Mom gave Victor money for a haircut and he was
walking along Bloor to Gus, The Other Barber’s, “Toronto’s Most Famous
Barbershop”, which you’ve probably never heard of, hands freezing because
Victor had lost his gloves and felt too guilty to say anything about it to Mom
who was working cleaning people’s houses in addition to her normal super-early
shifts at the bakery, working two jobs because of the wedding, which would be
over soon, so maybe things would go back to normal, finally, except his sister
would be gone, but whatever. Anyway, he got a text. Victor walked into the
nearest place—one of those Korean walnut cake places—so that he could take his
hands out of his pockets without wanting to amputate them. The text was from
Big Sean saying he’d got his dad’s old Atari working and that Victor should get
his ass over right now to play Space Invaders. Sure Victor played Space
Invaders all the time at freeinvaders.org, but there was something appealing
about playing on some old system with the original joystick and Big Sean was a
lot of laughs and wasn’t Victor trying to grow his hair anyway, who gave a shit
if his sister was getting hitched, right? Victor told Big Sean sure and bought
a box of walnut cakes because they were smelling so good right now and plus the
Korean people who ran the store were eyeing him like, Are you just going to
stand there, ass hole?
The welcome warm air in the stairwell up to Big
Sean’s apartment was soured with cat piss. Victor’s hands felt like stumps as
he fumbled with the reluctant zipper of his parka. He used the side of his head
to knock on Big Sean’s door. “Yo. Vicky. Give me a second,” Sean said. Tickles
meowed menacingly and trotted into the front hall, his legs casting delicate,
dancing shadows under the door and onto the top step. Victor cupped his hands
over his mouth and exhaled. Tickles reached an orange paw out, claws curling
towards the dangling lace of Victor’s boot. Using his heel as a pivot, Victor
positioned his foot right over Tickles’s paw and smiled to imagine Big Sean’s
fuckhead cat yelping in pain. Victor was better than that, though. He rubbed
his hands together. They were starting to burn and itch a bit. He grabbed one
handle of the white bag he’d hung around his left wrist and pulled it over his
hurting hand. The box of walnut cakes was still warm. Victor sat down on the
first step leading down from the apartment, far enough out of Tickles’s reach,
he figured, and grabbed one of the mouth-sized pastries. He was holding it near
his lips, enjoying the sensation of its soft warmth against his index finger,
which was still numb around the pad and tip, but tingling everywhere else, when
the door opened and Tickles raced out and rubbed against Victor’s parka.
“The fuck’s that?” Big Sean wanted to know.
“Walnut cakes.” Victor said, standing to get away
from Tickles. “I got a whole box.”
“Those Korean Timbit things, right?” Sean
scratched at some crease in his crotch, his dirty track pants dancing in rhythm
with his determined fingers. Victor looked past Big Sean, attempting to respect
Sean’s privacy. “Gimme one,” Sean said, holding out his scratching hand. Victor
held out the walnut cake he was holding. “Gross. I don’t want one you’ve
touched,” Sean said, reaching into the box and leaning over, his head close enough
to Victor’s face that Victor worried he’d breathe in some giant flake of Big
Sean’s dandruff. Big Sean dug around in the box, looking for just the right
pastry.
Standing on his hind legs, Tickles sunk the nails
on his front paws through the puffy cushion of Victor’s parka hem, then pulled
them out with a pop. “Hey, fuck off,” Victor said, swinging his free hand
towards the cat.
“Hold still,” Sean said.
Victor kicked his leg towards Tickles. The cat
dashed screaming into the apartment. Sean huffed and roughly pulled the bag off
of Victor’s arm.
In the kitchen, Sean scratched his head with a
sharp scraping sound then picked each walnut cake out of the box and placed it
carefully onto a plate. Tickles rushed by in the hall and a sharp, warm shit
smell wafted through the kitchen. “Oh my God, that’s disgusting,” Victor said.
Sean farted loudly. “Thank you.”
Victor buried his nose in the bend of his elbow
and laughed, though he actually felt a little like barfing.
Sean sat down on the floor beside the Atari. He
put the walnut cakes on the coffee table. Victor was hungry, but didn’t grab
one. He went to the kitchen, found the cleanest glass, and poured himself some
water. When he got back, Sean was starting a new game.
“What’s that hole in the wall?” Victor asked.
Sean’s eyes darted from the game and back. “What?
By that? Sorry. That weird painting?”
It was a weird painting. It wasn’t that it was
bad. It’s that it was almost really good, an almost really good portrait of
someone.
“Mom did it. In high school. Of her mom. My
grandma.”
“The painting?”
“Yeah. The painting. You stupid?”
“The hole though?”
“That’s my work.” The fraction of Sean that wasn’t
lost in the game laughed, though the rest of him quickly interrupted. It was
known that Big Sean was rough, so Victor wasn’t really surprised. In the gym
class where they met, Sean broke Steve Deikmann’s nose because Steve was
talking shit about Big Sean’s free throws during a three-on-three game and
Sean’s locker, where they met up sometimes at lunch, had this growing dent
which anytime one of them asked about it Sean would say, My fucking Math
teacher’s a bitch, or, Fuck that cocksucker, or whatever, you get the
idea.
So probably Victor shouldn’t have been surprised
when, after like an hour of waiting to play on the Atari with that old
joystick, an hour during which Big Sean had already gotten mad that Victor
expected a turn and so had gotten his laptop out so Victor could play on
freeinvaders.org, an hour during which mini-tiger Tickles gradually, and
completely without encouragement, managed to get his bloodthirsty self onto
Victor’s lap where he fell asleep after some exploratory pushing and clawing
all because Victor was, like, in the middle of a game and even though Sean
said, Just push him off, Victor was like, Yeah, right, to which Sean asked if
Victor was a pussy, an hour at the end of which Sean finally let Victor play
the Atari, finally handed Victor the joystick, which Victor couldn’t get both
hands on without moving and couldn’t move without disturbing the weapon of mass
destruction snoozing and purring on his lap, so he pulled a little bit and the
screen went this crazy green colour and Sean cursed and called Victor a fucking
idiot and put his hands on his head and tried to coax the Atari back into action,
all which disturbed the cat again, so Victor could get up and kneel on the
floor beside Sean and touch the game cartridge, which actually brought some
sort of pixilated image flickering onto the screen by the way, but it sent Sean
into some flailing rage and Victor was on his back and smelling cat piss off
the sandpaper carpet and holding his forearms in front of his face because Sean
was pounding him and then Victor was pushing against Sean because Sean was
hitting his ribs and Victor needed it to stop.
The walnut cakes were all over the floor. One was
still rolling towards a corner already occupied by a jackrabbit of a dust
bunny. Sean was against the couch panting and crying and emitting this strange
snarl. Tickles was looking at Sean from around the doorway. When Sean turned to
see what Victor was looking at, Tickles leapt up and ran thumping down the
hall. Victor felt his face. Under his eye was super sensitive. “I didn’t even
get to show my dad,” Sean said.
“Doesn’t your dad live in, like, Sudbury or
something?”
Sean held up his phone. “A picture, shit head.”
“You didn’t take one yet?”
Sean leaned forward and slammed his fist into
Victor’s thigh.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“It might work again, right?” Sean was looking at
the Atari.
“How would I know?”
As Victor limped home, he knew he was in shit. He
caught a glimpse of his face in the glass of this Christian bookstore and
coffee shop that he’d made the mistake of going into for a Coke once. Coke, 99
cents. Conversion attempts, free. But his face, now, on the way back from Big
Sean’s? Swelling fast. His left eye was nearly shut and both eyes were
underlined with crescent bruises. There was a ringing in his ears. Worst,
though, was that Victor’s hair was still curling sloppily out from under his
toque.
When Mom got home, Victor was sitting in front of
the computer his heart beating panic through his body. His tinnitus had
stopped, but the bruising on his face had established itself blackly. He put in
his earbuds and turned up Liturgy’s “Follow.” As the guitars washed out all
possible sound he returned to his game. He felt his mother’s hands. She turned
his head roughly, her fingers in his hair. When she saw his face, though, it
was like something had dropped on her—she tucked her head into her shoulders and
winced. She was crying and touching his face and Victor wished she would stop,
because how was he supposed to not start crying, then? He tried to pull his
face away, but her gentle, strong hands held him there and lay bare his regret
about not going to Gus, The Other Barber’s, about buying walnut cakes with his
haircut money, about going to Big Sean’s and getting his face fucked for the
pictures, about what he felt was some useless wreck of a life without any hope
of becoming interesting or meaningful or valuable or full of love or passion or
affection or even simple friendship, about squandering his mother’s love and
money, about disrespecting her and his big sister, but mostly her, mostly his
mother.
Victor meant to tuck his face gently into Mom’s
shoulder, but the force of his desperation and the speed of his embarrassment
at crying ran his face into her boney collarbone and sent a new blast of pain
radiating out from his nose. He grunted through clenched teeth, then started
laughing. Mom removed his headphones.
“What happened?”
He was laughing too hard to answer.
“What’s so funny?” He felt her shoulders start to
shake, too. “Oh, sweety,” she said, tender through her laughter.
Toronto, October 2015
Emoji sequence and photograph: Teacher and writer, Will Wallace
Story: Lee Sheppard
god this one was good.
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