When he as five, Frank lay on his bed, bothered by time and how it insisted on passing. It was pretty mean especially when he was playing baseball, when he was watching a John Wayne movie, when his brother Owen was being nice to him.
“If you find me, hide me. I don’t know where I’ve been,” he told Owen last night in the middle of Cowboys and Indians.
“You stupid ginger,” said Owen and then it was all over.
“What does that mean?”
Kids had been calling him that at school. That, and dirty Dogan, but he knew what that mean. The Prods would find him when he walked home from school and beat him with sticks. It was a bum deal because they were seven and there were three of them so, he just lay on the ground until it was over. He knew when he was licked.
“It means you have ugly red hair.”
“Oh.”
That night, he wore his cowboy hat to bed.
“Stop crying, you girl,” Owen said when their mother made him check on Frank before bed.
I’m going to fly, he thought to himself. If I can fly, they’ll leave me be.
By morning, he had already made his first attempt. He was still wearing the cowboy hat and nothing else. “There he stands on the edge of his feather, expecting to fly,” his mother said when he jumped off his bed and bloodied his lip.
It was hot in his room. He was boiling. The summer day beat through the window, and it hurt him that he had been sent there for bad behaviour.
“Why are you so stupid you to throw yourself off your bed?” his mother asked.
He held ice to his lip. The house was so quiet he could hear the heat rise.
Forget them, he told himself. I am going to fly.
He put his ice on the bed-stand. He closed his eyes.
Fly. Fly, fly like a bird.
He first felt it in his feet. His head felt so light he couldn’t be sure it still existed. He saw his bed beneath him. He saw the floor moving farther and farther away.
He was lying flat in the air.
It only lasted a few seconds and then he collapsed back into his bed, disappointed and exhilarated.
I flew.
He spent the day drifting in and out of naked sleep, thinking when I have a family, we’ll be different.
...
Frank stood with Duffy. It was the middle of the night, the middle of February, the middle of Toronto. They drank hot whiskey and hid in the dark shelter of Withrow Park, but the snot froze in their nose.
They were sixteen.
“I’m a failure, Duff.”
“Like shit you are.”
“I’m the failure. My brother’s the king.”
“You’re just upset because Honor turned your down.”
“She said her mother wouldn’t let her see me. She said I didn’t have any future.”
“Forget her. She’s a stuck up bitch.”
He chucked the empty bottle across the park.
“Maybe I should just stop looking back.”
“That’s the ticket.”
Frank’s lip started to quiver.
“I just can’t do anything right.” He felt blue and pieces of green.
It was so hard to do when time knew no bounds. How do you look forward, trace the genealogy of feeling, when you don’t know where anything begins or ends?
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