Contemporaneous: Chapters 29 – 30

29.

As I drive to visit my mum, what I can identify is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with my thinking.

It’d be easy to doubt the reality of my experience with Luca, but it sits there, along with a week’s worth of living, in my memories, the only thing that’s hazy being the train hitting me. But I think I feel even that, muscles aching like they would a couple of days after a workout. I’m not even sure I’m not imagining that, but it’s all so commonplace, no different to any of those ordinary things we do everyday that we assign to them no importance.

I don’t know, and something that creeps in is the fear that maybe I’ve lost my mind. This used to happen when I was younger – the fear, that is. And I’d assure myself by repeating the staples of my reality, as if that could prove to myself just how good a grip I had on who, what, and where I am.

The biggest difference, though, isn’t the Luca experience, but the imperative to be better.

The problem is I just don’t know what better means, aside from what I’m trying now.

Things were better with Lana. I don’t feel entirely rewarded emotionally – more doubtful than anything. But it’s a start. And I feel better about the conversation with Dom simply because it was a connection, however real, on an emotional level, rather than on a professional level.

With these things in mind, when I get to the home I ring the bell at the counter for one of the carers.

A svelte woman emerges from the office – maybe late thirties or early forties, with something demure about her. She’s cute – the sort of woman I attach to because cute implies (however unjustifiably) unworldly, and I project what it would be like being with her. My vision with her is Brady Bunch fare, where everybody is pleasant and supportive and just about always on the same page, and there are no horrific arguments. I could totally be with this woman if our lives were a sitcom out of the 60s or 70s, and she didn’t expect much from me, but given that’s not where I am, it sort of makes sense now why I’m with Lana – because she tolerates me, and I don’t know if anybody else would.

I ask the nurse for a wheelchair, and after I explain why I want it, she smiles and fetches me one, telling me I’m considerate. There are some points. I’d like to think that later, during a lunch break or something, she gushes to the other staff about the considerate guy who came in to visit his mother, although I know these things never happen, and what I’m doing is no more extraordinary than what so many people paying perfunctory visits would do (and I don’t want to think about what the people who are genuinely magnanimous are doing).

Once she’s fetched the wheelchair, I take it up the elevator, and wheel it to my mum’s room. She’s sitting upright, scowling (which is more and more becoming her resting default face) while something blares on the television that she’s not watching. But she likes the sound. She must hold onto it like it’s an anchor entrenching her in this world.

“Hey,” I say, wheeling the wheelchair up to the bedside, “I thought I could take you out.”

“Where?” she asks.

“We could go out to the garden. It’s beautiful outside today.”

“What’re we going to do in the garden?”

“We’re not going to do anything,” I say. “We’ll just enjoy the day.”

“What’s so nice about the day that I can’t enjoy it in here?”

“It’s sunny.”

“I’ll burn.”

“We’ll sit under a tree.”

“Is it windy?”

“Not really.”

“I don’t like sunny days unless there’s a breeze.”

“It’s beautiful outside.”

I lean forward, ready to draw her bedcover back. She seizes it and holds it.

“You smell like beer,” she says.

“I had a couple for lunch with Dom.”

“Dom’s married and has kids. You – look at you. Unmarried. No kids.”

“Let’s just go outside.”

“I’m not letting you push me in a wheelchair when you’ve been drinking.”

“I had a couple of beers,” I say. “I drove here. I’m under the limit.”

“You think that but who knows?”

I try to dig the bedcovers from her grasp.

“Just leave it alone!” she says.

“It’ll be nice.”

“If you wanted nice, you wouldn’t have put me in this home.”

I sigh, because the home wasn’t exclusively my decision, and she has so many health conditions that need attending that full-time care was the only option. But she won’t buy into any of that.

“So you don’t want to go?”

“I didn’t ask to go, you didn’t ask me to go, so it’s not about what I want. It’s about what you want.”

I release the bedcovers, and sullenly shove the wheelchair into the corner, taking my seat in the usual chair at her bedside.

“All right,” I say. “Fine. Do you need anything else?”

“What do you mean else? It’s not like you’ve given me anything – well, outside worry and grief and disappointment.”

She’s in fine form – better form than she was the last time around, the only difference being that I wanted to do something nice like take her out to enjoy the day in the garden.

So I say nothing more.

And instead just count down the time until I’ve been here long enough that I can leave in good conscious.

Well, I can leave.

30.

I get home, feeling maudlin, and given the disaster that was visiting Mum, try to formulate plans for how I’ll tackle Melody on Monday, and Regina on Wednesday, rehearsing scenarios in my head, but knowing they’ll never play out the way I imagine – they never do.

Melody’s the easier one: she’s an inexperienced writer who’s enjoyed some success, so she believes she knows it all. I can tackle that given my experience working with writers. I can find a diplomatic way to reach her. I can find a way to make her feel good about writing, and show her that I’m trying to help her.

But Regina?

I don’t think she wants me as part of Leopardus’s profile, and I don’t think I want them representing me given the clusterfuck of the first two books. They tried their best, but their best is no different to what the bulk of publishers do – try get reviews, try get interviews, and do a bit of advertising. It’s a scattergun approach with no strategy behind it. Throw enough shit out there and see what sticks.

Given how I feel, I procrastinate, playing too much of my ice hockey, and screaming when it makes the games close – even when I shoot out to substantial leads, suddenly the opposition score a string of goals, my computer-controlled teammate and goalkeeper becoming inept.

I get that restless sense of waiting again, and end up throwing on a movie – the awful biopic Tolkien. This is a shitty way to spend a second chance, but I don’t know anything better. It’s funny how often in these scenarios the protagonist (if I could be called a protagonist) never does anything extraordinarily different, like book a flight to Spain or something. Instead, they try to gain mastery over what wasn’t working, even though in my situation it felt like nothing was.

Stan texts me, What’re you up to?

With Lana, I tell him, although obviously I’m not, but that’s where this night is going.

Cool, he texts back.

Then it’s back to waiting, my anxiousness building. I remember getting this way as a kid, feeling like everything was just a bit off, just a bit out of sync, and that resulted in this jarring like I was falling out of place. But now it’s deeper. As a kid it seemed a transitory thing, something that I could correct. Now I have a sudden doubt – and that’s when Lana rings.

“Hey,” she says. “What’re you doing?”

“Watching a movie,” I tell her.

“Which movie?”

“Tolkien.”

“What’s that about?”

“JRR Tolkien.”

Silence.

“The guy who wrote The Lord of the Rings,” I say, because she obviously doesn’t know, although she once bought me a Lord of the Rings Extended Edition boxset for Christmas.

“Oh. Any good?”

“Not really.”

“Did you want to do something?”

“Sure,” I tell her.

Silence again. She’s surprised. Now before I unload the following conversation, there are two things it’s useful to know: “Mike” is Lana’s sister Lily’s husband, and you can skip this big chunk of text if you’re happy with how I summarise it after it’s done.

“Wait until I tell you what Lily did,” Lana says. “She bought this new car – did I tell you she’d been looking at a Camry? She’d been looking for months, going online, driving out to dealerships, and she ended up finding one just down the road. I don’t know why she didn’t just start there. Only had sixty thousand kilometres on it. But then Mike had a friend at work who was selling a Prius. Lily didn’t want a Prius – she really had her heart set on the Camry. The Prius also had eighty thousand kilometres on it. But it was seven-thousand dollars cheaper because Mike’s friend wanted to unload it because he and his wife were separating, so he just wanted to get rid of it. Did I tell you about Mike’s friend Henry? His wife cheated on him with her boss. He found out because she said she was going to a working retreat, but while she was away, their youngest kid, Dan, fell over and broke his arm. So Mike’s friend rang work to get the number for the retreat, but the forwarding number they had was for a hotel. So Mike’s friend went down there and caught them in the act. That’s why he wanted to unload the Prius. Lily sees it and it’s this gorgeous red she loves so she buys it but on the drive home she has to stop at the shops for some food. Somebody parked their car too close and opened their front door into the Prius. There’s like this big ugly dent on it. And it wasn’t even insured yet. I can’t tell you how pissed Mike was.”

This is how Lana tells stories – relaying needless prequel information, when all she had to tell me is that Lily bought a car, stopped at the shops, and somebody opened their car door into it before it was insured.

“What do you think about that?” Lana asks.

“Sounds like the car’s cursed,” I say.

Lana makes a little single-syllable laughing sound, but I know somewhere inside her head she’s probably seriously considering that possibility.

“What else have you been up to?” Lana says. “How was your mum?”

“The same.”

“What about Dom?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here,” I say.

“Has something happened with him?”

“No, but you’re coming over, so we’ll talk when you get here.”

“Okay,” Lana says, although she’s obviously a bit peeved. “See you soon.”

I put the kettle on, then make two cups of tea and bring some biscuits out to the coffee table, only Lana doesn’t see me soon – I wait around over twenty minutes, and then I get a text from her: Had to go home to put a load of washing on. Coming now. So I drink my tea, spill out hers, and make two fresh cups, although me drinking tea late at night is never good for my sleep.

She’s genuinely delighted when she arrives that I have the tea ready, as well as the chocolate biscuits, and since it’s too late for a movie, I throw my television onto the YouTube app so we can flick through some tunes, but typically the television then decides to update, which takes ten minutes of downloading and installing, and then another couple of minutes because it decides to do a hard reboot.

While we wait, I force myself to share details about the visit with my mum, but selectively edit how lunch with Dom went. Lana doesn’t need to know how I’m trying to find the secret behind why relationships work, what’s normal, what’s not, and what’s abnormally me. She’s not overly interested, though, because several times she checks her phone to respond to some family group chat, and she interrupts me at one point to tell me that her brother, Andrew, just made the same joke as me that Lily’s car must be cursed, but her response now is like she’s discovered some unused plot for Seinfeld.

I’m thankful that when the television finally switches on, and I flick it to YouTube, but just as I’m about to speak and choose a song, it reverts to a directory for the hard drive I have plugged in – something it’s never done before. I could dismiss it as an anomaly or whatever, but I know that this relates to the update.

I switch back to YouTube and give Lana the remote. She lifts it to her mouth.

“Bon Jovi,” she says. “ ‘In these arms’.”

The YouTube app thinks about it, and then a little Google icon appears, and the app tell us, “Bon Jovi is an American rock band formed in Sayreville, New Jersey in 1983. The band consists of singer Jon Bon Jovi, keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, guitarists John Shanks and Phil X, percussionist Everett Bradley, and bassist Hugh McDonald.”

“What’s it doing?” she asks.

Instead of searching YouTube, it’s decided to search the whole internet, because that makes sense – go on the YouTube app, and get search hits for Google.

“The update must’ve broken something,” I say.

“Isn’t the update meant to make it better?”

“Meant to, yeah.”

She hits the SPEAK button on the remote button and repeats her request. This time, the song comes up as a hit. She selects it, and is soon bouncing, singing softly to the lyrics, blissfully happy because I imagine hearing this song takes her back to a time before marriage, before a child, before her father’s death, when she was young and had her whole life ahead of her.

That’s not me trying to condemn her – I know, because that’s exactly what music from this era does for me.

We hold onto the past as a comfort – to a time there was nothing but promise.

And I don’t want to say that now there’s only the nothing, but the promise is rudely evicted by the regret. Regret’s so much more powerful. Promise is illusory. Regret is reality. We just try to find a way to navigate the conflict and survive the pillory.

Lana flicks through tunes for about an hour, and then she declares it’s time for bed and switches the television off.

I go through my shutdown routine for the night, clearing the coffee table, washing the cups, brushing my teeth, by which time she’s already gotten into bed.

She curls up against me, and I think this is nice, to feel that companionship, but when she finally turns, flipping to face the other side, she says sleepily to me, “Hold me,” and I don’t.