The Book of Stanley Read online

THREE

  The red Oldsmobile shook, stuttered, and finally stalled at a set of lights in front of Ed’s Pawnshop on 97th Street. As Frieda turned the key to restart the car, Stanley beheld a middle-aged man in a thin leather jacket in front of the pawnshop, presumably Ed. With one hand, Ed held a can of pop to his lips. With the other, he adjusted his crotch.

  With a lengthy stutter, the car came back to life. Frieda frowned at the steering wheel. “This isn’t good.”

  Stanley wondered what circumstances had led Ed to be Ed. For that matter, what had led Stanley to be Stanley, on his way to meet with a death consultant in the northernmost major city in the continent? An airplane passed overhead, destined for the municipal airport, its echoing yawn a harbinger of nothing, really. Trips not taken. Increased emissions. The slow halt of innovation. Retreat.

  “Stan.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re going to end up stranded. What should I do?”

  “There’s cheap parking in Chinatown. Take the next right and we’ll park and hop a bus to the hospital.”

  Stanley was so aware, so newly aware of his surroundings, he wanted to put his hands over his ears and shut his eyes. The signal light was a jackhammer, the sunshine a dagger. He throbbed all over, yet, oddly, he felt healthier than he had in weeks. Months. Years. Stanley released his right ear and gripped the armrest on the passenger-side door. First he squeezed it and then, with a quick jolt, he ripped it off. Bits of plastic and fluff covered the sleeve of his grey suit.

  “Jesus!” Frieda pulled into a parking lot behind a Vietnamese restaurant and XXX shop. “What happened?”

  “It must have been loose.”

  “Loose?” Frieda stopped the Oldsmobile.

  The inside of the door was filled with a synthetic mush. “This pink stuff must be for noise.”

  Frieda furrowed her brows and sniffed. “I’m confused.”

  So was Stanley, but the balance of their marriage forbade him from admitting it. When Charles was born, Frieda was anxious so he was calm. Whenever sickness or financial crisis arrived, they switched roles; Stanley stared at the ceiling all night while Frieda snored in peace.

  “It’s a cheap car.”

  “Since when is $25,000 cheap?”

  “Let’s just park. I’ll call the dealership when we get home.”

  It was mid-afternoon, a school day, so Stanley had not expected to see children. Six large teenage boys and a thin girl, with professional sports logos stamped on their puffy jackets, sat against the rotten parking lot fence smoking cigarettes and passing a Big Gulp container back and forth. Stanley pulled out his wallet to find some loonies for the ticket machine. Before the kids stood up in unison and began walking toward them, Stanley knew they would come. The two tallest boys swaggered in front.

  “Come on, you guys,” said the girl, hesitating by the fence. “We already got enough.”

  Frieda pulled Stanley away from the ticket machine. Through her teeth, she said, “Let’s go.”

  There was a practised hardness to the one Stanley picked out as the leader, enhanced by the yellowing remains of a black eye. He had brown hair with canary highlights. With the others behind him, the boy stopped and took a long sip of his undoubtedly spiked Big Gulp.

  “How can we help yez today?”

  Frieda pulled at Stanley again, as he plunked in a coin and ripped a ticket from the old machine. “Leave us alone,” she said.

  “We plan to, Grandma,” said the boy with the black eye. “We’re the security guards. You pay us, not the machine.”

  A couple of the other boys laughed nervously and shuffled their feet. Stanley cleared his throat. “That’s all I had.”

  “Three bucks? Bullshit. I bet you got a hundred-dollar bill in there. Just the wallet and you can go. The car stays safe.”

  Stanley loathed their pimply faces, their voices, their puffy jackets. He loathed their stupidity and their parents who facilitated it.

  The leader’s younger and slightly smaller friends, twitching and biting at the pieces of dead skin on their lips, scratching at the backs of their heads where the dandruff was hearty, were just afraid. They wanted this to be over. They wanted to be at home, playing video games, or even at school.

  Without a word or gesture of warning, Stanley dropped his ticket into the mud, stepped in, and grabbed the leader’s jacket below his throat. Stanley thrust his right hand forward, so the boy swallowed and screamed at once. The boy struggled, and with his left hand Stanley grasped a handful of his sweatpants above the crotch. He picked the boy up. In one motion, Stanley spun around and tossed the boy in a high arc so he landed with a plop in front of a distant SUV. Frieda screamed, and screamed once more. The boy had dogpaddled through the air but he had not released his Big Gulp until he landed. The cup lay dolefully under a K-Car.

  The boy honked and gasped, winded. Stanley took another step into the crowd of children and said, “Isn’t this a school day?”

  They backed away.

  Stanley walked calmly to the car, placed his muddy ticket on the dash, and led his trembling wife to the bus stop. The girl and one of the boys followed them. The girl said, “Can we come with you?”

  “Go to school.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  The girl and boy turned and ran south, without looking back. A bus rumbled toward Stanley and Frieda. Frieda pulled at the lapel of his grey suit. “Stan. What happened back there?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You hurt that boy.”

  “Not badly.”

  The bus stopped in a puddle. A day earlier, Stanley would have asked the driver to lower the hydraulic door. Today he helped Frieda over the puddle and jumped over it himself, without a running start.

  “Whoa,” said the driver. “Nimble.”

  Stanley dropped four dollars into the slot.

  “Moving like that, I don’t think you deserve the seniors’ rate.” The driver, a squinting woman in her forties, held eye contact with Stanley before looking up into the rearview mirror. “All right, move back. Move. Back. If you don’t move back, people, I don’t drive.”

  The riders didn’t move. Squeezed in now among fellow old men in outdated suits, students reading Jane Austen and Introductory Thermodynamics, and recent Latin American and African immigrants with plastic shopping bags, Stanley kissed his wife. “Don’t worry.”

  “If you want to sit, sir, ma’am, just tell someone to get up.” The driver reached back for Stanley and twirled her long fingers. Lovingly, Stanley thought. “They’re supposed to. But if you’re too bashful or whatever, let me know. I’ll raise hell.”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  The bus started away and stopped at a red light. Again, the driver looked into the rearview mirror. “Do we know each other? There’s something super-familiar about you. Something…I don’t know what.”

  Stanley smiled and shrugged. He felt Frieda staring at him like a flashlight in a dark room. Frieda held on to the support bar and stared at him the way she might stare at a dead body.

  “It’s hot in here, and smelly,” he said, just to say something.

  “Stan, yesterday you couldn’t lift a pot of minestrone off the stove. How is it you can throw a teenager fifteen feet in the air?”

  “I’ll ask the palliative care specialist. Maybe it’s a dying thing, a final burst of strength. Like those women who lift cars to save their babies.”

  “That’s a myth.”

  “Sometimes, myths are true.”

  “No, they aren’t, actually.” Frieda reached up and touched the wrinkles around Stanley’s eyes. She ran her fingers down his cheeks to the deep grooves around his smile, his jawline. “You look different.”

  “I’m not different.”

  “Is your right arm aching? Or your left arm? Do you smell burned toast?”

  “I’m not having a heart attack, and I’m not epileptic.”

  Frieda whispered into his neck. “When you went in yo
ur pants this morning, was there anything funny in there?”

  “I don’t know, Frieda. I just scraped and flushed.”

  “That’s how you tell if newborns are sick, remember, by their BMs?”

  “For God’s sake don’t say BM.”

  Someone behind them sneezed. Years ago, when someone sneezed on a bus or even in the flower store, Stanley would hold his breath for a few seconds until the germs dispersed. He would breathe in through his nose for a time, so his nose hairs might filter the pathogens. Now, on the bus, he cavalierly sucked it all in. Do your worst–viruses, bacteria, beer breath.

  “Earlier today, when you said you might be going crazy, what did you mean?”

  “I felt odd.”

  “What sort of odd?”

  “Just odd, Frieda. I don’t know.”

  “What happened back there, it’s not right. Not only for a cancer patient, but for anyone. It was…”

  “Shh. Let’s just see what the doctor says about it.”

  “The doctor won’t believe you. I saw it and I don’t believe it. That was not right, Stan. Are you listening to me?”

  The driver glanced at Stanley through the mirror again as she accelerated left through a yellow light. “You didn’t work at a TV station, did you? Weatherman or something? You’re not that guy, are you? Did you used to be fat? Sorta jolly?”

  Frieda whispered a laugh.

  “I owned and operated a flower shop.”

  “Where?”

  “Calgary Trail south of Whyte.”

  “Oh, south side. I’m never on the south side. Seen you somewhere else I guess.”

  “It’s a small city.”

  The driver sipped coffee from a giant Tim Hortons mug. Stanley could smell it was light roast, with heavy milk, sweetened with aspartame. Church coffee. “A million people now. You call that small?”

  Stanley wanted to end the conversation. Something was happening behind him, in the hot chaos of the bus, and he wanted to listen. They passed a 7-11 and Stanley pretended to be interested in some feature of the convenience store so the driver might look at the road instead of the rear-view mirror.

  “Well, I call that a pretty darn big city,” said the driver. “Just look at the way traffic’s changed the last few years, all these people movin’ in. Pretty darn big, my friend. I know: do you write for the newspaper maybe, in the garden section or whatever?”

  Behind Stanley, the noise in the bus began to swell. Passengers had begun to talk out loud. Not in a conversational style but rambling, chanting, even singing. Without turning around, Stanley received it as a warbling concerto. A cacophony. One woman sang “We’re in the Money,” her voice deep and grand.

  “Hey, it’s your favourite.”

  Frieda shrugged. “Favourite what?”

  It cheered Stanley that an entire busload would simultaneously break one of the most important rules of contemporary society. Why shouldn’t they feel free to talk and sing to themselves at once, packed in among fifty strangers? Frieda, for all her ease and confidence, always fell silent in buses and elevators. How had this happened? Had it started with one or two schizophrenics and moved through the bus like a yawn?

  A giant fog was easing into the city from the west. Could mean rain. Could mean anything, really: death for Stanley or the end of the world. “The song from Gold Diggers, the dance number. And all this talking.”

  “All what talking?” Frieda, who faced the rear of the bus, shook her head.

  Stanley turned to behold the babbling riders. It was clear by their eyes and their expressions, all the apologies and hopes and hymns and ordinary wonderings, that these people were speaking. “If she doesn’t, fine, I don’t either,” said a man in an Oilers cap, as he tapped his index finger on the window. “Necessito ir a la izquierda,” said a girl with bad skin. The singer was a large woman with a stretched plastic Safeway bag full of mittens. Her voice rose but her lips did not move.

  No one’s lips moved, yet no one on the bus was silent.

  We’re in the money, the skies are sunny,

  Old man Depression, you are through,

  you done us wrong.

  FOUR

  In the rotunda of the Royal Alexandra Hospital, a pianist played a Chopin nocturne. The man wore a black suit with a white shirt opened at the neck, and closed his eyes in mock-ecstasy when he stroked the high keys. On the mezza-nine, several patients sat or stood and listened. The very young and very old, thin and stricken, sat quietly and reverently in wheelchairs, their wrists attached to saline bags.

  One woman in a red spring dress and black cardigan stared at the pianist through thick glasses. An elderly gentleman, her father, shivered in a wheelchair. She held his hand as she watched. With her other hand, the woman pushed her glasses into place. She wondered whether the pianist’s choice of music was appropriate in the daytime. This was the sort of music the woman in the red spring dress wanted the pianist to play at night, in her apartment, as she sipped wine and schemed to unbutton his crisp white shirt.

  As he continued past the woman and toward the elevator, Stanley endeavoured to shut off his ability to listen. He heard everyone in sight, the patients and doctors and nurses and janitors, all but Frieda. The empty elevator, finally, was silent.

  “Are you nervous?” Frieda rubbed the back of his neck as the car rose to the sixth floor. “You look it.”

  “Something like nervous, yes.”

  Like all doctors’ offices, Dr. Lam’s was deliberately un-impressive, with fading paint on the walls and thin vinyl chairs in the waiting room. An infant sat near the coffee table with a communal Fozzie Bear, sucked by thousands of toothless mouths, pulling the bear’s arm and screaming intermittently. The baby’s mother sat talking on a cellphone, something about picking up a box of frozen dry ribs on the way home. Four others read People magazines from the previous century and various sections of the day’s newspaper, and Stanley heard them aloud.

  “Are you sore?”

  Stanley moved his arms around. “No.”

  “How do you feel?” Frieda squinted. “Right now. I mean, do you feel nauseous or weak or forgetful?”

  “Forgetful isn’t a feeling.”

  “What’s your mother’s name?”

  “Frieda…”

  “Ten seconds. Your mother’s name.” She looked at her watch and began counting down, silently.

  Stanley pretended to be insulted by the simple question. Even though he had just looked it up a week ago, just written it in his notebook so he would not forget, Stanley had forgotten his mother’s name. He wanted to guess Alice but it didn’t seem to match the quivering image of her. One good memory: a hayride at Lake Wabamun, his mother and father sharing a thermos full of hot chocolate and whisky. His youngest sister, whose name he also could not recall, had already died of polio. It was just Stanley, his other sister, Kitty, and their parents. How old was he? Seven or eight. “Alice.”

  “Alice?”

  “Yes. My mother’s name was Alice.”

  “Your mother’s name was Rosa.”

  “Damn.”

  “I’m coming into the room with you.”

  Stanley wanted to be alone with the doctor. His new sense of strength frightened and puzzled him, yet he also felt so strong, so vigorous, that he could walk through a wall. In case this was a sign of something horrible, in case his three or four months were about to be downgraded to a week, Stanley wanted to protect his wife. In old novels, sufferers of consumption became increasingly hopeful and optimistic as they coughed up more and more blood, singing happy tunes unto the end.

  The nurse walked into the waiting area with a tan file. Before she said his name aloud, Stanley told the nurse without speaking that he had to be alone for this interview.

  “Stanley Moss.”

  Stanley and Frieda stood up.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Moss,” said the nurse. “You’ll have to wait.”

  The woman showed him into the consultation room, empty save for a lar
ge desk and books about death lining the shelves, a few of them written by Dr. Lam. There were also two worn leather chairs. “How long will it be?” said Stanley.

  “Dr. Lam will be here shortly.”

  Shortly. Shortly. To be certain all of this was not a mirage, a dream, a psychotic episode inspired by the pressure of expanding brain tumours, Stanley waited until the nurse closed the door and then jumped forward into a handstand. On his hands, he walked to the centre of the room and did twenty-six upside-down pushups. He laughed and drooled on himself. His suit jacket came down over his head, blinding him. Yet he did not feel blind. He could not remember his mother’s name but he knew, intuitively, where he was in relation to all other objects in the small room. And, when he focused, in relation to the entire floor of the hospital.

  The moment he heard soft footsteps in the hall, rubber soles on old ceramic tile, Stanley hopped from his hands to his feet. He adjusted his jacket, plopped into one of the leather chairs, and exhaled.

  Dr. Lam opened the door and Stanley stood to greet him. The doctor was younger than Stanley had expected. Thin, handsome, of Asian extraction. He wore casual trousers and a bland blue sweater, with an open white lab coat. Was this middle-class facade part of every public health system?

  “Doctor.”

  “Mr. Moss. How are you?”

  “It’s hard to say, really. I have no precedent.”

  For a long time, Dr. Lam nodded. He tilted his head slightly, and spoke with soft concern. “In our society, we are not trained for what you’re going through, Mr. Moss. We don’t talk about it and we certainly don’t understand it, even though the basis of our spiritual and even artistic culture rests on our relationship with death. Did you not come with your wife?”

  “She’s in the waiting room.”

  “Wouldn’t you like her to be with you today?”

  “Frankly, no. Or not yet.”

  “How is she coping with your illness?”

  “The same way she copes with everything. With patience, intelligence, compassion, sarcasm.”

  “Do you and your wife have faith?”

  “In what?”

  “Are you believers?”