Читать книгу Something Remains - Hassan Ghedi Santur - Страница 14

7 what if ...

“The five greatest love novels of all time,” says Charles Cartwright, large black eyes widening as if experiencing a mystical revelation. “That’s what I’m thinking for the January issue.”

Charlie is famous for his unabashed enthusiasm among this small group of young, hip staff writers whose wardrobes are as limited to black and grey as their temperaments are to unjustified melancholy and cynicism. Charlie, the son of a farmer from Manitoba, is the odd man out among these prematurely disenchanted urbanites. He was the last of the three staff writers to join the magazine two years ago, and his excitement at these story meetings hasn’t diminished with time.

“We can get, oh, I don’t know, five contemporary writers to create lists of their top five love novels of all time and then each writer votes out the other’s pick till we’re left with … the greatest love novel of all time.” Charlie turns to his boss, Zakhariye, his moist, round eyes hungry for approval.

Zakhariye, who has been nodding the whole time, more out of benevolent encouragement than interest, is amazed at Charlie’s ability to find pleasure in coming up with these story ideas. The man grows enthusiasm for his job the way others grow hair, always springing up from some never-ending source. For a fleeting moment Zakhariye hates Charlie for having a love for the job that he has lost and doesn’t know how to regain.

“Why not just ask them to choose their favourite love novel of all time and be done with it?” Daniel Barnum asks with his usual derisive smile that always makes his fellow staff writers fidgety. He has a singular talent for belittling them and their ideas with just a grin, not even bothering to show his nicotine-stained teeth.

“But then it wouldn’t be a list,” Charlie says, avoiding eye contact with Daniel as if merely looking at him might bring tears to his eyes.

“Precisely,” Daniel cuts in. “Haven’t we already done enough lists? The ten greatest Canadian novels of all time. Top five Maritime novels. Top three this, top five that. It’s as if the entire culture has become incapable of judging the value of anything without ranking it, without putting it on a list and pitting it against something else.”

Zakhariye sits up in his chair and clears his throat a little in an attempt to assert his authority before things disintegrate into a shouting match. He shares Daniel’s loathing of lists. Having lists in his magazine reminds him of those “Ten Quick Moves to Flatter Abs” he always sees on the cover of every men’s exercise magazine. Or even worse, the “Eight Ways to Drive Your Man Wild” lists always splashed across the cover of his wife’s Cosmopolitan.

Despite his hatred of lists, at least one ranking of some kind inevitably finds its way into every issue of his magazine. The publisher loves them. For some reason readers respond to lists. But aside from his dislike of lists, Zakhariye doesn’t care. In fact, he hasn’t actually read the magazine out of interest for a long time, in contrast to the old days when he read every page, not only because they had to do a post-mortem after each issue but also because he genuinely enjoyed reading it. He loved what the magazine was about, still about — the art of good storytelling and the people who devote their lives to it.

In a feeble attempt to reduce the combative atmosphere, Zakhariye speaks at last. “What do you have in mind for the January cover?” He glances at Anna Winterbottom, a slender blonde with sharp, birdlike features who has a tendency to sit so low in her chair at these meetings that Zakhariye often wonders if she is even in the room.

“Well …” Anna begins, then clears her throat twice as if to dislodge a giant walnut. “Well, since we have Colm Tóibín as our cover story, I’ve been playing around with images of Henry James and Tóibín, a sort of collage, a superimposed collage, if you will, of …”

As Ms. Winterbottom delves into the details of what is no doubt the fantastical and poetic image she has in mind for the January cover, her slight, quavering voice is lost altogether on Zakhariye. He nods knowingly in all the appropriate places, occasionally saying “Hmm” or “Ah.” Zakhariye can see her lips moving, but all he hears is the screeching, metal-against-metal grinding of a streetcar on Queen Street and the rhythmic thump-a-thump of his heart.

He has been experiencing these odd sensations a lot lately in which he loses his hearing as if walking on an ocean floor like a deep-sea diver and all he can perceive are his breathing and the beating of his heart inside the pressure suit. I should see Dr. Owen, he thinks. Could be a brain tumour. Zakhariye doesn’t know what the particular symptoms of brain tumours are, but he imagines they include this sort of general, indefinable feeling of being submerged. Besides, he recently watched an episode of Medical Miracles about a woman who waited thirty years to have a tiny tumour in her abdomen removed until the thing ballooned to eighty kilograms.

The same thing happens later that day when Zakhariye talks with Virginia Kisor, the senior art director, an over-tanned, over-wrinkled, fifty-something woman famous for her colourful French scarves, which she ties around her neck as if they alone possess the power to give her the easy Parisian elegance she so desperately craves. That unmistakable feeling of submergence washes over him again as Virginia launches into a long justification for why she thinks they should go with a smaller, simpler font for the cover lines against the beautifully stark black-and-white photograph of Ian McEwan — their cover boy for the next issue — rather than the usual large, red, attention-grapping fonts. The longer he ignores the sensation the deeper he feels himself slipping away until he finally says to her, “Excuse me for a minute,” and starts for the door. But he makes sure he pats her back as if to say, “Nothing personal, but I don’t give a shit.”

Slowly, Zakhariye makes his way across the office, passing a line of cubicles full of hard-working interns who get paid nothing and who are frequently reminded how grateful they should be for the chance to be associated with the glamorous world of magazine publishing. As he heads toward the men’s room, his feet make more noise than he likes on the creaky hardwood floor of the sun-drenched, loft-like office with exposed red-brick walls that accentuate the self-conscious aren’t-we-so-hip decor.

Once inside the men’s room, Zakhariye shakes his head vigorously to snap out of the spell or whatever it is that has come over him. He yawns repeatedly in an exaggerated fashion until he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, which prompts him to stop immediately. To give his brain one last good shake, he tilts his head to the side and whacks the top of his skull a couple of times with an open fist the way he did after swimming on the beaches of Mogadishu as a boy to empty his ears of sea water. But the trick that worked for him as child doesn’t do him any good now.

Desperate for a remedy, Zakhariye paces the narrow, grey-tiled space that separates the sinks and stalls. Mysteriously, his head responds well to the pacing, at least better than the violent yawning or the head banging. Zakhariye has noticed that as long as he keeps moving the spells aren’t so bad. When his body is in motion, the numbness isn’t so all-consuming.

Zakhariye got a wonderful jolt of life, however transient, from nicking the two bumps under his chin during shaving, but he has no more bumps to slice and even the last cut didn’t give him the exhilarating rush he felt after the first accidental one. When he became aware of what he was doing, it seems, the delicious thrill was lost. That’s the trouble with being as self-aware as he is — he can never find his own self-destructive remedy among the countless “cures” people indulge in to cope. He is always too aware of their futility while in the middle of doing them. Like the time he was dumped by his first love for another man. To numb the agony that came with the realization of his utter replace-ability, he went to a prostitute. However, he stopped midway because he couldn’t expunge from his head the knowledge of why he was there long enough to find any pleasure in being there. The trick, he now realizes, is not to see himself in the act.

The same thing happened this morning as he stood over the sink, finger pressed on the slash, trying to staunch the bleeding. He imagined himself as a guest on a daytime talk show, perhaps an episode entitled “Men Who Cut Themselves with Shaving Razors.” And that was when the pathetic futility of what he was doing hit him. He was too old to be a guest on a Jerry Springer– style show, so he stopped what he was doing at once.

As Zakhariye now paces in circles, he realizes how strange it would seem if a colleague — God forbid, Daniel sporting his permanently smug grin — were to enter and see him going around and around in the men’s room. Zakhariye remembers a quiet, tree-lined street off Queen that would be perfect for the sort of anonymous, vigorous pacing he has in mind. He knows he needs to get back to his meeting with Virginia, imagines her sitting in her cramped office, waiting for him to return, endlessly rearranging that damn scarf of hers. But he fears what he might do if he goes back to that airless office. No telling what might result from an hour-long dissertation on font size and background colour.

The worst-case scenario is that during one of three meetings he has scheduled later in the day he will let loose with a sudden, deafening scream that will cause everyone in the office to hide their scissors and letter openers. He can’t take that risk. So he leaves the washroom, quietly passes Kisha, the receptionist, and escapes out the big glass door toward the elevator, trying hard to avoid Virginia altogether.

Zakhariye’s desire for movement, his need not to be pinned to a chair, has started to affect the customary dinner with his wife. It is a custom they started in the early days of their marriage as an antidote to their hectic, overscheduled lives. Although implicit, they agreed that no matter how chaotic things got, they would always make time for a proper family meal at the table, complete with good china and conversation. To their credit, Thandie and Zakhariye have maintained this tradition even after everything unravelled following Alcott’s death. Out of defiance, stoicism, or plain desperation to hold on to something familiar, they have continued to come home in time for dinner, sit face to face, eat, and talk. Or at least try.

Tonight, as they sit across from each other eating pasta and thinly sliced, well-cooked steak, the only sound in the room is the clatter of silverware against the fine china they received as a wedding gift. Unlike some couples who reserve the good china for company, Zakhariye and Thandie believe they are worthy of eating from their expensive plates.

He watches his wife absent-mindedly play with the long bangs of hair that rest on her forehead, and for a moment he sees the horizontal scar that runs across her forehead just under the hairline. Thandie grew the bangs to cover the scar the day before she returned to work four months after the accident. Recently, Zakhariye caught her poring over a website about plastic surgery on her computer, presumably doing research into having the scar fixed. He wanted to tell her she looked beautiful just as she was, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

Fidgeting has become a serious problem for Zakhariye. Whenever he has to sit at a table for a meeting or a meal, the constant rearranging of his limbs and how to conceal it from others takes up so much of his thinking that he often has trouble following a simple conversation. As he sits across from his wife, his thoughts are consumed by what to do with his elbows. He puts them up on the table, but that feels terribly wrong. It goes against all the etiquette his mother instilled in him and that he tried to encourage in Alcott.

Zakhariye can almost hear Alcott’s voice saying, “Your elbows are on the table, Daddy.” So he lets his arms dangle as he chews the steak. This, too, feels wrong. All the blood in his upper body seems to drain into his hands, and the weight is unbearable. Fuck etiquette, he thinks, placing his elbows back on the table. A little sigh of relief escapes from his lips after he does that.

Thandie turns to him. “Are you okay?”

“Sure.” Zakhariye attempts to hide the irritation in his voice. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It seems like you have something on your mind.”

Zakhariye shakes his head, his chewing more animated now from the effort of trying to look nonchalant. A moment later he puts his fork down. “I had an interesting thought today.”

“Oh?”

Zakhariye doesn’t know how to interpret his wife’s noncommittal “Oh.” She could be saying, “Oh, who gives a shit.” Or perhaps she means: “Oh, that’s wonderful. Tell me more, hon.”

Unable to decide, he continues to eat silently.

A moment later she glances at him. “Well, would you like to share your interesting thought with me?”

Damn! He is wrong again. Lately, he has been misreading her little gestures and code words such as “Oh,”“Uh-huh,” and “Hmm.”

“I took a long walk in the middle of the day,” he finally says.

“I was supposed to be in a meeting. But I took a walk instead.”

“Hmm. Must’ve been a good walk.”

“And as I was walking, the thought occurred to me. What if I quit the magazine?”

Thandie puts down her fork. “But you love your job.”

“Do I love my job? Or is it that I never really knew any other work, never really investigated other avenues?”

“Are there other avenues you want to investigate?”

“No, you’re right. I love my job. I don’t know. It was one of those moments, you know, those weird what-if moments.” He tries to smile.

“I had a what-if moment myself.”

“Oh?”

“We were prepping a triple bypass. A thirty-nine-year-old architect, can you believe that? So I put the anaesthetic in, and he’s counting down, eight, seven, six, and I thought to myself … what if we did something with the room?”

“The room?” Zakhariye knows exactly what room she is referring to.

“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.