All We Want Is Everything (4 page)

So we find him out in Barrie, his head hanging down between scabbed knees. Floor covered in puke, the McDonald’s fries still holding their shape and consistency amongst the orange sludge, except they’re white like bones and for a minute we think maybe the Magician ate a mouse whole or something. Maybe he swallowed a bird or ate a pigeon. We think this because we’ve seen him jump off the roof of a two-story semi-detached onto a child’s trampoline and also watched him pee off an overpass into oncoming traffic in broad daylight. But in the end, it is just fries and all of a sudden no one is hungry. The Magician is rocking back and forth on the floor covered in these white fries and telling the two of us to go away, go the fuck away. His face is covered in dirt and there are fresh marks on his arms oozing something thick and yellow and wrong. He points a finger in the air and the blood blisters glow bright pink under the light.

The Magician has no tricks. He can’t pick a card, any card, can’t guess your age; he can’t even pull a bouquet of roses out of his vest. He has no vest, just old cargo shorts and a T-shirt that says WOODBINE RACETRACK: FOR THE HORSE PEOPLE OF ONTARIO. He has no secret rabbit, no top hat, no amazing feats of illusion or mystery to torment inquiring minds. The Magician is the Magician because of his moustache, a long tendril of patchy fur stretching straight across his upper lip and extending two inches outward onto each pock-marked cheek like worn upholstery. The Magician has no sleeve full of kerchiefs and no assistant to distract the crowd. He only has twenty-two teeth left and he keeps repeating his old postal code like a beacon signal. We try to pick him up off the floor and he shakes us off before stumbling into an iron bed frame across the room. He spits out something green and mumbles that it’s our fault, all our fault, and no one tells him he’s wrong. Even after forty-three days stumbling through the province in some kind of pharmacy-fuelled haze, the Magician’s moustache remains stable and unyielding to the stubble on his face. It stands out against the dirt and flaking skin. It is the one trait we can rely on to find him when he disappears, when he ducks out at work or ditches his apartment. Dead fish and plants remain behind like damp ashes. Landlords call to declare him as an evicted tenant; supervisors announce his immediate termination in letters we receive in the mail. The Magician does not care. He floats along the cloverleaves of highways and lingers in truck stops between London and Woodstock, waiting for a ride, a hit, another rise before the coming fall, because there’s always a fall. The Magician can’t outrun it and Uncle Albert has stopped paying for the rehab and the rental units and the fines for public urination, destruction of public property and the ever-recurring ghost of indecent exposure.

Me and Carl got him in at the warehouse slugging booze and unloading trucks. We spent two hours convincing the night shift manager those snakes tattoos wrapped around the Magician’s stringy forearms were from the army, rewards for blowing up some sand people or whatever lie the manager wanted to hear that night. Night shift managers always own too many guns—always see too much roadkill on their commute home in the morning after everyone has gone to sleep. They clean up after the rest of us and so their world is made up of concentrated disinfectant mixtures, heavy curtains and endlessly detailed over-time sheets.

The Magician lasted two weeks riding the bus, eating ham sandwiches and flossing his teeth during the commute. He told everyone about his days riding horses, the pure thoroughbreds on Uncle Albert’s farm. No one was listening. We sat at a different table to avoid all the shit they threw his way. He tried to tell them about the farm up north of the city, how the grass smelled, what fresh milk tasted like when he was a kid. They all called him the Mexican Pedo behind his back. We tried to get them to change it to the Magician, tried to explain we were his cousins, but nicknames stick worse than ticks once you stepped inside. Mexi Ped came next and after that Maxi Pad followed in its course. They left tampons in his locker and stuffed a few in his lunch bag on breaks. When the cafe served tomato soup, the Magician would find it splashed all down his line, gumming up the works, lingering for days like a dead mouse between the rollers.

He tried to tell them about the one race up in Sudbury, the one where Uncle Al left him down at the hotel bar the night before, the one where he slid off the horse and got his face trampled by That Ghost Just Ain’t Holy Anymore, Juniper, and The Last True Austrian. Their collective hooves rearranged his face and Uncle Al’s number one stallion, Charles Bronson III, broke a leg in two places during the collision. The horse was put down right there out on the track and carted away in a pick-up. The Magician tried to tell them about the medication and the doctors, but they were too busy stuffing Maxi Pads into his newspaper. Carl and I watched as he mumbled about new prescriptions, better prescriptions, and the feeling of bliss, of God, but he couldn’t find anyone like that on the night shift. We found his dead spider plants sprouting fruit flies in his apartment after he didn’t show up for three nights straight. Uncle Al said let him go, let the fucker go. He’s probably in a McDonald’s somewhere asking for change or offering a blowjob. Probably lying in a ditch drinking rainwater again or locked inside a motel room with his pants undone and the television on mute. This time he phoned us from a hardware store.

They call it a youth centre out here in Barrie. They call it a place for people who have been rundown, people with nowhere else to go. No one looks sixteen here, not with rotting cheeks, tired eyes and yellow spots along their legs where the bruises have begun to heal. The Dillson Motel couldn’t keep the Magician anymore, not after he tried to pawn the shower head and let the water flood out half the first floor. The Magician is not sixteen, not even close, but he looks younger than he should. Maybe it’s the patchy nature of that moustache, the way it gathers in tiny bristled bunches on the edges of his cheeks. He is on the floor now and he’s rolling in the French fries, the bone white French fries he bummed off some kid across the room who keeps asking us if we are here to take him too. No, no, Carl says, we’re just here for the Magician, we’re just here for our cousin and the kid says they call him Chester the Molester ’cause he looks fucking forty, doesn’t he? Look at him. That ain’t no Magician, man, no way.

That’s Chester.

Uncle Al kicked the Magician out after he got a hold of some credit cards and crashed the third Volvo towards the end of high school. The Magician said it didn’t matter, he fucking hated horses anyway, hated their smell, hated their eyes, hated the way people talked about them like they were people. They weren’t fucking people; they were commodities like bonds or real estate. They were property and you were lying to yourself if you said you truly loved a horse. It’d be like loving your china cabinet or a fifteen percent increase in your stock portfolio. Like loving a toaster or a Toyota. Uncle Al loved horses so much, the Magician said, because he could always decide when to put a bullet between their eyes.

The Magician called every few weeks for cash and always found new ways to spend it. He got the snake tattoos from some Estonian girl in Scarborough, along with the hepatitis and whatever else was on the old needles she shared with her sister and their brother-in-law. The Magician picked up little tattered pieces from everyone and he clutched them until the stains were his too, until they all smelled the same. He collected all the spare parts he could find, even if they were busted

Carl and I pull the Magician up off the floor and he smiles at us. The teeth that are left are bright and white. He might have stolen more white strips from a pharmacy or grocery store. The staff say he has to go; this is a youth shelter, not a hospital ward. Carl waves them off. The Magician yawns and tells me he is tired. He is so tired and he makes his body go limp in our arms. Carl and I buckle under the load and then we are outside in the snow and I can barely see the car. The Magician is still wearing his cargo shorts and that Woodbine T-shirt, but he isn’t shivering. His skin is turning pink. He shakes awake in our arms, but doesn’t try to move his feet. We drag two parallel lines behind us in the snow. The air smells like McDonald’s fries and vinegar. The Magician mumbles in my ear that we should go watch a movie, go hide out in a theatre for a couple of hours. Only a couple hours until he can feel his feet again. His moustache is filling up with white flakes. He wants to know where we are going.

He asks Carl if he remembers watching
Death Wish
, if he remembers Charles Bronson holding that gun to a mugger’s head on the subway. He asks about that power, about the will it must take to kill a man. Easy enough to put a horse out of its misery if you have to—if you must. Easy enough to pull that trigger even if you aren’t Charles Bronson, even if your hands aren’t steady. My hands are getting cold, we’re all turning different shades of pink out here, but Carl can’t find the keys to the Chevy and the Magician wants to tell us more about horses. He wants to tell us about the best way to feed horses and about Charles Bronson III, the strongest of all creatures, the noblest of the beasts. He says he will ride again. Carl isn’t listening; he’s trying to find the keys somewhere in his jacket. The swirling snow bites at my ears and all I can see is the Magician moving his lips, trying to speak. Every word is swallowed by the wind, drowned out by a howl from somewhere down the highway. Somewhere cold. The Magician smells like McDonald’s and his eyes are pink around the edges. His lips keep making frosted words.

I can’t hear a thing he says.

The funds from the church were deposited in her name. The assets he couldn’t hide in Cayman banks or Swiss accounts were placed in safety deposit boxes that only she could open. The countless dollars invested by friends, family and parishioners—all of it floating in offshore bank accounts or squandered on those women out in Reno, the ones who will lick the salty tears off your face for five hundred dollars an hour. The endless shrimp he swallowed as his belly grew wider and wider, the gold watches he lost in cabs and limos with rented drivers and tinted windows. Albert Kale wants to apologize for all of this. He wants to make amends, but at the moment he is still struggling to breathe as water filters through the windows of his ’87 Camaro, a gift from his wife on their twentieth anniversary. It was his favourite car in their whole garage.

Albert Kale still believes drowning is less painful than hanging from his belt in a jail cell, swinging like some meaty pendulum. Albert Kale believes they would find him with his feet pointing north in the morning like a compass, a reminder of greater constants, of things beyond our brief reckoning here. He believes drowning will be less painful than a prolonged trial, than all those weeks on the stand, than facing the crowds that once came to worship in the house he built for the Lord. Albert Kale isn’t sure if he still believes in God. He knows death in this car in this river won’t happen in front of an audience. It won’t leave a bright red arc behind.

The water in this car is cold and it is up to Albert’s neck now. He keeps his seatbelt on because this is still supposed to be an accident. His heart pills, his liver pills, his pills for a back broken by one of his horses down in Louisville—they float around him in the car like spent confetti. Albert Kale knows he could have swallowed those pills in large handfuls. He has done it before in hotel rooms and on private ranches. Albert Kale is familiar with his pharmaceuticals, but he has no need for them now. He wants his system to be clean when they dredge this river outside his hometown, the river where all the kids used to swim and pitch bottles at passing boats until some girl on water skis took a Heineken in the eye and the cops started patrolling the shore.

Albert Kale remembers his friend Jonah telling him it didn’t hurt to drown. He told him it was like drifting off to sleep, like suffocating in a dream, like falling forever. Albert Kale believed Jonah because they were nine years old and Jonah was from Austin and his Mom never went to church. Albert Kale believed him because Jonah claimed he had once fallen off a fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico, back when his Dad still lived with his Mom and they had two televisions in the house. As he drifted below the water, Jonah claimed, the fish followed him down from the surface. Their silvery shapes began to spell out his name as his chest filled with water. Jonah said it didn’t hurt, not until after. It was one of the Mexican labourers on the boat who pulled him out, who pushed the water out of his lungs and brought him back to life. Afterward, Jonah’s father told him all the splashing scared away anything worth catching.

Jonah called sometimes from halfway houses on the Louisiana coast. He called asking to speak to his old friend Albert Kale. He called because Albert’s ads were all over TV down there, pictures of his benevolent face radiating calm, collected understanding. Albert Kale understood. He understood why a man might hit his wife, why he might cheat on his taxes, steal from his neighbour, or even bury his own child in the backyard without a marker to signify the crime. Albert Kale understood the weak and weeping masses that poured into his holy church on the second and fourth Sundays after the welfare cheques came out. He understood them all.

The water begins to burble around Albert’s mouth and he considers undoing the seatbelt, but his hands are too cold. Jonah said they were still running the church’s ads alongside reports about Albert’s crimes, about the money that disappeared and all those people he promised salvation for a dollar ninety-five a day. Jonah called because all those sermons seemed to drip with the same words he told Albert—back when they were kids, back when Jonah couldn’t spell methamphetamine and didn’t like the taste of cold medicine. Albert hung up on him, but Jonah did not stop calling. He wanted Albert Kale to know about the two years in juvenile detention, about solitude and ping-pong and what it meant to be alone, surrounded by men with old teeth, new wounds and no fixed address.

Albert Kale wants to keep breathing, but the water continues to slip through the cracks of his Camaro. He wants to rethink his options, reapply whatever twisted logic forced him to plunge his vehicle into the water this cold November. He wants to emerge from this enlightened, but the pressure keeps the doors shut. The locks have shorted out and his arms are so tired. His wife will not forgive him for this. She will smile because that is what she does, but she won’t forgive him.

Albert Kale has no ID in his wallet. He can’t reach his back pocket to check, but he knows it isn’t there. It’s on a nightstand somewhere with all his old receipts. Albert Kale wants someone to remember what his face looks like before it bloats beneath the water, before all the fluids in his body begin to turn to gas. His face won’t look like it does on the billboards scattered throughout the Midwest, the ones staggered up and down the back roads and the highways through dead and depleted towns. His face in these ads is clean-shaven. His chins are tucked beneath a bright white collar. It’s his eyes though that cause motorists to pause, that cause men and women in motels without bibles to dial the 1-800 number. They imagine those eyes staring at them like a beacon as they clutch the phone against their neck and listen to Prince after the dial tone, waiting for Albert Kale’s voice to tell them about the fish spelling out his name beneath the water, the ones who told him it didn’t hurt to drown or die.

It was like falling through a dream, he would tell them. Like being lifted up again.

Albert Kale knows Jonah has called this number. Even as the water covers his eyes and small air pockets begin to escape from his nose, he can only think about Jonah calling that number to hear Albert Kale tell his story about the fish and the drowning sensation. Except in Albert’s version, it’s his father who saves him. There is no Mexican labourer—no one thought that would sit well with the listeners. Jonah would call and find Albert Kale there, telling his story in that calm and collected voice, the same one Albert used in interviews with journalists and state’s attorneys and the old lady from 20/20.

Jonah would call asking for Albert, asking if it really was his father. Jonah remembered Albert’s father as a hard man, a man who kicked them out of the attic, who stole cigarettes from his neighbours’ cars and once rabbit punched a teenager in line at the liquor store. The police said it cracked two vertebrae, but no one ever identified the attacker. Jonah wanted to know who this father was and why there was no Mexican labourer on that boat. Jonah called and called until he spoke to Albert Kale himself. Jonah said he wanted to talk. He wanted to know why.

It does not feel like a dream. Albert Kale’s arms and legs begin to spasm and shake in the water as his body fights for air, for a surface he can’t reach. The roof of the car will not budge against his balding head. It is not like drifting off to sleep. There is no one here to grab him. Albert Kale is collapsing from the inside out. Maybe a passing driver will spot his bright red car floating in the river. Maybe no one will notice the bits of Jonah’s shirt still clinging to the undercarriage. Albert Kale knows there will be no one there to judge him after this car finally sinks. Jonah asked him for credit, as if his story about those fish in the Gulf wasn’t a lie, some old concoction from a child’s mind. Jonah just wanted all the things Albert Kale had, all the things now slipping through his fingers, all those things trapped inside this car.

Albert just wants this to look like an accident. He wants to tell Jonah—what’s left of Jonah on the bloody floor of that parking garage—this was all an accident. Each cell in Albert’s body screams for air as his lungs swallow up the brackish water. There are no fish left in this river. They all died back when Albert’s father worked at the mill, back before all of this began to crumble, before Jonah said this was a peaceful way to die. He always was a liar.