Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

Thebes yanked at her purple hair and groaned. We were quiet, thinking of Min.

You know, she used to write kind of racy stories herself, I told Thebes. But she could get away with anything at school because all the teachers were afraid of her.

Why were they afraid of her? said Thebes.

Well, not afraid of her, I said. They were wary of her. She had this ability to make every outrageous thing she did seem prescient, as though it would be the thing that all enlightened people would soon be doing and wondering why they hadn’t thought of it first. Which was great, I said, but also lonely. For her. It reads well in a biography but it doesn’t make real life easy. You know how most parents encourage their kids to be themselves, to speak their minds and not follow the crowd? Well, our parents did the opposite with Min. They begged her to succumb to peer pressure. To follow the pack and be content with it. Let other people get ideas first, they’d say. Wait around for normal people to map things out. They’d say it jokingly, with their arms around her.

Thebes stood still for at least seven seconds. I had said the wrong thing again. I had implied that radical thinkers automatically go crazy, which wasn’t true, and definitely wouldn’t be any consolation to a kid like Thebes. I wanted to say something else, to take it back and start again, but then she told me about another story Logan had written.

It revolved around a man who worked in a paper factory and became so bored he decided to set a goal. He’d become the fattest man in the world. It went on about the inner workings of this guy’s brain, how some parts were overdeveloped and some not at all and the guy wondered why, if it was something that occurred in his childhood, or because there were only women in his life.

Hmm, I said. I didn’t know either. At least he had a goal.

I was so tired. I’d been dumped for Buddha. I had jet lag. I’d just put my sister into a psych ward. I was suddenly responsible for two kids, one who hardly talked and one who couldn’t stop, with no clue how to take care of either of them.

Hey, said Thebes, what did Min whisper in your ear at the hospital?

Nothing, I said.

Yeah, she did, said Thebes. I saw her whisper something in your ear. What?

I can’t remember, I said.

Yeah, you can, said Thebes. C’mon. Think. She stood over me, a scrawny leg on either side. She still had streaks of candy necklace powder all over her face and neck. She pointed her finger at me like a gun. Tell me! she said in one of her character voices, or I’ll go right ahead and bust a cap in your ass.

She said we should find your father, I said.

That wasn’t true. I had made it up on the spot. Please help me die, is what she’d actually whispered in my ear. And I had said, No, never. Was that the right thing to say? I don’t know. I remember standing outside Min’s bedroom door, I was probably around twelve years old, and hearing my mother telling her that if she really, seriously, genuinely wanted to die, there was absolutely nothing that my mother could do to stop her and she would be devastated but she would give Min her blessing and she would love her forever. It bothered me. No, I thought, that’s not the thing to tell Min. Tell her she can’t die. Absolutely not. No fucking way. We had every way of stopping her and we’d never let her go. But now I’m not so sure. There is not one single thing that I am certain of, except that I have to make sure Thebes and Logan are taken care of. But not necessarily by me.

Did she really say that? asked Thebes. She sat down beside me on the floor.

Yeah, she did, I told her.

Really?

Really. Yeah.

Why?

Because, Thebes, she understands now just how sick she is and that she needs Cherkis to help her out.

With me and Logan? said Thebes.

Yeah, I said.

But I don’t want to live with Cherkis, said Thebes. I want to live with Min.

I know that, I said. Don’t worry. If we found Cherkis we would just ask him if he wanted to come back here to take care of you for a while.

But Min doesn’t want to see him, said Thebes.

I know, I said, that’s true, but I think she’s realizing that she needs some help.

Yeah, said Thebes, but you’re here.

Yeah, I said. I know…that’s true too.

I wished my mother was alive. She could tell me what to do. Or she could do it herself. She knew how to talk to Min and bring her down to earth, at least most of the time. She absorbed Min’s despair but recycled it into dark comedy, or something. She’d joke around with Min about death and hopelessness, and Min would respond. In a way it was like Min’s own theory that everything is bullshit, except that my mother took it one healthy step further: yup, everything is bullshit but it’s also funny. She died two years ago from a ruptured aorta, her heart exploded, but neither Min nor I found it all that hysterical.

Anyway, I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t know how to talk to the kids. I loved them, but I didn’t want to live with my sister. Even in her weakest, most defeated and delusional moments Min was in control. If she was again at that point where she wanted to die, where she was begging me to help her die, then there was no point in keeping Cherkis at bay. What difference did it make? I had no idea whether Cherkis would be interested in seeing his kids again, let alone moving back and taking care of them, but he was a decent human being, a caring guy. He was their father. He had loved them once and could again, or maybe he still did but from a distance. A safe distance. If there is such a thing.

So, said Thebes, is that what we’re going to do? Find

Cherkis?

I think we’ll try, I said. How does that sound to you?

Thebes said she didn’t know. Good, she guessed, probably, it was strange, kind of exciting, a little weird, she’d probably get a stomach ache, no, it was good, just a small stomach ache, yeah, it would be fine. Probably. If that was what Min really wanted.

Well, yeah, I said. It is. And I’m so sorry for lying to you.

Later that evening I lay down in Min’s empty bed upstairs and pulled her white sheet up over my head. I felt for my kneecaps and hip bones. I lay perfectly still, arms down, palms up. I closed my eyes and pretended I was floating in space, then at sea, then not floating at all. I hummed an old Beach Boys tune. In my room… Min had taught me how to play it on her guitar when we were kids. I opened my eyes and stared at her pill bottles and squinted until they all blurred together. I stopped squinting and lined up the bottles, smallest to biggest, in rows, like a class photo. All her life Min had been surrounded by pills and sometimes she took them and sometimes she didn’t and sometimes she took way too many of them. She’d always keep one small, blue pill under her pillow, like a tooth. Or a cyanide capsule right there at the ready.

I remembered the time she had agreed to go rabbit hunting with our uncle and was so horrified by the idea of killing something that she consumed an entire jar of my aunt’s diet pills so that her aim would be way off and the rabbits would escape. But Min, my mother had said, you could have said no, or intentionally misfired. You almost killed yourself in order not to kill a rabbit? That just doesn’t make any sense.

I turned on Min’s radio, heard someone laughing and turned it off again. There was still paint on it from when she and I, as teenagers, spent a summer painting a giant dairy barn. We painted in our bathing suits, and made scaffolding for ourselves from giant tractor tires and two by-fours. We played the radio all day and knew the words to every song. Min fell hard for one of the farmhands and ended up getting pregnant after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark. She lost the farmhand’s tiny embryo a month or so later in the washroom of a bar called Club Soda, and cried for days and days, and then stopped talking. Sometimes, before I went to bed, I would tap the wall between our bedrooms, and sometimes she’d tap back, very softly, but mostly she didn’t, and eventually I stopped tapping too.