.

~

We have this secret society at work, the Black Rod Club. We’re a bunch of guys working in a predominantly female workplace. I think this Black Rod thing involves subconscious desires.

The founder of the club sits at the desk next to mine. In this place where I work, some of the women have their own offices, but most of us sit at desks that are all pushed together in a couple of rooms. Jeff’s desk is perpendicular to mine and is always covered with stacks of books and papers. I don’t know what Jeff’s job actually is, but apparently it involves all the papers that are on his desk. Sometimes he puts all the papers and books into boxes and carries the boxes around for a day or two, as though he intends to do something with all that stuff.

When I ask Jeff about the history of the Black Rod Club, he rubs his beard. His glasses make his eyes look larger than they are. He says the Black Rod Club was founded by a bunch of guys with black rods. He laughs. He tells me that in the late 1600s a Scotsman named Roderick, nicknamed Black Rod, came to Canada and founded the Black Rod Club. He laughs again. He says he has work to do.

The room where our desks are has a window at the end, and we look out onto a courtyard with a picnic table sitting in the center of it, and benches under trees. We look at the people eating their lunches out there. We talk about these people. Some of them come every day, and we talk as if we know them. There is one blonde girl who has been coming a lot lately. She eats her lunch and we stare out the window at her. Sometimes a man in a suit comes to meet her. We believe they are having an affair. Sometimes they sit close to one another and look down at their laps. Sometimes the girl laughs and tosses her long, straight hair, and then leans close and brushes the man’s lips with her own. It drives us Black Rod members crazy to see this. We think the man should make his move. We want to see him really kiss her.

Mostly we notice the girls. These girls, whom none of us ever approaches or speaks to, are part of the Black Rod Club. Somehow they have become part of the club.

Today there is a guy sleeping on one of the benches out there. He keeps rolling around, and once in a while he rolls right off. Sometimes he undoes his shirt and talks to himself. Eventually he undoes his fly and, without getting up off the bench, he lies on his side and pees onto the interlocking stones beneath the bench. One of the managers finds out and calls the police. The police come and take the guy away.

I think the men in the Black Rod Club are afraid of something. They all laugh when the police come and take this guy away. They all make comments. There is talk of never having lunch in the courtyard again. Someone asks if any of the guy’s pee splashed on the picnic table. Beneath all this talk and laughter I think there is a kind of terror.

~

Anytime Sammy wants me to carry him, I carry him. Sometimes I carry him from the living room to the front steps. I carry him so he can get his shoes on and go outside and play. Sometimes I carry him all the way to the mall.

Today Sammy wanted to go to the mall to buy Tutti some blocks. “We could give Mommy some blocks,” he says. “Let’s get Mommy some blocks.”

“She doesn’t want blocks,” I say.

“Mommy wants blocks,” he says.

“We are not getting Mommy any blocks,” I say.

“Mommy needs blocks,” he says.

I carry him over to the mall on my shoulders. The air is cold and we go into Kmart.

~

Are you the kind of guy who, when it says, Take One, you always take one? I don’t know. Maybe you don’t get that kind of thing where you are. We get it on the buses.

~

There are things you can think about, where if you follow your thoughts in, no one will ever be able to get you out.

~

Hypnotize me or something, would you?

32

ONE DAY Tutti takes all the bank books and the bank cards and the bank statements and she says to me, “When your check comes in, give it to me.”

~

We just got back from visiting Mom. Yesterday, when we had to leave, Sammy stood outside the donut shop where my sister works and cried. He cried because he wanted a lemon donut. Tutti said he couldn’t have a lemon donut because he already had a chocolate donut and he couldn’t have both. We took him back to Mom’s house and put him in the car. I had all the suitcases on the roof of the car. Tutti was in the passenger seat with her seat belt on. Sammy was in the back seat, crying. He kept crying. He said he wanted to go back to the donut shop.

The thing is, I wanted to go back. I wanted to go back to the donut shop and get Sammy that donut. I didn’t want to hear Sammy cry anymore. He was crying so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. He said, “Daddy, you’ve never done this to me before.” Only, you could hardly tell what he was saying because of the way he was crying so hard.

~

It takes x number of years to figure out what you are trying to say, and then another number of years to find out that what you are trying to say cannot be said. What I want to know now is, what the fuck are you supposed to do with the rest of your life?

~

I took Sammy to the beach today. Tutti is out with Coco, shopping. I don’t know when they will be back.

It was cold and windy at the beach, and I didn’t bring any sweatshirts, because of the way the weather has been around here for the last week or so, and because I always think, once it is July, and it gets hot, it is just going to stay hot. I made egg salad sandwiches with cheese on them, but we never wound up eating them. We couldn’t even swim, because the waves were knocking Sammy down and it was scaring him. We ended up eating chips on the way home in the car. It was the jumbo size of rippled chips, and there weren’t many left, so Sammy would reach down into the bag and his whole arm would disappear. Then his hand would come out with some chips in it. He fell asleep on the way home, and I had to hold his head up with my elbow while I drove.

~

You know those things that look like various breeds of dogs, and you get them in the backs of guys’ cars, where it sits on the back dash and the head bobs up and down? What the hell are those things called?

~

Things would get quiet. Then, after a while, things would get quiet.

33

I GET that letter they send every year from the hospital, asking me to send them money.

~

She kept holding up the little cards with buttons on them. “What do you think of these ones?” she would say. She would hold the little card with the buttons in front of my face and wait for me to say something.

~

It is my belief that you can never have too much playground equipment. At the community center, near where we live, there is a playground for the kids who go to the day care over there. It says, Day Care Only, on a sign on the fence that surrounds the playground. I like taking Sammy over to that playground after dinner, when there are no kids left over there from the day care. I lift Sammy up over the fence and set him down in the playground. We watch the sun go down behind the community center. Then we hurry home. When the dark starts overtaking the sky, we feel a kind of fear. This is in the autumn. The air is cold. From the driveway, we can see Tutti in the kitchen, washing the dishes.

~

I got all my money out of the bank. I rode the bus. I called some of my friends, but they said, no, give it to me loose.

~

Coco once bought a little electric thing that was supposed to shave off those fabric balls you get on your clothes after you have washed them a lot of times. She lent it to me one time, and I brought it home, thinking about all the clothes I was going to save with this thing.

34

I THOUGHT I was alone. But then I hear this banging out in the hall and I say to myself, “I wonder who that is.” I open the door and look out. Gerome is out there. I turn on some lights. I go into the kitchen to make some coffee.

The light is on in the managers’ office, but I figure it’s Gerome who has turned it on, for whatever reason. Then I see Lina, one of the managers, working at her desk.

“You’re in early,” I say.

“I think I set my watch wrong.”

I think Lina is probably lying. I don’t think her watch is wrong. I think Lina is probably the same as my mother.

My mother used to get up at five o’clock in the morning and sit at the kitchen table paying bills. She wrote in her checkbook in this perfect handwriting she has. Sometimes she would get up and turn on the light over the kitchen sink, because she couldn’t get her solar calculator to work.

~

I wouldn’t die. I’d go out and buy something frozen. Or I’d eat something raw. Or go to a restaurant. I have money. I don’t need anybody to cook for me.

~

I unplug the coffeemaker and take it with me into the laundry room. I have the cream. I have a spoon. I hope nobody ever wakes up.

35

IF OUR life together were a book, this would be page 3504, the best page of the book, with the air breathing insect wings, conning the sun like radar blips, low-volume hum of life about to explode onto page 105, when out of the sky swoops the tail end of time, a nail driven down into the front porch, sweeping Foufou up by the scruff of the neck, our twenty-year-old cat carried off, out past page 252, past About the Author, right out the back of the book.

~

I go up the ramp and there are some windows with some scraggly trees looking in from outside and the sky is gray and the wall on the far side of the courtyard is a lighter shade of gray, only there are some dark streaks of grayer gray where the wall is wet from it being so wet and drizzly out there. Always having been here, I’m not sure where I might have been.

~

What I am is an object on the sidewalk with some wind on it.

~

When I was a kid, if you would have asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you I wanted to be one of those guys who gets reports coming in over their desk every day. How I imagined it was, I had this office, with a big window behind my desk, and I was way up on the hundredth floor, and guys would come into my office and drop files onto my desk. I would leaf through the files, and then more guys with files would come into my office and dump these files onto my desk, and nobody would ever say anything to me. I would go home at night and tell my wife and kid about all the reports I had coming in over my desk.

One time I was having lunch with my wife, only she wasn’t my wife yet. We had known each other, say, eight years. Or maybe six. I can’t remember. The point is, I got down on my knees, and I think maybe the TV was going.

~

There are two sounds. Coming home. Leaving home. That’s all there is.

36

As SOON as we get into bed and get the covers pulled up over us, Tutti gets her Milk Makes Sense calendar from the bedside table and starts circling numbers on it. I sit there and watch her for a while, trying to figure out what she’s doing. She does this every night. I get my head over toward her and push it up under her arm and rest my head on one of her breasts. I put my hand on her other breast.

“Get lost,” she says. She gets her hand on my forehead and starts to push. I just stay there, pushing back with my head, and after a while she gives up.

She has a pen in one hand and she’s tapping the days of the month off with the end of this pen. She has the eighteenth circled in dark, black marker. She counts forward and back from the eighteenth. Finally she throws the calendar and the pen onto the bedside table and says, “Forget it.” She rolls over on her side, her back toward me, and goes to sleep.

~

Dad took me out into the driveway and hoisted me up onto his shoulders and I felt the wind. Dad said it was windier up where I was, that my head was closer to the epicenter of the wind. He asked me for a weather forecast.

~

Listen, how much more of this do you think I can take?

37

I WAS sitting in the kitchen, staring out the window, waiting for Sammy to wake up from his afternoon nap, and I started thinking he was dead up there. I starting thinking, What if he’s up there now and he’s dead?

~

I go back downstairs, down the hall with the meeting room doors, and I start sticking my key into the knobs on all the meeting room doors, pulling open the doors and leaving them open. Then I go through the staff entrance, past the desks with papers and books on them, past the shelves with books on them, and I go over to where Paul is standing and I hand him a piece of paper.

~

I have been told it is necessary to waste time. I have begun to believe this is true. When I was nineteen, I got angry when people wasted my time. I don’t know who figured all this stuff out. I want to meet him. Sit down under a tree and talk to him. Figure him out. And then kill him. I imagine he is already dead, though.

~

When he was a baby, and we lived in the apartment, Sammy used to go to the cupboard and drop Tupperware lids down the space where the cupboard met the wall. We didn’t realize he was doing this until the day we moved out. I tried to reach down into the space and get the Tupperware lids out of there, but there was no way of getting them out without ripping out the cupboards, and we had to be out of the apartment by noon.

38

NOVEMBER 21. The third floor is open and the second closed. While second is closed, some things, not yet fully detailed, will be moved to third.

39

THERE IS a store over at the mall near my work where I sometimes go in the afternoon, on my lunch hour, to buy something for Sammy. I bring it home and give it to him after work. Tutti always says, “How much did you pay for that?” I always say, “Three dollars.”

~

My father used to play this game where he’d put us in jail. Jail was the bed in my grandpa’s bedroom. My grandpa was dead by then, but we still called it Grandpa’s bedroom, even though Grandma called it the spare room.

~

I don’t think there is an end to the depth of the soul. Sammy stood outside the video store and cried until Tutti picked him up and put him in the stroller. We were on holidays. Sammy got back out of the stroller. The wind was blowing in the grass.

~

Later, when I went back in his room, and I looked at him lying in his bed, with his blanket under his nose, lying there so peacefully, with his little eyelids closed over his eyes, I felt like I should apologize to him for something.

40

THE SUN was shining. No, wait a minute, the sun wasn’t shining. It was sort of shining. It was hazy. There were clouds. The sun was peaking out. No. That’s not right. The sun was an orange ball. Hold it, hold the orange ball. It was night.

The moon cast a pale shadow — no, that’s been done. The moon was a hole — no, that’s wrong, the moon was not a hole, the moon was bleak, there was something bleak about the moon, about everything. The earth was a prisoner. No, wait! I know. The earth wasn’t a prisoner. She was a hostage. No, she was free, the earth was as free as …

Wait.

There was snow. The snow was like…what? Not marshmallows, definitely not marshmallows. More like a whole lot of toilet paper. That’s it, toilet paper. Exactly. The snow was exactly like a whole lot of toilet paper.

It was New Year’s Eve. No it wasn’t. It wasn’t New Year’s Eve at all. It was summer. There were birds. No, wait, forget the birds. No, no, I know, there were birds, but they were asleep. So there were birds, but there were no bird noises. Wait! I know! All the birds are dead. There are no birds. There were never any birds. Forget the birds.

This is not a story about relationships. There are no men and women in this story. Okay, hold it. Of course there are men and women, all stories have men and women, but in this story the men and women never meet. They live on opposite sides of town. All the women live on the north side…No, wait! All the men live on the north side. Yeah, that’s it — all the men live on the north side of town, and all the women live on the south side.

~

If you think you can say a word, tell a person a single word, without telling the person everything you know, you are wrong.

~

I think a sink skirt is going to look bad in there. I would rather just go out and spend the money and get a proper cabinet. But Tutti has all the money locked away in investment certificates.

~

Tutti scissored the blinds again to have another look.

“Cliff’s lights sure are screwed up,” she said.

“Why?” I said.

“They’re on now,” she said.

“He probably wants them on,” I said.

“At 6:30 in the morning?”

“Sure,” I said. “Not on Saturday,” I said, “but you can’t set those timers that way. People are up for work at 6:30 on a weekday.”

Tutti shrugged and drank some coffee.

“You sure you want to drink that stuff?” I said. “You won’t be able to go back to sleep.”

“Yes I will.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

41

THE THING with Tutti gets more and more real, so it’s as though nothing happens until the words are on paper. It’s as though there is nothing going on in my life, there is no real person who is my wife, there is only Tutti. Tutti is the person who does the same things my real wife does, but it’s as though I don’t pay attention until Tutti does them. As if Tutti watches my wife and sees what my wife does and then comes along and does it better.

~

Some people died while I was in high school. A girl named Florence got hit by a car. Another guy, Dan, got cancer. Dan was away for a long time. When he came back, he was wearing a hat.

~

I remember one time I came home from school and I could not get the front door of our house to open. I couldn’t get the key to turn in the lock. I tried for a long time, until it seemed I would never get into the house. Then I stood on the front walk outside the house for a long time looking at the front door. I didn’t know what to do.

Dad was living at his new home at this point, with his new wife, and I phoned him there.

When I think back to that time, what I remember is my arms. I think of how my arms hung down at my sides.

I stood in the driveway, waiting for Dad, and when Dad came into the driveway I ran over to his car and waited for him to turn off the engine and get out of his car.

Dad went over to the front door and opened it. I was standing beside him, looking around him into the front hall. I told Dad to go home.

~

Tutti says, “Want me to show you how to iron those things?”

“No,” I tell her.

Tutti goes to bed.

After I finish doing the ironing, I go over to the window and look out and see all the lights. I think, Each light represents a possible other place I could be living right now.

I go in the kitchen and move things around in the fridge.

~

Tutti says the last time she was in the sewing machine shop there was a man in there yelling. The man said he would never buy another Singer and he walked out of the store. When Tutti was telling me the story, I pictured the man. The man I pictured looked much like the man who lives across the street from us, only in my mind the man was wearing a hat, and the guy across the street never wears a hat. I pictured this man walking out of the sewing machine shop, with this hat on his head, walking into the cold winter air, and what I pictured was the way the man’s breath came out, how you could see the man’s breath, because it was winter and it was cold outside. What I pictured was the man just standing there outside the shop, with his breath coming out of his mouth, just standing there trying to think what to do next.

~

You need to try to cover all the spaces, each space being a section on the grid, covering the various aspects, each aspect being a moment in the body’s life, with the life being composed of such activities as defecation, bereavement, and, finally, dissolution of the grid.

~

When I first met Tutti, I was skinny. I could put my hands around my waist and touch fingers on both sides. I only went to see Tutti once or twice a week back then. I would leave work at the grocery store, my hands smelling of lettuce, and I would walk up Tutti’s street, the one with the ditches on both sides. I could walk to Tutti’s house from where I worked. I would go up to where Tutti’s old man’s car was parked, and I would hardly be able to breathe. Tutti would be there at the door, with that hair of hers that goes out all over the place.

~

Dad would say, “Try not to hit those cows over there, dear.” And then he’d turn in his seat and wink at me and I would giggle. This was the year we rented the cottage on Lake Huron and we drove up one Saturday afternoon. We stopped in a small town and went into Kresge’s and Dad bought me a plastic bucket and a small plastic shovel. We stopped in another small town and Dad bought Mom a beach towel with seagulls on it. Dad wanted to stop in each town we passed through.

~

Tutti will get rid of that couch eventually. Right now she can’t get rid of it because we don’t have enough money to buy a new one. The one we have now looks like an old dog. Those pillows down there look like floppy ears. It sheds, too. It gives off little crusty balls, and you get them all over the carpet when you get up from lying there and these crusty balls are stuck to your socks.

I tried to get some of those balls off with that little machine Coco uses for getting the fabric balls off her clothes, but I only ended up wrecking the machine. After I wrecked the machine, Coco got mad. She told me those machines are only meant for clothes. She said you weren’t supposed to use those machines on couches. She went out and bought a new machine. She told me this time if I wanted any of my clothes fixed I could give her the clothes and she would fix them. She said she was not giving me the machine again.

~

First I had a milk shake. Then I went to bed. Then I got back up. I had raisin toast. Then I got a yogurt and stuck a spoon in it. I listened for any sounds from the bedroom.

~

I am never going to leave my wife.

42

My DAD was born in 1929. My mom was born in 1936. In 1956, Dad and Mom got married. I was born in 1959. In 1965, Dad and Mom got a divorce. In 1971, Dad married another woman. In 1974, he had a daughter from this other woman. In 1976, he had a second daughter from her. In 1993, Dad phoned me to see if I wanted to go for coffee.

~

Most of the time you couldn’t see my sister’s eyes because of her glasses. She had those glasses that look like butterflies.

~

Walking over to the mall, he was talking about Kyle.

“You know why Kyle is my friend, Daddy?” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because I like his name.”

~

I think eventually, for whatever reason, you have to give up everything. You have to say, I am not this and I am not that. Then, after that, you can sit back and wait to see what happens.

43

THIS GOES way back to the time Dad bought me a steak at a steak house. Back, even, before that. Before I was born. To the year Dad was in England. Or before that even, to the year my grandpa was in the war.

~

Tutti was with Sammy. We were at the beach. I was in the cottage and I could see Tutti out on the beach, sitting in the sand with Sammy. In a week I would be back at work. The phone rang. It was my sister. “We need the recipe for peach bars,” she said. I decided to have some toast.

~

My grandma and grandpa had a little room at the end of the hall where they stored all their stuff. They’re both dead now.

We’ve always had lockers to put our stuff in. In every apartment we’ve ever had, Tutti and I have always had a locker.

I like to go down and stand in the middle of the locker and look at the stuff we have.

~

Some nights I can’t sleep, so I turn on the light. I lie on my back and look up at the ceiling. The fan is on.

~

When Tutti was pregnant, she was always hot. She would lie on top of the blankets with her belly in the air. She could only sleep on her back. I would lie on my side and watch her sleep. I could see her belly sticking up in the air from the light coming in through the window.

~

I woke up. My eyes felt swollen. I lay there for a while.

I swung my feet over the edge of the bed. My eyes still felt swollen. The bottoms of my feet hurt. I stood up. I stood there for a while, feeling my hair. I was trying to figure out how much work it was going to take to fix my hair. I went downstairs.

I opened the fridge. I stood there, leaning on the fridge door, with my forehead against the freezer, looking down at my legs, how the hair on my legs got lit up by the light in the refrigerator. Ever since then the refrigerator light always makes me think of eternity.

~

There’s a guy across the road from us who drives a Cadillac. He’s bald and he comes out onto his front porch mornings to smoke cigarettes. Sometimes his son comes out with him. His son must be eighteen years old. He has long, blond hair, which is very beautiful, and he always wears a baseball cap. You can see that the world is just opening up for him and he has sworn never to be bald like his father.

~

I think when Dad and Mom got married they were making a promise to God. We kids were God. Mom’s handwriting was God. Dad’s need for the perfect hardboiled egg was God. These were the things that were God.

~

What I say is, “We’ll get it done. Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get it done.”

Tutti says, “No, we won’t. We won’t get it done. It won’t get done.”

This is early in the morning. Tutti’s hair is out all over the place. She goes on saying this thing about nothing ever getting done.

She says, “Nothing ever gets done.”

This is what she did when she first got out of bed this morning. She went into the living room and looked at the windows. She kept standing there in the living room, looking at the windows. Finally, she came into the kitchen and got one of the brown vinyl chairs and dragged it into the living room.

Where I was is, I was in the kitchen. I was in there with Sammy, trying to get him to eat his cereal. He had some cereal in a bowl. I was trying to get him to eat the cereal. He kept getting up. He was down on the floor, eating the cereal, and what he was doing was, he kept getting up. He kept taking a mouthful of cereal and then he would get up.

I was saying, “He keeps getting up.”

This is what I was saying to Tutti.

Tutti was in the living room, standing on the brown vinyl chair, hanging curtains, and I was calling out to her, “He keeps getting up! Why does he do that? Why can’t he just sit down and eat his cereal?”

I was drinking my coffee, and the thing is, I could feel how bad my hair was. I could feel that my hair was as bad as Tutti’s hair.

I kept telling Sammy to sit down, to stay sitting on the floor. I said, “You’re not supposed to get up every time you have a mouthful of cereal. You’re supposed to stay sitting down.”

Meanwhile, what I am trying to do is, I am trying to drink my coffee. I keep pushing on my hair, trying to get it to look less bad.

I say to Sammy, “Sit down and eat your cereal.”

“I need it, Daddy,” Sammy says.

“Need what?” I say.

Sammy stands there in his pj’s with the built-in slippers. He keeps standing there looking at me.

The thing is, I know what he wants.

So what I say is, I say, “No, you are not having my chair.”

I phone the guy up. I get him on the phone. I hear his voice. It’s a thing where you try to get as close to dead as possible and then come back at the very last minute.

~

I could hear the kids outside, screaming in the street, and this would wake me up long enough to get all the pillows moved around, so that more or less of them were scrunched up under my belly. I could hear Tutti downstairs making things. Sweaters or brownies or dinner or phone calls. She was always in the middle of making something. Sometimes I would go downstairs and stand in the kitchen doorway for a while, watching Tutti, and I could feel where my hair was sticking out. Then I would go upstairs and get back into bed. Getting into bed felt like falling off a cliff, with the feeling in your chest of knowing you are never going to land. It made me want to cry. I cried when I saw the clock radio, or when I lay on my back looking at the little bumps on the ceiling where the guy who lived here before me had stuccoed the ceiling with one of those little sponges you can get.

44

WE’RE AT the mall with the indoor amusement park.

I say to Sammy, “Do you need to pee?”

“No,” he says.

“I have to pee,” I say. “Do you want to come and pee with me?”

“No,” he says.

“If you need to pee,” I say, “you tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” he says.

~

When we get over to Grandma’s house, Grandma’s not ready yet. She’s not dressed.

“Can I eat the rest of your apple?” I ask Sammy. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, with the seat tipped back and my eyes closed and I can hear the rain coming down on the roof of the car.

“Sure,” Sammy says. He’s in the backseat, sucking his thumb. We’re waiting for Grandma to come out and get in the car.

We go over to the muffin shop and have our muffins.

After we leave the muffin shop, Sammy gets in the car. It’s raining on me and Grandma. Sammy wants to get all the snaps on his raincoat undone.

“Hurry up,” I say. I stand out in the rain, with Grandma standing beside me. Grandma doesn’t seem to mind all the rain that is hitting her on the head. We stand there watching Sammy pull his snaps apart through the rain on the window. When he has all his snaps pulled apart he says he doesn’t want to put his seat belt on.

“Jesus Christ, Sammy,” I say. “We’re getting wet out here.”

I love Sammy. I love him so much it is all I can think about sometimes.

Every five seconds the windshield wipers sweep across the windshield and things get clear again for a moment.

~

One morning I was eating my bowl of Rice Krispies in the backyard. I imagined myself telling people: I was eating my breakfast in the backyard. I imagined various people I was saying this to.

In a future where I had always had breakfast in the backyard, I was sometimes wearing my terry-cloth bathrobe. I would sometimes have the paper in one hand and my coffee in the other.

Years ago, there was only one twenty-four-hour gas station anywhere near where we lived, and this station was south of us. We would always be somewhere north and running out of gas.

I can see my mom’s hair all astray with the gray hairs standing out against the black. She is crying out the front windshield. It is always some deserted place.

Late at night. We are going like hell, trying to get to the twenty-four-hour gas station. Mom is mumbling at the windshield. Us kids are in the back, looking at her hair.

~

We drove to three or four restaurants that night.

I might leave Tutti. I might go to Africa. I might sail, or I might fly.

It’s not Tutti I’m leaving. It’s the phone calls. Coco calls. Says, “Is Tutti there?”

~

I did sit-ups for a while. I don’t have any willpower. I tried watching TV. I would do sit-ups first thing in the morning, or late at night. Nothing worked.

~

Tutti comes down from the cottage, wearing her blue terry-cloth shorts and her bra. There’s no one up here. It’s the middle of the week. There’s one guy, a young guy, up at number 413, but he sleeps all day. Then, around 5:30 in the afternoon, he stumbles down onto the beach and just lies there for a while, squinting up at the sky. My dog, Fido, tried to pee on him once. Fido must have thought he was a log. Fido tries to pee on every log on the beach. We come up for a week every summer and Fido loves to find the old logs he peed on last year. That’s Fido, though. If I had to describe Fido in one sentence…But then, why would I want to? Why would you ever want to describe someone in one sentence? I would want a whole book for Fido. I would insist on a whole book.

~

On my way home from work, I get going the wrong way on a one-way street. I go up onto the curb trying to get the car turned around as fast as I can. I can hear the hubcap of the front wheel bumping against the curb.

At work, earlier, Tutti called me on the phone. “Do you want to talk to Sammy?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Is there something you needed to tell me? Because I’m really busy here. It’s busy.”

“Sammy wants to talk to you. Hold on a minute.”

Sammy gets on the phone.

“Sammy?” I say. “Sammy? Are you there?”

The most Sammy will do on the phone is tell jokes no one understands. Then he laughs this laugh he’s picked up somewhere. I don’t know where he would have picked up that laugh.

~

I went out into the hall and stood outside Sammy’s door, trying to hear what he was saying. He was trying to tell somebody something, but I couldn’t understand the words he was saying.

I went downstairs to put my bike in the garage. I couldn’t get it in because of the way Tutti had parked the car.

“What is he saying in there?” Tutti said when I came back up to bed.

“I don’t know,” I told her.

~

At work, there is this door everyone is supposed to make sure stays closed so that people who don’t work at the library cannot get in.

45

THE WIND picked up the girl’s hair, then set it back down.

All the roses died that winter.

Using her fingers, she mounded up the soil. The following spring she unmounded the soil and waited. Every morning she went to the window and saw a different sky. There are limits imposed on your view of the sky that don’t seem logical. The woman looked out the window and said, “Damn.”

The next day she was up in the tree, at the top of the tree. It was as if she were seeing some edge of something, something that no one else had seen.

~

Sammy gets to ride the next-door neighbor, Veralynn’s, Batman Bigwheel. He can hardly get the pedals to go around. Veralynn is smaller than Sammy and she can get the Batman Bigwheel airborne coming off the curb in front of her house. When Veralynn’s daddy takes Veralynn in for dinner, Sammy struggles up the driveway on his tricycle and parks it in the garage. He parks it in the middle of the garage. He parks it so carefully, I don’t have the heart to move it.

~

I used to say goodbye to everything. I would run down from the cottage in my bare feet and yell, “Goodbye lake! Goodbye beach!” I would stand there in the wind, with the breeze coming off the lake, getting in my hair. “Goodbye sand! Goodbye pebbles! Goodbye sticks! Goodbye trees!” Then I would walk back up to the cottage slowly, my toes curling in the sand, saying goodbye to things as I went along.

Dad would drive us home from the beach and leave us standing in the driveway with our suitcases. Dad and Mom were divorced and Mom refused to speak to Dad. My sister and I would take our suitcases into the house and drop them on the floor. We would stand in the hall, watching, looking out the little front window, watching Dad back his car out of the driveway. Then I would go into my bedroom. There was a little space between the wall and the bed, and I would crawl into this little space. I would lie there on the floor, in this little space between the wall and the bed, and I would cry. I would cry so hard I thought I was going to break.

~

I’m sitting on the toilet when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to our door. They ring the doorbell. Sammy runs down the stairs to see who it is. “Who is that, Mommy?” he calls. Tutti goes downstairs and opens the door. I sit on the toilet with the bathroom door open a crack, trying to hear what the Johos are saying to Tutti.

So far today I have eaten a bowl of cereal, drunk two cups of coffee, and watched a video with Sammy. Sammy made tea in his plastic tea set and brought it into the living room for us to have while we watched the video. It wasn’t really tea. It was just water that I put in Sammy’s plastic teapot from the tap in the kitchen. About halfway through the movie, Tutti got out of bed and came down and sat on the couch with us to watch the movie. Sammy gave her some tea.

Now it’s ten o’clock and the Johos are at the door and I am sitting on the toilet. The Johos are saying something to Tutti about world events. They ask Tutti what she thinks about recent world events. Tutti says she knows nothing about recent world events. This is true. Neither Tutti nor I knows anything about recent world events.

Tutti tells the Johos we are a Catholic family and that she has to go out now because she has a dentist appointment. I come out of the bathroom and go into the kitchen. I can see the Johos standing in our driveway. There are three of them. They are deciding which houses they still need to visit. One of them is talking to the other two and pointing. The other two are looking where the other one is pointing.

“Bloody Johos,” Tutti says. She looks at me. “Do you agree?”

~

Tutti says, “What are those things on your knees?”

I look at my knees. “What things?” I say.

“Those little scabs,” Tutti says. “Why do you have those little scabs on your knees?”

“I always get those,” I say. “Every year. Usually they go away.”

Tutti looks at my knees. “What is it?” she says.

“Psoriasis?”

“I guess so,” I say.

“Are you going to get psoriasis like your dad?” she says. “You’re getting more and more like your dad every day.”

~

I have all my clothes on except for my socks. I pick some black socks out from my sock drawer. I unball the socks and sit down on the edge of the bed. I pull one sock on. I sit on the edge of the bed, going up and down a little because of Sammy jumping on the bed behind me. After a couple of minutes, Sammy lies down on the bed and starts to cry.

Tutti comes into the bedroom and tells Sammy to quit crying.

“Cut it out,” she says. She stands in front of the mirror, brushing her hair.

When we get outside, it’s raining, and the rain is freezing onto the trees. Sammy’s got an apple. I put him in his car seat and he sits in the backseat eating his apple.

“I like the skin, Daddy,” he says. He has only recently begun to like the skin. This is something new. He is always chomping away on apples these days, telling me how much he likes the skin. “This is good skin, Daddy,” he says.

~

Tutti wants to know: where are all the jokers of the world? She wonders if we are wrong about something, if maybe God meant us to live our lives a different way, because it seems we are the only ones living them the way we do.

46

AFTER YOU go out and do things, you get home from doing them and you go away from the people you did things with, back to the people you live with and the things you have done are done and they are nothing but memories of things that were done and where you are is at home with the people who have never done anything and you can try to remember the things you have done and tell the things you have done to the people who have never done anything — but what’s the point?

~

The guy was down in my garage.

When the garage door went up, the light hurt his eyes. He held his arm there. He had whiskers on his face. His face was white. He’d been staying in my garage for a week. I didn’t want him to go home.

“Can you get me a woman?” he said.

I went back in the house.

“He wants me to get him a woman,” I told Tutti.

“Where are you going to get him a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t just go down to the drugstore and get him a woman.”

“I could maybe call some people.”

“I don’t like having him down there.”

“It’s only temporary.”

“I can feel him down there. We have no place to park our car.”

I kept giving him things.

“Are you comfortable down here?” I said. “Maybe I could just come in and look around.”

~

When I was in grade four, I got four red stars. No one got four red stars. After that, I was all set.

47

I GOT to thinking about the drawer in the teacher’s desk where she kept all your stuff. All everybody’s stuff whenever she took anything away from anybody and said, “It’s mine now.” And then we would say whatever it was we thought would get the thing back if we didn’t have it and something were to happen to us, like if we were going to die or something because we didn’t have it. What I got to thinking the other day was, say the teacher took away some kid’s heart pills or like their hearing aid or something like that, and the kid gets run over by a car on the way home because he can’t hear anything. That’s what I got to thinking about, and I wanted to tell somebody about this, so I’m telling you.

48

I WOKE up in bed with Sammy still asleep beside me and I thought, I should stay here in bed beside him until he wakes up. I thought, I may never see him wake up into innocence again. Then he turned his back toward me and pushed himself back into my arms, and I realized I had been right in the first place: I would never see him wake up into innocence again.

~

I was trying to spread peanut butter onto some bread. Finally, I couldn’t spread it anymore. I put the knife in the sink. I left the peanut butter jar sitting open on the counter. I went into the living room to lie down. I looked out the window. There were some trees out there. There were two trees. I could see some of the branches on two trees. This is all I could see.

~

Yesterday a dog was killed in a car crash. I read about it in the newspaper this morning. It was on the front page of the newspaper. No people were killed. Only this dog. The newspaper showed a picture of the car where the dog was killed. It looked like the kind of crash that would kill somebody. They had this picture of the smashed-up car on the front page of the newspaper. The caption under the picture read, Dog Killed in Car Crash!

~

I don’t care about Tutti, really. The fact that Tutti will not get up in the middle of the night and go see what Sammy wants. This doesn’t piss me off anymore. It used to piss me off.

~

When Dad drove into the driveway that time in that strange, blue-colored station wagon he drove, I thought he and Mom were going to go back to being married. I really thought this. Mom was standing beside Dad’s car, looking down at her feet. Dad had the window rolled down. I had not seen Mom and Dad talk together in five years. I felt something important must be happening.

Dad didn’t even stop to talk to me. He waved. He waved as he backed out of the driveway, and then he got the car out onto the street and drove away.

Mom stood in the driveway, the gravel underneath her feet and the trees behind her, looking at her hands.

~

Sometimes I will just be sitting there, like in the kitchen, or in the living room or something, and I will be sitting there talking to Tutti, and we might be talking, or maybe we are watching television, more likely we are watching television, because we don’t sit around and talk to each other too much anymore, or maybe Tutti is cutting out a pattern for one of her sewing projects and I am sitting there watching her, and once in a while one of us says something, but most of the time I am just sitting there and Tutti is just sitting there and Tutti is maybe cutting out one of her patterns, and I’ll look down at my knees and see those two little scabs I have there on my knees, and I’ll go into the bathroom and get some cream and start rubbing some cream on those scabs, and if it’s Tuesday morning all you can hear outside is the garbage trucks going up and down the streets in the neighborhood, you can hear them even if they are clean over on the other side of town, you can hear them drive ten feet and then stop, and then drive ten feet and then stop again, and you can hear when the guy pulls down on the lever that makes the big hydraulic thing go up and squish all the garbage into the truck.

~

I can’t even believe that guy was my dad back then. That was some other guy. That must have been some other guy.

~

There is a big returnable bottle in the trunk of the car that rolls around and bangs into things. It sounds like a small body and Tutti says if I don’t get it out of the trunk and return it soon, she’ll throw it out.

I guess if I had to pick a day to die, I would have picked this afternoon. There are things I never resolved in my life. But at least the weather was good. Kind of cool. But sunny. If you stayed on the north side of the street, you could keep warm.

I know there will be people who will want to know certain things. For instance, do I have regrets? I’m sure that’s a popular concern. Or, what one thing would I have done if I had known ahead of time I was going to die?

I was the kind of guy who let things slip. I guess if I had one wish, it would be to get the world to quit slipping by so fast. I’d like to sit back for a couple of minutes, like on the couch in my living room, and take control of the universe.

49

I WENT back one time, to see how it looked. Sammy was asleep in the backseat. Tutti was in Edmonton with her sister. I didn’t get out of the car. I drove past slowly. I was trying to see if the swing was still in the backyard.

~

“What’s your grandfather’s name?” Tutti asks. Tutti and Coco are just looking for something to laugh about.

“Wynnfield,” I tell them.

They crack up.

“Rennie,” I say.

They laugh even harder.

“Thelma,” I say. “Bill,” I shout.

They stop laughing.

“You never know when to quit,” Coco says.

~

They stay there for a while in the mornings, in that tiny apartment, with a sort of tiny apartment attitude on the future. A tiny rose of hope for the frail thing they have together. They sit on the couch and have coffee and talk. Sometimes they don’t talk. Sometimes he reads and she does needlepoint. They are young, but in another way they are old, as though they have this tiny hope of making it the rest of the way together, but God help them if the rest of the way is a long way.

One day they leave the apartment early and head for an amusement park they know. It looks as though it will rain and she’s not sure if they should go. She keeps watching the sky and finally she tells him to drive to a coffee shop. They can talk things over. Maybe there is someplace else they could go.

He says they would have to do something inside if it’s the rain she is worried about. He keeps saying it isn’t going to rain, but she’s not sure. They get coffee. They buy a paper. He finds a pay phone. They call up a movie theater to see if there is a matinee that day. There isn’t.

In the end they go to the amusement park and after a while the sun comes out and it gets warm.

At the end of the day they come home. He falls asleep on the couch, but wakes up later and watches a movie. She goes to bed halfway through the movie, but he stays up until it’s over.

In the morning, she has to get up and go to work. He hasn’t worked all summer, but he gets up with her anyway. She’s tired, but she puts her arms up under his arms and rests her head on his chest.

~

It is always somebody else’s inspiration you are feeling. Even your own inspirations sneak up on you when you least expect them, and only in retrospect do you recognize them as inspirations, and then only if you allow for the fact that looking back on them divides you from yourself and that the you who knows the value of inspiration will never actually achieve inspiration, and the you who achieves inspiration can never know the windless velocity of inspiration and the terrible effect it has on your respiratory system.

~

Eventually, she said, you’ll have to leave. You’ll have to leave, and I’ll have to leave. We’ll both have to leave.

But as we leave, she said, we’ll both be leaving. You’ll be leaving and I’ll be leaving. But, she said, we won’t, each of us, be leaving the other. It won’t be an exponential kind of leaving, where the one leaves the other and the other leaves the one, and there’s a leaving of one from the other and the other from the one. It will be more a concurrent kind of leaving of everybody from everybody else, where everybody is leaving and nobody is staying.

That’s how desperate things are, she said.

~

I was in a washroom drawing Mozart’s head on the mirror in lipstick when a guy in cowboy boots came in and told me there was another way of drawing Mozart’s head.

About the Author

Ken Sparling is the author of Intention Implication Wind and five other books. He lives and works in Canada.

Content

Ken Sparling
Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

PRAISE FOR DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL

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DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL

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About the Author