“Well, we don’t really have a guest room.”
“We never have guests.”
“We could invite guests.”
“You want to turn Alcott’s room into a guest room so we can invite guests?”
“It doesn’t have to be a guest room. How about a home office? You could work from home when the weather’s really bad.”
“I don’t want a home office.”
“Well, anything then. We can turn it into anything you fancy.”
“I don’t fancy anything. I want it to stay as it is — Alcott’s room.” Zakhariye longs for the old days when there weren’t so many minefields to navigate, when they could talk, even debate, about anything that popped into their heads and the only outcome would be more talk. He gets up from the table with his plate, walks to the nearby kitchen, scrapes the uneaten food into the garbage bin, and puts the plate in the dishwasher. On his way to the living room he passes Thandie, who is still sitting at the dinner table, staring at her food.
Zakhariye flops onto the couch, puts his feet on the coffee table next to an expensive blue-and-yellow ceramic bowl, and turns on the television. It is already tuned to CNN, and since it is eight o’clock, he is in time for the headlines. There is a snippet of a speech by George Bush attacking John Kerry, and then a sequence of Kerry indignantly lashing back, or at least trying. How does Kerry hope to be president when he can’t even muster a good old-fashioned political finger-wagging? Zakhariye thinks.
Next there is a rather artless segue into a piece about insurgent attacks in Iraq. Thirty-four dead. Seventy wounded. Mostly Iraqis. The reporter is a bulletproof-vested, all-American young man. Dust covers his blond hair and face as though he just had a good roll in the desert sand before the camera started rolling. Where is Christiane Amanpour when you need her?
Zakhariye switches to BBC World News where a story on Israel’s security barrier is in progress. A reporter makes a point about Ariel Sharon’s insistence on building the wall despite European Union objections. He chuckles. Like they give a shit about the EU. When he turns to MSNBC, Hardball with Chris Matthews is on. A conservative and a liberal are going at it about family values. The conservative, a chubby, balding man in a striped suit several sizes too small, rants about how abortion is destroying the soul of the nation.
Shaking his head in disgust, Zakhariye flips to Newsworld and a segment about the parliamentary debate on North American missile defence. Canadian politics doesn’t inspire revulsion in him, but it doesn’t arouse much else, either. It isn’t that he finds Canadian affairs boring — well, maybe a little — it is just that they are so inconsequential … on a global level. Who gets elected south of the border has severe repercussions around the world in a way that it doesn’t in Canada.
He continues flicking from one news channel to another, fingers expertly gliding over the digits on the remote to locate the right buttons without looking. The fidgeting returns. Lately, even the news has lost its ability to pacify him. He needs a little bit of the rush he experienced earlier today when he escaped the office to walk. I’ll go for a jog, he thinks as he switches back to Hardball where Jerry Falwell is now pontificating on the so-called East/West clash, saying that Western values and identity are in danger from Islamofascism. Where do they come up with these phrases? Pithy political phrases like “enduring freedom” confound him. When did freedom become a hardship to be endured? He tries to listen to Falwell, and the longer he does the more appealing an evening jog seems. Zakhariye can’t understand how intelligent human beings can seek spiritual guidance from a man who believes that Teletubbies have a secret agenda to turn the toddler boys of America into raving queens.
Sighing, he turns off the television. Thandie has retired to their bedroom, so he climbs the stairs to tell her he is going for a jog. She will probably think he has lost his mind, what is left of it, but he won’t be discouraged. When he opens the bedroom door, he finds it dark, his wife deep in REM sleep. There was a time when they watched the news together after dinner, shared their thoughts on the major world events of the day, then tuned to a movie channel.
In those days they rarely made it to the final credits. Their hand-holding during the movie inevitably turned into a full-blown make-out session on the living-room couch, ending with quiet but passionate lovemaking, fearful of letting go, afraid to wake Alcott, but also savouring the rush of silent orgasms magnified by the effort to suppress them.
Zakhariye’s thighs are wobbly, and the ache in his knees that started out dull and general has now become a sharp pain localized to specific points in his knees. It has been months since he has done anything more vigorous than a walk, and his body reminds him of this fact every way it can.
His lungs burn. Each inhale is a flame across his chest, and his heart beats so hard that it sounds like a foreign object with an engine of its own. Despite all these complaints, Zakhariye presses on. He jogs at the steady pace of a cunning marathon runner trying to outpace his opponents. Who the opponents are, he hasn’t quite figured out yet. Zakhariye has been running for ten minutes now, can already feel beads of sweat dripping between his shoulder blades and down the small of his back under his matching navy blue Nike sweatpants and zip-up top. He has travelled from his townhouse near Jarvis and Wellesley and made an eastward turn on Bloor Street. A road sign to the left reads MOUNT PLEASANT. He knows that road is bound to be quiet at this time of night, so he makes a sharp left turn down the bridge.
Zakhariye’s persistence against his body’s protests seems to pay off, since he no longer struggles for breath the way he did a while ago. It is as if his heart has accepted the sudden demands of the night and has decided to co-operate with its unkind owner.
As he passes the intersection of Moore and Mount Pleasant, he wonders why he hasn’t done this before. All the cells in his body have risen to the challenge and conspire with their host’s desire to escape.
As Zakhariye races past the rows of houses lining either side of the street, he glimpses their inhabitants in their living rooms bathed in the flickering blue light of televisions. He wonders who these people are, what sort of jobs they have. Are they making love on their couches with the laugh tracks of sitcoms in the background? Or are they like him and Thandie — enduring lonely celibate marriages?
Forging on, Zakhariye is astounded by the beautiful mechanics of his body: how his brain commands his legs to move in perfect synchronicity, the dignified way his abdomen and the muscles of his back and torso collaborate to hold him strong and steady, how his once-muscular thighs aid in his attempt to flee. What an amazing instrument the human body is, he thinks as he passes the dark, leafy cemetery.
Zakhariye has always loved Mount Pleasant Cemetery in autumn — the way it injects a brilliant splash of colour into the city like an amber-and-crimson paintbrush streaked across a bleak grey canvas. Whenever he takes the subway on the Yonge line northward, he sits by the window on the right to get a view of the cemetery as the train whips past the immaculately kept grounds and the tall trees that shelter the dead.
As he jogs up Mount Pleasant toward Davisville away from his home and slumbering wife, Zakhariye thinks about how much farther he has gone than he planned when he began. He knows he should return and get some sleep. He also knows that his untrained body will ache badly for days to come. But his desire to keep running away and out of his life trumps all other realities.
“What were her favourite flowers?” the woman sitting in front of Gregory asks.
Gregory stares at her, unable to decipher the significance of the question.
“We try our best to make the ceremony a true reflection of the deceased,” the man next to the woman adds, their kind gazes trained on Gregory. They talk soothingly as though how gently they speak to the widower in front of them is