Fight Night(21)

I went to my room to read Mom’s assignment.



Dear Gord,

For now you’re a part of me. Your life is dependent on mine. For now your world is tiny, but soon—well, listen—I’m an actor, not a writer. Swiv gave me this assignment, of writing you a letter, but I just don’t know what to say. And I’ve got this deadline … I mean, I do know what I want to tell you one day, but I don’t want to write it down here. Why don’t I want to write letters? My sister, your aunt, she’s dead, asked me (begged me!) to write letters to her and I didn’t. Why didn’t I write the fucking letters? I remember reading an interview with a writer once and she said that she was writing against death, that the act of writing, or of storytelling, that every time she wrote a story I mean, she was working through her own death. She didn’t care about impermanence. She didn’t care if anybody read her stories. She just wanted to write them down, to get them out of her. Gord, you’re a story inside of me. You’re everything, man. Every joy, every sorrow, every joke, every heartbreak, every freedom, every sweetness, every rage, every humiliation, every fight, every serenity, every possibility that has ever existed. Can I keep you inside of me forever? I want to. Just like I’d still like to be inside of my mother! (Grandma. Who I really hope you’ll meet, but … chemicals are keeping her alive right now, I think.) Well, on some days. Many days. I mean on many days I’d like, still, to be inside of her and not this world. This world, man … you have to know who you are. Know you are loved. Know you are strong. I’m not a writer! Remember these words. “They can kill me, but they can’t scare me.” Your great-grandfather said that. Freedom comes at a cost, Gord. Men who are otherwise sane and respectable will lose their shit when women attempt to set themselves free. They lose perspective and they lose all shame. They will abandon babies and go to Shibuya forever. They will steal your passport and strand you in Albania. They will mock you when you refuse to take your clothes off. They will claim ownership of your work and steal your royalties. They will tell their friends you’re crazy and send you Google maps that look like targets with your house circled in the centre as the bullseye. They will demand your wages. They will try to fuck you over every which way from Tuesday. I had a dream last night that I had planned for three interviews to take place at our house in Toronto and I forgot about every one of them. All the interrogators arrived at once. I made an excuse to go to my car, to get something out of the back seat. The interrogators said that while they were waiting they would very quickly repaint my staircase. I ran out of the house. I got behind the wheel and took off, but then found myself in a parking lot and couldn’t find my ticket to get out and through the wooden barrier. I decided to smash through it. Instantly a young woman appeared next to me in the front seat. I told her, Well, looks like you’re coming with me. Do you want to be my friend? She said no, quickly. There was no pause before her answer. I was devastated and angry and determined, more than ever, to smash through the barrier. Afterwards, careening about on the city streets, I tried to check my e-mail on my cellphone. I couldn’t get it to work. I saw the e-mail of everyone I knew, for some reason, but not my own. I handed my phone to the girl, the one who definitely did not want to be my friend, and pleaded with her to fix my phone so that I could see my own e-mail. She grabbed my phone, sneering, pushed one button quickly and handed it back to me. It worked. She was so disdainful. I was so grateful, but troubled.

The cops took me to the hospital in the back of a cruiser and dropped me off at the emergency room and a giant, muscly guy with a whistle around his neck who worked in psych showed me around my new lodgings which included a white room with nothing in it but a drainhole in the middle of the floor. The giant told me that’s where I’d go if I misbehaved. Bring it, I said. I turned around to leave and he grabbed my arm and I used my other fist to punch him in the head. Nope, he said, you can’t do that. That’s exactly the thing you can’t do. I managed to squirm away from him and took off down the hallway but an orderly at the end intercepted me with his meal trolley and I plowed right into it and wiped out on the slick of apple juice that spilled in the collision. I knocked myself out when my head hit the floor and woke up wearing a disposable diaper and chained to a bed. What. Ever. They kept me tied up for two days and force-fed me anti-psychotic drugs which fucked up my coordination and made my eyeballs do strange things. I would focus them on something in my room, the wall or the end of the bed, but my vision would go elsewhere. I mean if I was looking at the wall beside the window, for instance, I was seeing the ceiling, even though—



I went downstairs to look for Mom. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t in her bedroom. What a mess there was in her room—a million little piles of scrunched-up Kleenexes that looked like a snowy miniature mountain range. Grandma had gone to bed. I went outside and sat on the second-floor deck stairs and threw clothespins into the pail. I missed every shot. It was dark, which was why. I went inside and slipped the pages of Mom’s totally insane and unfinished letter under her bedroom door curtain. Then I opened the curtain and took back the pages and put big red exes on all of them starting from each of the four corners. I slipped them back under her curtain. Then I opened her bedroom-door curtain again and took the pages and wrote on the first one: When can we meet to discuss your work. I returned them under the curtain. I went to my bedroom and lay down. I got up and went back to Mom’s bedroom and opened the curtain and took the pages and crossed out my question so none of it was visible. I didn’t want to talk about her work. I slipped the pages under her curtain. I went to my bedroom and lay down on my bed and turned off the light. I held my hand in front of my face and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness so I could see it. Finally I saw it. I got up and went to Mom’s bedroom and opened the curtain and took her pages to my bedroom and put them at the back of my closet with my broken toys from when I was a kid.