Eleanor Rigby. Douglas Coupland
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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,” but I’ve Googled their authors, and they all have spouses and kids and grandkids, as well as fraternity and sorority memberships. The universally patronizing message of the authors is, “Okay, I got lucky and found someone to be with, but if I’d hung in there just a wee bit longer, I’d have achieved the blissful solitude you find me writing about in this book.” I can just imagine the faces of these writers, sitting at their desks as they write their sage platitudes, their faces stoic and wise: “Why be lonely when you can enjoy solitude?”
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,