His eyes open and he hisses, “You’re too young for this shit.”
“I’m not quitting.”
“Oh kid. Don’t stay for my sake. I’m the burnout phoenix.”
I want to persuade him to apply to one of the treatment centres but I don’t because I know from my years at the hotel that’s not how it works, it’s not about what or me or nextness.
“Figure it out, kid. You gotta figure it out.”
“Let’s go to my car,” I say. I help him walk out through the back door, down the alley, and sit with him in the back seat of my car for an hour or so, and then we go back to work.
The day Hans goes to sleep for the last time, I’m running up the steps and a dice is sitting on the step at eye level with me and I capture it in my palm as I pass. I pocket it. I’m always finding little things like this all over the hotel and know I’m the only one who’ll pick them up.
The ambulance comes for Hans’s body and leaves. I take the dice out and set it on the computer monitor. I pack my bag and go to Hans’s room. I put Ulysses on his leash and take him to my car. I tell him he’s mine now. Hans had told me how many times Ulysses had saved his life—no doctor can smell when the sleep’s too heavy but that dog can. As I turn the ignition and the car’s engine gives me its reliable vibrational bearhug, I squeeze my eyes tight shut. I hotbox the car with my tears. I spread fingers over my face and shutter myself into this place. “Fucking idiot,” I say over and over and over. The pain floats in jagged pieces in my sternum. Somewhere in this, I think, how perfect, how fucking appropriate, that I will die in this little pod of my car in this underground parkade just as the people in the hotel die in their pods, lined up one after the other. They’re just sitting ducks for the sleep. Oh, the spaces between the swells of pain are widening and sagging like rotting floorboards where there used to be ribs. It isn’t Hans—it’s all of them. All the dead ones I’ve known in the years since a chunk of the population started to slip into unending unexplained slumber—not enough people to interfere with the grind of life, but more than those lost to cancer, more than heart disease, more than car accidents. Many of the sleepers never die. They are subclinical.
Hans had teased me—like trying to explain fucking to a virgin. I hadn’t known. My not knowing had changed me. My innocence had been a clear space for something else to grow. Like love for this world and also like horror against this world. The two doubled together within me, wrestling for control. I bend over and vomit, reach down to mop it up with my sleeve. I take off my shirt and toss it in a stinking ball into the back seat. I think, Hans is gone and everyone will go and then I feel scraped empty, and oddly weightless, my arms loose as they return to their original positions, the same and dislodged. I had worried about Hans’s judgement of me—he had seen I had no clue and let it slide—and now he was gone and what was the purpose of any care that I had put into our conversations, my management of his impressions of me, the story he told himself? Any expectations of me he’d had were irrelevant now. Not worthless, just stale-dated. I don’t believe in ghosts. That’s what I’ve learned from the sleep hotel. The body is the only real thing. The sugar in the blood, our only proof. The radio doesn’t play yesterday’s death toll twice. Somehow, I have fallen into this work with the continuously-dying and this is its nature: I am in competition with time. My car stinks of what’s inside me. I start the car and roll down the windows. I drink water and spit it out. I’m all acid and tendon, taut bone and fluttering nerves and names. I drive myself out of the carpark into the night.
The Last Big Dance
Conor Kerr
We ran out of hooch at that last big barn dance. It was good timing because the mounties showed up right afterwards and busted up the party. They came roaring in, with their usual big fuss and grandeur, pretending they were real tough guys, and not just a bunch of hooligans looking for booze and drunk ladies. Granny hated when they showed up. She didn’t want anyone in a uniform drinking the hooch she made, and she didn’t want anyone interrupting her fiddle music, least of all the mounties. Granny hates mounties. She’s got good reason too, they’re always showing up at her place looking for the stills, taking all the canned meat and vegetables from the cold cellar, busting up the horses, and lighting the wood pile on fire. They tried to bust her up once too but she smacked the man’s chubby cheeks red with her spoon and threatened to let loose her wolves on them. She didn’t have any wolves, but the city boys from Ontario who were posted on their first tour to northern Alberta didn’t know that. So instead of busting up Granny, they settled for busting up the barn dances.
That same night Uncle Jim went through the ice on the Amisk River on our ride back home. He was right pickled and somehow managed to fall out of the back of the wagon, off the bridge, and went all the way up to his neck in the muck and water even though the river’s only about three feet deep in that spot and he’s six foot plus. He kept screaming bloody murder about the beavers dragging him under the ice. Said he’d be back to “light them toothy fuckers up.” My cousins and I threw him the rope, tied it off to the wagon. Granny got the horses going and we pulled him right out of his hole and over the ice to the bank. We got him out of his clothes and wrapped in a woolen blanket in the back of the straw-laden wagon. First thing he did was grab a bottle of hooch he must have stashed in the straw and took a big swig. Then he winked at me.
“You and me girl, it’s just you and me,” he said with a moonshine slur before he passed out. My cousins and I killed time on the rest of the ride home by putting straw up his nose. We tried to see how many pieces we could get up there before he would swat them out in his drunken stupor.
“Jim never could handle his hooch,” Granny said as we unhitched the horses and headed into her cabin.
I moved into Granny’s one-room shack shortly after my tenth birthday in 1942. Granny had just celebrated her birthday by shooting a two-year-old bull moose off her front porch right in between the eyes with her old lever-action rifle. All the family and neighbours came over to help butcher up the moose and celebrate Granny’s good aim. It was at that party that my parents told me I wasn’t coming back with them. My mother and father had just had their ninth child and there was no room in their own one bedroom cabin. It didn’t bother me none. I liked the idea of having my own bed and not sharing it with four of my brothers and sisters. Uncle Jim had recently left Granny’s to go and fight the Nazis over in Europe. My parents told me that Granny was going to need a hand around her cabin. I figured that meant chopping wood, getting water, and shooting the odd deer or bird, tasks I was well-suited to having done them for as long as I could remember. In reality it meant spending days doing all those tasks plus carrying the fifty-pound sacks of grain half a mile back into the woods to the old copper still. The trail to the still wasn’t defined like the one that led back to my parents’ house. It was rough, tough walking. You were continually dodging around the fallen birch and pine trees and old spruce boughs with all that grain or wheat or corn or barley or horse feed on your shoulders. Worst of it was covering your tracks on the way out. If even a little hint of a trail was showing, a footprint in the snow, a tree moved out of the way, even leaves crunched up, Granny would hammer on you with her wooden spoon.
“You going to lead dem mounties right to it,” she’d yell. “Can’t cover a track, walking around out there like a goddamn mooniyah.”
At night, we’d sit around the wood-burning stove drinking spruce needle tea from the cast-iron pot permanently steeping on top of the stove. My night tasks were to make sure that pot was permanently full of water by melting snow in it and adding cups of spruce needles Granny had dried out during the summer. My other task was to place the beads on or thread Granny’s beading needle. In the last few years, her hands had taken to shaking and she couldn’t do either anymore. But once I got those on there for her, she’d be flying through the tanned moose hide creating elaborate flower designs. While she beaded, she’d tell stories of the land and all our relations that lived here with us. She told me about where mosquitoes come from, and why you should never trust a government official, a banker, or a mountie. She talked about long lean months in the winter when her, my mother and Uncle Jim wouldn’t have anything to eat except for the donations from some of the neighbour families who were also on the verge of starving. How she would have to do the hunting since there wasn’t a man around to go and get deer, birds, and moose. She talked about Jim, and how good of a shot he was with the rifle, how he learned to shoot animals in the head to ease their suffering and preserve more of the meat, how he had been doing that since he was six years old. Then she’d laugh and talk about how she pitied those Germans who got in the way of Jim’s rifle.