Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

“Masons aren’t the only ones to have a secret society. The Vatican is loaded with secrets. And they’ve got money too, right? They’ve got everything, they got an army, a bank and a passport office for war criminals….” She peers down her nose at a passport in her hand. “‘Hmm, Dr. Mengele’”—stamps it with a kchunk , then, smiling—“‘have a nice trip sir.’ I don’t get how it’s like this whole country — the Vatican — run by these guys in robes and tall pointed hats with crosses and no women or Jews, like are we talking Ku Klux Klan?”

She wipes her forehead with the heel of her hand while they laugh. Squeezes her eyes shut and sees yellow trails, the lights have lost their edges, making a shadowy mess of the audience.

“I’d be so pissed off if I were Mary,” she says, suddenly too aware of her own voice. “First of all, she gets married to a really sensitive guy, a ‘feminist man’ with like no money, can’t afford a hotel — at Christmas!” It’s as though there were a slight delay between the time the words leave her mouth and the moment she hears them. It’s fine, they’re laughing, she’ll power through this, then go home to a Neo Citran.

“So she gives birth in a barn and all these guys keep barging in with useless presents — myrrh? ‘What’m I gonna do with that?!’ Not to mention the presents are all for the baby. Then the Church comes along and says Joseph wasn’t even the father. God was. Plus, she was a virgin. Hello? The worst part, though, is that the Church Fathers — the pointy-hat guys — sit around all grizzled and serious and holy, debating whether or not it hurt when Mary had the kid.” Numbskull anchorman voice—“‘What do you think, Augustus?’ ‘Well Fluvius, I don’t think it hurt a bit. What do you think, Farticus?’ ‘Oh I don’t think it hurt, what about you, Thomas?’ And Thomas Aquinas says, ‘Oh, um, what he said. Didn’t hurt.’” Madeleine takes a beat, then “It did-n’t hurt?” Gapes at the audience. “It hurt!” Manic— “She was in the stable pushing out a baby the son of God he was bi-i-i-ig! He had a big holy head he was Go-od! It hurt! It fuckin’ hu-urt!”

Normally at this point the laughter is drowned by Iggy Pop, who blasts over the speakers while Madeleine pogos and improvises a series of lazzi —an old commedia dell’arte term meaning physical comedy turns: schtick. She’ll trip over the microphone cord until the series of falls escalates to a mad imbalancing act with no longer a bone in her body. Gumby and Pokey on bennies.

But tonight she stands frozen. The darkness, the laughter, the clapping and hooting are no longer friendly or warm, they are not anything. Out there, the silhouettes and lights are as strange as a landing strip at night. Numbness travels from her hands to her elbows, the smear of lights begins to waver and she loses a piece of the world to her left. A wedge from her field of vision is gone, sealed over as though it had never been there, the exit sign has simply disappeared.

She gets home somehow. Driving slowly, trying to stay alive, fearing not an accident but something she cannot name.

“Maybe it was just stage fright.”

“Is that what you think it was?” asks the therapist.

“That’s what Christine said it was.” And in answer to Nina’s silent question, “She’s my girlfriend. Partner. Thingy.”

“Panic attack” does not describe it, although that’s probably, officially, what it was. The total and complete loss of the known. The sudden inarticulable strangeness of the familiar; the appalling observation that one foot goes in front of another. The realization that one thing is not related to another. A finger bewildered by a hand.

Madeleine continues, thinking all the while, this rinky-dink therapist is going to tell me I’m having panic attacks and I’m going to tell her to fuck off. She finishes by saying, “Panic attacks, right?”

Nina says, “Is that how you think of them?”

Clever, doc .

Nina asks if anything has occurred recently in Madeleine’s life, any kind of change.

“You think I need an excuse to go off my rocker? I’m a comedian, I’m halfway there at any given moment.”

“Is that true?”

“That’s the cliché.”

“Is it useful?”

“Chicks love it.”

Nina says, “I’m wondering if something triggered the … thing.”

“I’m probably just burnt out, wouldn’t be the first time. It’s how it’s done; you work yourself into the ground and you make it look easy and you get somewhere.”

“Sounds as though you have to be pretty stable in order to do that.”

Madeleine shrugs, gratified but unwilling to show it.

“Why are you here, Madeleine?”

Madeleine summons irony but it falls back like a vampire at a whiff of garlic. She fights the sensation that she is turning into a velvet painting, brown eyes going treacly, throat swelling with tears — why? Oh no. Emotion taking hold … got to … swim away… . She looks at Nina and says reasonably, “I keep having these urges to skin puppies and violate young children.”

Nina’s calm, attentive expression doesn’t change. She waits.

“I cried at Loblaws.”

“Which aisle were you in?”

Madeleine laughs. “Ethnic foods,” she replies and weeps. “Holy shit.” She chuckles. “See? This is weird, is this like … really early menopause or something, should I be shopping for yam extract?”

She explains her recent bouts of incontinence: ambushed by tears at the sight of a woman in a sari putting a can of chickpeas into her cart. The yelp of a dog reaches her on a breeze, her hand flies to her eyes, she stops as though struck by a stray Frisbee, and weeps. Plummeting sorrow at a child’s anguished resistance to a sun hat; at an old man in a soiled tweed vest behind her in the bank lineup, as he keens the words “Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye.” At cooking shows, at special offers of twenty-five golden hits, These magic moments can be yours for only …!

“Is that why you’re here?” asks the therapist.

“Yes, I need to curb my daytime TV intake.” Nina waits. Madeleine hears herself say, “My dad had another heart attack.”

She feels her face tighten in the smile of grief. She reaches for the Kleenex and plucks several. “Few months ago. It’s not like he’s dying.”

And he isn’t. I’m lucky , he told her in January. It’s the rich man’s disease. The stuff they can do nowadays, they don’t even have to open me up… .

“Are you close to your father?”

Madeleine nods, opens her lips, tries but fails to get out the words. Nina waits. Madeleine says, “He’s my best….”

“Your best what?”

Madeleine shakes her head. “It’s stupid. Don’t know why I can’t say it, so corny.” She straightens in her chair, inhales and says, “My best old buddy.”

There.

But her cheeks contract again and her eyes continue to weep. She shakes her head. She is in worse shape than she thought. Or maybe she is just too good a performer — I’m sitting in a therapist’s office, I must be cracking up, therefore: crack-up. Do I get the part?

“What’s the pain, Madeleine?”

“Well.” Madeleine sighs. “It’s not as bad as having a pubic hair caught in the adhesive strip of your panty-liner. But it’s worse than a fork in the eye.”

Madeleine made the January drive from Toronto to Ottawa’s Heart Institute in four hours and fifteen minutes, door to door.

“Holy Dinah,” chuckled Jack, “what’d you do, fly?”

He was sitting up in bed reading Time —she was immediately reassured. Electrodes led from his chest beneath the blue hospital gown to a heart monitor, intravenous tubes ran from his wrist and an oxygen mask was slung casually around his neck. He winked and gave her the thumbs-up, past two young nurses who were joking and making a fuss over him as they changed the IV bags — one of fluids, one of blood thinners. Madeleine smiled, worried her face would shatter and fall, proud for one unreal moment of having the handsomest, youngest-looking dying father on the ward.