Lemon (15 page)

The subway is stacked with lifers. Drew stares out the window into the darkness while I watch the great unwashed, try to figure out what head-pounding is going on in their lives. Usually you can pin it on the job. They're all working for some asshole. A bald guy in a leather jacket and square-toed shoes is reading a book called
Think and Get Rich
. Amazing how wealth goes on being the safety exit. Nobody seems to notice that the stinking rich are total screw-ups. Drew grabs my arm and hangs on to it. It starts to hurt but I don't say anything.

My biological mother's name is Constance Ramsbottom. Connie Sheep's Ass.

The dentist is one of those fakers who asks how you are even though he doesn't give a monkey's turd. He sticks needles into Drew who looks scared out of her mind. I know she hates it when dentists yabber at her so I keep him talking until the hygienist takes over. Then I turn up the volume on the
TV
so chair-side chatter becomes challenging. Drew closes her eyes, numbed. I surf around the soap operas; some stud's got a gambling problem and I decide old Lil could start gambling. I'm holding auditions tomorrow, even though I haven't finished the play. It's time to jerk some cretins around, Kirsten in particular. They're all going for it, haven't noticed that Lund and Huff aren't in the loop and that the auditions are in my basement. I haven't told Drew yet. I'm hoping she'll be absorbed in her newspapers, sucking back another tragedy.

The oral hygienist is talking loudly about her new Shih Tzu dog who's ‘doing his business on the carpet.' Even when she lets it run around the yard it comes back in and shits on the floor. At night it sleeps beside her bed and yelps. She's going to start caging it. Somebody told her that if you cage them at night, they're so happy to get away from their shit and piss in the morning they run out and crap in the yard.

‘Castles with moats,' I say, ‘used to have parts jutting out so humans could crap through a hole into the moat. I don't know what the dogs did.' Even with her mask on I can see the hygienist's having trouble following my line of thinking, which is to get her to lay off poor old Drew who's too polite to tell her to shut up and clean her teeth. ‘Castles without moats had shafts that would narrow into a pit. Some poor serf had to come and shovel it out once a week. There were flies all over the place. People got maw worms that would eat you up from inside. People were pulling worms out of the corners of their eyes.' The hygienist clams up.

We stop at a juice bar and I make Drew drink some carrot and beet juice using a straw. She's so pale I'm afraid she's going to pass out. I'm not used to her looking scared. ‘What's it like being out and about?' I ask.

‘Fine.'

It makes sense that if you stop going out it gets harder and harder to go out. I read somewhere that the way to treat phobias is with exposure. So the less Drew is exposed to the harsh realities of Spaceship Earth, the harder it's going to be for her to resume earning a paycheque. Don't like to think about what will happen when the cabbage runs out.

Maybe Lillian will stop going out, after she blows up the bank. She'll make some chatroom buddies. Tora's dad doesn't talk to his family because he's too busy texting buddies he's never met, buddies in Australia and South Africa who can't see how mean and ugly he is, and buy his line that he's a devoted family man. Likewise Lillian's chatroom buddies wouldn't know what a fuck-up she is. Nobody could trace her tales about her fabulous hat-making business and hot sex life.
Maybe that's where it's going to go when the oil runs out. We'll all sit at home and spew lies into cyberspace.

16

E
leanor of Aquitane's father decided to become a pilgrim. Up till then he'd just been another stinking-rich warrior type. After some battle or other, he decided God did exist. It was Christmas and he got this radical idea to send bread and sweetmeats to his starving serfs whose feet were wrapped in rags. Next he marched off to Spain to find God, leaving his pubescent daughters to be chewed up by various rival factions. Everybody wanted to marry them because they were stinking rich. Their mother was dead, of course, dying of grief after her precious only son fell off a cliff. So old Eleanor and her sister Petronella were rattling around various castles, shitting into moats or down shafts, pulling worms out of their eyes.

Vaughn's been using my computer, connecting with other tree frogs. ‘Thank you,' he says when he's finished.

‘You're welcome.'

‘I'm a little worried about Drew.'

‘Me too.'

‘She's very different.'

‘She got stabbed.' On the way back from the dentist there was the usual wacko in the subway talking to himself, only this nutter kept pointing at people and saying, ‘Bam. I got you.'

‘She talks to
you
,' I say. ‘What's she talk about?'

‘You. And me. She worries about us.'

‘Why?'

‘She thinks we're lost.'

‘Unlike herself.'

He sits on my bed, which is a little disturbing. ‘Do you despise everyone?' he asks.

‘Not everyone.'

‘Who don't you despise?'

‘You. Yet.'

‘Give it time.'

‘Perhaps.' He's looking in the direction of my aborted play and I'm worried he's reading it and figuring out just how sick I am.

‘It gets tiring, disdaining everything,' he says. ‘I used to do it, it wore me out.'

‘So now you love everything.'

‘Not at all. I just look at things from a different angle. There's always another angle.' He stares at a picture I cut out of the paper for my mother/daughter scrapbook. It's an African mother with aids holding her baby girl with aids. What's astonishing about the photo is they look happy even though they're dying. They smile into each other's eyes.

‘If you look for the worst,' Vaughn says, ‘you see the worst.'

‘What do
you
look for?'

He thinks for a minute. ‘Nobility.'

‘You mean when you're up a tree, and rednecks are coming at you with chainsaws, you look for nobility?'

He shrugs. ‘They've all got families to feed.'

‘So it's okay that your friend fell down and broke his back?' He blinks a few times then stares into oblivion again. I don't buy this saintly shit. He's as angry as the rest of us.

The rival factions try to kidnap Eleanor and force her hand in marriage. She longs for Daddy-O but he's headed for Spain in peasant clothes. After walking for a week he runs out of bread and decides to eat a fish some fisherman is hawking. After frying it up and gulping it down he pukes his guts out. The enlightened king manages to scribble a note to his daughters telling them he thinks he didn't cook the fish enough, and that if they read this letter it means he's dead from rotten-fish poisoning. He tells them they mustn't worry because his death will bring him closer to God. Eleanor inherits his massive fortune and becomes even more marketable as a wife. Her evil elders marry her off to Louis the Fat's son who's devout and thinks laughing is a sin so you can imagine what a riot he was. Eleanor, accustomed to dancing, sun and sea, soon discovered that damp old Paris was no party town. Just like Marie Antoinette, she was scorned for being different. Unlike Marie Antoinette, she didn't take shit from anybody. She put up with Louis for a few years then had the marriage annulled. She married Henry II and went off with him to the crusades to kill some heathens. He became King of England and she started popping babies. Some of the children died, of course, but three of her sons survived and grew into rebellious teenagers who plotted to steal the throne from Henry. The King's forces killed two of the treacherous sons, which left Eleanor's favourite, Richard the Lionheart. Eleanor started plotting with Richard to overthrow Henry. The King lost patience with all this subterfuge and locked Eleanor up for twenty-six years. Richard the Lionheart was killed in some battle or other. You have to wonder what kept Eleanor going. You'd think if both your parents died when you were a kid and your husband locked you up for decades and slaughtered your sons, you'd want to pack it in. But old Eleanor lived to be eighty-something, which nobody did in those days. Guess she had a life purpose.

Even Bonehead shows up to audition. I keep him waiting in the rain, along with Kirsten and Nicole. I hand out pages I've formatted to look like a screenplay so the dummkopfs will feel like they're auditioning for
Spiderman Twelve
or something. I told Drew that it's all part of a school project. She just got a
Harper's
in the mail with a headline about how nuclear energy is going to kill us so she's busy reading. But Vaughn's doing laundry, which is unfortunate. He catches a couple of thespians acting out the Mike-chasing-Lillian scene, shouting ‘Arriba! Arriba!' and calling her
pussy gato
. Vaughn doesn't laugh or look askance, just does the tree-frog stare. ‘Later,' I tell him, waving my hand to suggest he squat elsewhere.

I ask the simpletons if they're comfortable with nudity, which gets them all giggly and it becomes pretty obvious everybody wants to take it off. I even get them to dry hump on the mildewy basement couch. My intention is to demean them but they're having a great time. They think they're on a reality show. I give ‘direction,' criticize how they look, walk and talk and they take it. I speak with authority, ‘direct' Kirsten and Bonehead to fake it doggy-style. None of this makes me feel any better. I start thinking I'm no better than they are.

On the radio a Jewish woman was talking about her mother who went up the chimney at Auschwitz. When the Gestapo showed up, the mother calmly told her daughter to run, to always keep moving so the Nazis could never find her. She gave her a leather bag full of papers. She told her daughter to keep the papers no matter what. The girl refused to believe she would never see her mother again and spent years searching for her. She couldn't bring herself to open the bag and look at the papers because she feared it was a war diary and that reading it would rip her apart. Sixty years later she looked in the bag. The papers turned out to be a novel about the war. She had it published and it became a bestseller, sixty-four years after her mother wrote it. She said its publication helped her to understand what the point of her survival was. When you read a story like that you have to wonder what the point is in
your
survival.

Bonehead and Kirsten are looking at me, waiting for direction. ‘Go home,' I tell them.

I sit on the mouldy couch thinking to be or not to be. I don't see how taking arms against a sea of troubles ends them. There's always more shit coming down the pipe.

‘All clear?' the Tree Frog asks.

‘Yep.'

He pulls clothes out of the dryer and starts folding them. I never fold, just stuff things in drawers. Vaughn has become our official laundry boy. I watch him fold a pair of my underpants, tucking in the crotch then folding the two sides. He mates socks and forms them into little balls. All this takes time, which I have.

‘How did it go?' he asks finally.

‘Bitchin'.'

‘Do you feel any better?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Than before.'

‘Before what?'

‘What happened here.'

‘What happened here?' I know he's hoping to assist me toward enlightenment, create an opportunity for self-reflection that will make me see, from another angle, that the world is resplendent with nobility.

‘You tell
me
,' he says.

‘Tell you what?'

‘What happened here?'

‘Who's on first?' I ask.

‘No, who's on second. What's on first?'

‘I dunno.'

‘I dunno's on shortstop. Who's on first?'

‘First's on second.'

‘Who's on first?'

He keeps staring at me and I consider telling him I don't need a straight man or big brother or a conscience but that would be reacting. I start singing, ‘Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack. I don't care if I never get back … '

‘I'm making frittata, do you want some?'

‘Fri-who?'

‘Spanish omelette with potatoes.'

‘No, gracias. I've got to watch my figure.'

I resume singing, more loudly, ‘Let me root, root, root for the home team. If they don't win it's a shame. For it's one, two, three strikes you're out, at the old ball game.'

He retreats and I am alone with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Kadylak's blood count is low and she has a fever. They've put her on an antibiotic drip and have stuck another needle into her to get blood samples. I tell myself not to freak because at least they're not putting her on a ventilator. When they wheel in the X-ray cart they tell me to leave. Even though Kadylak's pretty out of it, she won't release my hand. I loosen her fingers and tell her I'll be right back. I wrap her hands around Sweetheart the penguin. I stand outside her door and try not to despise everyone. Molly, the princess, is on the prowl. I try not to despise her.

‘What's going on?' she asks.

‘Nothing.' She knows I'm lying. Kids with cancer smell lies.

‘Then how come you're just standing there?'

‘I'm waiting.'

‘For what?'

‘Her parents are in there. I think I saw a new dvd in the playroom. Go check it out.'

‘What is it?'

‘I can't remember. Go see.' She schleps away, dragging her iv pole. The doctors and nurses bustle out and don't notice, me which is good because they don't want me in there. Kadylak's still conscious but fitful and seems to be looking through me, to the other side. ‘Do you want me to read?' I ask.

‘Tilly.'

A blood infection can turn septic and kill one of these kids in hours.