Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

We were puling Ben to his feet when we heard the girl.

A moan from upstairs. A gasp, and then an exhaled cry.

I remember the three versions of the same expression on the faces of my friends. The shame that comes not from something we'd done but from something we didn't yet understand.

We'd heard that older kids sometimes came to the Thurman house to do stuff, and that some of this stuff concerned boys and girls and the things they could do with each other with their clothes off. Though we didn't realy know our way around the mechanics, we knew that this was what was going on up there in one of the empty bedrooms.

I'm uncertain of many details from that afternoon, but I know this: we al heard it. Not the moaning, but how it turned into something else.

What we heard as Carl puled the back door of the Thurman house closed was not the voice of a living thing. Human in its origin but no longer. A voice that should not have been possible, because it belonged to the dead.

The moaning from the girl upstairs changed. A new sound that showed what we took at first to be her pleasure wasn't that at al but a whimper of fear. We knew this without comprehending it, just stupid children at least half a decade shy of tracing the perimeters of what sex or consent or hurt could mean between women and men. It was the sound the dead girl made upstairs that instantly taught us. For in the gasp of time before we stepped outside and the closed door left the backyard and the trees and the house in a vacuum of silence, we heard the beginnings of a scream.

[2]

There's a train to Grimshaw leaving Union Station at noon, which gives me three hours to pack an overnight bag, hail a cab and buy a ticket. An everyday sequence of actions. Yet for me, such tasks—pack a bag, hail a cab—have become cuss-laced battles against my mutinous hands and legs, so that this morning, elbowing out of bed after a night of terrible news, I look to the hours ahead as a list of Herculean trials.

Shave Face without Lopping Off Nose.

Tie Shoelaces.

Zip Up Fly.

Among the fun facts shared by my doctors at the time I was diagnosed with Parkinson's was that I could end up living for the same number of years I would have had coming if I hadn't acquired the disease. So, I asked, over this potentialy long stretch, what else could I look forward to? Some worse versions of stuff I was already experiencing—the involuntary kicks and punches—along with a slew of new symptoms that sounded like the doctor was making them up as he went along, a shaggy-dog story designed to scare the bejesus out of me before he clapped me on the shoulder with a "Hey! Just kidding, Trevor. Nothing's that bad"? But he never got around to the punchline, because there wasn't one.

Let's try to remember what I do my best to forget:

A face that loss of muscle control wil render incapable of expression. Difficulties with problem solving, attention, memory. The sensation of feeling suffocatingly hot and clammily cold at the same time. (This one has already made a few appearances, leading to the performance of silent-movie routines worthy of Chaplin, where I desperately dial up the thermostat while opening windows to stick my head out into the twenty-below air.) Vision impairment. Depression. Mild to fierce halucinations, often involving insects (the one before bed last night: a fresh loaf of bread seething with cockroaches). Violent rem sleep that jolts you out of bed onto the floor.

For now, though, I'm mostly just slow.

This morning, when my eyes opened after dreams of Ben caling for help from behind his locked bedroom door, the clock radio glowed 7:24. By the time my feet touched carpet it was 7:38. Every day now begins with me lying on my back, waiting for my brain to send out the commands that were once automatic.

Sit up.

Throw legs over side of bed.

Stand.

Another ten minutes and this is as far as I've got. On my feet, but no closer to Grimshaw than the bathroom, where I'm working a shaky blade over my skin. Little tongues of blood trickling through the lather.

And, over my shoulder, a woman.

A reflection as real as my own. More real, if anything, as her wounds lend her swolen skin the drama of a mask. There is the dirt too. Caked in her hair, darkening her lashes. The bits of earth that refused to shake off when she rose from it.

That I'm alone in my apartment is certain, as I haven't had a guest since the diagnosis. And because I recognize who stands behind me in the mirror's steam. A frozen portrait of violence that, until now, has visited me only as I slept. The face at once wide-eyed and lifeless, stil in the mounting readiness of al dead things.

Except this time she moves.

Parts her lips with the sound of a tissue puled from the box. Dried flakes faling from her chin like black icing.

To pul away would be to back into her touch. To go forward would be to join her in the mirror's depth. So I stay where I am.

A blue tongue that clacks to purpose within her mouth. To whisper, to lick. To tel me a name.

I throw my arm against the glass. Wipe her away. The mirror bending against my weight but not breaking. When she's gone I'm left in a new clarity, stunned and ancient, before the mist eases me back into vagueness so that I am as much a ghost as she.

Impotence. Did I fail to mention that this is coming down the pike too? Though I could stil do the deed if caled upon (as far as I know), I have gone untested since the Bad News. I think I realized that part of my life was over even as the doc worked his lips around the P-word. No more ladies for this ladies' man.

Is that what I was? If the shoe fits.

And let's face it, the shoe fit pretty wel for a while: an unmarried, al-night-party-hosting nightclub owner. Trevor, of Retox. Girlfriends al beautiful insomniacs with plans to move to L.A. I don't know if any of them could be said to have gotten to know me, nor did they try. I was Trevor, of Retox. Always up for a good time, fueled by some decent drugs up in the VIP lounge of the place with the longest lineups on Friday nights. I fit. Though never for long. I hold the dubious distinction of having been in no relationship since high school that made it past the four-month mark. (I was more often the dumped than the dumper, I should add. The women I saw over my Retox years occupied the same world I did, a world where people were expected to want something other than what they had, to be elsewhere than across the restaurant table or in the bed they were in at any given time. It was a world of motion, and romance requires at least the idea of permanence.) Who else was there with me in Retox-land? My business partners, though they were something less than friends, al work-hard—play-hard demons, the kind of guys who were great to share a couple nights in Vegas with but who, in quieter moments, had little to say beyond tales of how they got the upper hand in a real estate flip or gleaned the "philosophies" from a bilionaire's memoir. On the family side, there was only my brother left, and I spoke to him long-distance on a quarterly basis, asking after the wife and athletic brood he seemed to be constantly shuttling around to rinks and balet classes out in Edmonton. My parents were gone. Both of major cardiac events (what heart attacks are now, apparently) and both within a year of moving out of Grimshaw and into a retirement bungalow with a partial view of Lake Huron. That's about it. I've been alone, but wel entertained.

And then the doctors stepped in to poop on the party. Within three weeks of the Bad News I sold Retox and retreated into the corners of my underfurnished condo to manage the mutual funds that wil, I hope, pay for the nurses when the time comes for them to wheel, wipe and spoon. Until then, I do my best to keep my condition a secret. With ful concentration I am able to punch an elevator button, hold a menu, write my signature on the credit card slip—al without giving away my status as a Man with a Serious Disease. In a way, it's only a different take on the "normal act" I've been keeping up since high school. It's likely that only my best friends from that time, my felow Guardians, know the effort it takes.