“It’s unfortunate, I agree. But these things happen.” The supervisor moved in on Dan as though he were a dangerous psychopath he intended to disarm.
“That’s bullshit! Anyone with a history of mental illness is a critical case. This is a fucking tragedy. He should never have been let go without someone telling me or his wife!”
All his years of service would not buy his way out. The die had been cast, the hammer set to fall with a resounding crash. The incident got him six months’ mandatory counselling and replacement costs for the cabinet. He’d resisted the counselling but, faced with the alternative of suspension, he relented. At least they were paying for the sessions. Reluctantly, he attended the weekly meetings, though it was seldom his work Dan wanted to talk about.
He approached Queen’s Park, a miniature forest in the city’s heart. A mounted statue of Edward VII towered over crisscrossing paths, transported from Delhi when India left the Commonwealth, like the prize in a prolonged custody dispute from a messy divorce settlement.
It was here that Dan had slept on the hard benches his first night in the city, while crepuscular figures flitted like moths in the dark. It wasn’t till later he’d learned the intent of the men prowling the darkened pathways like vampires, but in search of a different kind of life-giving fluid.
Through the trees the sky was a honed blue, a nice ending to the day if you had nothing troubling you, but Dan knew by the time he finished his counselling session it would be dark, in keeping with his mood. After his hour with Martin, he’d walk back across Wellesley to the bars on Church Street and show them the picture of the young runaway. After an hour with Martin, he’d need to spend time in a bar.
He passed the brown brick residence at Whitney Hall where he’d met Arman and Kendra. After all this time the apple tree outside the porter’s office still flourished in the back courtyard. A few crabbed globes clung to its scaly branches. It felt strange to look up at the corner window and know his son had been conceived there out of his own macho drunkenness.
Arman was currently in Dubai. A brilliant IT worker, he was shipped from port to port at great expense. He’d slipped out of Dan’s world completely and married a woman chosen by his family, though by all accounts they were happy. Unlike his renegade sister, Arman had no compunction about doing what tradition expected of him. If things had been different in a very different world, Dan wondered, would Arman have been just as happy in an arranged marriage with a man if tradition ordained it?
Kendra lived a few blocks north on a tree-lined street in a hundred-year-old stone house. She’d become a success too, living life on her own terms and alone, as Dan knew she would. They may have been alike in looks and upbringing, but Kendra was a very different creature from her tradition-upholding brother.
He crossed through the heart of the university, past St. George and Spadina with their popular student pizzerias, to the euphemistically named Harbord Centre for Well Being, which was actually located on Brunswick Avenue. Like Edward VII, it too had been displaced, but kept its name after being transplanted to this little backwater street, like a deposed royal living out its life in an anonymous hamlet far from the cultural centres of its heyday.
Dan walked up to the decrepit building that showed at least three colours peeling through a brown topcoat like a bad tan. Someone had made a stab at beautifying the outside by placing pots of geraniums along the windowsills, but these had failed to bloom in the absence of direct sunlight. In fact, Dan wondered if anything could blossom along this rundown stretch of street. The scraggly, light-starved stems presented a pathetic welcome to anyone looking up from the sidewalk.
He checked his watch: he was twenty-three minutes early. He didn’t want Martin to think he was anxious to see him. On the other hand, there was nowhere else to go in this neighbourhood of shabby student-chic housing. He spent the next ten minutes perusing the walls papered in notices for used textbooks, political rallies, flats to let, roommates wanted (and unwanted), descriptions of missing items with hopeful phone numbers beside them, as well as a plethora of numbers and email addresses of arcane purpose, the relevant notices having faded or been cut off or covered over by others clamouring for attention and demanding to be heard above all else.
The building’s elevator was perpetually out of service. He took the three flights of wheezing, complaining stairs that announced visitors by their tread. Dan imagined the long queue of clients — timid or brave, world-weary or hopeful — who passed over this threshold and down the hall to the large oak panels behind which the eminent Martin Sanger and his dry, probing intellect waited. Dan had experienced moments of both hope and resignation as he approached these doors, but today he was what he usually was: irritable and angry at having to be there.
He reached the office and let himself in. The receptionist listened, blank-faced, as he stated his name. He wondered if she really didn’t remember him when he walked through these doors every week at this time, or if this was part of his training to help him learn to be patient with what Martin had labelled his “perceived stupidity of others.” Dan waited while she looked down at her appointment book, nodded as she discovered his name and asked him to take a seat.
He watched through the glass as she bent to speak into the intercom to relay notice of his arrival to Martin’s office. She always struck Dan as nervous and unhappy. He wondered if she was also a patient here. Maybe reception work was how she paid for her therapy. This was the only time Dan saw her. She was gone by the time his sessions ended, and he emerged to a semi-darkened waiting room, as though she’d been compelled to take the light with her wherever she went.
Dan settled into what he’d determined was the most comfortable of three waiting room seats: a faded green club chair. Or in this case the least uncomfortable. The room was silent, with that surprising mixture of stillness and anticipation. From one floor above, he heard a sharp humourless laugh followed by a thump. A car passed outside the window and then, after a pause, another. He wondered why there was no music to provide comfort or distraction. Maybe this was part of his therapy too, his little wait in limbo while he was observed through a spy hole in the opposite wall.
He went over the list of topics he had lined up, imagining Martin’s reactions. The tale of Steve and Glenda would elicit an anticipatory glance; it might also earn him a point for compassion at having met with Steve at four a.m. to talk over his troubles. He could follow this up with his annoyance at Bill’s unreturned calls. No point in mentioning the lousy drivers he encountered daily in the city. They were par for the course; no one was exempt. He could also mention Ked’s new friend Ephraim, the ruffian. Or would Martin think he was being racist? He could simply not mention the boy’s colour, if it came to that. But wasn’t this session supposed to be a safe place for Dan to unburden himself? Didn’t he have the right to express concern over his son’s future?
If that failed to feed Martin’s interest, he could delve into his childhood, that old stand-by. Martin seemed to like it when he did. During their initial session, the awkward getting-to-know-you of pre-interrogation invasiveness, Martin had asked him what triggered his anger as a child. Dan couldn’t remember being angry as a child and Martin seemed to think that in itself was unusual. How could anyone get through childhood without experiencing anger? It spelled repression. Try being the child of a violent alcoholic and you’d probably repress your anger too, Dan said.
“Then why do you think you’re so angry now?” Martin had asked.
“It beats depression.”
Martin pencilled furiously on the sheet in his lap. After that, he brought up Dan’s early years till Dan was sick of rehashing his childhood, as though the key to who he was now lay in some mysterious past time that had had the door closed on it forever and could only be viewed by coming to this man’s office and peering inside
