Invulnerable

The way he looked at her had an irrevocable quality, under which time slept, time crept and time stopped. 

It was something strong and far reaching, like a subway line with no terminus or a currency powerful enough to light a city of night. Her life that had been a string of near misses, but who cared?

Really, right now, who cared?

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

I have a learning disability called dyscalculia, which is like dyslexia’s sister, only for numbers. I can’t read the face of a clock. To me, a minute feels like a year. An hour feels like a century. I lose days like buttons, years like pen caps. Time holds me nowhere, nowhere. Right now, there is nothing but the shifting depth of this sunlight, spilling through the diner’s window.

I’ve always believed that clocks offer, at best, a convenient fiction. They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when I know it does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.

But then, my senses have always been distorted.

I can’t tell left from right, and so I can’t drive. Neither could my father. Being a permanent pedestrian is something we have in common and that’s what makes it horrible. Not that Los Angeles has no sidewalks. Not that I took a thirty dollar cab ride to this restaurant.

I’ve been taking lessons from this Mexican guy Carlos for three years.

“Marla, you drive like you are. Impatient.”

“How do you know I’m like that?” I asked.

Time scares me; it leaves so quick. I can’t see it coming back. As a result, I’m chronically early. I inherited that from my father, only he was chronically late. Chronically not there.

Somewhere else.

Six Characters in Search of An Author

"I think it's good for him, to have this modern family. Then he has to learn what we all have to, in this day and age, go with the flow, you know? Not all this, oh, that screwed me up or this screwed me up. No, none of the blame. It didn't work out and that's all. It didn't work out. That's all."

My father.

There's a book that follows me about you. I think about it how most women think about their child; what will he look like? What will he sound like? Will he love me how I love him? 

A man.

I sat in the cab with her, in a city with a different language, talking about her wedding. I said, "But, when will I meet my ...? Like, really? When?" I was joking, convinced the answer was not for a long time, not ever. Two days later you sent me a quote about love at first sight.

Life is just a big fucking joke, isn't it?

My brother.

"Yo, Kate, I'm so proud of you. Yo, man, fuck, shit is hectic in this circus. I'm gonna hang my baboon mask up at the top of the stairs and paint, WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS. Like, shit with people is hurting, too. I'm just too real for a lot of this stuff, you know? You guys gotta be gentle with me now. Real fragile. Yo, still, shit is so hectic. Are you listening? Why are you always working? Easy!"

He says "Easy!" instead of "Goodbye."

My mother.

And when she cries, I don't recognize her face. It looks like her face is breaking, melting, gone. She looks two years old. She's in a state of flux and when I explain that to her she say's that's the difficulty, that nothing lasts.

I am happy when transparency exists with a friend or lover, like child and mother, telepathic, it's magic when you love someone like that.

"It's okay, Mom. You're the child now. That's normal. That's supposed to happen."

My two girls.

We are each other's families now. Let's sit and get drunk and plan our own lives. Let's pick boys and leave for good, never come home. When our husbands die, and when our daughters do this to us, let's search Craigslist and live together in a big house in the east end and pay under eight hundred dollars a month.

Me.

Stick around, some real feelings might surface.

Out Of The Fog/Into The Myst

While it's true that everything ends, some things never really begin, either.

Do you remember when I was with you I couldn't drink coffee? Do you remember how you didn't like it when I drank alcohol, so I was sober? Do you remember how you would fall asleep and I would lay there, trying to tell my heart to stop beating? Do you remember how my eyes looked different? Do you remember how I was too tired to do anything? Only, now, I can't stop. I can't sleep. I don't feel the affects of caffeine. I'm drunk all the time. I feel like I'm flying.

What do you think of me, when you think of me, if you think of me at all? 

Human beings can't end things with dignity; not like trees that change colour, flowering, fading, falling, beautiful, alive. I am acting out but I also feel nothing at all. 

Our dreams, if they were dreams, came and went unannounced.

I don't know how to remember you and that's the saddest thing of all. 

...

There's someone that he loved before and she's probably the me to his you. I feel her, hovering around us. I want to tell her to leave, but I want to know her, too. Is she like me? Would she like me? 

I am trying so hard to stay away from lonely places. 

What happens after the first shot is fired?

You are that scarf I left in my friend's car in London; one thing, sewn together. 

You were something I loved, lost and shouldn't have, left behind without noticing. I knew exactly where I'd put you, but I couldn't be bothered to write and have you sent home.

Have you ever had one of those moments where your future visits you so clearly?

Black Sheep, A Novel Excerpt

I leave quickly and my father doesn’t follow. I don’t make a scene. I roll my eyes at him and grab my mickey from the floor. I take a long swig and throw it in the shiny silver garbage. I flatten my dress against my thighs and leave. I press my fingertips against a tattoo that sits happily on my forearm.

Desiderium is written in black Franklin Gothic font. It is the alphabet my father stared at every day for forty years during his career as a newspaperman, the typeface that accepted him, the one set of symbols on earth that loved him as he was. 

I walk down the stairs and on my descent I slip back and forth in my high heels.  I am drunker than I thought, than I expected to be. I take off my shoes and hold them in my left hand, the banister in my right. From this elevated perspective, I see my mother. I drop my shoes, they crash on the wooden stairs and I yell out to her. 

“Mom! Mom! I was looking for you.”

She turns. She doesn’t notice that I am shoeless and braless.

Desiderium; “A yearning desire for something that you once had and now lost.”

Black Sheep, A Novel Excerpt

The day John F. Kennedy died, Frank was painting his mother’s window. He had just moved back in with her, having left Montreal, having left Patty, having left everything. In his mother’s old age, he’d wanted to keep her company. He also didn’t want to be alone.

It was November and it was cold. He pulled his windbreaker closer to his chest. He had just cropped his hair close to his skull. The colours had gone and so had the ability to see what ailed people. The leading feelings remained but he ignored them with a willful conviction.

Go away.

What replaced them was an empty, angry sensation that spilled through his organs and lived in his stomach. 
He put his brush in the white paint. The ballgame was interrupted by the following message.

“John Kennedy has died.”

“Fucking Protestants,” he said. He took the brush and put it against the window frame without missing a single stroke.

In following years, although he was fascinated by conspiracies of his death, he wondered why he was not surprised that the President has been assassinated. Why he never felt surprised about anything, not for a moment. He wondered if even though the leading feelings were hidden, hung in shame, it didn’t mean they that they weren’t somewhere. 

Maybe somewhere they were living in full bloom.

Even though he'd never admit it, that was a hopeful thought.

Black Sheep, A Novel Excerpt

We make small talk about nothing for another twenty minutes. As I’m leaving, he asks, “How’s Andrew doing? You know, if he’s ever…unhappy with his management, send him to me.”

I nod. “I will.” I gather my purse.

Andrew was a dedicated student of the Meisner technique in Toronto. The teacher, the guru of his class, was like his second father. Actors sit in chairs and repeat single sentences to each other, sometimes only words.

“Fuck.” “Fuck.”

 “You’re wearing a black shirt.” “I’m wearing a black shirt,” and so on. I never understood the benefit. I always thought it was a cult.

“Doesn’t it get old?” I’d ask him.

But now, having the word “Andrew” said to me countless times a day, I understand. My repeating it back elicits strange reactions that even I couldn’t predict. Pride. Jealousy. Sadness. Heart palpitations.
But strangest of all, is that after saying it a hundred times, it began to feel true.

My reality is now a Meisner exercise of my boyfriend’s name.

“Maybe you should get a tan,” my manager tells my back as I’m walking out of his office.

I ask the cab to drive the long way to my meeting. 

Pictures of You Pt. 2

I woke up the next morning and pretending not to be hung over, I told my mom about it.

"So, we still love each other."

"You do?"

"Yeah."

"So what's going to happen? Are you back together?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Maybe we will be. I think so."

She smiled and then we ate breakfast together. She always thought Peter and I were meant to be and that we'd end up together.

I sent him a Facebook message later that day:

“I'm just writing because I want to tell you that you should be honest. I think we both have to be honest. I know it's hard, but we both have to do it because what do we have, if not the truth? I will love you until my heart stops.”

In retrospect, it's a ironic and hypocritical that I would encourage someone else to be honest, when my modus operandi was to lie about my feelings to everyone, especially myself. But maybe, my subconscious was wiser than I gave it credit for. Even though I addressed that letter to him, I was writing to me.

I spent the next few days going back and forth between feeling elated because we were still in love and on the verge of tears because we were still in love.

Pictures of You

You'll think this is crazy, but I did then, and for a long time after, believe that somewhere, in some alternate universe, that Kate, and the Peter that loved her, the ones that didn't live on earth anymore, not in the flesh anyway, just in their slowly fading memories, were together and would love each other, with a force and profundity for the rest of their days.

But I was young then, so much younger than I am now.

I didn't know that something could be untrue even if you really believed it.

Black Coffee Night

I have lost myself to love twice.

Three times, depending on the shaking nature of my memory that day. Lately, it moves like trees in the wind with light falling at random. Things get lost in the darkness.

...

Don't the hours go shorter as the days go by?

We were going to save the world that night, both his hands pressed around my neck, softly, careful not to hurt me. He poured everything he had inside into me.

I like it that way, almost but never quite in pain.

I wake up the next morning sure I was in the house of someone else, a man I knew once but no longer. I remember the trees where he lived. They met above the road, like a bridge.

What he will remember of me when he's old?

 It scared me right out of myself.

Sympathy For The Devil - Personal Essay Excerpt

He started crying. 

“What do you mean you don’t trust me?”

 Then I started crying.

“I don’t know what I mean.” 

Neither of us spoke for still minutes.

“So what are...what are the terms for this, if we work it out? How do you want it to be?” I asked, voice aching.

“I want you to accept me for who I am. I want you to love me enough that what I believe doesn’t matter.”

 Maybe that was our problem; I didn’t love him enough for what he believed to not matter. I could never love someone that much. But his strength was on Sunday, no place else. 

“Glenn, you don’t accept me. You want me to not ask questions. I’m always going to ask questions. I love asking questions, that’s all I ever do. Why did you think I would ever be okay with us never discussing the most fundamental thing in your life?” 

“Things are fine until you disagree with them.”

 “It’s the other way around, Glenn. I’m fine with you until I disagree with things. Do you just want me never to disagree with things?”

  He looked away, angry. 

“Why were you ever with me if you wanted someone without an opinion? Why me? Why’d we go though all this?” I asked.

 “Because I love you.” 

Silence.

“So I have two options; stay married to you and have parts of the world we can’t discuss, or break up?”

He didn’t say anything. 

People say of love that you never know what you had until you’ve lost it. I think that proved true for us both. We didn’t know the other until it was too late. I find it emblematic that our break up took place via machines and letters and people other than us. It pisses me off that I had to write him emails like a politician, that I couldn’t tell him to fuck off, that we couldn’t work things out how two people that are in love do.

But then, everything that went wrong exists permanently in black and white type. Maybe this way I’ll have to be more rigorous in how I remember things.

 In front of other people, I spend most of my time laughing about it. “I think it’s cosmopolitan divorcee at twenty-two!”

But I feel cheated. He and I were better than what happened. I alternate between believing that he lost his mind and that’s why he behaved how he did, and that I’m stupid and never knew him at all. The more time I spend with it, the more I think that sometimes things are Heaven sent.

I was never meant to see this coming.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt.

“It's one of the great tragedies of contemporary life, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.” Andrew told me that once.

We were lying around, watching t.v., stuck in one of those days that never begins and then never really ends. He wouldn’t look at me when he said it, he just kept staring at the television. I have moments with him where he’ll say one thing that changes my life forever.

I’m dumbstruck, silent, and he’s none the wiser.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

“Did you sing that song a lot when you were a kid?” I asked him.

I’m always asking him about his childhood. I’m a stupid, old detective trying to understand the man I love.

“All the time. My mother would always say, ‘Sweet Lord, the never ending song!’

“How did you sing?”

“Very earnestly.”

“Were you good?”


“No, I was awful.”

He is a beautiful singer now. He is beautiful at everything he touches and I am jealous of him. Maybe that is why I love him.

“I was. In Grade Two, my teacher told me I wasn’t allowed to sing at my desk anymore. Then on the last day of school, everyone got to pick one special thing they were allowed to do and I asked to sing again.”

I pictured him as that little boy, with too much energy singing his heart out for hours at his desk. Maybe he was performing, or maybe, he just liked the company of his own voice. Either way, I thought it was mean that a teacher would take that away from him.

Especially when he had a dead brother.

“Did you ever really feel like you were married?” he asked me as we fell asleep that night. My marriage was another thing we talked around but hardly ever about.

“No, not really.”

And when I was married, I never did. Things only feel real once they’re over and even when they’re over, stories never really end.

In the hazy dark of the night, I looked at Andrew.

“I hope you’re my never ending story,” I told him.

I meant it.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

I picture my father in his prime as Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men; smoking in elevators, busting into politicians offices in corduroy bell-bottoms, coercing pretty young women into giving him leads.

Only, he was tall and handsome like Robert Redford.

Only, he believed Watergate was the end of journalism he wanted to be apart of, the end of turning a blind-eye.

He stopped working undercover with criminals, exposing sex scandals, interviewing off the record. He became editor of the sports page and travelled with the Toronto Blue Jays, almost year round. He refused to wear anything but jeans, sweatshirts and ball caps.

He told me that he just had to get out. He didn’t have the taste for the jugular he used to.

I know the truth. That was the year he quit drinking.

That was the year he lost his nerve.

Nan Nan

My grandmother lay in her bed.

"I feel too sick to sit," she told me.

My grandmother had nothing wrong with her, nothing that could be determined, anyway. She had a fragile mind and I watched it breaking as she got older.

"What'd you do today, Nan?" I sat on the chair near her bed. I should have sat on her bed with her but it scared me. It had swallowed her whole.

"Nothing, just lay here. Thinking about my life, all the people that have come in it. I have thought of every single person in my life."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Can't help but think about things, stuck here like this. I have known so many people. Even near-strangers I am thinking of. Most of them are dead now."

"It's funny how some people only come in for a short while, like they weren't meant to stay for long."

"But you never forget them. They come in and out but you never forget people."

She got up out of bed and for the first time in as long as I could remember, she didn't need my help.

Anna

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

...

My brother quit drinking and started having nightmares. We sat, as usual, at the diner up the street. He poured what looked like a million grains of salt on his eggs, one for every star in the galaxy.

"What do you dream about?"

He sighed and moved towards me like a secret. His thoughts hurt him, always had.

"Last night I dreamt of her."

She was his best friend, a beautiful girl he had fallen under when he as fourteen. He loved her so purely, the kind that is rarely returned. Even that young, she was a ghost-girl; already dead, see-through, not meant to be here. By the time they were twenty she was gone completely, this arm to that drug, that leg to that bad man.

"Why did she give herself away?" he asked me.

He needed her.

"I dreamt that I was in her house. Dad was helping her with something and then he got pissed off and started screaming at her. He left, disappeared like a cloud of smoke. I ran up the stairs and I found her all alone. She was so skinny, and she said, 'Don't leave.' I said, 'I won't.' And then she turned and looked at me, I've never seen someone so skinny, Katie. She said, 'Will you help me?' and I said, 'Help you with what?' and she said, 'The cancer.' She had cancer, I knew it in that dream way, like I had known it all along but not a second earlier. Isn't that fucked?"

"What do you think it means?"

"That I'm being like Dad by cutting her out. That she needs my help."

I took his hand.

"You did the right thing, Mike."

"Yeah," he nodded. "It's just a lot easier to stay out than get out, you know what I mean?"

I nodded.

"I just wish I could love someone like that again," he told me as he finished his coffee as if it was the first time, as if he hadn't told me that one hundred times before.

I hated watching the world strengthen the man in him, destroy the boy in him.

Crutches - Personal Essay Excerpt

Everybody needs something.

It was fall. He and I were about to break up. I knew it and he knew it. Why neither of us did it, I don’t know. I’ve come to realize that you don’t know how wrong being out of love is until after the fact.

There are small similarities between loving and being unloved, so many in fact, that you can convince yourself everything is okay. They are the ones you call every night. They are the ones you share a bed with. They are the ones who hold your hand. In life’s more clever moments you are tricked. You think what you share is an intimacy with that person, when really, all you’re doing is marking time.

And so, while marking that time with him, I told myself it wasn’t so weird that we’d share a bed and not make love. It wasn’t weird that we never made each other laugh. It wasn’t weird that I could never be myself around him, that I felt like an alien, that he never understood me, that he thought I was stupid.

None of it was weird, none of it was heavy, nothing broke my heart.

There are those relationships that do not serve the usual intended purposes. Sometimes, there is no love given and so, no love lost. With he and I it was never about how he felt for me or what I felt for him.

I wanted someone.

As far as I can tell, so did he.

Til Death

He holds me in his big arms, drunk and I am seeing stars, this is all I think of.



"I think I'm not married because I take it too seriously. I am too committed to the idea. I think when you get married you shouldn't take his last name, you should create a whole name. A whole new tribe, together. I think your husband should be your absolute first priority. If your husband is in a car, choking, and your mother is dying by the side of the road, you help your husband first. That's really what I think. He asked me to move to New Zealand with him and I couldn't do that because I thought of all the films I had in production, all the stuff I couldn't do there. I realized, this isn't right. Some things are more important than work. Some things should be, like your husband. I should have said to him, 'Yes, baby, I'd move anywhere with you.' I should have wanted that. I didn't."

She was the type of woman I admired but never wanted to be like.

I would have pretended to want to move to New Zealand and filed it under bridges soon to be burnt, never crossed.