I thought it over. “I’m the dog.”
“How’s that?”
“You said the dream made you think of me. I’m the dog.”
“Um… no. I was actually thinking—hang on a second.” She half-covered the phone to say something to her husband, then came back on. “I should get going. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I hated her,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Kim. When we were together, I hated her and she knew it. But everything’s different now. I’d do anything to get her back. It’s like she changed me somehow. She put all this need inside me.”
My sister was quiet for a long moment. “You know,” she finally said, “you might want to talk to someone. Like a professional.”
My hand tightened around the receiver. “That’s what Kim said.”
“Well, she’s right. I hope you’re not harassing her.”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean.”
“I… Why did you call me again?”
“I was worried. But you’re okay. So.” She kept saying it, as if repetition would make it true. “Have you talked to Dad lately, by the way?”
I made a vague noise, unsure just how long it had been.
“You should give him a call.”
“Why?”
“You just should. Listen, it was good to hear your voice. I really need get back to bed…”
We hung up after promising to talk again soon, neither one of us meaning it. Ever since she’d moved to New Zealand, we’d been like strangers. All the same, I felt better for having talked to someone. I put the phone down and it rang again almost immediately. I answered without thinking.
“Hello?”
“You bastard.”
“Kim?”
“I thought you’d done something to yourself. I was about to call the police.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, surprised and touched.
“What is wrong with you?” she shouted.
“I just… had a problem with my phone.”
“A problem with your phone?”
“The line cut out.”
“The hell it did. I heard background noise. I thought you’d fucking killed yourself!”
The louder she got, the calmer I became. Her anger was irrelevant. She cared. That was all that mattered. As she continued to harangue me, someone knocked at the door. I carried the phone over and found the superintendent on the other side of the spyhole. I held the phone against my chest, watching her. She knocked two more times then gave up and went away. I put the phone to my ear again. “Kim, listen…”
“No, you listen!” she said, her voice breaking. “You’re sick! You’re a sick human being, Felix!”
I laughed, without knowing why.
“This is funny to you?” she yelled.
“No,” I moaned, laughing so hard my stomach hurt.
She sputtered for a moment, then grew dangerously calm, uttering four words, with the intensity of someone laying a curse: “Never. Call. Me. Again.”
The line went dead. I set the phone in its cradle, still laughing, and went into the bathroom. In the mirror, my face looked old and shapeless. I punched the wall, surprised by how easily my fist broke through the plaster. I turned off the light and climbed into the empty bathtub, soothed by the close walls, the low drone of the ceiling fan. I draped towels over the tub to make a roof for myself. I’d stopped laughing. I’d stopped crying. Minutes passed. Hours. Days, maybe. I experienced each moment of emptiness, the building unusually quiet, as if had been evacuated for an impending natural disaster. I slept and woke and slept again. Hunger gnawed at me, then left me alone. Eventually, a thin voice came to me through the darkness, a voice I recognized as my father’s, eroded to a low, barely audible pitch, as if he were speaking through an impossibly long tube. I slipped into that tube, shimmying back several years to a grey blurred street. A January drizzle. A cold phone against my ear.
“Dad?”
“Felix.” Dad sounded tired. “How are you?”
“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m good.”
I took a drag on my cigarette and looked up and down the street to see if anyone had followed me, if anyone was watching.
“Are you on a payphone?” he asked.
“Yeah. Thanks for taking the charges.”
“It’s fine.”
“I didn’t want to call from the house. They’re always listening.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.
I hopped from foot to foot. My skin hurt from exposure to the outside world. “I would have called sooner,” I said, speaking quickly. “But I’ve been really busy. I got a job at a warehouse. A part-time thing. And I’ve started writing this book.”
“I see.” He didn’t ask me to elaborate. A silence descended on the line.
“How’s Eileen?” I asked.
“Your sister’s fine. She’s in Australia now.”
“Right, I knew that. Did I know that?”
“I’m sure I mentioned it. She’s been travelling for months now.”
“Huh.”
More silence. My body ached to get moving. “So you’re working,” Dad said, not a question, but a statement.
“Yeah.”
“That’s good.”
“Actually…” I rubbed the side of my head. “The part-time thing didn’t work out. I’ve got some leads, though.”
Dad didn’t answer. I pictured him in a pair of ironed blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt, tethered to the wall by our old rotary phone, snow in the window, faded flowers on the walls. Tears filled my eyes. I fought the urge to slam the receiver against the side of my head. “Well,” I said. “I just wanted to check in.”
“How are you doing for money?”
I flexed my jaw and dropped my damp cigarette on the pavement. “Now that you mention it… rent’s coming up soon.”
“I see.”
“I don’t need much.” I crushed the cigarette under my foot, obliterating it.
“I understand,” Dad said.
“A couple of hundred should get me through.”
“I’ll put something in your account tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I realize that.”
“All right. Thanks.”
I sagged in shame, the transaction over. There was nothing left to say. I missed Dad the instant I hung up, but knew that if I’d gotten him back on the line, I’d have only wanted to hang up all over again. Strangers passed, probing me with their eyes. I pulled up my hood and walked down the street, trying not to think about how my roommates had been going through my things, stealing my food, filling my head with subliminal messages while I was sleeping. The world tipped down and I stumbled over my own feet. Hardly knowing how I’d gotten there, I found myself at the bottom of a steep set of stairs on a rocky shoreline. Empty mansions loomed on a cliff behind me. The sea looked stagnant and dull. I sat down on a driftwood log and peered through the rain at a distant container ship, unable to tell what direction it was going, or if in fact it was moving at all. It seemed to me that the ship had always been there, always would be there, just as those same gulls would always be stamped against the sky on ragged, crucified wings. I hated the dull coastal winters with their endless drizzle. I wanted to go home, to the snowy fields and the wide-open skies of the prairies. But for all Dad’s efforts to keep me off the streets, he’d seemed happy to leave me right where I was ever since I’d dropped out of school, making it known in countless small ways that home didn’t want me back.