I Have Demons Read online

  Copyright @ 2018 Christopher Adam

  Published by Iguana Books

  720 Bathurst Street, Suite 303

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2R4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Editor: Holly Warren

  Front cover design: Daniella Postavsky

  Cover image: Photo by David McCullough on Unsplash

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77180-300-7 (paperback). 978-1-77180-301-4 (epub). 978-1-77180-302-1 (Kindle).

  This is the original electronic edition of I Have Demons.

  To my family — here and departed

  Preface

  I Have Demons shines the spotlight on people who, in different ways, live on the margins — the overlooked elderly woman who gets her thrill pocketing stir sticks and coffee creamer; the jaded parish priest tending to the needs of a man holding a terrible secret; and the small-town Ontario student struggling with the very real possibility that his undergraduate degree in literature is a ticket to poverty.

  I set out to explore the concept of the centre versus the periphery, alienation, lives lived in futile anticipation, and the brittleness of faith. Writing and reading fiction is such a dynamic process; it is an unspoken conversation between the author and the reader.

  Three works have had a particularly lasting impact on me. Margaret Laurence’s The Divinersis one of the few books I have read and reread many times, even committing to memory one of its incredible monologues — from the scene where the young Morag Gunn accompanies Christie to the Nuisance Grounds where he works. The two were the subject of ridicule for their poverty and unenviable social standing in the fictional town of Manawaka. Yet in a profanity-laced tirade, Christie explains that as the small Prairie town’s garbageman, he is privy to the dirty secrets of respectable society — the things that “proper” people most wish to hide about themselves cannot be concealed from him. He is powerful, yet few realize it.

  “By their garbage shall ye know them,” Christie declares definitively.1 In a sense, this gruff man of modest means and little formal education was nothing less than a diviner.

  Equally meaningful to me was Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. It’s a long journey from a small Prairie town to a British-controlled, colonial West African state. Yet Scobie, a British officer with a conscience so deep that it seems to paralyze him, also appears to be sifting and digging — in his case, he is examining the shallowness of the English colonial community in which he lives and his own troubled Roman Catholic faith, not to mention a debilitating sense of Catholic guilt. This all-encompassing sense of shame and a lack of faith in the power of forgiveness even turns his participation at Sunday Mass into a macabre experience of human loneliness and despair:

  The words of the Mass were like an indictment. […] there was no joy anywhere. He looked up from between his hands and the plaster images of the Virgin and the saints seemed to be holding out hands to everyone, on either side, beyond him. He was the unknown guest at a party who is introduced to no one.2

  While Greene explored the concept of guilt and forgiveness within the context of the Catholic faith, twentieth-century Hungarian poet János Pilinszky tackled the presence, or lack thereof, of the Divine in our world against the tumultuous backdrop of postwar Central Europe. Pilinszky produced one of the most powerful works exploring human alienation. The poem “Apocrypha” was borne from the smouldering ruins of the Second World War, the poet’s personal experiences in 1945 and a complicated faith in a God who appeared distant and removed from the world of suffering.

  My own word is more homeless than the word.

  I have no words. Their terrifying weights

  fall crumbling through the air,

  a tower rings out and reverberates.

  You are nowhere.

  The world is but thin air.

  Forgotten sun-beds, empty garden chair.

  My shadow jars upon the ragged stone.

  I stick out of the earth. Worn out. Alone.3

  Pilinszky, initially barred from publishing during the period of Stalinism in Hungary, spent a lifetime working through the memory and burden of the war, and the Holocaust in particular, but ultimately concluded that

  God, exiled from behind the facts, from time to time returns to bleed through the fabric of history. The mark that He leaves is so endlessly unpretentious that it is questionable whether we can ever reach it.4

  Fractured, often unsatisfying human relationships run through the three stories in this collection. And the human relationship with the Divine is tenuous too. In different ways and taking divergent paths, the characters in each of the stories are in search of redemption.

  Ottawa is often synonymous with the federal government, policy wonks, political spin doctors, foreign diplomats, as well as the negative stereotypes of dull stability and mediocrity that haunt government towns. For many, Ottawa is mostly Parliament Hill and the tight political world north of Highway 417. The stories in this collection, however, explore the city’s peripheries — both geographic and social. The people in these narratives are not affluent and, on the surface, they wield little power. Often, they are forgotten and isolated.

  Ottawa’s landscape lends itself particularly well to exploring the world of the peripheries and of isolation. Beyond the small downtown core of Centretown and the ByWard Market, a handful of adjacent historic neighbourhoods and sprawling suburbia, Ottawa is a vast, sparsely populated land of forests and quiet rural communities on the border between English and French Canada. In these stories, the greenbelt, wilderness and rural life serve various purposes. They are at once places of refuge, sources of redemption, reminders of childhood and innocence, as well as symbols of loneliness and alienation. The people who inhabit or journey to and from these lands in my stories seek both to escape — and at times return — and find comfort.

  Christopher Adam

  1. Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1975), p. 39.

  2. Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, (London: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 223.

  3. Peter Zollman’s translation of “Apokrif” published in the European Cultural Review (no. 14) – The Audit is Done: An Anthology of 20th Century Hungarian Poetry.

  4. János Pilinskzy, Nagyvárosi ikonok — Összegyűjtött versek 1940–1970 (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1971), 167. (Excerpt translated by C. Adam)

  An Alphine Lodge Special

  Suzette was in for a treat. She took a quick glimpse at her surroundings before slipping a dozen packets of sugar and a handful of plastic stir sticks into her purse. It was the same ritual every night, except on Sundays. That satisfying little shiver still ran through her body, as if she was pulling the heist for the first time. The old man, even more of a regular at the coffee shop than Suzette, occupied the one family table across from the counter. He squinted at her disapprovingly and made a clicking sound with his tongue. He almost never spoke but still managed to communicate his feelings in no uncertain terms. In all those years, Suzette could remember the old man breaking his silence only once. A few weeks back, the head office installed a self-serve electronic kiosk at each location, after which the franchise owners fired most of the cashiers. That day, the old man rose from his VIP table and demanded to meet with Joel, the young manager, in the dry storage room. Behind closed doors, words flowed endlessly from t
he old man, one into the other. They were tinged with rage. Suzette could make out only a few — cold, unwelcoming, impersonal, inhumane.

  “It’s way better when he doesn’t talk.” Joel sounded flustered and Suzette tried to reassure him. The next day Joel and the visibly irritated owner of the franchise location hung a sixteen-by-twenty print of a fireplace in a cozy living room on the wall above the old man.

  “Evening, Mrs. Thibeault! You’re leaving us already?” Joel towered behind Suzette, who stood facing the soda fountain. She was startled, yet savvy enough to know that she had to remain cool, collected and composed. Those were the three Cs that her son always repeated to her. She calmly zipped up her purse and turned around slowly to the cheerful, pudgy-faced manager. He could have been her grandson. They are so young these days.

  “Oh, yes, dear. I have a very special dinner tonight.” She found that she inadvertently whispered the very special dinner part, as if she were preparing to engage in something illicit.

  “Nice, nice…” the manager didn’t sound too interested, but he also made no move or gesture indicating that he wanted to cut short the conversation. They were in that awkward space where there was nothing more to say, yet neither party seemed willing to assume responsibility for ending the exchange. Maybe he was waiting for her to take the first step. After all, she was much older and a lady. Suzette never accepted the accusation that kids these days have no manners. It’s true that some of them were never taught proper etiquette at home. And so many young men seemed clumsy and socially awkward. But they were well-intentioned and very trainable.

  “Before I forget, Joel, the Boston cream was just wonderful today. It was so fresh.” Suzette smiled, as she buttoned up her coat, leaning into Joel again, lowering her voice, as she said so fresh. She never knew why she did that.

  “For sure. Guess this time they weren’t all freezer burnt when we took ’em out to thaw,” remarked Joel with a satisfied smile, pulling his phone from his pocket for no apparent reason. It wasn’t ringing. Nobody was texting him. There was no buzz to indicate that yet another virtual friend had “liked” the photo of what he’d eaten for lunch that day. Suzette noticed that young people liked to hold their phones in their hands nowadays. It seemed to give them a sense of security, like an infant clasping a soft, warm blanket.

  “Well, I will let you get back to work, mon minou. I hope you don’t have to stay too late tonight.” Suzette turned towards the door. She wanted to get far away from the counter with the soda fountains and the coffee paraphernalia. It was an enclosed space, and the walls, like the old man, had eyes — they had witnessed her act. Her purse felt heavier by the second, as if God was using the burden of her sin to weigh her down.

  “Yeah, for sure. See ya tomorrow, ma’am,” responded Joel. And within a moment he was buried in his phone.

  It was much too cold for early October. The orange hanging lights of the Alpine Lodge, illuminating each booth and window, made the single-storey box building stand out promisingly in the far end of the parking lot. The pavement was uneven, marked with fissures and potholes. Every other moment, a gust of wind felt strong enough to lift Suzette right off the ground and either carry her up through the black starless sky into heaven or toss her right onto the vast four-lane road, where the traffic was relentless.

  Everyone was in a rush to get home. A mother frantically packed bags of groceries into her trunk as her infant wailed in his stroller. Her empty shopping cart, taking on a life of its own, made its way down the sloping parking lot, heading perilously towards another parked car. The mother looked up, startled by the sound of the impact. She grabbed her crying infant, now hysterical, plopped him onto the backseat and jumped into the vehicle as quickly as she could, leaving the stroller behind.

  “Madame!” Suzette raised her voice and looked at the woman in the car, pointing to the abandoned stroller a few feet away. But her words were devoured by the wind and the long growl of a truck ripping down the road. The woman caught a glimpse of Suzette — a slight, almost ghostly presence puncturing an otherwise empty parking lot. She drove away with determination.

  ***

  The Alpine Lodge’s washroom was a place of refuge. Suzette felt chilled to the bone, but in this overheated, brightly lit space, with faint remnants of a stranger’s perfume in the air, she felt pleasantly ensconced. She reapplied her hallmark red lipstick and emboldened her already rich application of eyeshadow.

  “Age gracefully,” her son’s girlfriend said when they last came down to visit her at the home, a few weeks following her eighty-fifth birthday. Pam’s passive- aggressive dig at Suzette’s propensity for makeup fell short of a direct order. Pam wasn’t invested enough to bark out an order.

  Suzette lined her lower eyelid, putting all her mental and physical energy into steadying her hand. The reflection in the mirror made her hands appear particularly gnarly — thin, bony fingers, like bare twigs on a mature shrub after the first frost. Her fingers were attached to what looked like an uneven field with ridges, hills and crevices painted green, blue, purple.

  Purple. That’s royalty. And royalty, if anything, is graceful. But Suzette was no Queen Elizabeth and she knew it — perhaps more like an ageing actress who once commanded adoring crowds of men and who could still be a captivating presence if she were to return to the limelight. Captivating, yes; though would her audience find her attractive? Suzette gave it a moment of thought before concluding, why yes, even if not in the traditional sense.

  Suzette stepped away from the mirror, her back up against the stalls. She was getting even thinner and her face seemed to be receding inwards, leaving more pronounced cheeks. Her eyes appeared to have retreated to the backs of their sockets, as if they had just lost a battle. Her ruby lips and her highlighted eyelids shone like car lights piercing through a dark highway. The glitter she had mixed in with her shampoo looked like tiny diamonds shimmering in her hair. The white stockings and short skirt — though unconventional — accentuated what used to be her best feature: her legs.

  “Oh my God, I think it’s really happening this time!” A woman’s giddy enthusiasm startled Suzette. She peeked out the washroom door and could see a waitress with a tray of pop in her hands walking away from the line cook, who had stuck his head out of the kitchen. The woman’s zeal failed to wash the blank expression off the teenager’s pale, almost translucent face.

  “Okay, whatever,” he replied and ducked back into the kitchen.

  “I’m telling you, this is it. You just watch me. I’m getting a one-way ticket out of this joint,” she added. She hurried towards the tables with a bounce in her step.

  Suzette’s curiosity was piqued. She certainly didn’t want to miss out on anything. For a brief moment, she steadied herself by holding onto the counter before finding the fastest route back to her booth.

  ***

  “Welcome to the Alpine Lodge. My name is Kay. Have you been here before, hon?” The waitress must have been in her early fifties. She had curly red hair, thinning near the top, and wore a black polo shirt bearing a bright Swiss cross and the slogan: Taking you to new heights.

  “Well hello, Kay. I’m Suzette. And no, I don’t believe I have,” she replied, eyes sparkling with anticipation.

  “Not a problem. Can I start ya off with a drink?” inquired Kay.

  “You know, I am right across the parking lot almost every day. They know me there by name. They have wonderful coffee and donuts, but I go for the people and the ambience.” Suzette started to laugh, a little self-consciously, as she leaned over to Kay and whispered, “They say I am like a fixture!”

  “Aw, isn’t that nice. Now how ’bout a drink, hon?” Kay stood eagerly with the tip of her pen already sitting on the pages of her notepad, like a marathon runner waiting impatiently on the start line.

  “Oh, something nice and warm while I wait would be wonderful, because—”

  “Tea? Coffee?”

  “You know what, that’s a good idea. Maybe a tea!”
Suzette sat back in her booth and looked up at Kay, a firm, self-confident and robust presence.

  “And I’m guessing you’re coming for the traditional turkey dinner special. Am I right?”

  “Well yes, Kay. How did you know?” inquired Suzette, genuinely surprised.

  “It’s what’s drawing in new people tonight. The stuffing is to die for. Back in a sec, hon.”

  Suzette closed her eyes and relished the comfort of the moment. The soft burgundy leatherette bench, the coziness of her very own booth, wooden beams running the length of the ceiling, giving the feeling of a mountain cottage, and a gas fireplace in the middle of the restaurant. Why didn’t I come here sooner? She saw this place every day from her spot at the coffee shop, and the home was a stone’s throw away. She would have just enough left from her pension to treat herself twice a month to a meal fit for a queen, or a respected veteran of Broadway. Either option was more than acceptable to her.

  But tonight was different. She was doing this mainly for Mathieu. He could really use a warm meal in a nice family restaurant — probably more than anyone else she knew. A few days ago, yet another dispute with his girlfriend had turned vitriolic. When Suzette called him, poor Mathieu was busy collecting his underwear from atop lampposts and stop signs in Kapuskasing. Pam had driven around town in an awful fury the night before, after their latest fight, using his briefs like Christmas ornaments.

  “This is a scandal. Our family has never behaved this way!” No sooner had those words of righteous indignation escaped Suzette’s lips, than she realized that perhaps she was being economical with the truth.

  “I know, eh?” said Mathieu, sounding as though his thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

  “You will drive safely and you will leave early?” asked Suzette. She realized that she had unwittingly wrapped the telephone cord so tightly around her fingers as she was talking that it was cutting off her circulation.