Live Bait
Michael Bryson
Darryl Whetter Fiction Award - 1rst Prize
Jake's father was dead. Jake's father was dying. Jake's father was resigned to his meaningless existence. Jake sat on the chesterfield in his father's apartment, beer in hand, TV remote on his knee. His father sat in his armchair in the corner by the window pondering the chess problem in that morning's newspaper. The Leafs were on TV. The sound was off. Jake's father stood, gripped his chest, fell through the outer layers of the atmosphere, through clouds, trees, earth, ground rock, lava, the earth's molten core. He fell into a pond of light and a piercing pleasure. Exploded into a million fragments and then compressed into an invisible dot. On a cloud in Heaven, Jake's father strummed a lyre. In a deep pit in Hell, Jake's father was a pillar of pain. Lost in purgatory, Jake's father prepared to be re-born as a snail. Jake changed the channel. Dolphins. Blue ocean. Sharks. His father stood, folded his newspaper, and disappeared into the kitchen. Jake and his father: the family. Everyone else was gone. His mother, dead. His sister, dead. Through the window of his father's apartment he could see large, heavy flakes of snow. He would never get home in time for Letterman. The streets had been clogging fast when he drove across town in his ancient Volkswagen, tires bald, his car sliding through stop signs, creeping behind snowploughs. He would have to sleep over. Ten inches was what they were calling for. Twenty-five centimeters.
"What's that?" his father had asked.
"Ten inches."
Had he ever known love?
Linda had loved him. He had loved her and pushed her out. Her love had made him feel soft and weepy. Made her seem desperate. She hadn't been that way when they met. Maybe he hadn't noticed. Thinking about Linda now, Jake saw how she resembled his mother. If he was still sleeping with her, he wouldn't have had that insight. He looked at the world and saw it was ever-changing. He never walked the same sidewalk twice, never crushed the same snow, never rode the same elevator. He had no fixed point, no center, nothing to give anyone. It was two days before Christmas. His father didn't want presents, he didn't want to celebrate.
Jake asked, "When was the last time you saw Dr. Miller?"
"Last month."
"What did he say about Christmas?"
"We didn't discuss it."
"How can we not celebrate Christmas?"
"It's just another day. We just treat it like any other day."
"But it's not just any other day."
"I don't want to talk about it."
His father had been a school teacher. For twenty-five years he taught fourteen-year-olds the basics of the physical world. In a quarter-century, he hadn't missed a day of classes. Not when the cancer finally took Jake's mother. Not when Jake's sister threw herself off her balcony, sixteen stories above Jarvis Street. Now he couldn't translate centimeters into inches. Is light a particle or a wave? No one knows. Objects fall towards the earth's core or the nearest centre of gravity. Space is infinite, time is curved. His father had never before said no to Christmas. Jake would have to call Dr. Miller. "My father doesn't want to celebrate Christmas." "Oh." Everything surprised the good doctor. His father liked Dr. Miller. The doctor had a scientific mind. He weighed the evidence. He spoke about probability, lived in a world of doubt. "When will my father get better?" "Maybe never." His father said, "He speaks truth." The doctor told Jake, "What is this life made up of? Why do things happen? I don't know. What does it matter? My job is to help people be happy and productive, but my influence is vague. I can write prescriptions, but the healing is beyond my control." This wasn't what Jake wanted to hear. He didn't believe it, but he couldn't refute it.
His father had been the foundation of all of their lives; he had withstood every blow; then he had come apart.
What would his mother say? When she was dying, she said, "Take care of your sister." He had and it hadn't mattered. He had looked after her, but he hadn't saved her.
You can't save anybody. Why would you even try?
The last party he went to, Jake found himself in a crowded kitchen mixing martinis. The hostess was trying to set him up with her sister. The sister was tall, red-headed, and pressing her breast ever-so-slightly into his shoulder. The sister was wearing a tight T-shirt with the words "Live Bait" across the front. Below the words was a cartoon drawing of a man in oversized glasses holding a fishing rod like an extended penis. Jake said, "Gloria Steinem was right. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. I see no reason why a fish wouldn't need a bicycle. Look at Salvador Dali. Look at the world the way Dali saw it and you'll see what I mean. The world is not solid, it cannot be replicated. Realism is just the representation of the world as it has traditionally been represented. The world cannot be represented, and so realism is just another form of weirdness."
"Like the Matrix," the sister said.
"Yes," Jake said. He didn't know what he was saying. "Yes, yes."
The sister asked, "Do you fish?"
"Yes," Jake said. "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Do you need a ride home?"
"Now?"
"Now is a good time."
The sister said, "I'll get my coat."
But it turned out the sister couldn't take her clothes off with a man unless she smoked some marijuana first. Jake hadn't smoked pot in ten years and didn't know where to get any. The sister lived with her sister and had some pot but didn't want to take Jake there.
"Well, just hold me," Jake said.
They lay on his bed, fully clothed, wrapped in each other's arms.
Had he ever known love?
Claire hadn't loved him, but she'd needed him in a way she hadn't been able to comprehend. "'Come here, go away,' those are the only two messages you send to me," Jake said to her once. She responded, "I need to push you away before I can feel close to you." She liked to, yes that, and, oh, yes that, too. More often, longer, and better than any other woman Jake had slept with or just kissed. "I'm just a penis to her," he said to his friend Randy. "She only calls me when she wants to bonk." Which wasn't anything worth complaining about, he said. What was worth complaining about was how five nights a week he didn't know where she was. "Don't hound me," she'd say. "I come home and there's twenty-seven messages on the machine from you." It was all or nothing with Claire, and she was the one who decided when it was all and when it was nothing. Then she was arrested as part of an accounting scandal at the senior citizen's home where she worked. Six months bingo money had gone missing. Claire had one of only two keys to the cupboard where the money was stashed; she kept the books. Where was the money? "I was going to pay it back, Jake. I was, I was." She posted bail, then bolted. The police picked her up again in Victoria, B.C., trying to board a ferry for Seattle. She called Jake collect from prison, but he declined the call.
His father stumbled from the kitchen, blood leaking from his forehead. His father called from the kitchen, "I've just swallowed three tablespoons of rat poison." His father slipped silently out of the apartment and was never heard from again. Jake flipped to MuchMusic, hoping to see Britney Spears and Madonna. Sluts, sluts, sluts, give me, sluts, sluts, sluts. No, Britney. No, Madonna. But the screen was filled with legs, breasts, legs, breasts, legs, breasts, legs. BOOM, BOOM, CHICK-A, BOOM. He would have to call the sister before too long. He said he would call her tonight before ten, before she went to bed.
Yesterday, she had said to him, "If anyone says they know women and men, the way they are; if anyone says they know how men are and how women are, one is from Detroit and the other from San Francisco, or something like that; I'd have to say they're full of it. The boundaries around these categories are permeable; they bend, they leak, they might as well not exist. Men are any number of things, and so are women. Humanity is infinite. To say humans are too complex for definition doesn't go far enough. People are fucked. That's better. People are fucked beyond the limited measures of our measly instruments."
Jake said, "You go, girl." Randy knew someone who knew someone who trafficked. Jake scored five grams. The sister was a different person after she toked up. She didn't want to put her clothes ON. Jake watched her cross the room, butt naked, a glass of water in her hand. She was a little overweight but still lovely. AND SHE WAS A GOOD PERSON. Though not much of a cook. Jake made a blue cheese omelet, she burned the toast. She sat at his kitchen table, his spare dressing gown fallen open in front. Her large breasts sagged, pointed left, right. She said, "Do you think I'm fat? No. Don't answer that. I think I'm fat. Why else would I ask you? I'm anxious that I'm fat, but actually I'm comfortable with my weight. Comfortable but still anxious. How about you? Do you think you're fat?"
He said, "I could lose ten pounds."
"Oh, no," she said. "No you couldn't. You lose ten pounds and you'll be skinny."
When his parents were first married, his father had told him recently, they had almost split up. Not even six months into their marriage they were discussing divorce. "We went to a New Year's party and I got a little carried away. Started kissing all of the ladies. We were both twenty-one, remember. Your mother and me both. I went around the party kissing all of the ladies, married, unmarried, it didn't matter. Just a little friendly kiss on the cheek, sometimes on the lips. Just a little friendly kiss. We'd all been drinking, we all felt good. Someone's sixteen-year-old sister was there, someone's sister or cousin or neighbour, I don't know. Some sixteen-year-old was there. I was saving her for last. I kept avoiding this girl. I knew if I kissed her, your mother would be mad. Kissing the married ladies was okay, kissing the other women there, the ones with dates, that she could live with. But even then I knew your mother had limits. I saw this sixteen-year-old go upstairs. I waited fifteen seconds, then I went up, too. Your mother waited longer than that, but then she followed me upstairs. And a good thing, too. If she'd waited any longer, our marriage would have been over. She found us necking in the hallway, but I was ready to throw this girl down on the nearest mattress. It took ten years for your mother to forgive me. It took ten years for her to trust me again. I never did anything like that again. In fact, I went out of my way to make that marriage work. All because of that sixteen-year-old. And what a beauty she was, Jake. I've never forgotten what it was like kissing her in that upstairs hallway. It was just fabulous, Jake. A taste of terror that saved my marriage." Jake asked, "Why are you telling me this?"
Jake asked, "Why are you telling me this?"
"She's all I think about," his father said. "I think about that girl all of the time. She'd be sixty-three now. I wonder where she is. I wonder what happened to her. I wonder if any of that old spark is still left."
Jake would have talk to Dr. Miller.
"My father's in love."
"That's great!"
"He's in love with a sixteen-year-old girl he met forty-seven years ago."
"Where is she now?"
"I haven't a clue."
The sister thought it was cute, his father's tormented passion. "It's good for him. It reminds him he's alive."
Jake was less charitable. He thought his father's love was killing him, the hopelessness of it. Love thrown into a void, love with no hope of return. Outside, the wind pushed the heavy snow up against the apartment's windows. The wind was stronger now and gusting. The sun was setting for the last time. Cars were sparse on the streets. The barometer and temperature were dropping, heading for absolute zero, the end of life, the end of everything.
Jake pulled back his shoulders and stretched. He reached for the ceiling and his back popped, once, twice. He reached into the chest pocket of his shirt and remembered. A dime bag with a small amount of pot and some rolling papers.
"Hey, Pop," he said. He heard his father shuffle in the kitchen. He took out the pot and the papers and started rolling a joint. "Hey, Pop. C'mere. Talk to me."