Gargoyles (6 page)

“Richard?”

He is standing over her in her chair. His hand rests on her shoulder and she has put a hand over his to keep it there.

“What.”

“He doesn't have dementia, Richard. He's working.”

At the top of the stairs he's aware of the shifting facets of himself. He's aware of vestigial anger, a lingering bile that wants him to stomp down there and yell
get the fuck out of my house you low-life bastards.
Several deeply quiet breaths take care of it for now. Another part of him wants to be entertained, wants to come upon them as if casually, tell them to please do help yourselves, yes, take those electronics specifically, I no longer have a use for them, too much nudity on TV these days, so yes, please, do me the favour of carting everything away. Another part of him wants to appear from out of the shadows, gnarly, old, and clearly unafraid. And then of course a wheedling part, a part he has to breathe through as well, wants to run back to his room, lie down, cover up, hide, wait.

But he takes a first step down. As he does so he almost falls, for in his stepping he has understood, for the first time, the genius of a staircase. Squares of wood fit perfect against squares of space — harlequin squares. Sized to fit the human stride, they ascend and descend, impossibly, at the same time. Up and down both, always and eternally, and very alive at their fulcrum of stillness.

The cab driver has buzzed, Richard and his mother have hugged. His hand is on her doorknob but he stops because she is going to say something more. Behind her head, the cruise ship is being pushed sideways into a pier by three tugs.

“He thinks I'm afraid but he's the one who's afraid.” She
stares through Richard's chest, angry. She brings her hands up and clenches both into fists. “He's afraid, Richard. Do you know that? He's afraid of his feelings. Do you
know
—” She pauses, looks up at him, appears to be registering his face at the cost of forgetting her words. She has to look away to find her train of thought. “— Do you know he could not watch the movies? Never could? Never tried again?”

She keeps her gaze on his chest and appears satisfied and finished, so Richard must say, “What do you mean?”

“The family movies he took. Remember? With the old camera? The home movies.”

His father had always had the best possible video camera — early on, a Super-8 — for walking around a structure so he could see how it “moved,” as the light, shadow, and background changed as he circled it. Once in a while he pointed it at Richard and his mother. Richard has seen them all once or twice, though not in twenty, thirty years. He remembers favourite shots, his father water-skiing and falling cartoonishly for the camera. A sequence of Richard at the same cottage, ten or eleven, a chisel-wound from carving, a palm gouged and proudly displayed for the camera, the young machismo. Holding his hand up and waving, a blood bead coursing down his wrist. On film it looked black.

“He's never, never, been able to watch you. I saw him try once, and he looked miserable and he cried. I don't know if he sees your life flying by or his life flying by, but he can't stand it.” Eleanor is teary now too. “Can't see you as a little boy. Simply can't stand it.”

Richard is unable to tell whether his mother is crying out of sympathy for her husband or out of the same horror, seeing time die.

He starts down the sacred stairs, treading softly with new respect. He hasn't heard the men for a minute but he senses they haven't left. He doesn't know why he feels so weak but he does, and it's all he can to do to keep gravity from helping him too quickly to the bottom of the stairs.

He no longer knows what he might do or say and even less what he
should
do or say. All plans are off, mostly because a plan will change in any case — warp, distort, join the long dissembly that is the ongoing scatter and fade of his mind. Thoughts, they rise, have their say and then fade, all thoughts are the same in this, none are more than others, even the ones that change the faces of buildings. Each thought, like this one, fading now. Into the image of a knee lifting and planting, descending a perfect set of stairs, which was once seen to be a miraculous machine. Some people were probably afraid of early stairs, like his mother had been of the telephone. Richard at three was newly afraid up on his shoulders, though as a baby he had loved it, he grabbed him hard by the hair, a pain you can hardly stand but love anyway. Yes, once he clomped down some stairs with Richie on his shoulders, the little guy squealing, almost ripping out his hair. Eleanor unable to look, afraid they would fall, speaking so sternly with her face averted, that panicked monotone of hers, she wouldn't dare a rambunctious syllable for fear it will make him trip and tumble, Richie fast in his hair like a monkey.

Someone stubs a toe in the dark, swears, hisses,
Gimme your light
.

And so, halfway down the stairs, he says to them through a smile, “Sorry.” It
is
his fault they're labouring in darkness.

An intake of breath, a
Jesus
. A flashlight beam swings up, into his eyes, light's body strikes him and he begins to fall.
Taken in gravity's certain hand he lets care itself dissemble. And, time — another flashlight beam finds him, falling. As his hands come away, as his robe comes apart and widens, he sees what he must look like as he flies down to them.

At the front of the hospital is a wide fountain and Richard climbs the steps beside it. The air feels cooler for the planes of water running over slabs of smooth concrete. It's a '60s style his father dismissed, calling it “cubism for the masses.” The moving mirrors of water make no noise at all, and Richard knows someone was proud to get it exactly so.

The ward he's directed to is not intensive care, as he had assumed, but geriatric.

When the elevator doors open he can smell an earthy something under the chemical germ-killer. He passes doors but won't look in. He hears soft moans from one room, whining babble from another, silence from most. He came with Melanie to a place like this to visit her mother, once.

Is his father here for good? All these old folks stuffed into sterile caverns, waiting for death. His father, so aware of his environment, claiming how environment
is
one's mood. He would find a hospital hellish for that alone.

At the nurse's station he gets pointed directions, is told a nurse is in with his father now. Richard finds the door and meets this nurse on her way out. He introduces himself to the short, young woman with a kind smile and tired but patient eyes. She is dressed mostly in what appears to be green disposable paper. She rustles when she moves.

“I had to dress his thumb again. It keeps bleeding because he won't stop wiggling it.” She could be speaking about a child — isn't he naughty. “We might need to put in a stitch.”

Richard needs her to back up into bigger things.

“He's had a stroke?”

“Well, now, the tests show nothing so far, but he's uncommunicative.”

“Always was.” Richard smiles to tell her it's a joke.

“He had a blow to the head. So we don't know if it's that, or it might be the shock, from the attack. He's, how old is he? Seventy-five?”

“Seventy-nine. He was definitely attacked? The doctor I spoke to says he may have fallen.”

“Well, we don't know. The police report was very, was not very clear. A neighbour found him just as he was regaining —”

“My father won't say what happened?”

The nurse eyes him anew. Her manner softens.

“I think you have to see him yourself. He won't stop moving. He's hallucinating.” The nurse has Richard by the arm, stopping him from going in quite yet. “I should warn you. There's lots of swelling.”

His father is curtained off at the far end of the room. Sunlight enters such that Richard can see his father's shadow projected onto the curtain. He is sitting on the edge of his bed, and his hands are busy.

Richard doesn't pull the curtain aside but more quietly lifts and steps under. His father's face is badly swollen on one side and an eye socket is puffed and blackened. His nose might be broken. Other than that, it's his father, who has always looked old to him.

“Hi, Dad.”

It's curious, his father's response to this. His hands keep working away in front of him. He turns his head to Richard's voice but his eyes stay down, keep staring at whatever it is his
hands are working on. Turning in the sunlight, his face is cut hard with shadows.

“You feel okay?”

His father looks content enough. Nothing in his eyes suggests pain or suffering of any kind. He looks freshly cleaned, his hair combed. On his bedside table, an empty Dixie cup is torn into many pieces. A drinking straw with an accordion bend has been pulled straight and taut.

“Mom sends her love.”

He realizes he does feel repelled. Not by his appearance so much. It's that his father still isn't talking to him, still isn't looking at him. His father who, sitting there, patiently working his hands, looks like a contented summary of himself.

Watching his father push whatever it is away, watching him nimbly combat the very air, Richard sees a perfect picture of futility. And he feels close to his father, as close as he ever has. He sees his father and knows himself: he lets no one in either.

Richard watches the hands. They are deft, and more articulate than his words ever were. They move, still, with delicacy and precision. Minutely pinching, pulling, sweeping. On second thought, he's not fighting the air. He's trying to clear it away. Not clear away — take apart.

This Tofino,” pronounced Uncle Phil, from his bed, first cigarette of the day bouncing unlit in his lips, “is a freakish place.”

It was warm and lovely out and the cause of his declaration, yesterday having been stormy and cold. “Hilariously cold,” he had said, not laughing. “Mid-May?” He'd also found it freakish that you could always hear the roar of waves, the constant roar of waves.

“Cheers, mate.”

Philip liked how his Uncle Phil thanked him. His uncle's namesake, he had fetched the cigarettes from the condo's living room, the kind of chore he'd been happily performing for two days, wanting to get to know his English uncle, his only uncle, whom he got to see once each year. Interesting, these notions of “relative” and “English.” And Uncle Phil was entertaining in ways Philip's parents certainly weren't. Those expressions of
his, for instance the way he sighed and said under his breath, “Deep carni
val
,” pronouncing the second word like the French might. What did Uncle Phil mean by that?

From the doorsill Philip watched his uncle suck absently on his cigarette, take it out to discover its unlit end, then swear and lurch out of bed with more energy than he would show all day. Philip's mother wouldn't let Uncle Phil smoke inside the rented condo because of the children.

Uncle Phil still wore the bathing suit he'd worn last evening in the hot tub. He had the kind of body, Philip noted, that you expected of an English man, especially a musician, in that it was without defined muscle. Even his uncle's tan seemed not very attached to its skin, and mismatched to the pale tone underneath. Philip had to agree with his mother, whom he'd overheard telling his father that “Your brother is two years younger and looks ten years older.” She'd said it accusingly, and Philip knew this had to do with his uncle's lifestyle. Or, as she put it, “How your brother lives.”

“We did it backwards, darling,” Uncle Phil shouted again to Aunt Sally, who didn't hear because she was out at the car “searching the boot” for sunscreen. By backwards he meant they shouldn't have gone to Jamaica before Canada, because “the other way 'round wouldn't have felt so freaking frigid. Next year we do cold
then
hot.” Uncle Phil said “freaking” a lot and slipped occasionally. At each slip Philip's mother closed her eyes, and once took his father away for a hissing talk.

They sat eating breakfast quickly, Philip's little sister and brother racing to lick jam off their toast before they were told to stop. Philip's mother was impatient at the stove, waiting for the bacon to cook. Uncle Phil always wanted bacon, crispy bacon. Philip enjoyed the way his uncle defended his sins: earlier this
morning, announcing that she was off to the resort store and what would people like for breakfast, his mother had startled at Uncle Phil's, “Any deeply sustaining pork product!” booming from behind his closed bedroom door. There was something so English in what he said, sly like the book
Winnie the Pooh
was sly.

The idea this morning was that Philip's mother and father and Aunt Sally would go whale-watching while Uncle Phil took the three kids to the main beach to enjoy the warm day. Twelve, Philip was old enough to appreciate the rather undramatic grey whales surfacing to breathe, but he got seasick even on calm water and in any case he had to help, as his father put it, “poor Uncle Phil look after the hordes.” Uncle Phil did look grateful that Philip was staying behind. He and Aunt Sally had no children — another side of Uncle Phil that seemed to rub his mother wrong.

Eating bacon, pretending to try to entice them away from whale-watching, Uncle Phil said, “You're actually choosing the big grey blobs over ‘the kite trick'?” He refused to tell anyone what the trick was, though Aunt Sally nodded while she confirmed, “It's a good one.”

After breakfast, his parents and Aunt Sally gone, Philip stood in the bedroom door again to watch his uncle pull a canvas hunting vest over a bright red long-sleeved T-shirt and clutch himself, saying, “
Brrrr
.” He enjoyed being watched. His hair was always wild, standing up in strands that shifted comically as he moved. He would stay the whole day in that hunting vest — it had bullet holders and was apparently the real thing. On its back was a big yin-yang symbol, though two shades of blue rather than the typical black and white. Philip knew what it meant — it meant opposites that made a whole. Though odd on a hunting vest it was one of the more sensible ornaments.