David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

Of course, no one else would view it that way. Grandmother was the family’s legendary victim. Everyone had heard the story of how Grandfather had seduced her when she was young and beautiful, then cast her off with the birth of Michael’s father and uncle. The years spent raising them had taken that youth and beauty. He had done more, in fact: disowned the family, disappeared from view. But never mind that — the family’s umbrage was entirely directed to Grandfather’s shabby treatment of Grandmother.

Listening to the family stories, one would think Grandmother had been left in some gutter with nothing but the clothes on her back and a bent walking stick, not in a comfortable Etobicoke bungalow, with the mortgage paid and two grown sons to dote on her every need.

No, Grandmother had a power to her, a gravity, just as much as Grandfather had the will to defy that gravity. Eventually, the will was not enough — Grandfather would have been ground-bound, as he liked to say, after a few more years with Grandmother.

He’s understood that intimately, from the first night he decided to leave Suzanne. They had been married for just three years — and as marriages went, he supposed theirs was a good one. But as he lay in bed with her, feeling the Earth impaling him on bedsprings sharp as nails, he knew it could never last. Not, he thought, if he ever meant to fly like Grandfather.

Flight, Michael was beginning to realize, was essential to his survival. When his Grandfather had refused to take him in the air that afternoon at Uncle Evan’s old place, he had merely been hurt; but as the years accreted on his back — along with more hurts and disappointments, slights and insults and injuries — he began to realize his desire to fly was more than a desire. It was a need, bone-deep and compelling, like nothing else he’d ever felt. Once he’d defeated gravity, Michael was sure, nothing else could weigh him down.

“Michael!” Grandmother called from upstairs. “I found it!”

“I’m coming, Grandmother! For Heaven’s sake, don’t strain yourself!” he called, and started up the stairs. He was puffing when he reached the top.

Grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table, an array of envelopes and letters spread in front of her, cigarette smouldering in a brown-stained glass ashtray, a sky the colour of an old bruise framed in the window behind her. She held a small brown envelope close to her breast. She was wearing thick reading glasses, and her magnified eyes looked almost comically worried, or perhaps surprised.

Michael pulled out a chair and sat across from Grandmother, smiled at her. He extended a hand across the table, and Grandmother smiled back, her dentures white and perfect in the midst of her age-sagged face. Still holding the envelope close to her, she took his hand in hers and gave it an affectionate squeeze. Gritting his teeth, Michael squeezed back.

“I haven’t seen or spoken with your grandfather in years, you know,” she said.

“I know,” said Michael.

“It was…” she squeezed harder, and enormous tears appeared behind the lenses of her glasses. “…it was very painful between us. You cannot know, dearest Michael. The things one must do. Your Suzanne is such a lovely girl, and you… you are such a good boy. You are both so terribly lucky.”

“Yes,” he said. Grandmother’s hand was thick and dry, and its grip was formidable. If it had been around his throat, Michael thought crazily, that would have been the end of it…

“Lucky,” he said. “The address, Grandmother?”

Grandmother’s eyes blinked enormously behind the glass. “Is something wrong, dear? You don’t look well.” She let go of his hand, and it flopped to the tabletop.

“I’m sorry,” said Michael. He flexed his fingers. Although they appeared normal, they felt swollen, massive. “I’m just a little anxious, I guess.”

“To see your Grandfather,” said Grandmother. “Of course you are. Well I can certainly help you with that.”

They sat silent for a moment, regarding each other — warily, waiting for the other to move first. Michael felt himself beginning to squirm.

“May I —?” he finally said, and extended his hand again, eyes on the letter.

Grandmother didn’t move. “There is a condition,” she said.

“Yes?”

The envelope crinkled as her hand tightened around it. The flesh of her neck trembled like a rooster’s and her eyes widened to fill the lenses of her glasses. A weight shifted badly in Michael’s belly as she opened her mouth to speak.

“You must go to visit him immediately,” she said, “and you must bring me with you.”

Although Grandmother’s tone seemed to preclude argument, Michael attempted it anyway. He told her a meeting now would be painful — after all, the two of them hadn’t parted on the friendliest of terms, had they? He pointed out that he, Michael, hadn’t seen Grandfather for many years — and he was uncertain enough as to how the meeting would go in any event. Couldn’t he visit Grandfather once on his own, and then perhaps broker a meeting between Grandmother and her ex-husband for a second visit? Or perhaps he could convey a message?

“Michael,” Grandmother said quietly, “I’m afraid I don’t have time to wait for a second visit. Also, I’m afraid I don’t care to risk, if you don’t mind my saying, your good will on this matter. My condition must stand. I would like to make this trip as early as possible. Immediately.”

Michael almost laughed at that — the world was crushing him, and he had planned on setting out the following morning. Now, with the added weight of Grandmother’s condition on his shoulders, the pull of the Earth was so unbearable, he’d probably leave as soon as he got the address.

“Are you well enough to travel?” he finally asked.

“Wipe that smirk off your face.” Grandmother’s eyes narrowed and her mouth became an angry line. Michael felt his face flush — he hadn’t realized he had been smirking. “Of course I’m well enough,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”

She stood easily, pushed the chair back underneath the kitchen table, and hurried off to the closet.

Some days, Michael felt the Earth knew of his plans to escape it, and reached up with an extra hand to hold him ever more firmly. It had been bad the day he left Suzanne — ironic, because that was the very act he suspected might liberate him utterly, not yank him closer to the ground he had begun to despise. Now that he was so close — to Grandfather, to his secret — it felt as though the Earth was actually pushing him down, driving him into itself like he was a stake.

God, he just needed some time alone with the old man! Simplification, isolation, was not enough — there was something else the old man knew, and Michael needed to know it too.

He remembered the day Uncle Evan shot his movie, the day he saw the miracle of his Grandfather’s flight. His father, genial sadist that he was, had built him up for it, on their way over to Evan’s: Grandfather’s a miracle worker, Mikey — just like Jesus. Maybe if you ask him nicely, he’ll work a miracle for you! He remembered his mother trying to shush his father. That’s not why we’re going; don’t get Mikey’s hopes up , she said, and to Michael: Grandfather’s not like Jesus .

As it turned out, Grandfather showed up almost four hours late, and Michael was the only child there — so of course the waiting had made him crazy. It had in fact made everyone crazy. Michael’s father drank too much, and wound up spending what seemed like an hour sick in the bathroom, and his mother paced, feigning interest in Uncle Evan’s movie camera, which he loaded film into, in a black cloth bag; or the notebook. It was filled with crabbed handwriting, mathematical equations, and an array of charts and diagrams Evan had assembled, to try and explain the phenomenon of Grandfather’s seemingly miraculous flights. She flipped through the book with Aunt Nancy, then called Michael over and made him go through it too, and finally shut it and put her fingers to her eye-sockets and shooed Michael away.