David Gilmour: Extraordinary

She went on. “It was a temporary arrangement with Kyle, but it gave me something for which I was hungry: it gave me him, his company. He had been such a bright, perceptive little boy, so clever about his friends, his parents, even himself. How to put it? It was so sad. He belonged to that group, that maddening group of people who are capable of unsparing self-analysis but incapable of controlling the same impulses they talk so brilliantly about. But I loved him, and I kept waiting for him to happen on the right key for the right lock. And for a while, it looked like he just might.”

“And?”

“He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Got a terrific sponsor—a middle-aged businessman who phoned him every night. He got a job in a warehouse. Marek got it for him. He did it for me, yes, but he believed in the magic key too. Except his was a bit different. His was the brutality of hard work. That Eastern European thing. And for a long time, maybe six months,it worked.

“Kyle got himself another girlfriend. Japanese this time. Women always liked him. It was a blessing and a curse. They always wanted to save him. Including his mother. All of us believing in the magic key. One month went by; three months; six months. I could feel a belt loosening around my chest. And then, one summer morning on the way to work, he walked by a neighbourhood bar—I even remember the name, the Moonstone—and he went in.

“He must have walked by that bar, God, I don’t know, a hundred times? But that day he went in. They were just setting up. He put money down on the bar and asked for a beer. The bartender asked him what he wanted. Kyle said, ‘You choose something.’ Unusual request. That’s why later, when the guy talked to the police, he remembered Kyle.”

A door opened just down the corridor from Sally’s apartment. Music briefly issued onto the flowered carpet. “Come on,” a young woman’s voice said, “this was your idea, now come on. ” A dog collar rattled by the door, followed by an excited bark. “Shhh.”

“Next thing we know, Kyle calls into work, says he’s sick. Not a word to his sponsor, naturally. He knew the guy wouldn’t buy it. Sometime around noon, Kyle ends up in a ravine with a couple of guys. The ravine right under the subway bridge that leads to GreekTown. They drink their way along the Danforth, walking out on a few bills, stop in to see one of the guy’s girlfriends who works in a health spa and borrow some money from her. Somebody sells them an eight ball, crack and heroin.

“They come back across town and end up in that private school on Avenue Road. What’s it called? The one you went to?”

“Upper Canada College.”

“They bust into lockers looking for something to steal. They figure, because it’s a private school, all these rich kids have got to be keeping bags of loose cash in their lockers. A security guy hears them, they throw a pair of soccer boots at him and hightail it out of the school. They run across a cricket pitch where there’s a game on, all these guys in white flannels and cricket bats. By the time the police arrive, they’ve disappeared over a side fence and are hiding out in a backyard in Forest Hill. An hour later, the police get a call from a woman who says there are three naked guys swimming in her pool. They get away again.

“Two days later, a cop sees an illegally parked car with no plates on it. He opens the door. It’s my baby inside. Kyle. All by himself. They figured he died somewhere else and they dumped the body in a stolen car and walked away. In his pocket—and this always breaks my heart—is a city map, all the places he’s been over the past few days, this long arc through the city heading back to his apartment. Inscribed on the map were the words, I am on a voyage of mysterious intent. He was like a fish swimming upstream. He thought he was going home, but he wasn’t. He was getting ready to die. And he did.”

We sat in the silence for a moment; her refrigerator came on with a hum. She said, “I’ve thought about this a lot, and the truth is, I think he knew he couldn’t manage more than six months of ‘being good,’ and the alternative wasn’t possible either.”

Somewhere in the wall behind me, a metal pipe clanked.

“But why do you suppose he chose that morning to go into the bar? Why not the day before? Why not the day after? You lose a child, you keep wondering about those little things. As though, if I could find an answer, I could somehow make it not have happened. Which is absurd, I know. But still, I can’t seem to leave it alone.”

I said nothing.

She turned her dark eyes to me. “How could his sister be his sister and he be him?”

“What do you mean?”

“They slept in the same bedroom, they had the same parents, the same amount of love, the same things for breakfast. They used the same words, they spoke with the same speech rhythms. They liked the same TV shows. They disliked the same songs on the radio. They were like a little unit moving around the house together when they were small. How could they be so similar in so many ways and yet, in that small corner of their personalities where they were unalike, be so unalike, and have that same unlikeness be the deciding factor in the course of their lives? Why wouldn’t it be the other things, the other qualities, that set the course? Can you explain this to me?”

“I can’t.”

“It’s the same with you and your brother, Jake. You hate each other.”

I said, “I haven’t talked to Jake for years. Have you?”

“Sometimes. Rarely.”

“What’s he like?” I asked, my voice rising half an octave, as though my body, independent of my will, was preparing to defend itself, as though the time between now and our last ugly confrontations had been reduced to a matter of days, not years.

“Unhappy. So unhappy. He’s quite categorical about it. He says, ‘I’m not going to be happy until I’m fifty.’”

“Why fifty?”

“I don’t know. He just said it.”

After a moment, I said, “What am I like?”

“At your best?”

“Let’s start there.”

“Here. You’re here. And all that that—implies.”

“At my worst?” I thought, Let’s get it over with.

She shook her head. “You’re here. That’s what matters.”

The elevator doors opened down the hall. Voices passed the door.

“It’s late,” she said. “I wonder who they are. I wonder where they’re coming from.”

The candle sputtered.

“Am I safe to ask you something?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Will you regret this? Will you drive through this neighbourhood some night twenty years from now and regret this?”

“It doesn’t matter. Not tonight.”

“It’s hard to imagine you in twenty years,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine you a day older than tonight.”

“Why did you ask me if it was safe?” I said.

“Because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

“Please, Sally.” I could feel my eyes watering.

“What?” she said suddenly.

“Please say whatever you want.”

The phone rang again. Purr, purr. I raised my eyebrows at Sally. She shook her head. She knew who it was, I thought, but didn’t want to tell me. Finally, it went silent. And again the room seemed preternaturally quiet.

She said, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Can you hang on?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll be here when I get back?”

“Yes.”

Sally got up on her crutches. I put my hand under her armpit—it was warm—and steadied her. “Okay?” I said.

She stared down at the carpet. Or her slippers, I couldn’t tell which. “Yep,” she said, breathing in on the word the way people sometimes speak in the country, the way her grandmother spoke.