Alex, perched on the examining table in her crackling blue-paper wrapper, had the urge to ID the doctor before she let her slip her child-size hand inside her. She wondered if the girl had even gotten her period yet. Maybe it was bring-your-kidto-work week? Her own GP, a wiry-haired woman she loved who had seen her through a devastating bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, was away on a Doctors Without Borders mission in Haiti.
Alex stared at the girl doctor’s hands to avoid looking directly into her face. “The Hippocratic oath,” the doctor said, pulling up her T-shirt to reveal more of the script spiralling across her taut belly. “In the original Greek.” Tugging her shirt back into place, she asked Alex a stream of straightforward questions, then snapped on a pair of green-and-white latex gloves embossed with the Starbucks logo, the mermaid with her tail split at her crotch. “We’ll have to run a few tests to make sure, but if I’m going to hazard, like, an educated guess? I would say premature ovarian failure.”
“What?”
“Early menopause.”
Alex heard herself shrieking. The sound of the big ginger tom next door happening upon a raccoon clan in the back alley. Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. A B-movie screech in Dolby Digital 5.1. On the wall behind the child doctor was a calendar featuring anthropomorphized bacteria engaged in Winter Olympic-style sporting events with an assortment of antibiotic soaps.
“It happens,” she told Alex matter-of-factly. To who- whom? To whom does this happen at thirty-six?!
Walking home from the clinic, clutching a referral for a geriatrics specialist and a pamphlet on the pros and cons of estrogen replacement therapy, Alex felt the elasticity in her skin giving way with each step, her uterus a dried gourd inside her, rattling like a maraca. She spotted a guy who looked like Rufus putting up a poster on a telephone pole outside Dream Cycle. Staple gun in hand, he scootered up Commercial from pole to pole. That goofy hat, the orange hoodie. It was Rufus.
The poster read: Shuffering Shuccotash at the Iberian Club, Wed. April 13th. It had a picture of Sylvester the Cat as St. Sebastian, pierced from cartoon ears to foot-paws with arrows. Tweety Bird fluttered above his head with a shit-eating grin and a bow in his fist. A creepy cupid. A malevolent angel.
It was the year of the Benevolent Municipal Bylaw (section iii, clause 8d) that allowed the homeless to camp out in construction sites as long as they signed a personal-injuries waiver. Developers didn’t like it, but since the 2010 Olympics and the overextension of credit and enormous cost overruns, sites sat empty. A waste, the majority Farsighted People councillors decided. The opposition FRF agreed, but had wanted to charge rent.
Across the street from Alex’s house, under the rib-like girders and jutting rebar, a troupe of Kamper Kids slept each night in a tangled mound like buttered noodles, the remaining stained-glass window casting a fractured mosaic over them whenever the street light came on and flickered through it. During the day they moved on, forming their silent, almost biblical tableaux outside the off-sales, loonie stores, and coffee bars all along Commercial Drive. At dusk they drifted back, lit a small fire, and sat companionably around it passing containers of takeout back and forth until the flames extinguished themselves. And then they slept again.
From: ‹ adinesen@globeandmail.ca›
To: ‹ rufus@bioman.ca›
Sent: February 10, 2008
Subject: way2go!!
Congratulations on your award!! That’s Mammut, baby.
You’re a green machine, Roof.
Same-same here. Hot, heartbreaking-jaded professionals, desperate people. My fingers feel like molten lead just typing about it. Latest in tomorrow’s paper. Maybe already online. Sudan still denying it’s backing the rampaging Islamic rebels.
Don’t worry so much, the Human Rights Watch boys are good to me and share their tp & tipples.
forever & ever, Lex
Why couldn’t anyone else smell the damn carpet? Alex sat at the front of the classroom pinching the bridge of her nose and ignoring her students. For the past two weeks she’d been letting them do whatever they wanted, waiting to see who would crack first, her or them. There were only nine days left until the end of spring term.
She was playing hangman on the whiteboard with Xmas Singh while the rest of them deployed blue rinse bio bombs and plasma grenades against digital enemies or thumbed away at their PDAs. All jacked into some device, busy and bored. The only truly weird thing about the situation was that most of them still showed up at all, as if attending class was a condition of some kind of day parole. Or maybe they thought this was all there was, maybe they were satisfied that Alex had sunk to their level of expectation. There was no longer any doubt in anyone’s mind; she was simply a bad teacher, as opposed to a badass teacher, the kind who could inspire a group of inner-city toughs to excel at calculus or develop a healthy dollop of self-respect. Sidney Poitier’s Sir (“I am sick of your foul language, your crude behaviour, and your sluttish manner”-Alex could just imagine the blank stares if she said something like that), Morgan Freeman’s “Crazy Joe” Clark, Edward James Olmos’s Mr. Escalante. Maybe she was too white.
Corinna D. hadn’t shown up for almost three weeks. The one call Alex had made to her home had been answered by a tired-sounding woman who said Corinna was out visiting her cousins. The college’s privacy rules prevented Alex from mentioning that Corinna had been a no-show for an awfully long time.
Xmas Singh asked: Is there an X?
Alex added a second leg to the stick man dangling from the noose.
Xmas Singh clutched theatrically at his throat and made gurgling noises.
Alex said: Best of three?
Rufus asked: Too settled? Too happy?
“Shuffering Shuccotash?” Alex said, peering at Rufus over the top of her new drugstore reading glasses. They were lying in bed, Rufus shuffling through his latest batch of Pokémon trading cards and Alex squinting at a pamphlet on osteoarthritis.
“My band.”
“Your band?”
“Our first gig is on the thirteenth.”
“But you don’t even play an instrument. You’re tone-deaf.”
“I’m the gear guy.”
Her triceps had sagged like saddlebags in the mirror after her bath, her hands ached, her ovaries were shutting down, and this morning she had plucked forty-three more grey hairs from her head before she stopped counting and swept the offending nest into the toilet. When she flushed, the hairs had swirled into a small, furious animal before disappearing with a gurgle. Alex started to cry.
“You’re supposed to be the guy making sharkskin so we can all live in the water when the air gets too hot.” Alex smacked at Rufus, hard and fast with both hands, like an inspired jazz drummer. “You’re supposed to be focusing on saving the planet.”
He grabbed her wrists and pulled her towards him, nuzzling her neck. His chest was smoother than when she’d met him, the curve of his penis like a scimitar. He smelled hairless, like peeled cantaloupe.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Alex muttered. “It’s starting to feel like incest.”
But she closed her eyes and rose to try to meet him halfway.
It was the year the enterprising homeless constructed ad hoc villages of tidy huts from purloined election signs. The colourful little houses lined the cut at both ends of the Terminal Street Bridge. The design world took notice, with the San Francisco- based architectural magazine Dwell running a photo essay with text by Toronto’s latest public intellectual. “These intelligent spaces represent design that fully integrates the residents’ ideals and values with their needs. Like the yurt and the Quonset hut, the ‘signage-home’ or ‘Sigho’ will no doubt evolve well beyond its origins, co-opted by those with a discerning eye for the frugality and transportality of the design.” He supplied the requisite Walter Benjamin quote from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and ended with some McLuhanesque wordplay.