He kept looking at the television, wondering where the picture had gone. So Marcie positioned herself in front of him, still talking to him, bending over with her face close to his. She was in his line of sight, and he tried to nudge her aside, but he wasn’t very gentle and she fell over the coffee table, landing hard on the floor, rubbing her elbow and crying.
“I know you’re an asshole right now because of Africa,” she said. “But you’re also just being an asshole. Don’t you get it?”
He did. He knew this darkness inside him wasn’t Africa’s doing. It had always been there inside his deepest self, and all his time abroad had done was to wear off the veneer, revealing the truth at his core. Or maybe it had given him permission to acknowledge that most of life just didn’t matter.
Months passed, more of the same. In the winter he took to walking for hours after he got off work, letting the cold air pinch his nose and ears. He spent as little time as possible at home, hoping this might make things better for Marcie. He was standing in the park one evening watching some boys play hockey, the rink a pool of light in the darkness, their skates clashing and whistling in rhythm, when Yozefu came to him unbidden, unwanted. He saw the boy not as he’d been in the days before his death but as he’d looked when Tug first met him.
He saw him laughing as he kicked the banana-leaf puck around the dusty courtyard, yelling, “He shoots, he scores!”
He started to cry, pulling his hair with both hands. Sobbing, choking on his snot, he curled into a ball next to the rink and tried to huddle there for warmth. Probably he would have spent the night there, but one of the hockey fathers came up to him and said he had to leave, that he was scaring the children.
This was the end of one part of his life. Afterward, he was calmer. He stopped drinking so much. He went to work, came home, was well behaved.
But he still wasn’t sleeping, and he spent his nights on the couch, hollow-eyed, watching TV with headphones on, so as not to keep Marcie up. They went out to dinner with friends and he would sit quietly at the table, a pleasant smile on his face, rarely saying anything at all. He was like a well-trained dog, patiently attending his master, observing human behavior that had nothing to do with him. Many of these people complimented him on how well he was doing, and he couldn’t tell if this was sarcastic, encouraging, or ripe with condescension, like telling a child how good he is at checkers. After a while he understood all they meant was that compared to the alcoholic rages, the quiet calm looked more like normalcy, and perhaps this was enough. So he tried to adopt the contours of a regular life, molding himself to it as if his personality were made of clay.
He got a promotion at the stationery store, to evening supervisor, and his hours changed. By the time he left, the parks were quiet and there were no boys to remind him of Yozefu.
Christmas came, then went.
In January there was an ice storm, and the store lost its electricity. He called the manager, who told him to close up early and go home, so he walked home with the sting of sleet against his face. The city was stippled with light and dark, some buildings still sparkling, others black, a pattern of blankness and power.
When he got home, the lights were off, and Marcie was startled to see him. He explained what happened, and she burst into tears.
“It’s just a storm,” he said, puzzled. “The electricity will come back on.”
She was sitting on the living-room couch, and candles flickered on the coffee table in front of her. There were two glasses of wine there, sedimented with red.
“I’m sorry,” she said, now crying hard.
He had no idea what she was talking about. “It’s okay,” he said.
“No it’s not,” she said. She was curling into herself, her head down. “I know I should be more patient, but I just needed somebody. I’ve been so lonely. I’m so alone.”
Tug had trouble focusing his attention on the scene before him, this woman and her tears. With some difficulty he realized she was still talking.
“I guess you want to know who it is,” she was saying. “It’s Jake. I know, I know, it’s terrible, but he and Joanne are having trouble and he and I were just, well, comforting each other, I guess. That old story.”
“Who’s Jake?” Tug said.
Marcie raised her head, tucked her blond hair behind her ears, and drew a deep breath. When she spoke, her tone was acidic. “Jake and Joanne Herschfeld,” she said, very slowly, “are our friends. We had dinner with them last weekend.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
“You’re not even here,” she said. Then the anger passed and she started sobbing again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m messing them up, I’m messing us up. I should be supporting you. I’m evil, I’m terrible, I’m the worst.”
Feeling sorry for her, he put his hand on her knee. (She told him later that it was the first time he had touched her in months.) He wanted to say something to make her feel better. He looked down at his fingers and thought of a child running through the streets carrying his own severed hand in the one he still had.
“This,” he said, looking at her. “This is nothing.”
By the time the power came back on she was living with her parents. Over the next week she emptied the apartment of her possessions, and was gone.
Should he have felt sad? Probably; but he didn’t. He was enormously relieved. And best of all, he was freed from the obligation to think about the future, in which he no longer had any interest. He was released.
Of that day on the mountain he wouldn’t say much, only that the idea of not having to sit in front of the television at three a.m. waiting for the night to end, of not having to pretend to be happy for the sake of other people, was perilously tempting. It was luxurious, almost a reward. He never said that he wanted to die.
He did say, “I wish I’d stayed in Africa.”
When Grace thanked him for telling her all this, he shrugged. “You can tell people your story,” he said, “or any terrible story, and it doesn’t make any difference. Things just keep happening, over and over again.”
NINE
Montreal, 1996
AFTER SHE LEARNED the truth about Tug, Grace thought everything would be different; it seemed as though she had broken through a barrier and found herself in Tug’s own country, closer to the heart of things. Tug himself acted differently — glad that he’d told her, glad that she’d understood why he hadn’t wanted to talk about it earlier. Reliving it was something he had already done, and now he wanted to move beyond it and live somewhere else.
“I’m not that person anymore,” he said. “I need to get used to life in the comfortable nations.”
“Comfortable nations?” Grace asked.
“I heard an aid worker say that once. He said the hardest part wasn’t being over there but coming back. Supermarkets. Cars everywhere. Too many choices. That kind of thing.”
“It’s not that bad to have supermarkets and choices, is it?”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t.”
In this comfortable nation, it was a cold spring. Grace and Tug went skiing every chance they could. She loved seeing him up ahead of her, striding hard, his shoulders broad against the gray sky; sometimes he would turn around to see where she was, and she loved that he checked.
They spent their weekends together, except for Tug’s Saturday shift at the stationery store. They went to movies or, more often, stayed at Grace’s place and cooked. While the stews simmered or the meat roasted, they read or napped or talked. He asked her tons of questions, and she asked as many in return. Now there was no limit to their conversation. He wanted to know everything about her childhood, her family, her life with Mitch; she even told him about Kevin and the child she’d chosen not to keep. She heard all about his adolescence, his first girlfriend, his family’s summer house in Muskoka, his sister in Toronto and her two spoiled children.