
A New Place
“Let’s find a new place to get to.” “Hell yes.” We took off on bikes, up one-way streets and past churches and stores on the other sides of bridges. We found a place near a grocery store but David said Bullshit and we kept going. We found another place inside a school, one in the basement bathroom of a regular bar, but none were really perfect. “Let’s find someplace better,” David said. We found a place near the water, but David didn’t like the architecture—I mean the art, the sculpture art. We found a place near the stove in my kitchen, late at night, after a show we’d both been to but separately and at different times. I told him the story of the singer, who I knew, and her boyfriend, the guitarist, who was going to die. He told me about his cousin who had died of the same thing. I told him about my mother. We found a place a month later on a big puffy armchair in the middle of a backyard at a surprise party for my roommate. I was leaning against the chair and he came over and sat on its armrest and touched my arm to get my attention. I told him I’d broken up with my girlfriend. He said he had a farm he was thinking of moving to. I said I liked his shoes even though they were normal. He was wearing a polo shirt I’d given him, which he’d tried on in my bedroom the day before, taking off his plain white T-shirt and showing his impossibly flat hairless chest, which I stared at while pretending to root through a drawer in the back of my closet. He went out into the hall when my roommate Darrah came up the stairs to tell me the bolognese was ready. David asked Darrah what she thought of the shirt. Darrah said it looked fine. “The baby blue? The baby pink?” said David. “It’s definitely feminine,” said Darrah. “Can I pull this off?” “I don’t know you well enough, David.” “I don’t either,” he said.
I saw David a year later in Kensington Market. He was now an engineer.
He said: “I make so much money I only have to work two out of every three years.”
I felt skeptical. He had no discernible haircut.
Then he said he was going to get married in the spring, and my heart pinballed through my kidneys and obliterated my balls.
Who to?
Someone named Karen Guillaume. She worked for the government. They were moving to Ottawa.
I baked him challah in my apartment around the corner. He did the dishes afterward, and a floating soap bubble shimmered in the afternoon sun near his shoulder.
“What happened to—” and he said the name of my ex-girlfriend, holding his elbows up over the sink to let the dishwater run out of the yellow rubber gloves.
“Graduated, stayed in Scotland,” I said.
We had sex in my bed. He told me it was his first time with a man. The condom broke twice. I don’t think either of us enjoyed it, but we kissed afterward and we were naked and it was nice.
I took a shower and when I came out he was wearing an old pair of my aviators and a bra he’d found somewhere.
“What did you do to deserve me?” he pranced.
I told him I had emotional problems, that I’d been in a perpetual state of crisis since I’d come back from Halifax. I told him about snorting drugs in an alley beside a dive bar with people he’d never met, hoping to sound like I’d accomplished something.
He said he never stopped thinking about his father.
We had breakfast together on a sunny patio beside a hospital that blew hot smelly air at us out of a leaky valve. He seemed bothered so I said we could move—we should move; but he didn’t want to, and he kept smiling an awkward, too-sweet smile.
“Let’s find a new place,” he said, later, pinching the skin of my floppy scrotum, but it wasn’t funny, it was annoying.
I went to New York for six months and when I came back I saw David at a party. I was surprised to see him; I didn’t know he knew these people. He saw me too but we didn’t acknowledge each other till late in the night, on the back deck, where I was talking in a circle of people. He came out alone and stood at a window and looked back into the house and laughed quietly to himself. His curly hair was lit up by the light from the window and the shadows gave him cheekbones he didn’t really have. After a few minutes I broke away from the group.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s just so humorous—you over there, me over here, neither of us saying hello.”
“I thought you were laughing at something else,” I said.
“No, just this,” he said.
I wanted to talk more, but a loud French girl was telling gossip about a semi-famous person I wanted to know about and I went back to the circle, leaving David standing alone at the window.
David wrote me a lot of emails in the next few weeks, but I didn’t respond. “Let’s find a new place,” he said. I wasn’t interested and I resented him for using our old phrase on me, because it partly worked and I don’t like to be confused emotionally. I responded to him flatly and curtly and late, and his emails became less frequent. After a couple months he wrote that he was fucking a guy he’d gone to school with, who was figuring out the stock market with his computer and had “never been laid.” It sounded awful. “I just fucked the tornado of desperation ridge,” he wrote. I didn’t respond.
For a while I didn’t see David. I started a new job and met new people and had sex with some of them. I had a few good conversations. I was standing on a bridge and a cyclist rode by me and shouted, “Beautiful day! ”
In September, Rachel Isthmé, a friend of David’s, called and asked if I wanted to “be present at” a meeting she was having at her house tomorrow at two. “About David,” she said.
I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about.
She sounded hesitant, timid, but excited at the prospect of breaking the news.
He’d had a “psychic break,” was the term they were using.
I said I would be there.
She sounded like she wanted to talk about it more, but I felt uncomfortable with her tone, so I said, “I guess we’ll talk about it more tomorrow.”
“Yeah, mm-hm,” she said, soft as a mother.
The room buzzed at two o’clock on a Monday. No one worked? I knew about half of the attendees by sight. Misha and I were the only ones who hadn’t been aware of the situation. Rachel brought out a frozen fudge cake and a blue plastic bowl of kettle-roasted chips.
“I know most of you know,” Rachel began, “but for anyone who isn’t aware, David was an alcoholic all through high school. He was kicked out of his house for it when he was sixteen. He got clean while he was at McMaster and he’s been sober ever since. But for some reason in the past year he’s started drinking again.”
“More worryingly though,” said a big, clean, square-jawed man, “about six months ago David started drilling people about conspiracies against him.”
“Seven months,” said Rachel.
I was surprised at David’s friends. Everyone had really good skin and considered outfits. They seemed like what I thought graduate students would look like.
Everyone, that is, except for the little androgynous guy beside me who had been introduced as Kenzie, who was wearing an adjustable ball cap and smelled like cigarettes and was listening with rapt and storing attention. When he spoke, I realized he was the ex-virgin engineer and tornado of desperation ridge.
“I started a new job and met new people and had sex with some of them.”
Kenzie told us that a few weeks ago David, who had resisted Facebook since forever, had finally joined and immediately started reading sexual meanings into the posts on Kenzie’s timeline. Within a week David had gone over to his place and accused Kenzie of being unfaithful. They broke up that day. Before David left, he’d also accused Kenzie of organizing a secret Facebook group devoted to making fun of him.
Was the alcoholism related to the paranoia? Did one cause the other? People had opinions but nobody really knew what they were talking about.
Rachel said that the day after David broke up with Kenzie, David had photocopied a bunch of unpublished Leonard Cohen poems from the Thomas Fisher rare books archive and sent them to a girl he knew in Hamilton, along with a fifty-page introduction that was actually a love letter. He’d also stopped using any kind of mechanized transport, including bicycles. He’d also been hearing voices.
“Well,” said the square-jawed man, “David has always been strange—in third grade he used to mumble to himself in class.”
“We should be careful in over-diagnosing,” said a red-haired girl in a paisley skirt. “Some behaviours of David’s aren’t symptomatic; they’re just weird.”
“True,” said Rachel, “but he’s been getting stranger for about a year and a half now.”
“Maybe even two years,” said a soft-spoken guy with huge arms.
The square-jawed man, who was subtly wrestling the reins of the meeting from Rachel, joked about how David’s education was actually a hindrance to his recovery; he’d been using critical theory to explain the doctors to themselves.
David’s sister was sitting beside me. She had her brother’s curls and his small intense features. She said David had spent a week at home with their family. He’d been in a psychiatric hospital for ninety days before that, getting treatment, but they’d had to let him out because he’d affected impeccable behaviour the whole time.
“He’s very good at controlling his behaviour. Conforming to expectations, manipulating doctors,” said his sister.
Everyone agreed this was true.
However, out of the hospital, living at home, he’d gotten much worse. He didn’t have a job and he didn’t get along with their parents. It was true, his sister said, that their mother and father didn’t understand the illness; they grew up in a very different culture and for them it was something to be ashamed of. David kept saying he was going to move out, get a job. He said he was going to move to Hamilton, where the rent was cheap. “I told him there were no jobs in Hamilton.” Every morning at the breakfast table after their parents went to work David would ask her what job he could get. She didn’t know what to tell him. He got angry if she suggested that he wasn’t fit to work right now, maybe he should focus on getting better, getting a therapist. He got extremely angry and told her she, like their parents, didn’t understand his way of thinking, because they hadn’t gone to university. She reminded him she was in university. “‘But you haven’t finished,’ he said.”
Two nights ago David’s sister woke up to crashing and banging. She found David in the basement taking the family’s only computer apart piece by piece. He said he knew there was a microphone in the computer, that their parents were gathering evidence to put him back in the hospital. He said he needed a walk, then disappeared for five hours. She looked around the house and found other things taken apart: the toaster, the TV, an electric pencil sharpener.
“ ... he’d been using critical theory to explain the doctors to themselves.”
She’d called Rachel in the morning, who’d called the square-jawed man, who’d called his dad, who was a doctor, and had called St. Mike’s, which had admitted David for seventy-two hours “on spec.” However, if for the next thirty hours David behaved as well as he did at CAMH for ninety days, he’d be back outside, in his parents’ house, in the condition he was in.
“And he probably will pull it off,” said Rachel. “I was in there this morning, and he was pellucid.”
“Yeah, when I was in yesterday he was extremely sharp,” said a skinny guy in a bathrobe who had come in halfway through the meeting. “Like, more sharp even than normal. Calm, talking about Madness and Civilization.”
General laughter.
“But if he stays like this, he’ll be back out on Wednesday,” said the square-jawed man.
Everyone agreed. No one knew what to do.
The front lobby of the CAMH at College and Spadina was under construction. No reception desk anywhere, just wall-high plastic sheets staple-gunned to bare wooden beams and cans of paint on the floor.
Misha and I took the elevator to the ninth level where a panel of medical professionals greeted us from behind a wall of bullet-proof glass. Misha pressed an intercom button.
“Down the hall, around the corner,” said one of the nurses behind the glass, and gave us a room number.
David’s door was closed, but there was a window in the door about four inches tall and four inches wide. I stood on my tiptoes and looked through the wire mesh and saw David sitting on the edge of a single bed. He was leaning forward and I could see the bumps of his vertebrae through his T-shirt. He was looking at his hands, which were folded in his lap.
You know how there are like three actual people in the world.
Misha knocked and I stepped back.
The door opened and David quickly drew back into the room. He said, “Hello, hello,” and retreated even further. He said, “Hi, nice to see you guys.” The skin under his eyes was dark and he looked incredibly thin.
“So what’s up,” he said. He said, “So what have you guys been up to?” He said, “What’s new?” He said, “What have you been reading lately?”
Misha went to the bathroom and David and I were alone.
I looked around the room. There was a small pile of books beside one wall. French and Spanish writers. A Saramago on his bed, bookmarked.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. David was sitting on his bed, I was sitting on a chair.
David looked down at his hands.
I leaned forward on the chair.
I balanced the chair on two legs.
David looked up at me, at what I was doing.
We looked at each other.
A knock on the door, David’s younger brother came in. Little guy in a hoodie, grade about ten.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
David’s brother seemed thrown off-balance by my presence, and he took out his phone and stood leaning against a wall.
I looked at David.
David was looking down at his hands.
I thought of telling David’s brother that Misha was in the bathroom, but I didn’t. The three of us remained in silence until the toilet flushed and Misha came back in. Misha, an easy talker, carried the conversation. He asked David’s brother about his school, quizzed him on the new slang. Misha: “Has anyone seen any good movies lately?” I watched David’s face as Misha described the plot of a Hollywood movie.
“You guys wanna watch some TV?” Misha asked.
The TV room shared one long wall with the glassed-in panel of nurses.
Misha switched on the TV and the four of us sat on two couches.
During a commercial break, I got up and walked down a random hallway. A piece of paper on someone’s door had a nineteen-point list titled “Proverb/Good Sentense,” written in pencil. Number three was “Mistake make man’s/People Perfect.” Number ten was “Be Optemistek.” Eighteen was “Life, I don’t know.”
I went back into the TV room and sat on the couch with Misha and David. Jeopardy came on and the floor’s residents drifted in to its theme song. Introductions happened. All the residents were high school and university age. Everyone seemed shell-shocked.
At another commercial break, a girl in a tracksuit and tangled hair said she liked my jeans. Then she said she liked Misha’s shoes. Then she asked me if I was a “homo.” Then she said she had just dropped out of York because her boyfriend broke up with her. Then she turned back to the TV and ignored everyone.
Misha left during a commercial break, and David’s brother left, and then David and I went back to his room.
When we were alone David told me when he first arrived he was on suicide watch. A nurse was in his room twenty-four hours a day, and the nurse would come into the bathroom when he showered, and he had to keep one hand outside the shower at all times.
“Wow,” I said.
We were silent for a while.
“You don’t have to be here, you know,” he said.
It took me a second to recover. “I know,” I said.
Looking right at me, he said, “You don’t even like me.”
I returned his stare. “I like you a lot,” I said.
David looked down at his hands.
I tried to think of something to say to convince him that I knew him, I liked him, I cared about him.
“I heard you might be moving to Hamilton,” I heard myself say.
I spread a puddle of maybe-orange soda over the ground with my shoe. “So this is the place?” I said.
“This is it,” said David.
We were sitting on a stone wall beside a tableau of life-size Irish saints and beggars cast in bronze in a little parkette on the lake. Our first time seeing each other since David had gotten out of CAMH.
“So what’s new in the fabulous life of Michael Marsh?” said David.
I told him about a girl I was seeing.
He interrupted to kiss me. His lips felt thin and hungry and his tongue felt like a fish. I think he sensed I didn’t like it because he stopped and stood up and walked out to the edge of the pier and in an uncharacteristically chatty way read the names of boats in the marina one after another, as if they were self-evidently funny.
I studied his strange animated body. The back of his head was shaved and his neck was red.
I went over to him.
We sat on the edge of the pier, our legs dangling over the water, our calves against the cold cement. We talked. About music, books, movies. A crew of boys in their early teens came and hung out down the pier from us for a while and then left. It got dark and the lights from the island airport coloured the waves.
“You know,” said David, “most of the time I exist in such a tiny area of the city, that sometimes when I come down to the lake, where you can see the city and the water, I really feel the bigness of the world.”
I waited for him to go on.
He continued: “I think I realized that to meet girls you have to actually leave the house.” He turned to me. “I really stayed in for a while. Like a whole season, almost, I spent at my parents’ place. Maybe two seasons even.”
I realized he was inventing an explanation for his six months in psychiatric institutions as if I’d never visited him and knew nothing of what had happened. I was shocked and didn’t say anything and the moment passed in silence and then it was too late to address it.
He got up and went over to one of the Irish statues.
“Can you see what I’m doing from there?” he said.
He changed his position.
“Is it the same?” he said.
He was picking the statue’s nose.
A few months later I ran into David outside the Royal Cinema. I was leaving, with a girl, and David was going in, alone. There was slush on the ground, but he was wearing only a loose-fitting T-shirt with a hanger-damaged crew neck that revealed his chest hair and sleeves that showed off a new tattoo.
His head was shaved.
“Hi David,” I said. “How are you?”
But he just nodded without making eye contact and walked into the theatre.
I was at a party and I ran into Kenzie. I was standing in the tarp tent in the backyard looking at the strobing plastic skulls with alarm clocks in them when he appeared with a camera in his hands. We talked about David. Neither of us had heard from him in a while. It occurred to me that maybe something that was true was that I no longer knew David.
We stood there in the small enclosure looking at the little plastic skulls with their silent strobe lights flashing out of their mouths. I could hear the noise of the party back at the house. Our shoulders were touching. The strobe lights were out of sync, so each of the skulls were lit up at slightly different times.
After that Kenzie emailed me whenever he heard news of David, and I did the same for him. In the Spring, Kenzie told me about David and a trans guy named Jez. One of them had thrown a frying pan at the other’s head, and there was maybe going to be a court case. It seemed distant and unreal.
I had a little thing with Kenzie. I sang “Unchained Melody” with an older man at a karaoke bar. I walked home from my studio at night through a snow storm with Nina Simone on my headphones, caffeinated and warm and ecstatic.
My phone rang in February and it was Rachel Isthmé. I answered. A car David was in had spun around and flipped on the 401. David was at Mount Sinai.
I went.
He was getting X-rays when I arrived. They said it was almost finished, and they expected him to be out within the hour. I waited, but he wasn’t out within the hour or the hour after that. The waiting room closed at ten and a janitor came in and turned off most of the lights and locked the door to outside, but let me stay. All his other friends had had to go and none of his family had shown so I was left alone to wait.
“I looked around the hospital room questioningly, jokingly, eyebrows pitched.”
A nurse came in around midnight. She told me he’d fought his restraints repeatedly and they’d had to be reset several times. He’d required a relaxant, so he’d be a little out of it, but physically he was fine and I could take him home.
I went in.
Lying in bed, he seemed tired but happy to see me.
“How’s the baddest guy in the room?” I said, sitting beside him on the hospital bed.
He held my gaze. He looked small and weak and his smile was a little weird. They’d given him a fluffy cream-coloured blanket and I tucked it around him, under his ribs. He looked somehow different from the last time I saw him. I realized he’d grown his hair out.
“How’s the fabulous life of Michael Marsh?” he said, unenthusiastically, but too tired to really be mocking.
“It’s okay,” I said. “How’s your life?”
“I think I found a new place.”
I looked around the hospital room questioningly, jokingly, eyebrows pitched.
“No, in my life,” he said flatly. “With my self.”
I waited for him to proceed. He shut his eyes and eventually I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep.
“Do you remember where we first met?” he said, his eyes still closed. “That alley beside the fish place in the Market?”
“Sure.”
“I was thinking of that place just now,” he said, opening his eyes. He exhaled loudly. “You know, I used to walk around the city. I’d find a place like that alley, with the bare bulb above the door, and get really excited and say ‘I wanna direct a play here—look at it from this angle, the lighting is so dramatic, the actors would enter from here and exit from here.’”
“You could still do that,” I said.
He shut his eyes.
“No, I couldn’t,” he said. “I’ve fucked up my life.”
I took David back to his house. We stopped at a bar on the way home from the hospital—we thought it would be zany, or hardcore—but it was a terrible idea and it made David feel sorry for himself and we left our pints unfinished on the table in the booth.
“Yes let’s,” I said as we walked up toward his room tripping over each other and the stairs. “Yes let’s.”
We took a break on the last landing, because we were drunk and tired and post-operative. A record player was on the floor under a hole in the wall. We could hear a guy’s voice and a girl’s voice, coming through some wall or walls, both emotional and drunk.
I’d never been in David’s room before. It was in the attic. His floor was covered in books and Chinese takeout containers, and on his desk was an unopened box of condoms, still in the shrink wrap.
“It occurred to me that maybe something that was true was that I no longer knew David.”
I helped him undress and get into bed, and sat down on the bed beside him. As I was sitting down, he wrapped one hand around the back of my neck and drew me in, but I turned so that he kissed my cheek and the corner of my mouth.
We looked at each other.
I reached above him and turned on the lamp over his bed and got up and turned off the overhead light and came back to him.
“I don’t know how to get a job,” he said, when I’d sat down. He said he’d tried to get his old job back, from last year, but they wouldn’t take him.
“Do they know where you were?” I said. “Do they know what happened?”
He looked down at the covers like a child being punished. “No,” he said.
I felt bad. What was I doing here?
He looked up. “I’m sorry, Michael.”
“For what?” I said.
“I’ve avoided you,” he said. “I think I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know what we are.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said. “We’re friends. You don’t owe me anything.”
“Are we friends?” he said.
“I think so,” I said, and gave him a look I knew would be uninterpretable, and looked away—at his desk, at the condoms in their shrink wrap. At the Chinese takeout containers. Books on the floor.
“Does that work for you?” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Keeping everyone out.”
I looked down at him. Light from the lamp made his dark curls shine. Shadow accented his brow. His eyes, with specks of yellow near the pupils. He looked very beautiful.
“Anyway,” he said, still looking at me, “I’ve been thinking of moving to Hamilton.”
“I know,” I said. “You should go.”
“The rent’s cheaper,” he said.
“I know,” I said, more softly. “You should go.”
And he touched me then, and I kissed him and got under the covers, and we slept. And in the morning he was on his back gripping his headboard with both hands and his ankles were around my neck and the box of condoms was on the floor and the shrink wrap was in pieces and the stucco ceiling and sunlight on the sheet and him making sounds and I looked at his face and his eyes were closed and I looked at his lips and his lips were open and he was open and I was open and one of the few actual people and what is more important and what am I holding out for and you can be young again through new love.