Edward Brubaker
Fiction by George Bowering
Edward Brubaker did not have the perfect marriage and family life, far from it, or rather not far from it but some distance from it. Enough distance to make him feel lonely even when he was in the house with his wife Debra and their two daughters. He spent a lot of time, especially early mornings, in the basement, where he was trying to write a novel. He had been working, as he called it, on his novel for a few years now.
When you sit down to write a novel, and you are facing that proverbial blank page, you may as well have been plunked down in a country whose language you don’t know. The language you are going to try to work with is useless. All you can hope is that you will come up with something that seems powerful, and something more rare than that — beautiful. In that case, you will not be comfortable, but you will be on your way to citizenry. When you sit down to read a novel, well, where are you?
On Saturdays he was in the habit of doing something with the girls, Sonya and Sally. When they were really young, four and three, he walked with them up to the children’s park off Marine Drive, and stood by while they slid down the slide and swung on the swings and waded in the nice big circular pool with the gradual slope toward the middle, where it as still only up to a three-year-old’s knees. Sonya and Sally liked sitting down in the pool and splashing each other.
As the years eased by, Edward would take the girls to ice skating and Halloween collecting and T-ball. Eventually, there they were, in Brownies, and then in Girl Guides. He became their softball coach and led them to a couple of defeated seasons. He didn’t talk much with the other dads and mostly moms, but he would smile and even wave at times.
One Saturday he noticed by his watch that it was eight a.m., so he shut down work for the day and went upstairs. His routine was to shout up the staircase and then march to the kitchen and make Saturday pancakes. On this rainy-windowed Saturday morning his wife Debra was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the easier of the daily crosswords.
“Why were you hollering up the stairs?” she asked, without looking up from the squares on which she had penciled the word “ano” without the accent.
Instead of replying, he put a handful of utensils and a couple of glasses on the kitchen table, a careful distance from her newspaper. He stacked four plates beside the stove, smeared butter on the skillet, and started whisking stuff in a big bowl.
“What are you doing?” asked Debra, still not raising her face.
“What do I always do on Saturday morning?” he said, lightsomely.
“All right,” she said, and did not loose her grip on her pencil. “Why are you flinging so many plates and forks on the table?”
He flipped a perfect pancake.
“Debra. Edward. Sonya. Sally,” he intoned.
Her grip on the pencil, if anything, appeared to grow tighter. In moments such as this, especially those in which she was grasping an object, he tried to fight off fear while also filing the scene away for possible use on a page of fiction.
A mate with a different set of personality traits might have slapped the pencil down longitudinally by now, or ruined its writing end with a downward stab at newspaper or tabletop.
“Don’t start that up again. I have had all I want to hear about your imaginary offspring. You have no children, Edward. You are incapable of having children. You will never sire a human being.”
Eventually she ate two-thirds of her pancake with raspberry syrup, then used the remaining part for grinding out her cigarette. He ate the contents of the three other plates, then cleaned up the dishes and pan and opened the front door to check on the weather that would greet his excursion to the ballpark, three tickets in his shirt pocket.
At Runcible Stadium he met his best friend Freddy in the chili dog lineup. There were a lot of empty seats, so he just kind of followed Freddy to his spot behind first base.
“I could use some company,” he said, or that is what it sounded like as the words fought their way past a huge bite of chili dog, which included onion, relish, and mustard, no ketchup. “I couldn’t talk Debra into coming, even with this great baseball sunshine.”
“Do I know this Debra?” asked Freddy, between chili dog bites. Sauerkraut and tomato slices. Tough on shirt fronts.
“Uh, my wife?”
“Once again, Edward my oldest friend, you have no wife. You have never had a wife. Your fictitious wife seems to have a different name every time I hear about her.”
Edward brooded in silence, except for some eating noises, until the fourth inning, by which time the Zephyrs were down by six runs. He snagged two plastic cups of see-through beer from the costumed beer guy and handed one to his pal. Freddy smiled his thank you, and gestured with his beer.
“Let’s drink to Debora.”
“Debra.”
The Zephyrs lost by ten runs, no mercy, and now they were alone as can be in last place, but who cares? There was sunshine and there was going to be sunshine for the next two months. Edward had a job that kept him indoors, but during coffee break he could take his coffee outside, and he could go to a nearby outdoor fried chicken place for lunch. Sunshine was a special treat in the so-called northwest, and when it was here you wanted to be in it.
The morning sun was shining but it was by no means hot on Monday morning when he got off the 99 bus and walked the one block to the print shop. He loved the smell of ink and even the sound of the biggest printer that once in awhile went ker-thunk. There were no customers around yet, but someone had opened, so Edward could go to the back room and hang up his Zephyrs cap and his light jacket and find himself an apron.
It was Max that had opened the shop. Max was using a dark cloth to clean the biggest printer. First he seemed to ignore Edward, even after Edward said good morning. Then when Edward started putting on an apron, he stopped his wiping and sighed a sigh that moved his shoulders up and down.
“Now, listen here, whatever your name is —”
“Edward.”
“I don’t care what your name is.”
“Yours is Max. We have worked together for years.”
“No, we haven’t, Ed. I don’t know what your game is, or what your name is. I only know you are a pain in the ass.”
Edward turned his head a quarter of a rotation, and lowered his chin and put on a you aren’t fooling me face.
“I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you Nobody, too?”
“Shut the fuck up!” Max advised.
Edward put his hands on some paper, and the fellow named Max took him by the arms and persuaded him to remove his apron, collect his hat and jacket and step outside, never, it was mooted, to return.
“Unless you are a customer,” said Max, with a gentle push.
What was Edward to do? He could not very well go home, or they would wonder why he was there in the middle of the work day. He was not in the mood for a mid-day movie, and he had better stay away from the girls’ school playground, having had a rather unpleasant experience there a while back. It was going to be a hot sunny day, so the smart thing to do was to head for some place with air conditioning. He walked six blocks over to the biggest department store in town and walked around inside for what seemed like hours, but when he caught sight of a stylish clock on the kitchenware floor, he saw that less than an hour had gone by. To heck with it. There was an air-conditioned place that he knew quite well because he often dropped in there on the way home after work.
It was a couple steps down from the sidewalk on Butler, past all the neon signs advertising American beers you could not buy there, past a fibreglass penguin, whose pate all the patrons rubbed on their way to tables or the bar. Edward found a place at the bar, and right in front of him was a little bowl that looked as if it had recently had peanuts in it.
“I’ll have the usual,” he said to Murray the bartender.
“Yeah, funny,” said Murray.
“Funny?”
“I hear that all the time. What’ll it be, stranger.”
Murray’s tone was a little jokey, thank goodness, so Edward continued.
“Waal, ah’m a stranger in taown. How’s about your best rotgut?”
Murray poured a shot of the house rye whisky. Then he tended the other end of the bar. When he got back to his part of it, Edward dropped his accent and attempted to make a request.
“Seriously, can I have my usual?”
“Maybe it helps your ego out to have a usual,” said the bartender, cleaning things while he spoke. “But you are not a regular in this room. It is part of my job to recognize customers and other people, and I can tell you that we have never, until this hour, met.”
If he had stopped for a moment and thought about it, Edward would have been aware that there was some sort of pattern developing. In fact, though he was not aware that he was aware of it, he was aware of it. That is likely why he said the following.
“Your name is Murray, right? How do I know that if I’m not a regular?”
“Maybe from the word ‘Murray,’ which is sewn to the pocket of my little vest here.”
“Oh, this is crazy.”
“Something or somebody is, I am forced to agree,” said Murray.
Edward picked up his empty shot glass and drained an imaginary drop into the mouth on his upturned face.
“Okay, may I please have a scotch and soda, one ice cube?”
“No, sorry, you are ninety-sixed.”
“What’s that?”
“You know eighty-sixed? Ninety-sixed is that much more.”
Edward left the bar and felt the wind pulling at his clothes, so much so that he had to use his left hand to keep his Minnesota Twins cap on his head. He was beginning to feel somewhat worried. One possibility was that everyone was playing a complicated joke on him, pretending not to know who he was. Another possibility was that he had been mistaken at every turn, but some of those turns involved a wife and two daughters. That would be no joke. He did not know what it would be, but whatever it was, it would be terrifying. As if he had walked through some kind of rip between universes or realities or whatever. A third possibility was that he had gone mad, or that he had always been mad. The more he held his hat on and leaned into the wind and thought about these possibilities, the more alarmed he became. He decided to look for help.
You were supposed to have an appointment if you wanted to see your doctor, but what was he supposed to do? Make an appointment for a week from now and then do what?
Minnesota Twins cap? What about his Zephyrs cap?
Where had he slept between last night’s baseball game and this morning’s printing press?
How come he knew his way to Doctor Meaney’s office, and here he was. What would he do if Doctor Meaney and even his receptionist Sherri claimed that they didn’t know who he was?
“Hi, Mister Brubaker,” said Sherri with her usual exaggerated cheerfulness.
“I need to see Doctor Meaney,” he said, using the high counter between them for support.
“It’s Doctor Meaney,” she said, still cheerful. “That’s what I said.”
“No, you said Meaney.”
“I know what it is,” said Edward. His head was not spinning and the room was not spinning, but something was.
“It’s usually the doctor who knows what it is,” she said, without hostility.
“Anyway,” said Edward, with a fall in the level of hope obvious in his voice, “I need to see Doctor Meaney.”
“You are in luck,” said Sherri, opening a daybook on the counter in front of her. She had red hair all over her round head, which was not all that big.
“That’ll be the day,” said a gloomy Edward M.
“I mean,” said Sherri, ramping up the cheerfulness, “I mean that there has been a cancellation, and you can see the doctor at two-fifteen. That’s ten minutes from now. More or less.”
“Oh, thank you, Sh——”
“Sherri,” said Sherri.
In the half hour that was granted him to think about his day and the problems it had presented, Edward, or “Ed,” as his friends at school and work used to address him, he imagined all sorts of conversations or catastrophes that might be waiting for him whenever he was permitted to walk down that hallway and into the little room with the high bed and the blood pressure machine. Doctor Meaney, for example, might assert that he could not find anyone named Brubaker in his computer. Or he might be someone totally unfamiliar to his interlocutor. Edward almost felt like running out of the building, never to return.
But what really happened was that at the end of a little over half an hour he was welcomed into the little room, soon to be joined by Dr. Meaney, a short affable man with freckles. Dr. Meaney did all the usual things, stared at his computer screen, took Edward’s blood pressure, pressed a metallic circle at various places on his back and chest, and told him to put his shirt back on.
“We’ll be wanting you to do some blood-work,” he said, touching a sheet of paper here and there with the tip of his pen, “but so far I would say that your condition is more or less the same as it was —” he looked quickly at his computer screen, “a year and a half ago.”
“Thank you,” Edward had been saying from time to time.
He walked all the way to his house in the neighbourhood he took for granted. It was miles and miles, or at least miles, but his breath was just fine and his feet were not sore at all, as if he had been flying while upright, which was the situation in one of the recurring dreams he had had as a boy. When he got there he saw that the lawn needed mowing, not really badly, but somewhat.
He poked his fingers at the numbers that were required to unlock the front door. Nothing happened, not even little beeps. This would be true if the door was unlocked, so he tried the door, which turned out to be locked. Then he really concentrated and poked the numbers again, to no avail. I have been taking avail for granted, he thought, with a touch of concern under the words. Well, fear, maybe.
He tried to think back on the morning, and on the night before, looking for something that might explain this — why were the numbers changed? Did D—, did his wife, something that starts with D, did she say anything to him about changing the numbers on the lock? Should he go around and check the back door? Well, he did, but when he got there he couldn’t remember the numbers he had tried before, the wrong ones. He went back to the front door and looked at the street number. He thought it looked right. A woman with a cigarette was in the front yard next door, right at the fence if there had been a fence.
“Can I help you with something?” she asked him, eyes going up and down the street to see whether he had come in an unknown car, it looked like.
“Thanks, no. I think I must have the wrong address,” said Edward.
The woman watched him walk away down the sidewalk until her cigarette was done. Then she walked to the curb in front of her house, if it was her house, and expertly flipped the glowing stub halfway across the street.
Now, anyone would wonder what was going on with all these disappearances, all these no longer the cases, you might say. Edward Brubaker noticed them — don’t think he was that light of brain. He was a persistent man — that is true. But what was one supposed to think? What would we choose to think?
Either the particulars of a man’s life had all at once gone haywire, or he was the wrong man for the particulars. In any case, he was not naively stumbling from one situation to the next. He had to consider the possibilities. One of them was the possibility that he had gone crazy, or maybe that he had been crazy for a long time. Maybe he had lost his family, for instance, or he had never had that family. He had read a lot of science fiction when he was a boy, as boys do, and though things that were formerly science fiction were becoming facts, such as space platforms and two-way wrist radios, slipping through a hole between parallel universes was just a fantasy, had to be.
He could probably work things out between his novel and the purportedly real life he was living or almost living, but he hadn’t actually touched the novel for days and days. He felt sort of as if he was not a citizen of that place that was his book. He had struggled, not able to find his way, and had had to throw up his hands, fingers and all, and give up, emigrate, as it were.
But to where? A country that was becoming even more difficult to negotiate as the one in his novel.
Then he had to put a stop to such speculation, if that is what we want to call it. This was so because of his feet. Or not his feet so much as the odd way his feet were functioning all of a sudden. Not so much functioning, to be more precise, but becoming less than informative about whether they were functioning. Now, the experience was unusual, to say the least, so if Edward were describing the problem, to you, say, he would find it hard to tell you exactly what his experience was. To us, it might be said, without satisfaction for anyone, that he could walk all right, as good as usual, in his athletic shoes with a manufacturer and logo unknown to just about anyone. He could walk along the downtown side-walk, but he could not feel his encased feet touching the surface upon which he walked. He could see them, alright, those grey and wine-coloured shoes. He could watch them perambulating, with his unseen feet inside them. But he could not feel them.
Back when he was a kid in elementary school he liked Miss Herriot’s explanation of the brain’s relation to the hands and feet. The hand, for example, might touch something too hot. It would send a message up to the brain. I’m touching something too hot, it would inform headquarters, so to speak. Then the brain would say, okay, stop touching that thing that is too hot. Immediately the hand would acknowledge the message and stop touching the hot thing. This would all happen really fast.
All right. Why was his brain not getting a message that his feet were walking but not feeling their steps?
This place surrounding his body was getting to be a country that was becoming at least as difficult to negotiate as the one in his novel. Could he have, not noticing, stepped from one into the other? He would like to have a firmer grip on the one, or at least to be able to read the other. But the other was, or it was supposed to be, inside his house, the one he could not get into, even if the woman with the cigarette is not watching. For that is what happened: it was not that he had forgotten the numbers, or that D— had changed them, but that his fingers made no impression on the numbers. No more than if they were being approached by a memory of fingers, or made-up fingers, fictional fingers.
Edward wanted like crazy to get into that house and pick up that computer and go somewhere and read what he had written. He wanted to know what side he was on, and what side of What.
“You know what is happening,” said a voice.
“Bleah, bleah, bleah...” shouted Edward, hands tight over his ears. But his hands were as insubstantial, good word, as his feet had been, walking.
Maybe the case is that when a person writes a fiction, he or she is doing what everyone does all the time. Maybe what everyone does is made up. Maybe we could call it non-fiction and that wouldn’t make any difference. Maybe that’s what God meant when he made us in his image. The big fiction writer.
“This is bullshit!” said Edward and the reader.
Edward wished that he had been more attentive to his novel. He wanted to be in charge when it came time for an ending.
“A Buddhist monk I used to know said that if you want to be responsible for some good poetry, you should be openly inattentive,” said the voice, not at all with the intonation of an instructor.
“Bleah, bleah, bleah.” It still didn’t work.
“Probably the same thing applies for wanting to be responsible for a good novel,” said the voice, familiar.
“All right,” said Edward. I will admit that I think I know what is happening if you assure me that I have a wife whose name starts with D, and two girls. Three. No, two. I had two. One of them began with S. Begins.”
After a short pause, the voice resumed, maybe outside Edward, maybe inside. “Bleah, bleah, bleah,” it said. »