Consumption (45 page)

And as they retreated from the fact of the dead girl to the big picture, these dry words settled their grief a little. “I suppose we’re just going to see more and more of it over time,” Balthazar replied.

“Maybe the case report should be published,” she said. “I’ll have to review the literature.”

“It might be quite interesting,” Balthazar agreed, and inanely thanked her for the phone call. “It isn’t often that I get feedback from the teaching hospitals,” he said. As she hung up the phone, Miller did not wonder why.

Balthazar walked out of his office, pulling on his jacket, and left the hospital. He saw Victoria’s house down the road and he walked toward it. This was the day she was to have flown to Winnipeg to be with Marie. It was after nine, and Justine would be in school, he thought. Had Victoria been alone when she received Miller’s call? He hoped not, and, despite himself, and to his great shame, he hoped she had been, as well.

When he knocked on the door, he heard steps approaching it and thought they were too heavy to be hers. Simionie opened the door and when the two men recognized one another, a flash of sympathy wrapped around a core of suspicion flew between them. This was a complex emotion to be communicated in the cast of an eye, but one second after the door opened, Victoria realized who was there and flew at him, her streaked and anguished face swollen and contorted.

She pushed Simionie aside and struck Balthazar square in the face with a closed fist. Him: falling back down the steps onto the gravel; her: following him and kneeling upon the much larger man, hitting him again and again as she gasped and sobbed. “You killed my baby!” she shrieked at him over and over as he pulled his arms over his head and tried to ward off her blows.

Simionie approached her from behind and tried to pull her off, but she flung her elbow back into his face and he let go of her. Every conscious pair of eyes in the hamlet watched this scenario play out—Simionie, clutching his broken nose, Victoria’s elbow crimson with his blood, and Balthazar, wailing like a child, “I’m so, so, sooooorrrrrrry.” He lay on his belly, his huge chest shaking, his arms over his face, his head, sobbing.

“You… you… you… yoooooooooo,” she cried again and again, the strength of her blows weakening now, her hair wet from her tears and hanging against her face and over her eyes, her chest shaking, her baby cold and dead, and motionless, not eating, not breathing, not opening his wee eyes, his little purple lips puckered like a flower’s bud, no matter how closely she held him, the child did not move, did not reach for his mother, just lay there, dead, not suckling, his mother’s aching breast running in a steady stream, milk flowing over the dead child’s chest, to no avail.

TWENTY-THREE

THEY LIT THEIR BONG
and dropped a little coke on some pot Kat had left over. Lewis took pride of place, and was soon leaning back and grinning. The girls followed and then Kat, too, drew deeply on the bong and for a long moment they thought Lewis had been duped, that they had just inhaled vaporized bath crystals.

They were suburban kids, each of them, well acquainted with weed and with E. But cocaine, down, and crystal meth were not as well known to them. These carried the cachet of genuine menace, and so long as the kids were possessed of their suburban timidity, they had not spent their money on such drugs. They were less timid now, roaming between their various sleeping spots—Kat’s room, Lewis’s apartment and the couches available to them—and they imagined themselves to be up for the challenge. The girls suspected in one small and distant part of their beings that they were underestimating the capacity of the world to crush them, but they pushed such thoughts away and threw themselves into entirely new sensation.

And so, as their jaws began to tingle, they did not recognize the first rush of nearly pure cocaine, sweeping through their lungs and toward their brains. As it passed into them, they reeled. The intensity of the euphoric pleasure that struck them that first time was beyond anything they had experienced; these were years full of
new feelings for them, but nothing, not sex, not pot, not new freedom had disoriented them as pleasurably as this.

After that initial, numbing wave of sensation they were silent for many uncountable minutes, and then slowly they began talking and, in throwing out words to one another through that void, they realized that each was not alone there and that they should put out the pipe and not smoke any more.

The girls spoke to each other in low, melodic tones, full of long pauses and gropings for the appropriate adjective, about what they were feeling and how good it was. The boys leaned back and laughed, raw and rippling in their teenaged power and grace. Everyone was too hot, sweating sheets of salt water, as they became aware of their own pulses throbbing flutteringly at the base of their throats.

Kat asked Lewis what he was thinking about; Lewis replied that he was realizing for the first time how fucked up everything was—how he had always thought that, mostly, he was fucked up. But everyone thought that they were fucked up, didn’t they? And if everyone thought that, then maybe none of them were, maybe it was the world.

Kat said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

Beth asked Amanda if she knew she was loved. Amanda paused for a long minute, forgetting what the question was as she looked at the smallest cobweb imaginable in one corner of Kat’s room, between the ceiling and the wall, wondering whether spiders would ever use old cobwebs built by other spiders that had moved on, or died, recycling them. She suspected not, because if it wasn’t being used then presumably this was for a reason—it had not kept its builder well-enough fed. Which was a shame when you really thought hard about it. Love. Oh, yes. Yes, who loved her? Well, her parents in their fashion, she supposed. And her uncle Keith, and… Lewis? She studied him. No, Lewis did not love her, she saw now, but would hold on as tightly as he needed, say what he needed, to stay afloat.

Beth whispered, “I know what you mean,” and Amanda wondered how her thoughts had been audible. “Shhhhhh,” Beth added. “We have to make our own way. The boys are lost in this world. They’re beautiful to watch, but they’re lost.”

Lewis was talking about guns. “They are the most perfect thing humanity has made, a peak technology. They haven’t changed fundamentally now in eighty years. The new ones have plastic grips, maybe, and the machine tools that make them are computer-controlled rather than manual, but the workings, the design, is almost unchanged.”

“Like a bicycle, maybe.”

“Yeah. Like a fucking bicycle.”

“It’s weird, that this would be the thing we perfect before all others,” Kat said.

“Maybe not. Does anything else give you the thrill the way a gun does, when you hold it?”

“No.”

“Wanna see mine?”

“What?”

“C’mon.”

Amanda said, “Did you ever think you were pregnant?”

Beth said, “Yeah. I had an abortion last year. I guess I never told you about it.”

“No, you didn’t. Was it okay?”

“It was awful. Some guy I met at a party was the father. I never even knew his name.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Sorry I didn’t use protection. I go back and forth about the abortion.” She began rocking her arms in front of her, as if cradling a neonate, and tears ran from her eyes. “I’m sorry, little baby…” She looked up at Amanda. “I still have dreams I’m talking to her.”

“Would you do it again if you got pregnant again?”

Beth looked down at her arms and smiled, then leaned to kiss an imaginary forehead. She looked up at Amanda. “And kill this beautiful baby?”

“But,” Amanda quavered, “it’s not actually a baby yet.”

“I know,” Beth said, smiling at her hallucinated baby, cooing in her sixteen-year-old’s arms, stick-thin and laced with blue veins.

Lewis led Kat into the hallway and down to the basement of the squalid apartment building. There was a storeroom there, which had been left unoccupied, forgotten by the building super, whose capacity for remembering was limited. Lewis had put a lock on the door, and it had not been noticed—or anyway sawn off. After a month, he had begun to use the room as his own.

There was a mattress inside, and some clothes and cigarettes. He lifted up the mattress to show Kat his bolt-action 22 rifle.

Kat inhaled sharply.

“It was my dad’s from when he was a kid on the farm. I found it in the garage years ago and hid it in the rafters. He never mentioned it. I think he figures it was accidentally thrown out or something.” He slid the bolt back and aimed at the dimly lit opposite wall. Click.

“Wow.” Kat’s eyes were gleaming. “Have you ever fired it?”

“No.”

“Do you have any ammunition for it?”

“My dad had a box of shells I found with it. Here.” Lewis held up a faded cardboard box of 22 long rifle shells.

“No way.”

“I’m gonna take it down to a firing range one of these days and see what it can do.” He aimed at the wall and drew back and then seated the bolt. Click.

“It’s beautiful.”

Lewis nodded. He took the magazine out of the rifle and opened the box of shells. He watched the shells spill into his hand, little cylinders of brass and lead and rattly gunpowder within. He pressed
the shells into the magazine one by one with deft oft-practised movements. Then he put the magazine back into the rifle. He aimed it at the wall and worked the bolt, seating a round in the chamber. He pulled the bolt back again and the unfired cartridge flew across the room and bounced onto the concrete floor. He worked the bolt again and again until all ten rounds had been ejected onto the floor. He looked over at Kat.

“I wish we lived in the country and could just go get lost in the woods. Could shoot some squirrels, tin cans, whatever.”

“Can I hold it?”

“You gotta be careful.”

“I know.”

“Amanda, what’s the story with your ’rents?”

“Why?” she heard herself answer as she studied her own reflection in the night-shiny window, rain running slowly over the glass in a confluent sheet, dispersing the blue light of the streetlight. What she saw in the window was a girl, seventeen years old, and not, as she usually imagined, older looking, nor much younger looking, but seventeen, and tired and high, her eyes blinking slowly with the concentration of being that high, her hair long and thick and a bit dirty, her complexion flushed, her cheeks full. She was not as full-faced as she had been a few months earlier, when she lived with her parents, and the dye job had grown out enough that her sandy blond roots showed through in a manner that satisfied her. She saw anxiety in the girl’s expression, and she saw too that she was, after all, a little beautiful.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t just break things off with them, if they were never actually awful, only stupid, well, maybe they’ll come around.”

“They are only interested in their fucking selves, Beth.”

“Who isn’t?”

“You, for one.”

“I love you, Amanda.”

Amanda pulled her eyes from the window (they stretched out like taut rubber bands, resisting the turning movement of the head they were attached to, before finally breaking loose and slapping back into their sockets) and settled them on her friend. They were both so high they had the sense of speaking to each other inside a large and echoing room, their words flowing out of their mouths and swirling around like currents of pigment in a watery centrifuge, finding their target only after long and circuitous trajectories. And when they arrived, it seemed their words and sentences were disordered, their meanings concealed, but anyway, who knew what they really meant? Certainly not the speaker.

“Wow, you’re really high, huh?” Beth said, touching Amanda’s shoulder.

“Did you ever want to do just one thing that everyone would always remember and know afterwards who you were, and what you thought about all this shit?”

“Yeah, all the time. Like Spiderman, a normal guy, right, just swept up in the world and its problems, and then he has his chance to do something great, even if no one else knows about it,” Kat said.

“That’s a fucking comic book, man.”

“And an animated television show.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Maybe I am.”

“I envy the guys that got to go to Nam or to fight the Japs, or whoever. That’s what’s normal for guys like us to do, to go out there someplace where it’s hard. Fucking get your ass kicked a little.” Lewis aimed the rifle around the room. “Kick some ass yourself,” he added. He aimed into the corner and squeezed the trigger. As the diminutive click sounded, he made a wet rushing sound in his cheeks, intended to evoke the movie sound of a rifle firing, full of rumbling, thunderous, and Wagnerian portent. At that moment, he looked and sounded and thought exactly like one million other comic book readers, envisioning heroic action sets, himself the
archetype, more muscular and silent than he actually was, with a lethal aim and a convulsive temper as well. He looked above the sights back at Kat and added, “Come back a man.”

Beth and Amanda lay down together in that dim room. They had forgotten about the boys, did not even wonder where they had gone to. Neither was tired, the drug still arcing through them in a succession of small sparks. Even when they closed their eyes, their lids shone with bright, spiralling lights. It was gripping, but it was ceasing to be entertaining to them—it had been going on for hours now, and was not letting up. Like LSD that way, but happier, more euphoric. Which itself became dull with time, as it must for all but the most thoroughly unhappy. And this response—their boredom—for the first time in their lives became a beneficial thing.