Away From Everywhere Read online

  Some days there would be funerals. On one miserably foggy spring day, the mournful sounds of sobbing and one woman’s guttaral cries of goodbye caught his attention, and he tuned into the Brooke family’s funeral. Some people seemed so devastated, one woman bent at the waist to let out gut-wrenching howls. Others seemed merely obligated to be there, standing tall and biting their fingernails or blankly watching traffic. Some held each other, and others held themselves. Some were dressed in well-fitted suits; the teenagers wore the best outfits they could throw together: black jeans and a borrowed dress shirt two sizes too big. When they lifted their arms, it looked like they were budding wings.

  It was the beloved grandfather/father/brother/husband Thomas Brooke who’d passed away. From the family’s reaction, from each of their individual reactions, Owen spontaneously started to create a fictional life story for Thomas Brooke. With the exception of the wife, there wasn’t much crying, so he assumed it was a long drawn-out death, cancer maybe, since no one had that loud shrieking cry that meant someone has been taken too soon, too unexpectedly. But by the words shared, by how long people lingered, by the quote Owen read on his headstone after the family left, he could tellThomas was loved. He could tellThomas was loved by the way no one knew what to do with their hands when they spoke to each other. Thomas seemed like the glue that held the family together. It was definitely his house where they all got together at Christmas. He was definitely the man who fell asleep in the chair at the hospital waiting for each and every one of those grandchildren to be born, so he could be the first to see them. But there was one girl, mid-twenties: why did she stay back, listless and biting her nails? That’s where the story lay, why this girl was the foreigner in the family.

  Owen took it from there. He had his laptop with him and wrote the story of what the grandfather did for that girl that no one else in the family could know about. How it was so profound, so selfless and inconceivable, that it meant she died when he did. That she was in that grave with him.

  The story he wrote, “Thicker Than Blood,”won Owen the recognition he’d been waiting for and opened the door to a modest career in writing. People called to congratulate him on the good news, people who once considered writing a juvenile waste of time and awkwardly changed the subject whenever he talked about his writing.

  The story earned him five thousand dollars, but more importantly, a contract to write a novella for a literary magazine called Tether . It was a thick magazine released quarterly, and they wanted to divide the story into four instalments and drag it out over the year. Overall, he got the initial five thousand for the short story, and another twenty thousand for the novella, which he agreed not to publish elsewhere.

  He gave them The World Before Now , a forty-thousand-word manuscript he’d written years earlier. Something that had been rejected by seven publishers. The editors at the journal loved it though, and marketed Owen as “a grittier James Salter.”A reviewer in a national newspaper had written: Collins has written a story that will reach its hands into you and pluck the heart clean out of your chest. He has written it so magicallyyou’ll feel that pain and love him for it.

  The money meant he could finally get a more comfortable apartment, and budgeting his spending to a thousand dollars a month allowed him to take the next two years off to write a novel. Start from scratch. Begin again.

  He moved into a quiet, clean, two-bedroom apartment on Gower Street, five-fifty a month, heat and light included. That left him with four hundred and fifty dollars a month for food and alcohol,to fuel the writing . He used one bedroom as an office, and loved the old fireplace in there, the exposed brick along the entire wall.

  Above the toilet in the bathroom, there was what looked like a door to an attic. Within two weeks he had to satisfy his curiosity and open the latch. He dragged a chair into the bathroom, climbed it like a ladder, opened the door, and braced himself for a hailstorm of insulation and mouse droppings. But it wasn’t an attic. The latch opened to the roof: a black sky, some stars, barely shining behind black clouds, and the glow of the moon spilling across it all from the left. He crawled up and took wary footsteps, afraid the roof would cave in and swallow him whole.

  A previous tenant had built a make-shift patio up there, with a table and two wooden lawn chairs, all painted blood red. It became his new writing nook, and all September long he watched huge cruise ships squeeze into the harbour through two walls of rock locally dubbed The Narrows. Every time a cruise ship left the harbour,Owen thought of all the places he could’ve gone, of all the different people he could’ve been. Each alter ego budding a new story to write.

  When he was younger, but old enough to have conversations with his father, Roger had made him promise that the two of them would take an Alaskan cruise on his fiftieth birthday. His father was always fascinated by the North, by snow and icebergs, how they could stop us invincible humans dead in our tracks. The sheer age and immovable nature of glaciers and icebergs, he said, reminded him of how short-lived and insignificant we humans are in the grand scale of things.

  His father was turning fifty-three in October; they were already three years too late. If he could have afforded the cruise, Owen might have checked him out of the hospital that year, stolen him if necessary, and booked that cruise.

  “We’ll hear the sound of silence,”his father had said.“We’ll feel life. We’ll be away from everywhere. Because there is no room left in the world for people like you and me, Owen. I know because I’ve searched and not found it.”

  Owen’s savings lasted roughly two years, as planned. He had a collection of short stories written by the end of it, titled Four Letter Words , and his publisher would have it out in stores for the fall of 2003. So it was important to him to find a way to make money from home, where he could favour writing a novel over his job. As a sort of congratulations for his first official publication, Alex fronted Owen some money and he started an eBay-inspired website called buyitlocally.ca. He maintained the website himself, and charged ten percent on any sales made through his site, where people could sell anything from couches to original thousand-dollar pieces of art. What really made his business catch on, at least in St. John’s, was selling local music and art on the website and cutting out retailers, so artists got the full twenty dollars a CD or full price on their artwork. He wanted to start doing the same with books, and eventually he had businesses and artists buying ad space on his website. He was averaging not quite a thousand dollars a month, but that was enough. When it wasn’t, he used his MasterCard and squared up on a better month. MasterCard and squared up on a better month.

  Some people were jealous of Owen’s new lifestyle; even Alex envied all that free time. It bothered Owen how people always overlooked the labour that went into his writing, the hours it took to sharpen his sentences until they cut like knives, and the sheer mental exhaustion of hauling a fictional world out of his mind and making it feel real enough for a reader to fall into. He wrote at least eight hours a day, the same amount of time most people sat in their office chairs, and the days he worked ten straight hours were a hard-earned testament to his ambition, but still, everyone assumed he had it knocked, never having to go to work.

  Yet these people were right to say that he spent his days in a way which, for Owen, ate away at his identity and how he fit into the world. The cost of no social obligations, of having nowhere to be at any specific time, of having no family, no significant other, made him lose track of time, of what day of the week it was, and soon one day slipped into the next, stitching identical days together into identical months. He had to check channel nine from time to time to see what day of the week it was. He barely even left the house, and carried an extra fifteen pounds as proof. He felt every pound of it in the extra effort it took to haul himself out of a chair. The soft recoil of gut on gut.

  He started feeling more and more detached from himself, from the world. He’d putter at hobbies, in between writing, and go for walks. He rented a lot of movies and tau
ght himself to cook and grow herbs. He even adopted a black lab from the SPCA. But something was missing, gnawing at him. He worried the depersonalization disorder was tightening its grip. He ignored it. There was no way to fight it off anyway.

  What started out as an interest in red wine turned into him needing that sensation in the back of his throat every night. It wasn’t the drunk he needed, it was that ethereal transcendent feeling that red wine gave him. Red wine and red wine alone. It made him feel more alive, more aware of himself and his surroundings. More in tune with his feelings and the world around him. He saw it as medication, it was waking him up, breathing life back into him that the world had sucked out. Then he noticed how the wine was evoking something in him that made the writing come easier, and that what he was writing had so much more depth and beauty to it. Sentences spilled out of him more freely, more vividly, more honestly. He could only capture things, up to his standards, using wine as a lure to coax the right words out of him.

  It was winter, and nothing of interest was in walking distance. The thirty dollars a day he’d spend on wine meant an extra nine hundred dollars a month, which was more than his rent. It was an assault on his savings, but he justified it by saying that if it helped him write, and if writing was how he made a living, then it was worth nine hundred dollars a month. He saw it as an investment in himself, in his writing. Even if it made him irritable and forgetful at times. Even though he was getting confused by simple things like instruction manuals now. Even though he was developing a chronic dull pain in his guts and growing increasingly anxious and depressed.

  He’d think of his father from time to time, of his genetic predisposition to end up like his father if he kept drinking. He kept an old pamphlet on schizophrenia in his dresser, one a nurse had given him. He’d read it from time to time, as a sort of check on himself: Schizophrenia often merely needs a trigger…substance abuse is common in over 40% of schizophrenics-to- be.

  He ignored it all. The wine helped.

  One by one his friends all moved away for jobs, or graduate schools, or went into seclusion with their partners, getting married and having kids, or they just gave up on him. But Alex came home from Halifax for Christmas one year and stayed with Owen, and Owen watched those few days startle and crush Alex. It took that to realize how lost he was in it all. One night at the supper table, he watched his brother struggle with where to look and what to say. Owen tried to be discreet about rounding the corner to top up his wine, but he couldn’t make all the bottles around the house invisible. And he couldn’t correct the slurred speech, or keep attentive and tuned into their conversation. He couldn’t stop himself from passing out on the loveseat during the movie they were watching.

  They were in the airport saying goodbye when Alex blurted it out. “I mean, I know you’re not an alcoholic. The drinking is just a side effect of the depersonalization disorder, I’m sure of it. So it’s not your fault. But I think you should go talk–”

  “It’s possible I’m just a drunk, Alex. It’s possible I’m just an alcoholic.”

  “No!”He shouted it, then looked around, a little embarrassed that the people in the seats behind him, or the blonde flight attendant walking her luggage down the corridor towards them, might have seen his outburst. He turned his back on the blonde and said, more quietly,“We’re not alcoholics. It’s the depersonalization disorder that has you like this. You’ll be fine, just go talk to your doctor about–”

  “We?”Owen laughed, sardonically, shocked. “Is that what this is about? You’re yet again ashamed of a family member? Rest easy, man, we’re in two different provinces now. No one has to know you’ve got a drunk for a brother. You can tell them I’m a rich lawy–”

  “Fuck off! My plane is going to be here any minute, I don’t want to leave like–”

  “Look, if it helps, why not just write me off like you did with Dad? Okay? I’m giving you permission.”

  Alex fidgeted then, like a scorned kid.“I’m just saying, you need to talk to your doctor.” He looked down at his feet as he spoke.

  Owen felt bad after he’d said his piece, and he knew his brother had to leave St. John’s with a clear conscience. “Look, Alex. I’m sorry.” They were both looking at their feet now. “You’re right, and I’m getting testy and defensive. Denial is step one.”He lied to comfort his brother.“That’s what my sponsor is always reminding me of. I’m already in AA, on doctor’s orders, and it’s really helping.”

  Alex was visibly relieved. He let out a big sigh, a weight shifted off the sunken shoulders and his posture straightened. He looked up and met his brother’s eyes again. There was a moment of hesitation there, a look of Honestly? You aren’t lying to me? But then it faded away, like maybe Alex was letting himself believe the lie. The same way they’d all let themselves believe their father wasn’t mentally ill all those years ago.

  He loved the sound of it, the hollow pop of uncorking a bottle and the clugging sound of the first pour. He threw the cork in the garbage, and stared at the blank screen. The blinking cursor. The empty page. This was always the hardest part. Page one. And he was too drunk to keep a train of thought. He’d write two sentences and have to re-read them to come up with a third. There would be too much lag time between his modest critical praise and the completion of his new manuscript for any publisher to care about him, and he knew it. He never had the attention span for a novel now, and he knew why. He’d scrapped three already. Blamed a lack of substance and appeal, not alcoholism.

  He’d started his newest novel ten different ways before settling on the opening scene. His character was driving his mother home, but ran a stop sign, so she died in his arms. It was a visceral paragraph describing a tooth in a black cupholder, and the surreal sensation of feeling his mother’s warm blood and hearing her last words stuttering out of her. His obvious guilt for not waiting at the stop sign, and how the rest of his life would trace itself back to that moment. His novel started that way until he decided he’d have more of a story to work with if it was his child and not his mother. The opening scene being his character having to tell his wife that he’d just killed their daughter. It was important to drop a reader’s jaw on the very first page. He was about to revise it all when the phone rang.

  “Hey, man, how’s the writing game going?”

  Owen was shocked by the question, the sudden interest, and taken off-guard by the voice. It had been six months since their conversation in the airport.

  “What? Good, I guess … Is that you, Alex?” Owen was drunk, and it broke his heart he couldn’t hide it from Alex.

  “You’re ... okay, are you?”

  “Yes, yeah. It’s just ... you know what today is, right?”

  Silence. A sigh.

  It was the day their mother had died. A humid, windless July third just like it.

  “I was thinking,Owen, since you’ve got such an imagination and a way with words, that you should write a crime novel, or a horror or something. I just saw this great suspense movie on TV and couldn’t help think that’s what you should be writing. That’s what most people want to read.”

  Owen was touched that Alex had thought of him, but jarred by Alex’s years-long refusal to talk about their mother. He’d just throw up a wall no one could climb over. At least if Owen was in the room. So he let it go and explained what seemed obvious. “I write literary fiction, not genre fiction. Switching over for the sake of more money would be like selling out.”

  There was a pause before his brother responded. A pause of frustration, like he wanted no bitter tone when he responded to Owen. “Selling out is something kids talk about, Owen. The whole concept of selling out is childish. You could write a publishable thriller, and we both know it. You have to eat. You’ve said yourself that your website is dying off, and you should start looking for a job job.”

  “Being a starving artist…”Owen trailed off on a drunken and irrelevant tangent, “doesn’t so much refer to a lack of income. I need something more meaningful
from life than you do, Alex. Something more than a job and money. Something more meaningful and intangi–”

  “Owen … grow up, man. And spare me, for once, this holier-than-thou artist bullshit. You’re not a hero for turning your back on money and society, and you don’t sound or act like a man with much meaning in his life! You know that’s why Abbie lef–”

  “And just because you’re a surgeon who can buy a three-storey house and a BMW doesn’t make you a hero, Alex. It makes you sad, and empty. Basing the worth of your life on the stuff and things you surround yourself with. You’ve got no more idea of what it means to be happy than I do, and we both know it. We’re just messed up in our own little ways!”

  “I’m not the one fucked up. My life is well on track.”

  Owen slung his head down. “I’m not talking about your life. I’m talking about you. And let’s not shit ourselves about why you’re a doctor.”

  “Whatever. I was only trying to help when I called. I’ve got to go now.”The commitment had left his voice.

  “I know, and I appreciate it, okay? It’s nice to hear from you. It is. And I’m melodramatic, and I know it, and I’m sorry. But I’m never going to understand you, you’ll never understand me, and we’re both going to try and make sense of this life in our own different ways, okay?”

  “Yeah, I gotta go. This is not why I called. And good luck finding some meaning in life when you are so goddamn bitter and drunk all the time. I refuse to reason with you when you’re this drunk and depressing. Talk later, Owen, take care. And you can be the next one to call. And make sure you’re sober, too. You woke Hannah when you called last week, and hung up without saying a word. What was that all about? And you woke the kids. It was 2 a.m. here. I mean God! I fucken golf and ski with her sister, but what are you to Hannah? My creepy brother?”

  He slammed the phone down.

  Three weeks later, his telephone was disconnected and there were two unopened disconnect warnings on his coffee table from Newfoundland Power.