Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
Who could have done this to him? I looked around, and nary a weed or daisy stem nearby had been bent or bloodied. There was no evidence that the cutting and splattering had occurred on location. Even to a twelve-year-old, it was pretty obvious the body had been dumped. I stood there in the heat, suddenly thirsty. I remember that it was the corpse’s makeup that confused me more than the body, or even the skirt.
I am not a callous person, and have never been. I imagine most people might have vomited or looked away, but I simply didn’t. That’s how coroners must feel. I can only imagine that one is, or is not, born with squeamishness. Surgery scenes on TV? I’m in. To be blunt, finding the body seemed to affect me about as much as an uncooked roast.
And also—and this is something I didn’t pinpoint until years later—being that close to something so totally dead made me feel … infinite—immortal.
I was standing there immobile for maybe five minutes before I heard a train off in the distance, coming from the north, from Squamish. It was the Royal Hudson, an old-fashioned steam train refurbished and converted into a tourist attraction, chugging down the Howe Sound fjord. I stood beside the body amid the fireweed, chamomile and dandelions to await the train’s approach. I kept looking between the body and the bend in the track around which the train would come, as the steaming and chugging came closer and closer.
Finally, the Royal Hudson huffed around the bend. I stood in the middle of the tracks, the scent of creosote from the trestles burning my nostrils, and waved my arms. The conductor later said he almost popped a blood vessel seeing me there. He clamped on the brakes, and the squealing was unlike any noise I’d heard until then. It was so shrill it collapsed time and space. I think that was the moment I stopped being a child. Not the corpse, but the noise.
The engine stopped a few cars past the body and me. The conductor, whose name was Ben, and his partner jumped down, cursing me for pulling such a prank. I simply pointed at the severed body.
“What the—? Barry. Come over here.” Ben looked at me. “Kid, get away from this thing.”
“No.”
“Look, kiddo, I said—”
I just stared at him.
Barry came over, took a look and promptly vomited. Ben came closer, and he dealt with the corpse simply by not looking at it. Meanwhile, I couldn’t look at it enough. He said, “Jesus, kid—are you some sort of freak?”
“I found him. He’s mine.”
Barry radioed the authorities from the engine. Of course, the tourists were gawking from the train’s windows, snapping away. I suppose these days photos would be posted on the Internet within hours, but back then there was only the local papers, none of which were allowed to publish either news or photos of the body until the next of kin had been found and notified. And so, while the passengers tried to hop out of the cars to check out the action, Barry was able to feel useful screaming at them to get back in. By the time the authorities arrived, he had the cheese-grater voice of an aged starlet.
The police asked me questions. Had I moved anything? Had I seen anyone? I kept my peeled alder switch a secret. But other than having found the body, my role was limited. I just watched it all. The one question they didn’t ask was, Why would my parents allow me to pick blackberries so far away from home all by myself? Again, it was the 1970s.
The police complimented me on my coolness, and once the scene calmed down a bit, Ben offered me a ride in the engine back to the PGE station in North Vancouver. The police wanted to drive me home, but I pleaded my case and was able to ride the train. I have yet to equal the sense of mastery over my destiny I had during that experience. Me at the helm of this million-pound chunk of fate, pounding along an iron track—God help whoever stood in my way. It was supreme. I was alive! I was not a corpse!
Nobody was home to witness my enigmatic arrival in a strange man’s car. It wasn’t until I had to jump up to reach for the house key in its hiding spot on the top brick that I realized I’d clutched my Tupperware container of blackberries perfectly level for over four hours, with not a single berry spilled.
When I told my story at the dinner table, everybody just rolled their eyes and assumed I was being morbid. Mother said, “You need to be around people your own age more.”
“I don’t like people my own age.”
“Of course you do. You simply don’t know it yet.”
“All the girls my own age do is shoplift and smoke.”
Dad said, “No more dead body stories, dear.”
“It’s not made up.”
Leslie said, “Tanya wants to be a stewardess after school ends.”
“The body is real.” I went to the phone and dialed the police station. How many fifth-grade students know the phone number of the local police station by heart? I asked for Officer Nairne to confirm my tale.
Father took the phone. “Whoever this is, I’m sorry, but Liz—What? Oh. Really? Well I’ll be darned.” I had newly found respect.
Father hung up the phone and sat back down. “It seems our Liz is on the money.”
William and Leslie wanted gory details. “How far gone was he, Lizzie?”
“Blue cheese gone?”
“William!” Mother was being genteel. “Not at the dinner table.”
“It actually looked like the roast pork we’re eating here.”
Mother said, “Liz, stop right now!”
Father added, “And you weren’t going to eat those blackberries, were you? I saw them in the fridge. The railways spray the worst sorts of herbicides along the right-of-ways. You’ll get cancer from them.”
There was a charged silence. “Come on, everybody, I found a body today. Why can’t we just talk about it?”
William asked, “Was he bloated?”
“No. He’d only been there overnight. But he was wearing a skirt.”
Mother said, “Liz! We can discuss this afterwards, but not, I repeat not, at the dinner table.”
Father said, “I think you’re overreac—”
“Leslie, how was swim class?”
So there was my big moment, gone. But as of that night I began to believe I had second sight that allowed me to see corpses wherever they lay buried. I saw bodies everywhere: hidden in blackberry thickets, beneath lawns, off the sides of trails in parks—the world was one big corpse factory. Visiting the cemetery in Vancouver for my grandmother’s funeral a year later was almost like a drug. I could not only see the thousands of dead, but I began to be able to see who was fresh and who wasn’t. The fresh bodies still had a glow about them while the older ones, well, their owners had gone wherever it was they were headed. For me, looking at a cemetery was like looking at a giant stack of empties waiting to be handed in for a refund.
Bodies. Oh, groan. I’ve always just wanted to leave this body of mine. What a treat that would be! To be a beam of light, a little comet, jiggling itself loose from these wretched bones. My inner beauty could shine and soar! But no, my body is my test in life.
* * *
William hustled the boys out after I finished the tale of the body. For once in their lives their Aunt Liz had, for a moment or two, fascinated them. I suspect that for a time Hunter and Chase thought I was a sorceress, too, albeit a boring sorceress with no food in her fridge.
My relief that they’d gone was akin to unzipping my pants after a huge meal: it was one of those few moments that being by myself didn’t mean I had to feel lonely. When I think about it, I’ve never actually told another person I’m lonely. Whom would I tell—Donna? Everyone in the coffee room? Leslie and William, who feel duty bound to keep checking in on their spinster sister? I maintain a good front. I imagine the people in my life driving in their cars discussing me …
Is Liz lonely?
I don’t think so.
I think she’s like one of nature’s castoffs.
She genuinely enjoys not being around people.
She’s very brave in her own way.
Books always tell me to find “solitude,” bu
Gee, in a lifetime of singleness I’ve never once toyed with the notion of locating solitude for myself.
I’ve checked out all the books on the subject, books ranging from the trailer park to the ivory tower: Finding Your Achey-Breaky Soulmate to Deconstructing the Inner Dialogue—Methodologies of Navigating the Postmodern Self. The writers of these books that tout loneliness cures universally trot out a dusty list of authors through history who have dared to discuss loneliness as a topic, but they could never just say loneliness. It has to be a tree or butterfly or pond—dead nineteenth-century gay guys who wrote about trees and lakes and who probably had huge secret worlds that they never wrote about. Or …
It occurs to me that I sound like a bitter old bag.
But when your central nervous system is constantly firing away like a diesel generator, relentlessly overpowering subtle or fine emotions, how are you supposed to derive solace from stories of oneness with nature written by those old-fashioned writers, about hiking and breezes in the trees? If they were alive today, they’d all be in leather bars.
* * *
A day passed. I was still drugged, but it wasn’t fun or verklemptish any more. By Friday morning my face had shrunk back to its old shape. I’d run out of videos, and I was tempted to phone Liam and ask to come back to work for the day. But then, around seven in the morning, the phone rang. It was the RCMP, asking if I could come to Lions Gate Hospital.
“Excuse me?”
“There’s been an incident, Ms. Dunn.”
“An incident? What? Who?”
“Do you know a Jeremy Buck, Ms. Dunn?”
“Jeremy Buck?” It’s not like my memory bank of contacts is very big, so I was quick to say no. “What does this have to do with me?”
“If you could just come to the hospital, Ms. Dunn. We had a young man brought in here last night, an overdose case with some bruising and a few cuts.”
“What?”
“He had no ID on him, but he had a MedicAlert bracelet around his wrist saying that, should anything happen to him, you were the person to be notified. It had your phone number on it. Which is how we came to contact you.”
In one searing moment it dawned on me who Jeremy was. This was the phone call I’d never allowed myself to imagine.
“Ms. Dunn?”
“Sorry …”
“Ms. Dunn, can you—”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
The officer told me the hospital room and wing numbers.
I’d always wondered if this day would ever come. It felt like the fulfillment of a prophecy. My mind was blank while I went through the motions—dressing, going to the car, driving along Marine, Fifteenth, St. George’s, then entering the parking lot, walking in through the automated hospital doors—the elevator, the smell of disinfectant, the harried staff.
When I asked the reception desk nurse about which hospital wing was Jeremy’s, she signalled an RCMP constable toward us. He told me his name was Ray Chung, a nice man who shook my hand and asked me to follow him. And so I did, down a yellow-lit hall and around a corner, mostly staring at his feet marching ahead of me on the polished aggregate flooring. We entered a darkened room, passing through a veil of thin and overly washed blue curtain.
A doctor stood in front of some venetian louvre blinds. She was clearly impatient, and her head was haloed by the dozens of hair wisps that had escaped hours ago from her bun. “I’m Valerie, Dr. Tyson. I’m the duty doctor. This guy here related to you?”
Constable Chung nodded toward the man on the bed—a handsome guy, early twenties, large, fair skin, with dark, slightly curly hair and just enough of my family’s head shape to quash any doubts about who he was. This was him. This is who he turned out to be.
I walked over and touched his hand. This woke him up, and he started: “It’s you.”
“Yes, it’s me.”
He sat up and looked around the room. “Wait—something kind of weird happened here.”
“What?”
“I think I was dead.”
What was he talking about? “As far as I could tell, you were only asleep.”
“No. I was dead. I know I was.”
I looked at Dr. Tyson, who said, “Technically, Jeremy, you were dead, for maybe a minute or so when you first came in this morning.” She looked at me. “Around five.”
I was surprised. “He was dead?”
“We used the paddles on him.” She made a hand gesture like a defibrillator.
I looked back at Jeremy, who seemed disturbed. “I didn’t see the light—you know—that light you’re supposed to see when you die. I just saw a blob of darkness, and I was being pulled into it.”
None of us in the room knew what to say to this, so Dr. Tyson used medical science to stabilize the mood, to make it clinical. “We found traces of cocaine and Rohypnol in your system. That might account for anything unusual you may have seen.”
Jeremy was mad now. “May have seen? I was being pulled down, down into the earth. I wasn’t going up into any light. There was no light for me.”
I took hold of his hand, which was freezing cold. The bracelet looked more like a dog tag than jewellery. “Jeremy, look at me,” I said, saying his name out loud for the first time. “How long have you been wearing this bracelet on your wrist?”
“Four years.”
“Four years?”
“And a bit.”
“And you didn’t call me?”
“No, but don’t take it that way. I didn’t call because you’ve always been my hope—the ace up my sleeve.”
“But you don’t know me. How can you say that?”
“I know enough about you.”
“How?” I couldn’t imagine what this must’ve sounded like to Dr. Tyson and Constable Chung.
Jeremy said, “I did legwork.”
“How do you mean?”
“I, well, I sort of followed you around.”
“You what?”
“Relax—it’s not scary like it sounds.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No. You’re looking at it the wrong way.”
“What’s the right way?”
“The right way is this: I’ve been with so many screwed-up foster families in my life that before I went to meet my real family, I wanted to make sure you weren’t a psychopath like the rest of them.”
This struck me as a pretty good reason. It also shut me up.
“I know where you work and where the rest of the family is. All that stuff. The basics.”
I said nothing; he had every right to be wary. Constable Chung coughed. Dr. Tyson hadn’t left; overworked or not, this was truly something.
Jeremy said, “Liz—Mom. You like to think of yourself as a rock—that you’re tough and nobody can hurt you, but you’re wrong there.” He stopped. I had the strange notion that something in his head had just melted and made a stain of some kind. “I think I’m fading here,” he said, and closed his eyes.
Dr. Tyson checked his pulse, looked at me and the cop, and told us he should probably sleep awhile.
“Can I stay here?” I asked.
“Sure.”
Jeremy was instantly asleep, and what could I do but sit there silently, now holding the chilly hand of my own son? On a chair I saw a pile of silly-looking mesh stockings and black lingerie. Constable Chung saw me looking and said, “Uh, we found him in those, and he was all made up. The nurse cleaned him up.”
I recalled the body I saw when I was
Taking a look at my face, the doctor volunteered, “I think it was actually a costume for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They do midnight screenings at the Ridge Theatre. I used to go to them back when they were happening the first time around.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked her.
“This time, yes. Next time—maybe. The time after that? Who knows?”
Unarguable logic. Jeremy’s hand was warming up. I looked at Chung and he shrugged. “You’ve never met your own son?”
“No.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I mean, I knew he—Jeremy—was out there, but not …” But not what? But not this beautiful man here in front of me.
“How old is he?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty?”
The hiss of oxygen in the tube beneath my son’s nose—it took me back to Rome. It carried me back two decades to the night where fat, plain, Canadian me stood in the rain on a rooftop near the Colosseum. I was sixteen, and it was the era of acid rain—a subject that seems long forgotten now. The skies of Europe showered battery acid back then. I remembered looking out over the Colosseum and its neighbourhood, under a pigeon-feather grey sky, quite late on a weeknight, all traffic noises gone. The acid rain was falling on the city’s marble and travertine monuments, and I imagined I could hear them hiss and crackle under the acid, dissolving more in one year than they had in a thousand, history melting away before my eyes. And this was the oxygen ventilator’s noise.
I moved in closer to Jeremy and kissed him on the cheek.
* * *
That I had wanted to travel anywhere, let alone Rome, had sent a shock through the family dinner table. To most ears a Latin class excursion sounds like the pinnacle of dullness. Not quite so. The class actually had a somewhat dark mix of students, a blend of linguistic geeks, rebellious sons of literary parents, and cool-headed girls with their efficient eyes focused on being MDs one day. It was the only fun class I ever had.