Jericho by George Fetherling Read Free Book Online Page B

and I realize that my mother has predeceased me as well, that is, if I’m not dead. I see the middle-aged man I knew hiding deep inside the old fellow standing before me. I feel like the last survivor of an age, which, when I wake up, it turns out that’s what I am. And later Lonnie and I go into Mother’s room (I’ve never been there before) to collect her effects. The bed where she died, one of two built-in cots, still unmade. A little metal shelf of her things screwed into the wall. I go through her wallet—my wallet, in fact—checking ID. A small drab cubicle, and outside the window, far down below,a city that’s all pewter grey. It’s that fifties city again, at its peak or close to it, with the old-fashioned newsstand and the busy Dempster Fireproof Hotel. But now everyone is deaf. Applause. The day after dreaming this I realize that the room was in fact a cell.
    Last dream: I am visiting this social-worker type, Theresa, in the lobby of where she works. She is her usual condescending self. I don’t have to wait long for that first elongated
nooooo
in that corrective tone that always drives me crazy. But she is decent this time all the same. She talks about the past and tells me to wait by the tree in her back garden, where she brings me some food. It’s like I am some sort of laboratory animal in a controlled experiment. Without any warning, we are in Montreal for a type of overheated sex show, but Boots is there with his goons and he translates—though as far I know he didn’t know French unless it was maybe Hell’s Angels French. Pimps and heavies.
    Sometimes I invited Beth to come over to the women’s health club where I enjoy a membership, signing her in as my guest. She had to sign in too, which is how I came to know that Beth in her case isn’t a whole name or short for Elizabeth but instead is short for Bethany, a name I don’t believe I’d ever seen before. We would have a good workout, side by side on the stationary bikes, or take an aerobics class together or sit in the sauna and go out for a quick lunch afterwards. I am on the board. On the membership and finance committees as well.
    I enjoyed watching her shower. She was just a bit thicker everywhere than I thought she would be but very firm, like a piece of fruit at the absolute optimal moment. I loved tosee the rivulets of soapy water run over her shoulders and then down her back or drip between her breasts and belly. Of course, to get a good long casual look, I needed my back to the wall and the rest of me exposed, which I hated. I’m not really sure but I believe this is the heritage of my separate-school education. Gym class with the nuns. The sisters also told us that we must never go to the washroom at Woodward’s department store, as white slavers lurked there and we could be kidnapped and forced into lives of shame.
    Beth told me how she was getting nowhere selling jewellery and was bored all the time and so had gone to see about going back to her other employment. She had an unwarranted obsession with finding her father, and when she had made her day’s quota of sales, if she did, she would resume her wanderings in the world of lost souls, looking for male derelicts of the right age to whom she could show the photograph she had. This didn’t strike me as a very practical approach. The area is just too big and too populous and her whole methodology too random, too dependent on sheer good luck, which she never seemed to have. I did not want to tell her that I thought she was wasting her time. I wish there had been something positive I could have done. I made an honest attempt at some research, because she was expecting me to. But there were no social service records in the City of Vancouver archives for any male with that name or nobody with even approximately that name who’s remotely the right age. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting to find any. It’s not as though there’s an
Alkies’ Who’s Who.
I was naturally surprised,