Chapter 8 - waiting for the truth to catch up
The burden of a good imagination
I send the blog post down the tubes and wires and across the ether. Or however it works. I should have paid more attention in school. I wonder if anyone, anywhere, has the internet backed up somewhere? Every thought, photo, argument in the last fifty years, all appearing to happen at once. The internet isn’t linear, that much I know. It’s a chaotic web of 1s and 0s, and my own face is encoded into it thousands of times.
Tricia comes into the doorway of the bedroom. “Just going to read your post. I got a notification.”
I wait on the bed while her eyes slide back and forth over the lines, from my heart to her mind. Penelope the cat has slipped in, and I watch her as she makes motions of trying to jump up on the comforter. I will not have it, I think to her, hard. You will not be given permission to put your stinky butt on my sheets.
“I was thinking that too,” Tricia says, throwing her phone onto the bedspread, where she sits, crosslegged.
“What?”
“About the parallels between this and your cancer. It’s really scary. What if you’re like... the second coming? Sent here just to die again alongside the planet? A martyr.”
“Aren’t you an atheist?” I ask, my eyebrows impossible to keep down.
“I thought I was, but... With all this...”
“Ah,” I say. “We’re in a foxhole, are we?”
She nods. “Sure feels like it.” She tugs a hair elastic off my wrist and flips her hair up into a messy bun.
“Thievery,” I declare, throwing my hands up.
“You always have more than I do,” she says, obviously feeling justified in her action.
“Because I buy more when I run out, I don’t just pull them off people’s bodies!”
“The universe provides, Katherine.”
I want a magic word, something special I can say whenever moments like these happen. A word that can take a full-sensory screenshot, recording everything about this absurdly normal moment. Her smile, the warmth of her fingers against my cool wrist when she pulled the elastic, the way one strand of her hair strands comically at odds with the others. The outfit she chose to wear today, the smell of cannabis smoke and two-day old deodorant, a smell I could clock anywhere. Now. That’s the word, I decide. It’s now. It’s all we have, it’s all we’ve ever had. I want so much more of it.
I breathe, and my heart aches. I want to say, “It’s going to be grief until the very end,” but I can’t – not to Tricia. She doesn’t live in the same space I've occupied, this place of boring pain and normal death. I’m going to have to keep a lot of death thoughts to myself.
“Did you hear from Nicole, the woman from Windsor?” Tricia asks.
I nod. “She sent her driver’s licence and I looked her up on social media. She is who she appears to be. The EXIF data matches the phone she’s holding in one of her selfies. Obviously it’s not foolproof. But I think maybe we can meet her outside town.”
“The bus is still running, can you believe that? But no one’s working at Shopper’s Drug Mart anymore. Well, the pharmacists are still there but everyone else quit. I don’t think Galen Weston or the Waltons will ever be able to show their faces in public again,” Tricia says, scoffing.
“I guess not,” I say. “Wonder what they’re up to right now?”
“Probably making sure guards are facing the caviar properly in the storeroom.”
“I wonder how many of the filthy rich actually know how to defend themselves.”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? Even if you rob a billionaire, what good is money going to do? From now on, everything is going to be about what practical skills you have to offer,” Tricia says. She meets my eyes, hers wide and mine narrowed. I can’t let her go too deep down this rabbithole, but I can’t think of anything that’s both helpful and true.
“Girls!” Mom calls us from downstairs.
“What? Tricia yells, at the same time as I shout, “Yes?”
“There’s a meeting at the Town Hall tonight. In two hours. We need to go.”
I run down the stairs and stop at the kitchen door. Mom’s brewing a huge pot of coffee. “We can’t go to that, are you out of your mind?”
Mom tips her head to one side and looks at me. “Please decide not to talk to me like that, Katherine, or I’ll decide not to talk to you at all.”
I hang my head. “Sorry, Mom. I just mean, who knows who’s going to show up? The Council has been accused of everything from embezzlement to being literal lizard aliens. They have so many enemies waiting for a moment like this to give them permission to freak the fuck out.”
“Aliens?” Tricia says, making her way down the stairs behind me. She pours herself a cup of coffee and heaps in the sugar and cream. I watch myself become an afterthought and she pours one for me as well.
“I’m saying that I don’t think we should go to the meeting. I’m afraid it’s going to get violent.”
“But these are our neighbours,” Mom says, but her voice belies her fears.
“That’s what I mean,” I say. “We know nothing about most of these people except that they live in our general vicinity.”
“I want to believe people are generally good.” Mom puts down her mug with the finality of a person used to having the last word. Tricia and I look at each other, both swallowing down our rebuttals along with our coffee.
“Well, I’m going to go,” Tricia says at last. “If we’re making decisions as a town, I want to be a part of that.”
“So do I,” says Mom.
I, too, want to believe that people are generally good. I feel like I’ve been collecting information either for or against that argument my entire life. And maybe if I’d never had the internet or watched the news, maybe if I’d just lived on a mountaintop somewhere, it would be easier to believe the goodness argument. But I’ve seen what people are capable of, have been on the receiving end of someone else’s unfelt hurt many times. I know how scared animals behave, and we as a species have just been backed into the deadliest corner possible.
“I’ll come too,” I say, quiet and unsure. I leave the house to sit on the front porch with my coffee. I’ve always wanted a porch swing – the thought comes to me as it often has, as I’m settling into the less-than-comfortable cushion-less bench. Unlike the other times I’ve considered this, something is different. I can’t force my mind to pick the perfect spot from which to hang it. I can’t imagine the pattern on the seat and pillows, can’t picture how it would feel to snuggle in, to press the balls of my feet against the porch and gently start to swing.
I’ll never have a porch swing. I’ve entered the timeline of a million griefs. Everything I dreamed of, from the huge things like having a family to the small things like having a porch swing, it’s like there are no more forks in the road ahead of me. No more good choices. Just survival from here on out. And the wildest part is, nothing bad is happening to me right now. Right now, I have a serviceable chair, a warm drink, loved ones within reach, and despite the cancer, a working body and brain.
So why do I feel like I’ve already died and I’m just waiting for the truth to catch up?