WALKING DOWN THE hospital hallway, Dr. Singh bopping ahead of me in the dim light, that's not the way I want to remember my brother, not now. I want all those moments I can tell other people about, those moments when I was there and so close to being a part of his life — our post-up games in the driveway, running pick-and-rolls to perfection, me driving and dishing to him for the spot-up jumper. I want the kid at the beach, spinning and giddy and tumbling in the sand.
Dr. Singh stops at a door and peeks in through the little window. I'm still a few paces down the hall. When he starts to open the door, I pause. By now Dizzy's postcard is little more than a crumpled, papery mush in my hand.
I look to my right, into another room just like the one I'm sure my brother's in. Sitting on a chair with his back to me is Bettis, and lying in the bed in front of him is a pale, pretty woman with a bald head. He's got both of her hands in his, held up to his mouth, and his big shoulders are heaving, shuddering like a glacier run ashore. He's weeping, but his wife's looking at him with a smile on her face — the tired, sad smile of someone saved.
I turn away and Dr. Singh has disappeared. The door to Dizzy's room hangs open, an invitation, with a triangle of pale yellow light slanting into the hallway from inside.
But I don't move, not yet. I stand thinking about my brother, lying there in bed. In my mind the image starts to play out as a film. I see myself going in, sitting down in an uncomfortable chair at the foot of his cot, saying hello, not much else. My parents arrive. After some discussion, I end up staying the night. Dizzy and I don't talk much — he fades in and out of sleep, I huddle under a blanket in the chair; a breakfast comes he doesn't eat, then a lunch. I call Jen and we talk and decide that I should stay out here for a while. The days go by. Some nights I stay at the hospital; others, I sleep in my old bed at my parents'.
Meanwhile, Dizzy would be getting better, but our conversations would still be minimal — me asking if he needed anything, if he was feeling okay, whatever. Maybe I'd even bring in tapes of old NBA games, although I can't imagine we'd watch them. They'd probably just lie in a pile on the side table between a few vases of flowers, him never acknowledging them, me never suggesting we put them on. The nurses would come in and I'd look away while they changed the bandages where his foot used to be; if he was sleeping they'd ask me how he was doing and I'd nod and say, "Good." But mostly I'd just sit there with him. And sitting with him, I feel myself hoping, might just be enough.
I start to move down the hallway, toward Dizzy's room, toward the light shining out of it and the soft murmur of Dr. Singh talking to my brother. I'm thinking now about how, eventually, Dr. Singh is going to say that Dizzy is okay to leave. I see myself collecting his things, and through the window of his room a winter morning — sky like a white curtain, bright. I see me and Dr. Singh easing Dizzy into a wheelchair, some paperwork filed, some talk of prosthetics, good luck. And then I'm wheeling my brother down the hall, through the doors of the hospital, into the light, outside, where the snow's just starting to fall.
BEING LIKE BULLS
IT TOOK THREE weeks in a row of no one coming in before the place really got to me. My parents' old shop had always been full of stuff that, even back when we still got tourists through, I couldn't imagine anyone would ever want. Junk. Everywhere, piled up on shelves or hanging from display racks, all with more or less the same tacky logo splashed across the front in neon script: Niagara Falls, Ontario. It might have been gradual, building up over time, or it might have just been that something snapped. But suddenly everything my eyes landed on — the coffee mugs, the key chains and pencils and snow globes, the T-shirts and sweatshirts and jackets and hats, the daytime postcards with the water flowing green and frothing white over the edge, the sunset postcards burning orange, the nighttime postcards all purple and blue — came needling back into my brain. Simply put, the place was a museum of crap. So I got my jacket on, closed up, and drove over to CanAm Tower.
Dave and a new girl I hadn't seen before were out in the parking lot having a smoke. They both had their uniforms on, navy blue jumpsuits stamped with the CanAm logo: the stars and stripes and maple leaf styled into a yin-yang sort of thing. Cross-border solutions, it said along the bottom. Their belts dangled various paraphernalia: flashlight, walkie-talkie, nightstick.
The nightsticks Dave and I used to joke about — until one morning just before dawn he caught some pickers trying to drag an old fridge out of the pit and bashed one of them into a coma. The guy had been from one of the camps out in wine country and for a while things got pretty dicey: while Dave's victim was still in hospital a few of his pals snuck into town one night and beat two American pit workers to near death. CanAm responded by equipping its night security with tasers and instructions to zap first and ask questions later. But the picker came out of the coma and things settled down. Instead of being reprimanded, Dave was just put on the day shift at the top of the tower, told to radio in if he saw anything suspicious.
I came across the lot, waving. Dave nodded back. "Busy day?"
"Right," I said. "Something like that."
The girl — her nametag read Kaede — was plugging her nose with one hand and smoking with the other. She was young, mid-twenties or so, and when she grinned at me I was surprised to find myself grinning back. Looking away, I scratched at my elbow through my jacket. "Cold out today," I said.
Dave turned toward me and I could smell the liquor coming off him in waves. Nine thirty in the morning, so this was probably remnants of the night before. Lately I'd been staying in, reading magazines and falling asleep by ten. "Kaede," he said, in a weird, slow voice, "this is my good friend Aagyapal."
"Paul's fine," I told her, eyeing Dave.
"Hi, Paul," she said, fingers still pinching her nose, breathing smoke through her mouth.
Then she checked her watch, took one last drag, smiled again at both of us, and wandered off down the street, flicking her butt over her shoulder. It spun there on the pavement in the wind, sparking orange, until a bigger gust snuffed it out.
"Cheery girl," I said.
"Japanese," Dave whispered. He punched my shoulder, seemed like he was about to say something else, paused, and eventually added, "But totally speaks English fine." Kaede moved off in the direction of Rainbow Bridge until she was out of sight.
I shivered. "Mind if I come up? Some October. Feels more like January."
We shot up the tower in the elevator, the view spreading out beneath us. In the observation room Dave sprawled on the couch in the corner while I gazed through the south-facing windows over that end of town. It was empty, nearly derelict. Nobody along any of the little avenues that used to be so full of tourists, nobody down the end of the boardwalk where folks would line up to watch the river come crashing down over the edge, nobody at the coin-op viewfinders tilted on haphazard angles from the last time — months ago, now — that anyone had fed a loonie in to spy on what was happening below.
"Those fuckers were hogging the pool table again last night," Dave said, stretching. Then he laughed. "I feel like my old man — 'Send them back to their own country."'