Stopgap Read online

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgements

  For Kelda

  1

  For much of my abbreviated life on Earth, the relationship I had with death was as inconsistent as it was mystifying. As a boy, attempting to wrap my mind around the unflinching laws of nature seemed the most unnatural of tasks — a mental decathlon resulting in total upheaval versus that of order and balance. Suddenly, life no longer came with a guarantee on the packaging. Life was something that could be lost. And not lost like an action figure or a baseball over the fence. Not like a scarf or rogue winter glove that could find its way into the lost and found. Life was now something that could be permanently unaccounted for. No tricky coin slot for second tries. No chairlift up for another wild run at it. On any given day, one could happen to be without it.

  Dead.

  Suddenly, everyone and everything around me had an ambiguous expiration date. There we were, risking our lives at every turn. What used to be an enjoyable car ride to soccer or a movie was now a harrowing game of Russian Roulette. Visits with pals became a process of in-depth risk analysis. “Luke, would you like to play with James today?” Not a chance I’m risking my one lap around the track to see that guy. Though, remarkably, certain things qualified — people, places, and events that were worth climbing into an assembly of moving parts and flammable liquids to visit. I would sit in the back seat of Dad’s Chevy Parisienne and cross my fingers with each passing car, holding my breath as transport trucks screamed past me. Dad would tell me it was fine. He would say that the big boat was as safe as anything they sent into space. But I’d heard that from time to time space shuttles exploded, and, even at that age, I knew those things cost more than Dad’s Parisienne.

  Just another lie to calm the young mind.

  Previous to becoming a member of those in the know, past promises surrounding the issue of death revealed themselves to be nothing more than an inside joke. Preceding any knowledge of death, the snake on the road being worked into the pavement with the rubber of each passing car was just sleeping. As was the neighbours’ German shepherd, the bloated carcass of which was carried out of the ditch with a snow shovel.

  He was just taking a nap.

  As was the deer strewn across the highway.

  As was the snail smeared across the sidewalk with its mobile home in a million tiny pieces.

  He looks hurt, I’d say.

  No, he’ll pull himself together when he wakes up.

  That’s how it works. That’s what we’re promised as children.

  Then one day that promise dies and is shipped to the graveyard of untruths.

  For most, the introduction to death becomes inescapable when a loved one has passed. Here, the word died or dead is first used and is then explained with hushed tones, back rubs, and comforting hugs. We voice that our stomach is in knots and our heart is breaking over this confusing news, this concept, this introduction to endings, until, rest assured, that recently deceased loved one, along with the entire collection of missing family pets, have all gone to a better place.

  A better place above the clouds to be with God.

  A place called Heaven.

  We’re fed these new promises for pain relief, like Tylenol. Then we all feel better for a while, until the next heartache. Then more Tylenol.

  Life is never the same when our youthful minds are directed to meet Death. After we are forced to acknowledge his presence. Bent with confusion, we’re asked to outstretch our trembling right arm, open our clenched fist, and shake the giant black tarantula he boasts for a hand.

  Pleasure to meet you, Death.

  We pull over our adventurous voyage with Life and unwittingly invite Death to ride along for the remainder of our journey. Life sits in the front, passenger side. Death sits in the back, chauffeured, and without the requirement for any shallow banter. He just sits there patiently observing our fascinating interaction with Life.

  Thrilled to be present is Death — and only ever a glance away in the rearview mirror in case you forget he’s there. Which, of course, happens from time to time. We tend to get caught up in our roaring relationship with Life and stop checking our rearview mirror. We do wild, outrageous, careless things with Life, and then it’s too late. Death taps us on the shoulder from behind the driver’s seat with his grotesquely long spider-leg finger, awkwardly hinges open his broken jaw, and whispers, “Remember me?”

  Yes, he’s been there the whole time.

  Ready to receive us.

  Loyal to a fault is Death. Certainly far more loyal than Life. Life is fickle. It can leave you at a moment’s notice. Life can terminate a beautiful relationship in mere seconds and without the slightest trace of remorse. Life will desert you for the love or abuse of it; for the care taken along the way or the complete lack thereof.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Sooner or later, Life reveals its true colours, its despicable fair-weather tendencies.

  • • •

  It was Granddad Stevenson who forced my introduction to Death. He was in the process of teaching me how to play chess when he told me I could only count on two things in life: death and taxes. He had a million sayings like that one. I was quite young when he dropped that gem on me. Five, I think.

  “What’s taxes?” I said.

  “When you make money, you always have to give some back.”

  “To who?”

  “To the country. To the government.”

  “Why?”

  “Now there’s a good goddamn question worth asking! I should give you a loudspeaker and set you up on Parliament Hill.” He laughed hard. Then he snorted and broke into a chunky coughing fit. He’d bang at his chest with a closed fist and tell me the old speakers were popping in there. He’d swirl his drink so that the ice cubes knocked shoulders a few times before it went down the hatch.

  “What’s death?” I said.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said and rearranged the wisps of hair populating the top of his freckled head.

  From there, this decorated veteran of war explained the concept of death with the utmost colour and candour, as one who had witnessed death of all kinds would do. With regard to his explanation of death, this is what he finished with: “So just get used to it.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “Luke, when your dad and I stuffed poor Apple Basket into the wood stove, did you really think it was because he was cold?” he said, breathing old coffee and new whisky on me. “The poor little bastard was dead.”
>
  Apple Basket was an orange tabby I used to carry around in an apple basket when he was a kitten. To this day, no one knows where Apple Basket came from. Mom was out hanging laundry on the line, and when she reached down to pick out more bedding, there was the kitten, kneading the dirty bedsheets with his front paws and purring like a hedge trimmer. When Mom came back in from the line, she dropped the basket in front of Dad and me. She placed her hands, thumbs forward on her hips, and said, “We now have a cat. This is his home. That is his bedding. This is a sign from God. I need a proper laundry basket.”

  And that was that.

  Apple Basket was mine, and Mom bought herself a brand-new wicker laundry basket. The kitten and his new home of the same name lived on the floor at the foot of my bed. After a few months, and some growth, he would make his way out of the basket and would fashion a nest in the duvet cover between my feet. This little guy was my best pal in the whole world. With a piece of string dangling from a twig, he would entertain me with a circus lineup of backflips, mid-air swats, and feats of athleticism for hours on end. Over time, Apple Basket became increasingly adventurous. Sadly, the twig-and-string routine began to bore him, and his wild eyes told me that he was ready for bigger and better things. Something with a heartbeat. Something with wings. Something with whiskers and a tail. Training camp was over, and he was ready to turn pro.

  Every deadly sniper relies on a trusted spotter, but in the hunt I was more a hindrance than a help to Apple Basket. He would turn and look back, as if begging me to not follow him into battle. We eventually agreed that he could have the afternoons to himself, and he was pleased with that. I knew this because he would bring his trophies home to me and lay them dead centre on the doormat. He would sit majestically alongside whatever was now baking in the hot summer sun until I came home and gave him applause. He would circle me a dozen times, snaking his tail around my calves. Mom would promptly collect the prize and take it away. The bird or mouse had lost the fight, and she was taking it somewhere to heal before it could battle once again.

  Apple Basket never lost a fight.

  Until he did.

  One afternoon I came home and there was no trophy waiting for me. No Apple Basket either. A few days passed, and Mom and I stapled pictures of him with our phone number on them to telephone poles around the neighbourhood. Eventually, Dad found him on the side of the road and said he was badly hurt and extremely cold. Being so severely hurt and cold meant that my best pal in the whole world required warming up inside the old wood stove before he could depart on a great adventure.

  This adventure was his duty, I was told. His calling from the great cat lord, King Lionel.

  I became sick with the news and asked if I could go into the wood stove — if I could go on the adventure. But it was explained to me that it was a magical stove, only for burning wood and heating cats before they embark on great quests.

  And that was the promise.

  That was gospel.

  I was fed that story for unbearable pain relief, like morphine.

  • • •

  After the chat with Granddad Stevenson, so began my obsession with death.

  The million and one implications.

  The uncertainty of it all — or did it all just go black? What was the point of an ant, especially when that ant is stepped on and spins around in circles, mortally wounded, until he’s stepped on again to be finished? These were questions I would later learn humankind had been pondering since we could sharpen a flint.

  “Are we all just spinning around waiting to be put out of our misery?” I said to Granddad Stevenson. He laughed so hard that I could see all of the silver puddles in his back teeth.

  “I like that one a lot. Yes. My answer is yes. But listen to me, pal. We’re to have as much fun as possible before the final squish. Understand?”

  From that point, it became a self-imposed requirement to learn more about death. After dinner, I would position myself next to my father on the couch to watch the news. All kinds of death and suffering were reported there. News anchors with nice teeth and perfect hair spoke of death without the slightest emotion, as if robotic, as if stripped of humanity or any semblance of emotional quotient. Night after night, images of dead bodies from around the globe entered our home. People I’d never met. People with families and stories. People who used to smile and laugh and have friends, now bloodied, limp, and lifeless.

  Something to be collected and discarded.

  Their images were magically beamed into my little living room in Oakville so my father could shake his head and say, “What a damn shame,” and then yell to my mother about how pissed off he was that the car had picked up another nail.

  “Can’t we do anything?” I’d ask.

  “You’re going to see the world tear itself apart ten times over, and there’s nothing you can do.”

  This is what I would do:

  I’d go up into my room every night after the news and crack the spine of a novel. I’d dive into worlds where people were saved and heroes won. It was my only respite from the awful, unpredictable place that was the world around me — an escapee living vicariously through the heroes of great fiction.

  I slayed dragons. Saved empires. Restored order.

  Protected everything from castles to kings and queens, common people to golden rings and sometimes, on occasion, I’d offer a ring to a maiden I had saved or won the heart of somewhere along the way. This is where I preferred to live.

  I walked the hallways of elementary and high school relatively anonymous. Not a soul was aware of the heroic things I was doing between the hours of dinner and midnight. Such is the plight of the protagonist at times — acts of valour without recognition or reward. It didn’t matter much. This was my alternate universe, and I largely preferred it to the one I was living in.

  • • •

  While my preteen and teenage years were consumed with wrapping my head around the implications surrounding death, devouring news, stacking my bookshelf, and coping with my inability to gain the interest of the opposite sex, I managed to shed the albatross of virginity during my first year at college.

  Her name was Diana.

  I didn’t know her last name.

  Not that I forgot it. It has more to do with the fact that the information was never shared with me. Frosh week: I was downing skunky keg beer out of a red plastic cup I had paid five dollars for. The alpha-looking gent with whom I had transacted for the cup assured me that I was paying for the cup, and the beer was free. He made a real point of that. You know, to get around the liquor laws.

  “I’m just not sure that would hold up in court,” I said.

  “How about you buy the plastic cup or fuck off,” he said.

  I promptly bought the cup.

  So did my roommate, Russell Stern, who had dragged me to the frosh party in the first place.

  Russell wasn’t all that handsome, but anything he lacked in looks, he made up for with gobs of wit and a boatload of confidence. The guy oozed it. Fearless when it came to successfully breaking ice. Undaunted by the prospect of rejection. Russell made a beeline for the prettiest girl at the party and struck up a conversation as easy as a match meets striking paper. A dozen or so feet away, I stood in absolute wonderment. He seemed to be able to make her laugh and smile time and time again, as if he’d tapped into her central nervous system and any stimulus, anything at all, resulted in an agreeable mating response. Witnessing this, I wasn’t sure whether to applaud his efforts or plunge a sword through his gut in a fit of jealousy.

  Of course, I did neither.

  I did what the rest of the guys crippled by social paralysis were doing: I drank the skunky beer and repeatedly checked my watch to make it look like I was waiting for someone. After an hour of that pathetic charade, I gave up and did my best to move to the music that was playing at a thousand decibels above what would be deemed a nois
e violation. I was dancing. I think. Though dancing is supposed to be freeing and human. What I was doing was a series of highly self-regulated movements to ensure that my limbs were in sync and not in danger of harming anyone.

  It was neither human nor freeing.

  Then this happened: Diana, a fancy diamond in the human form, and entirely out of my perceived league, walked over to me and said, “It looks like my friend and your friend are going to be chatting for a while, so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m Diana.”

  Poor Diana was left to chat with me, the worst consolation prize ever, while her girlfriend batted eyelashes and flashed her big teeth and pink gums at Russell. I offered to get Diana a beer, and she told me it wasn’t beer they were serving — it was horse piss. She said they had a Clydesdale with a heavy bladder out back and were using him to fill the kegs. That perhaps they should call the beer Draft Horse. She laughed at her own joke while I swirled around what was left in my red plastic cup. I downed it, right then and there, and wholly agreed with her remark. She told me I was brave, and I candidly disagreed with her. I asked Diana what she was taking. She said journalism, and her tone suggested I might think that was unoriginal.

  “If you write, you must love to read,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “What have you read lately?”

  She cracked a smile. One of those half ones where one corner of the mouth turns up, but the other corner isn’t yet convinced.

  What came out of that horribly awkward conversation-starter was that we had all but shared the same bookcase growing up. I dropped reference after reference of all the greats, and she ate it up ferociously. She asked me what I thought of one book after another, and my responses seemed to dazzle her. She would say words like, “yes,” and “absolutely,” and “I can’t believe you’re saying this! I just can’t!”

  Soon she was batting eyelashes and flashing her teeth and gums at me. She was touching her face and neck and tucking perfect ribbons of hair behind her perfect ears, exposing the definition of her perfect cheekbones. After books, we got onto the subject of the news, and it was very clear that we were two news junkies in a pod. Playfully sparring over who was the best anchor, and why. She said Sterling MacKinnon, which floored me. I jutted out my jaw, tilted my head like a dog hearing its own name, and gave her the best Sterling MacKinnon impression I had in me. The whole thing sounded more like a drunken Sean Connery than the world-renowned news anchor, but she was more than entertained with my effort.