DAY 9

My middle son finds me passed out in the bathroom, like they did Elvis Presley. Hunched over my knees on the toilet with nothing left to give. My laptop out of battery on the hamper I used as a desk.

“What are you doing, Daddy?”

“Dying?”

“But you’re still alive.”

This is my son, Oscar, my second born, who is ironically blonde with ebony eyes. He is wearing his new glasses. We have finally sold him on them.

“I know. Can you turn around so that Daddy can pull up his pants?”

“Privacy?”

“Yes, privacy, good boy.”

Another remembered lesson apparently learned.

I worry if I saved the last segment before I passed out. Luckily for me, I recall the technology of auto save, which saves me another panic-induced toilet episode. Nothing like losing something you wrote. Instant horror.

When my son leaves to give me privacy, The Man enters to occupy it.

“You killed him before the mission? Now we have to start all over again, find someone new to send my message? I don’t get it. I don’t get you. Kashif was supposed to kill him after he received the message, like passing a simple baton. You did this on purpose to spite me.”

I don’t answer him. I hobble to the sink to wash my hands and to see two sunken eye sockets traced in charcoal. Except, there is no energy in these sun blockers, only fatigue.

“If he dies, he dies,” I recite this famous ’80s movie line under my breath to intimidate The Man. He is not impressed by my allusive humour.

“He was worthy enough to deliver the message and you know it.”

I don’t respond. I can hear footsteps all over the floor above. The heaven of my family awaking too early in the morning to beat the sun with breakfast activity.

I remove the laptop from the bathroom for fear one of my younger children will find a place for it in the toilet (perhaps where it belongs), and store it instead on a bookshelf. I need to spend the day talking to my eldest son. He needs to know how much I care about him. Like a miracle worker, I actually believe I can convert him back to confidence.

My wife is making waffles for my son Tobias, whose diet is very limited due to his aversion to textures—another side effect of being Downs. He loves waffles and dipping them in syrup. His only other preference is ice cream. He can eat ice cream any time of his waking day, and yours, and anyone else’s in the vicinity. He is an ice cream addict, like his mom and dad.

The waffle batter smell doesn’t help my stomach in the least. I resolve to return to my flu water diet, except my right eye is really sore for some reason. Perhaps I threw up one too many times, or maybe it is a sinus thing. Whatever it is, my wife notices me in pieces.

“Boy, you look like you are falling apart.”

“Thanks. Is Aidan up yet?”

“No. Everything all right with him?”

“He’s not getting along with his teacher and he’s been disrespectful. His grades have dropped.”

“Oh my.”

I can tell she is distracted in her tone of voice. She went in for her mammogram and we are awaiting the tests in the torture of real life suspense. Leave it to doctors to have mastered the art of it.

“I want him to come and live with us, full time,” I say, not in the form of a question.

“I think he needs you too,” she says, as if interpreting my real intentions.

Before I can answer her, I have to rush to the bathroom again. However, this is a dud run. When I arrive at the toilet, I realize I have nothing left in my stomach to throw up again. Not even bile. The Man is waiting for me in this bathroom too. My kids are outside the door, knocking wildly to enter. Even Oscar, whom I thought learned the value of privacy.

“I know what you are doing with The Messenger. I figured it out. Like On The Sidewalk Bleeding.”

This scares me. He can read my thoughts.

“You want him to realize there is a reason to live before he actually dies. You wouldn’t have spent so much time and words leading him to Bsharri, just to let him die just outside of it. You’re not that masochistic.”

Once again, I wash my face in this upstairs sink. The dimmer lighting is more flattering to my paler complexion. I haven’t shaved in a week either and there are hairs growing everywhere. Just below my eyes, on my temples, my ears. I need to recover my neglected self.

I ignore The Man but he continues.

“You liked that story as a kid, didn’t you?”

He is alluding to “On The Sidewalk Bleeding,” a story about a young, teenaged gang member who gets ambushed when he leaves a party to buy some smokes. It is raining and he can’t speak, but he tries desperately to die without his gang jacket. He struggles to remove it. In the meantime, three parties of people discover him but are too afraid to help. He manages to get the jacket off, but by the end of the story, when the police officer is writing the report, he notices the discarded jacket first. He says, “just another Royal,” and Andy’s dream of dying as himself, as just Andy, is tragically destroyed.

I received the strap, or actually, the ruler strap, in grade six for reading the story. I had finished my homework and Mr. Hill, our six-foot-five Iroquois Indian English teacher, had ventured to the back of the classroom from his permanent position of writing terms on the blackboard. After finishing early, I opened my desk and found the grade eight book of stories, the last of which was “On the Sidewalk Bleeding.” As I finished reading it, he was staring over me. He called me to the front of the class and sarcastically gave me the ruler on my hand, in front of Christine Persia, a girl I was hopelessly in love with. I kept telling myself, “don’t cry, don’t cry” because I didn’t want her to see me cry. She would never like me if she saw me cry.

I remember going home and telling my mom, and in her Italian immigrant way she said I deserved it.

From that moment on, the story, “On The Sidewalk Bleeding” seemed to follow me. As a teacher, I found it surviving the cuts into new story anthologies. I taught it so many times that I decided to write a gang story myself. My story published under the title “Blood Relatives.” When I read it at the magazine launch, an elderly woman in the front row approached me afterwards. She said my story reminded her of a story she used to teach. At the same time we said, “On The Sidewalk Bleeding,” and the irony was finally complete.

I received a nomination for The Journey Prize for that story, but it didn’t make the shortlist.

Although I hadn’t purposely tried to put The Messenger in the same predicament, I found myself later in the day, as I watched my children take swimming lessons at the university pool, wondering if my subconscious managed to put The Messenger “On The Hill Bleeding.” The Man must have secured access to my subconscious a step before it dictated the words to my fingers. This worried me. I didn’t want him to interfere with the story. He was just a character. He didn’t have the rights or authorial privileges, and yet, he was clever enough to see influence in my work.

My eldest son stays a safe distance away from me the entire Saturday. He hides in the group of his brothers and sister, or with those who visit to see him. I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about his troubles any more. He doesn’t appreciate my disappointment in him. This time, I made a hurtful impression and I begin to feel guilty again for hurting his feelings. I have to convince myself to stay strong to my words. I am his father, a parent, in a position of authority (as I assume I am with my novel), but instinctively drawn to hug and kiss him. My embattled Italian grandmother on my father’s side, the one who never visited a hospital, and died at 93, the same one who walked ten miles a day in the harsh Canadian winter with grocery bags creasing her veiny hands, used to tell my father that you kiss your kids when they are asleep—so that you don’t make them weak to a cruel world. Although I considered this advice heartless at one point in my life, I reconsidered its rationale in the context of my fatherly responsibilities. It just felt unfair to attack him, when he spent so much time away from me.

So I made him confess to everyone in our extended family so that he wouldn’t develop the habit of hiding things from me.

He hated me for making him expose himself with honesty, all of the stuff that contributed to this lack of confidence, but by the end of this exercise, we were both laughing at it. I think it made him feel like he was big enough to defeat it. We watched the hockey game together at night, and fell asleep together on the couch.