Away From Everywhere Read online

  He only ever woke up because of the dog. Holden would prod Owen with his snout every morning for food. Cold, wet streaks across his forehead. Owen could forget about the occasional supper, but Holden wouldn’t let noon come around without insisting on a full bowl of food. He fed him well to make up for being such a bad owner. If he barbecued steak, Holden got the better of the two. It was the guilt he felt over the dog that made him aware of his drinking problem. Some nights Holden would just sit there and watch Owen. He had a strange posture: he’d tilt his head diagonally and just stare into him, his eyes prying for a reason why Owen was ignoring him. Sometimes Owen would get overwhelmed with guilt and stop what he was doing and take Holden for a walk, drunk, his landlady peering out the window at him as he stumbled down the street with the dog, talking to it more than a civilized sober man would, not avoiding traffic like a sane person would. His relationship with the woman got awkward. She lived below him and they got along great at first. After seeing him like that though, she clearly stopped feeling comfortable around him. She pretended to be looking for something in her purse whenever they crossed paths, or she’d look down at her toes when he gave her his rent. She’d watch him from the window whenever he took the dog out back, and if Owen looked back at her, she’d quickly fling the curtain shut and hide behind it. The curtains were red, with brighter red circles all over them. They made a slow-motion ripple when she pulled them shut, and then she peeked out more subtly when he turned back around. So he stopped throwing an extra burger on the grill for her, and he stopped having the driveway shovelled for her when she got home from work. He couldn’t stand to look at her, the shame, the acknowledgement that alcohol had consumed him like that.

  He eventually gave the dog away too, feeling that Holden was the kind of dog who wagged his tail too much to live alone with an alcoholic. He deserved some family with a kid to maul him all day long, and a fit soccer mom to take him out for a daily jog.

  He was surprised at how much he missed Holden. The ball of warmth jumping on and off his bed at night, or curled up at his feet as he wrote. Or even just the excuse to get out of the house. Without the company of his dog, however, he found himself calling Alex more – in the mornings though, when Alex would be around but Owen was still sober. It had gotten to the point where they were talking only five or six times a year. Throughout his bout with alcoholism, it made life easier on Owen that Alex was okay, “happy,” successful. Having a brother so far ahead in life somehow made him feel a little less behind. And if his father ever did snap out of it, he’d have at least one kid worth boasting about.

  One night, sleepless, the room spinning, he crawled out of bed, stumbled down the hall to the living room, and watched a documentary on haunted homes. He went to bed with the notion that it was possible his mother was a ghost he couldn’t see, watching him. She’d be frowning, crying, shattered by it all. He thought about putting her out of her misery.

  Alex tried one last time. No interventions, no guilting him into it, no clichéd motivational you-could-be-so-much-more speeches. He flew home and stuck by Owen’s side, unshedable as a shadow, until it got unbearable and Owen broke down and started pouring the drinks, which gave Alex the chance to give him that judgmental look. Alex asked him out to breakfast, and Owen had to acknowledge he’d be too hungover to enjoy himself. He asked Owen to a movie one night, and the first thing Owen thought was that he was usually drunk by the time a late movie started. Too drunk to go stumbling through the cinemas in the dark.

  He hated it the most when Alex would come over, look around his apartment, and look at him without saying a thing. It was the looks in people’s eyes more than their words that got through to him. The look in Alex’s eyes that night when he dropped Owen back home and watched him drop his keys trying to open the front door.

  When the weekend was over, Alex pleaded with Owen to come back up to Nova Scotia with him. Owen refused. They settled on a deal. Owen would mail Alex his AA chips, to prove he was attending meetings regularly and getting better. And for the next year he did just that. Except he bought the chips off eBay, stuck them in an envelope, and never once went to a meeting. He marked on a calender when to send each chip – 30 days sober, 60 days, 90 days …the anniversary chip.

  HEAR ME, WITHOUT WORDS

  August 30th, 2008,

  Beside him and alone in the world.

  There were a million moments this could’ve happened between Owen and me. What made today the moment?

  We were swimming again. He had turned around and I was getting dressed. I let myself go. I gave into that voice that’s been screaming the truth at me for weeks now: we belong together, no matter what. No matter what that means. No matter how that screws everything up.

  I walked towards him. He heard the rocks rustle beneath my feet and he tensed up, curious. To relax him I lied. I told him to be still, there was a wasp in his hair. I kept walking towards him. I pressed my bare breasts against the warm curves of his back. I slid my fingers under the elastic of his shorts and filled my hand with it, felt it throbbing into life.Limp softness replaced by a rigid stiffness so quickly it meant he’d been waiting months for this. Forever maybe. With the other hand I circled his nipples as I kissed his neck, tasted the sun there, the summer’s heat. He tore his shorts off and it slapped off my thigh as he turned to face me, and I laughed about it. Nervous, I guess. Elated. We were naked and alone and possessed by each other’s bodies, wild with action and movement. His hands cupped the back of my neck, and he pulled me towards him. He had a thumb on my cheek, his hands in my hair. The lightness passing between us. The lightning. Indescribable really. Like my tingling lips were all of me. Like I’d never been so sensitive, my sense of touch so alive. It was so right, so perfect; there was no room for guilt.Just pleasure. Ecstatic pleasure.

  At the wharf, with just the shade of fragrant evergreens to clothe us, it happened. Water dripped from our hair as our hands explored every inch of each other’s bodies. Fingers behind the crooks of bent knees, and roaming hands wanting it all at once. We rolled through pine needles and pebbles, and settled against the splinters and warmth of the sun-soaked wharf, and it was the best sex I’ve ever had, if only because of the wait, the passion, the build-up. Hell, the view, the sound of the water slapping off the wharf, the look in his eyes, how he looked at me. Like he could cry about how beautiful it all felt. Like he knew it would all end and it saddened him to think about it.

  The only guilt I have is the guilt of feeling no guilt. It was too right, too perfect to feel guilty over.

  The rest of the day felt equally comfortable and uncomfortable.At night the alcohol helped remove the discomfort of the day’s actions. He joked about me being an enabler, and we made love again. We made love, we didn’t just fuck. How is it possible for two brothers to approach a woman so differently?Alex makes me feel like a sex-toy, but Owen is selfless and knowledgeable and brings some passion to the table that his brother never had. My God! I can compare brothers: who’s bigger, better, cleaner, nicer to look at and work with. Whatdoes that make me? And now I’ve felt him shuddering there against me, in those precious last few seconds. So vulnerable and all mine.

  It’s been so long since I’ve seen another one of those things, let alone handled one. But something took over and knew just what to do and…look at me! Glowing with a splinter in my thigh! How can I have a sense of humour with this? I am so very schoolgirl giddy right now. There are so few people who can do that to a grown woman. For years I’ve felt so unseen.But tonight Owen was all eyes and I was everything he saw.He is the dream a girl crawls into bed and waits for.

  He’s made a little girl of me. Like the thrill of it all is too much for me and I have to share it, to dole it out to other girls, as we scream and shriek and lock hands about it all.

  I can’t tell him I love him because those are words for a husband, not a mantress. That’s what I’ll call him, my mantress, because I don’t know what the term is for the male equivalent of a mistress. H
e is asleep beside me as I write this, so beautifully defeated by life. I want to know how he got that star-shaped scar on his side; I’ll ask him when he wakes. For now I’ll just wonder, I’ll just imagine the imperfect life this perfect man has lived. Whatever hell he has endured has given him character, if that’s any consolation.

  Owen cowers from life. He has given up on life, on everything, without having tried a thing. Why? Everything he writes is so goddamn sad. He keeps talking about his past but never his future. He keeps talking about “getting away from everything,” but the sad thing is he has nothing to run from. No one and nothing. So what is it you are running from, Owen?

  Actually, come to think of it, what he says he wants is to be “away from everywhere,” whatever that means. I don’t thinkhe knows even what he means by that, and I think that’s his problem. Owen is brilliant, and could have anything he wanted, yet he is forever with his back to what he is looking for, running from it. Heading “away from everywhere.” I worry sometimes. The way he thinks is mesmerizing, but often equally frightening. He can isolate himself from the world and exist in his own.

  I held back on saying what I felt lying next to Owen tonight.I held back because statements lose emphasis if you say them too often. I don’t have to tell him I love him anyway. What our bodies shouted to each other tonight was more than words could ever convey. For some things there are no words, just actions that say it all and more.

  Touch me,

  Without hands See me,

  Without eyes, without light, in the dark

  Hear me,Without words.

  FROM NOTHING TO NOWHERE

  IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT when he got to the bottom of his last bottle of wine. He threw the empty into his recycling bin and cringed while it was in mid-air, expecting a shatter. There wasn’t one. He checked every cupboard twice for another bottle, opening each door slowly, as if that increased the odds. Rarely, in his last few years of alcoholism, did he not have another bottle to go open, but he couldn’t even get that right anymore. Especially now that he wanted out. Now that he was trying to sip cola or brew coffee instead – sick of the hangover, the subdued ambition, the pointlessness of everyday life. The absence of passion he couldn’t even get from writing, because he couldn’t even write anymore.

  Earlier that day, he was in the liquor store. He picked up a second bottle of wine, and laid it back down. Picked it back up. He pretended to read the beige label so that the pretty blonde in the tight black dress wouldn’t look at him and wonder why he kept picking up the wine and putting it back down. He was moderately sober and thought it might be a good idea not to buy the second bottle, so he could start getting used to the idea of getting drunk and leaving it at that. Not needing to keep drinking for the sake of it. Because he was awake and bored. Or writing. Or just lying there, reading, always habitually sipping.

  He was drunk now, and hated himself for his earlier resolve. His faith that he could wean himself off the wine. He was hating himself for searching through the cupboards, so desperate he never trusted his own eyes.

  There was no wine in his house, but searching through the kitchen, he found the cheap bottle of rum he’d never finished because it tasted like rubbing alcohol, and he spent ten minutes digging through his freezer, refusing to accept that there was no ice there, and below it, in the fridge, no mix. There were no stores open where he could go buy mix. He couldn’t stand the taste of watering it down. It would only make it worse.

  He needed that mix and thought his solution was brilliant: he’d walk to a McDonald’s drive-thru window and order an extra-large coke. He stuck a foot in his shoe, but the sudden shift in balance toppled him over and he caught the heater on his way down with the palm of his hand, tearing it off the wall. He just stared at it: the jagged white line separating the beige paint of the wall from the bare gyproc where the heater had been attached.

  Ten minutes into the hour-long walk from Gower Street to the McDonald’s on Topsail Road, he realized he was wearing only one glove. He took it off to stuff it in his jacket pocket but it wouldn’t fit, so he threw it at a garbage can. He missed. He kept walking. It started to snow, lightly enough that he could’ve dodged each oversized flake. He thought of his father, how he’d sit with a cup of tea at his office window and just watch the stuff fall, be pacified by it. Alex always found it weird, but Owen wondered what he saw in it all. He’d watch his father watching it. One night his father turned to him.C’mere. He patted his lap. What if it never stopped,Owen?What if it kept falling and fallingand buried us a hundred feet deep?Tell me what you’d miss the most out there.

  Out there. Owen kept on walking down the endless road, his body tense from the cold, arms tight against his sides, realizing that he’d grown into a man who spoke of the world with the same contempt his father had. Out there , he’d called it, like it was somewhere worth avoiding. All of it. Like the plague, slowly rotting us all away. It had been ten minutes since he’d walked past anything but commercial property adorned in signs and pushing products: hamburgers, clothes, booze, porn, electronics, gas for cars. Cars. Out there.

  The snow and ice-covered sidewalks had him stumbling along like a man fresh off a merry-go-round. A young teenage couple were walking towards him, but chose to cross the street rather than walk past him. All of a sudden he was that guy now. The disheveled guy you notice and avoid. It might have bothered him if being that person didn’t make life so much easier.

  He was about halfway there, and a blue car full of kids drove past him, music blaring from the open windows, an indistinct buzz and thumping bass. They each threw a snowball at him. The sudden onslaught toppled him over, and laughter soared out of the car. He was too cold and drunk and irritated to laugh at himself. He was the dumb drunk who gave bored kids something to do. They circled around again and teased him this time. They drew back to throw the snowballs and feigned throwing them over and over. They laughed each time Owen braced himself. The first real one missed, but he slipped trying to dodge it. He stood up and they pretended to throw some more, but he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of running. The second snowball was packed so tight it was ice. It felt like a baseball when it crashed into his face. It pushed his bottom lip deep enough into his teeth to draw blood, like a jab from a two-pronged fork, and he let out a guttural moan that seemed to earn him some sympathy from the kids. The throbbing fat lip added to his anger and justified, in his mind, his next move. But as he was scouring the ground for something to throw, a rock or a bottle, the car sped off before he could decide if he’d actually throw it. He kept a rock in his pocket just in case they came back for round three. He filled the half-inch cut with the tip of his tongue. Tasted the metallic blood there. Felt the warmth of it filling his mouth, enough to let it collect before spitting it out.

  Pressing a lump of cold snow into his throbbing lip exaggerated his previous feelings of despair. The run-in with the kids meant he was sick: a pathetic drunk too weak to clean himself up.

  The walk and the fresh air, and the encounter with those kids sobered him up some, but he still startled the girl behind the drive-thru window when he staggered up to it and rapped his knuckles on the glass. She didn’t want to serve him, she was visibly scared and threatened to get security, but he persisted.

  She yelled through the glass, “Sir! It’s our policy. We can only serve people in cars, for your safety and our safety, and for health regulations.”Her breath against the window condensed, blurring her tired-looking face. Frizzy spirals of hair jutted out from under her cap. She looked equally irritated and sorry for the guy staring in at her.

  He saw his patchy beard in the window, his hair woven together at all angles, like a worn-out rug. There were headlights on him now, from a car behind him. Beeping the horn. Throwing confused hands and shoulders in the air.

  The commotion caught the attention of two other kids working that night. They looked about nineteen and found Owen’s story hilarious and admirable. To a nineteen-year-old, a guy who wa
lks an hour for mix must be the life of a party. They must have pictured him coming from a house party bigger than they’d ever been to, and gave him two extra-large cokes, free of charge, and a pat on the back. When he went to walk back home, one of the guys offered him a drive back to his apartment in exchange for an invite into the party. Owen nodded his head, no words.

  When the kid dropped him off,Owen apologized, looking down at his feet, “Shit, man, I’m sorry. Thanks for the mix and the drive, but the party must be over.”The kid sped off, more pissed off at Owen than sorry for him.

  He was too worn out to take his shoes off, and streaks of slush and dirty water followed him as he walked through his cluttered living room to his kitchen. He laid the cokes in the fridge. Somewhere in the last hour and a half, the urgency for the mix had diminished and the whole act seemed pathetic.

  He blamed the look that kid gave him when he dropped him off. It was always the looks that got to him. He remembered his fat lip and touched it, to double-check whether that whole scene had actually happened. There was a blueberry coffee cake in the fridge he didn’t remember buying. It wasn’t uncommon not to know how certain things, like the coffee cake, ended up in his house.

  All the dishes were dirty; every last piece of cutlery he owned was spread out across a pile of plates and bowls falling into the sink and begging to be washed: black and brown globs crusted onto everything like a colony of insects. Too much effort to wash off. He hated himself for it. For where he ended up in life, for the life that got away. For the alcoholism. Tonight was the first night he blamed the alcoholism for what he’d done with his life, and not the other was around.