Holding Still for as Long as Possible (13 page)

Oddly, despite our differences, we appeared to see eye to eye on a lot of things. “I'm going to be your new best friend,” I had said to him on a night when the three of us — me and Josh and Roxy — sat up watching a
Kids in the Hall
marathon and speaking in British accents. By this time, Roxy had passed out in the armchair.

“Okay,”
he'd said
.
“I'm okay with that.”

But afterwards, I had decided to put away my attraction for him so as not to interfere in his relationship with Amy. Plus, why would he want to date a crazy lady?

“Don't worry, I didn't tell Josh how crazy you are,” Roxy said, pelting me with dish soap. It was as if she could read my mind.

“I'm not crazy!”

Roxy went over the stove, mimed turning it on and off, on and off. “Really? Totally normal?”

“A lot of famous and smart people have
OCD
.”

“A lot of crazy people have
OCD
too.” Roxy kissed me on the cheek. “Anyway,” she leaned in, whispering, “apparently Amy is jealous of you. Like, Josh comes home and your name comes up in the Google history on their computer. She's been checking you out. He asked her about it and she said she was just curious. You know, about your fans, your music career.”

“And you think that's, like, impossible? That my career was so embarrassing that no one would want to read about esoteric moments in Canadian celebrity?”

Roxy opened the back balcony and placed a cigarette in her lips. She didn't want to hurt my feelings, I'm sure, but that didn't stop her from launching into an emphatic mocking chorus of “Building a Mystery”
by Sarah McLachlan. When I ignored her as I would an obnoxious four-year-old, she stopped.

“Of course, it's possible Josh is just an egomaniac and thinks everything Amy does is related to him. But I think he's been honest with her about wanting to ask you out.”

“Huh. Maybe Amy likes me instead. Maybe it has nothing to do with Josh. What do you think of that?”

Roxy shrugged. “Femme-femme couples are the new fag couple, I s'pose.”

I knew this wasn't the case.

I went into my room and took off the zombie outfit, pulled on my red slip, and turned around in front of the mirror a few times, then lined my lips with a red pencil. I threw on a hip-hop playlist and danced around to Ol' Dirty Bastard. Then I made the bed and reordered my bookshelf by author. I felt as though I'd been offered a brief respite from the anxiety that had been plaguing me for months.

[ 10 ]

Josh

On the coffee table sat an information pamphlet I'd already read three times. It was early November, the night before our first training session, and I was unable to fall asleep. The pamphlet read:

The Goal of
COHERT
:

To organize Health Emergency Response Teams across the country, ensure that they are ready to be deployed on a continual basis to assist provincial and local authorities in providing emergency medical care during a natural disaster, explosion or major chemical, biological or radio-nuclear incident. Each team will have expertise in triage, stabilization, evacuation and patient management.

Hours later, I woke up to Amy straddling me on the couch, her legs like a wishbone.

“Instead of breaking up, maybe we should get a dog,” she suggested, one freshly manicured hand wrestling with the elastic band on my drawstring pants, the other holding a cigarette to her lips. She looked like a truck coming at me. Smirking.

“Uh. I dunno. I didn't think we were breaking up. Are we breaking up?” It's true we'd been tabling the possibility lately, but I didn't think we'd made a firm decision. “You know I love dogs.”

“I went on the Humane Society web site yesterday. I found a few adorable little pups! Or we could go to a breeder.”

“Yeah. Okay. I'm not sure it's a good time. We're both so busy.”

Amy shrugged. Exhaled smoke over her right shoulder. The curves of her clavicle were so prominent lately. Instead of looking like a sculpture, a fancy art model, she looked drawn, her skin pulled tight against bone.

“Why are you smoking in the house?” I asked. “I can't get sick right now.”

The clock on the
DVD
player read 5:05 a.m. Amy clearly had not been to bed. I had been sleeping fitfully on the couch. The plan to sleep alone, and therefore sleep, hadn't worked. From 3 to 5 a.m. I had fallen into a tumble of dense dreaming.

Amy continued to straddle me, grinding her teeth like a teenaged meth freak, red-eyed. It was still dark outside.

“I have to be in a field by the airport by quarter to seven for
COHERT
, Amy.”

“I know. I remember. God, Josh, it's not like I don't listen to you.”

Amy started jerking me off. I didn't want to give in but we hadn't had sex in weeks. These days she looked at me like I was a maggot, when she looked at me at all. The sex was hot. It was terrible that it was hot. I didn't know how to understand my responses any more. Amy could be a scary top when she wanted to be.

“Disaster training, Do you even care that
we're
a disaster, Josh?”

“Amy.” Repeat the patient's name. Look in their eyes. “Fucking relax.”

“Relax? Oh,
that
's
my favourite thing to hear.”

This whole interaction mightn't have seemed like a turn-on, but Amy knew me too well. I closed my eyes, and I saw Billy's tits in my mind. I pictured her hand, her face. I got off with my eyes shut tight. My body took over. Amy pulled her hand away, looking at me like she'd just given me a balloon at the county fair and I should be grateful. Kissed me aggressively on the forehead.

She got up and dropped her smoke into an empty Steam Whistle bottle on the coffee table and marched down the hall to the kitchen. Her legs, her arms, mechanical. Metal eyes. In her voice I heard her mood change, from bitter and frantic to conciliatory, as she asked Tina if she wanted breakfast. Why are people always so much nicer to their friends than their partners? It doesn't make sense.

It didn't surprise me that Tina was there, and that Amy hadn't even bothered to mention it. Tina was around all the time now, as though Amy needed a constant distraction. The two of them went out at night and didn't stop until ten in the morning. It was like they were still seventeen and didn't have jobs or lives.

After a good minute-long stare into the still darkness of our street, I made my way to the kitchen, hoping Amy had calmed down a little. I felt guilty for picturing Billy during sex, but what are you gonna do? It was either Billy or one of the many celebrities usually reserved for daydream bit-parts.

Tina had her legs up on the kitchen table. She scratched at her left nipple as if she were trying to erase it through her thin white T-shirt. She was one of those people who'd be completely comfortable answering the door stark naked and carrying on a conversation with a courier. Like,
what's your problem
?
I thought she might be a sociopath. She could be hilarious but not quite present at the same time. It was creepy.

I slammed the coffee-filter holder into the machine and it popped back out. I slammed it again. While I was in the shower, the kitchen expanded with the smell of Ethiopian dark roast.

After drying myself I took my new uniform off the hook behind the bedroom door and dressed hurriedly. The uniform felt like a cracker, so stiff and new, and it fit a little awkwardly.

Tina watched me walk to the kitchen counter to fill up my travel mug. She was smirking at nothing. “You're going to play fake terrorist-attack today for the department of public health, I hear. Boy, I bet there's some fucked-up politics going on there.”

I didn't answer, and focused instead on the perfect cream-to-coffee ratio, the heaping spoon of sugar. I stuck the spoon in my mouth and sucked on the raw crystals. Sitting on the wicker bench by the porch door, I did up my boots. I had shined them last night, the way I used to when I started at
EMS
and felt proud. I hadn't stopped feeling that way necessarily, but now everything was a little more laid-back — my posture, my seams. Now I was lucky if my shirt was tucked in properly. When you're a student and you ride out with paramedics, all you want is to get a call. After about six months of working for real, all you want is to sit around the station avoiding calls. It was amazing how quickly you could shift like that.

Tina took my silence for another opening. She hated having no attention paid to her. “Don't you think it will be fucked up politically, though, Josh? Don't you feel weird being around all those military people?” Tina's long, thin fingers shook as she flipped through a magazine.

Amy selected two unnaturally blue bottles of Gatorade from the fridge, blew her hair out of her face, and sighed before handing one to Tina. I knew she was high then, without a doubt. Refined sugar ingestion was a major tip-off.

“Josh doesn't talk politics at work, Tina. He doesn't rock the boat.”

“You don't think there are fucked-up politics at
Vogue
?” I said, picking up the magazine Tina was leafing through, pointing at the pursed lips on an anorexic-looking model.

“God, Josh. Relax. We're all friends here,” Tina said, the way a boss might make a vain attempt at corporate team building. “I just wanted to make sure you're still on our side, right?”

I glanced over at Amy, who had her back to me as she wiped down the counter. She was making exaggerated motions with the cloth around the coffee machine because she hated how I left drips and dregs to dry and crust over.

“What are you guys on?” I asked.

Tina just smiled. Amy didn't answer.

I tried to remember if it was someone's birthday, if there'd been some art opening, if there was any reason why they'd still be awake and grinding on a Tuesday morning. Then again, Tina didn't usually need a reason to indulge.

I left through the back patio door, walking around the side of the house to my car. I hadn't said goodbye.

It was 6 a.m. when I stopped at the 7-Eleven on Dundas to get gas. I ran into Rob, one of Amy's film friends, at the pumps outside. He was an indie-rock white guy with messy brown hair and cowboy shirts, the kind of guy who said things like
I like Alice Coltrane
, and belonged to bands with twenty-three members, half of whom played the accordion or a single oversized cymbal.

“What are you doing up so early?” he asked.

“I'm going out to train for a fake disaster.”
It was in moments like these that I realized how different my life was from that of almost everyone else I knew. Rob nodded. I wondered if he'd heard me or just didn't care. He looked burnt-out. “I've been up all night shooting a zombie movie,” he said. “Gotta crash. Say hi to Amy.”

I was almost at the 427 by the time I stopped picturing Tina in various states of humiliation.

Our training session was out in Etobicoke, near the airport. The organizers emphasized repeatedly that during a real emergency the only thing you could really know for sure was that everything would be unpredictable and the environment would be totally uncontrolled. You had to roll with what happened.

It was odd to park the car, carry my heavy pack past the gates, and have no idea what I would be walking into. I checked in with a coordinator, Dave, who was dressed like a soldier. Even before we got started the site had been set up with actual debris and fake dead bodies.

I had understood from our initial training sessions in the classroom that this would be how the exercise would look, but I hadn't really imagined the detail. There were over a thousand participants, including rescue dogs and a
HUSAR
team going through a fake bomb blast, complete with real rubble and student actors preparing to be stuck under beams. One had a ripped-open head. “Does this look real?” he was asking his buddy, who stood beside him adjusting his fake broken leg.

Like most things organized by government teams, there were glitches and things yet to be set up. I was led into a warehouse where a bunch of nurses I recognized were sitting on fold-out chairs playing cards. While the Mission Support team set up the remaining triage tents, I kicked ass at euchre and drank terrible coffee. Everything was pretty disorganized. It was freezing. Amy kept texting me with notes such as
Arf! Meow! I talked to the cats. They're ok with it
. I ignored her.

I was holding a grudge, stemming from last week when Amy qualified our relationship as her “learning” marriage — meaning that eventually she'd have a real one. The comment was hurtful, and she had made it almost casually as I was leaving for work. I hadn't responded in depth to her question,
What can we do to make things better? I need to hear how you feel. What do you feel?
Apparently
I can't get into this now
wasn't a good answer. Later that day, I had called her from work and she had apologized.