He hangs his head over the edge of his daughter’s bed, feeling his bones being compressed by rigid muscles. He lifts his head then lets it drop back and listens while his connective tissues crackle. It unnerves him that his bones, under his skin, look like everybody else’s. Even Clara’s bones, were she dead, would look like everybody else’s. He wouldn’t recognize them. He clings tightly to her pillow.
Amir Kassam had a wife and children. Reese saw them on the news; the wife and daughter had burkas over their faces, but the boy looked vengeful, taut, as though he’d never forget, as though when he reached manhood he would track down and eviscerate his father’s killer. Although there was no killer. Only a sick heart that had already been subjected to triple-bypass surgery, “Courtesy of Canada’s health care system!” a rabid journalist commented.
Clara’s bed feels good, although a bit narrow. He pulls up the fitted sheet to locate a brand name. He can’t remember when they bought it, if it cost five thousand dollars. The chicken pot sits on the floor beside him. He only came for the pot, had not intended to doze on his daughter’s bed. But the familiar surroundings of her room have soothed him — the stuffies, the books he’s read to her, the untidy doll’s house that belonged to Roberta when she was a girl. What if Elena is watching him on his daughter’s bed, thinking he’s perverted, pathetic? “Don’t get pathetic on me,” she’d say when he resorted to begging. Killed by a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, Dendekker wrote, adding that she didn’t suffer. How could he possibly know? Didn’t Amir Kassam suffer? Didn’t he feel his heart exploding, his world ending? Don’t we know when we’re about to die?
Reese must leave before his family returns from karate. If he is found here, Roberta will call the police, change the locks, terrorize their children with her fury.
Sterling demonstrated his usual lack of discretion by announcing to one of the childhood disease clients that Reese was going through a “ball-busting divorce.”
“Been there, done that,” the client said. He was very thin with jutting hip bones.
“No, kiddin’, Wes?” Sterling said. “So we’ve all got something in common.”
Wes rested a hand on one of his jutting hip bones. “I never see my son anymore.”
“Never?” Reese asked.
“I go to his baseball games,” Wes said.
“You mean you take him?” Reese asked.
“No. I go so I can see him. We wave to each other.”
Reese knows that he cannot live sneaking into his daughter’s dance recitals and his son’s soccer games. He knows that if Roberta reduces his access to waving in public places, he will have no choice but to take an axe to her head. Acting strangely and sticking things up dolls’ bottoms. What is she talking about?! Wouldn’t he have noticed this — Clara, in pain — there’s no way he could not have noticed this. He releases the pillow, now damp with his tears. He turns it over and finds one of Clara’s fuzzy ponytail elastics. He thinks of baby teeth under pillows, that panicked groping in the dark while the child sleeps peacefully. It is not possible that this is no longer part of his life. Not possible. He sniffs the ponytail elastic then slips it on his wrist.
“Belly dancing is an art form,” the futon salesgirl says. Her midriff is exposed, her belly button pierced. Reese tries out several futons, considering that perhaps he is a futon man after all.
“My boyfriend gives me grief about it,” the salesgirl says. “He thinks it’s exploitive, like, he just doesn’t get it.”
Reese thinks of lying on futons with the belly dancer, how much energy would be required. A girl Clara’s age somersaults on futons while her parents prod and squeeze them. Reese fears but also hopes that the child will fall and split her head. He imagines that his pain might lessen in the face of someone else’s tragedy.
He bought a chicken for the pot. It’s warming in a plastic bag beside him, breeding salmonella. He will not cook it, he knows. The Babb & Hodge letter has rid him of any desire to eat well or live long. When Sterling asked him, over his Krispy Kreme, “What exactly are your priorities anyway?” Reese replied, “Don’t have any.”
“Don’t get crunchy granola on me,” Sterling said.
Why fight it? Any of it? He’s scaring his children. They stopped playing in the yard when he stopped watering the lawn. The city had pleaded with its citizens to water sparingly due to low water levels. Reese appeared to be the only citizen on his block who’d heeded the plea. “The neighbours think our grass is ugly, Daddy,” Clara said. “Please, can’t we water it just a little?”
“Sweetapple,” Reese said, “if everybody waters ‘just a little’ that adds up to a whole lot of water, which means there won’t be enough for everybody.”
Mike, the chief complainant and water waster, was hosing down his SUV. “Your weeds blow seeds onto my lawn.” Clara ran into the house.
In retaliation, Reese stopped weeding altogether and witnessed nature’s reclaiming of his patch of dirt. In addition to the rampant dandelions at least three different species of thistle flourished, and orange-limbed creepers. A thin intricate spreading vine smothered the grass. Clusters of clover grew, and even mushrooms. They did not demand watering. Mike stopped speaking to him. His children were ashamed.
He is scaring them. And Clara is acting strangely and sticking things up dolls’ bottoms.
He rolls onto his side on a foam-filled futon to watch the somersaulting girl and the belly dancer. There can’t be many years between them. Clara will soon want to belly dance and have her belly button pierced. Clara will soon squeeze her breasts and thighs into tight-fitting clothes and allow herself to be fondled by boys wearing pants falling off their asses, allow them to push their penises into her orifices. Reese shoves his face into a rice-filled pillow, which the belly dancer has assured him is awesome for neck tension.
There is always kidnapping.
At the Bay, he tries to watch a movie in the electronics department. The store is quieter than his basement apartment and he hopes that a movie will take his mind off his children. Unfortunately, there are children in it, and a husband and wife who enjoy getting it on. Reese can’t recall ever witnessing a real live couple, with children, feeling each other up while packing their minivan. He senses that a tornado is pending in the movie, but the couple go on Frenching while their children squabble. Sex has been destroyed by its public existence, Reese believes. Too many articles about orgasms. Too much instruction about foreplay and positioning. Too many movies in which actors move seamlessly through fornication, climaxing in unison. Too many print ads of mouths on mouths and naked body parts. An excess of misrepresentation of what should be the most private of acts. He has always imagined that he would try to explain this to his children at the appropriate time. He has always imagined that he would be there.
The garbage piled on the lawn outside his basement apartment has pushed his “War is Not the Path to Peace” sign to the ground. A municipal strike has halted pickup but the singing-and-dancing tenants don’t appear to have absorbed this information. One of them, the female, sits scantily clad on a plastic Adirondack chair, reading Variety. Reese yanks his peace sign from under the garbage and jabs it into the lawn closer to the house. The upstairs tenant’s overabundance of flesh embarrasses him. A dragon tattoo spans her thigh. She ignores him. He has no presence in her mind, he is but a subterranean creature to be trod upon. Her witless arrogance astounds Reese. The world is overrun by such doughy cretins, unable to see beyond their own greed and consumption. He did remind her that he had acquired additional