Black Sheep - A Novel

My daughter, Marla, just turned twenty-three. I wonder if we would have been friends had we met when I was her age. I have never asked her.

The irony is that I don’t appear before myself at different ages. But I feel myself at different ages, shaped by what the people that visit tell me of my past.

Friends or not, I like my daughter and she likes me. We both consider privacy paramount.

“So, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time again?” Marla’s fingers are yellow with nicotine. I miss smoking.

“Why are you quoting Vonnegut? What an awful book. I wish I had never wasted my time reading it.”

“Life is hard sometimes.”

“I didn’t tell you about this so that you could mock me.”

Last year, I told her that people come to visit me. I shouldn’t have. It was a moment of weakness, born of living in the past more often than before. I guess I thought that maybe people came to visit her, too.

They don’t.

She touches my arm. A blue surrounds her and has since the moment she was born. I love blue. When her blue is near me I feel safe. I don’t know why. It has always been difficult for me to trace the genealogy of feeling.

Where is anything born, if everything that’s happened exists before you at once?

“I love you, Marla.”

“Did you pay your rent on time this month?” she asks, starting to clean my dishes.

“Leave those alone. I worked at forty major newspapers across Canada. Why do you think I’ll always forget to pay my rent?”

“Well, did you?”

I shake my head.

My daughter stops with the dishes and she makes me a sandwich.

I don’t know why she is always worried that I won’t eat. My mother’s sandwiches were good. Marla’s aren’t, but I appreciate them anyway. She leaves quickly after I’m done eating. She always leaves quickly.

“Bye, Daddy. I love you.”

“Bye.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I love you.”

I kiss her on the forehead. I am very tall, and I have to lean down to reach the soft skin under her dark fringe. For a moment, I see her mother in her eyes. She locks the door behind her.

When I head back to the kitchen, I see Marla as a four year old, hiding in the corner, laughing. I hope we will get to spend the day together. I love children. They are much easier than adults.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“What a wonderful surprise!”

“Sorry for hiding.”

Don’t envy me. Just because my memories are just three-dimensional doesn’t mean I get special treatment. I don’t get to choose the pace at which my life happens. Death comes fast or it comes slow. Time will one day end it.

Frank, by the way. My name is Frank.

He walked towards her. He’d dressed up. He held his motorcycle helmet in his hand.

“So, how are you?” she asked.

He shrugged, uncertain. She noticed her reflection in his eyes.

“How are you?” he asked.

The conversation hung on that.

“So do you want to go first?”

“No,” he said. “Why don’t you?” He looked away, wincing. “Let’s not do this here.” And so they walked, exactly two meters apart, along Toronto’s busiest street. Traffic sounds pitched and blurred. She pictured them walking naked, like mannequins, looking like people but really being plastic.

“I’m not happy,” she said.

He put his hand against the air, stopping something hurdling towards him.

“We don’t have to do this. We’ve talked so much, that’s all we’ve done. My failure has always been an inability to communicate with you.”

She nodded, and five minutes later, he left.

And that’s how two years disappears in the blink of an eye, the slight of a hand.  

She could only identify it in retrospect, but the man she hadn’t met was hovering around her.

She knew him; like magic, like weather, like dreams that came and took over unannounced. 

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.