The Dead Are More Visible Read online

  “That’s more or less what I think,” you say. “What I’ve decided. Thank you.”

  “Are you all right, girl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Here,” she says, “let me tape you. You try to sleep now. Many of you seem to be having bad dreams.”

  Under the doctor’s blue eyes the skin is bruised and pouchy, but the eyes themselves have a morning freshness. As you enter, he grins, almost shyly—a boy working up his nerve to ask a girl to the prom. It’s creepy, yet touching. Even if his interest in you is clinical and close to morbid, it’s touching.

  “Hey, Roddy! You look better this morning. How do you feel?”

  “Like I’m half asleep and just dreaming I’m here.”

  “Great. Just roll up your sleeve. Should we try first for a true reading?”

  “Well, it might be harder for me to raise the pressure today,” you say—and it’s true, you do feel somewhat calmer, clearer, as if a fever has broken in the night.

  He pumps, releases, eyes fixed to the gauge.

  “You’re not thinking about him now, to raise the numbers?”

  “Not really.”

  “Because we’re still low, but we’re approaching low-normal.” He reaches for his clipboard, looking shy again. “How would you feel about me, uh … doing a little follow-up on you, after this trial is done? I’m thinking of trying to write a small paper.”

  Now you place it, that faint, skunky smell: pot.

  “What went wrong in that other sedative trial?” you ask.

  “It’s confidential, I’m afraid.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  He says eagerly, “A depressed male in dormitory B overdosed on a benzodiazepine variative we were retesting. Apparently that was his plan. He’d been suicidal on and off for a year and no longer had access to sleeping pills. He managed to bribe one of the other males to save his pills, every second one—just pretend to take them. Meanwhile he was doing the same. We noticed irregularities in the various blood tests, but the drug was new and we weren’t sure what was happening. And this was before Vivienne. Nurse Nkwele. She’s unfoolable. So after the last blood draw on the fourth night—sedative trials were five days then—he swallowed all the pills he’d stored up.”

  “He died?”

  “But these things have a much lower toxicity than the old barbiturates. We figure he took at least fifteen. As expected, he just slept for a long time.”

  You gaze expectantly at Dr. Wall. He’s enjoying himself.

  “Eighty-two hours, to be exact!”

  “A coma,” you say.

  “Ah, but the research indicates that drug-induced stupors are not the same as comas caused by accidents, say, or blunt trauma! It’s something else I’d love to be researching, if I had the time. Last I heard, our Rumpelstiltskin was functioning again and hadn’t repeated his attempt. Maybe we could all use a good eighty-hour sleep, huh?”

  “Rip van Winkle,” you say.

  “Sorry?”

  Something comes to you now, a poem you read in high school about kids climbing birch saplings until the young trees bend under their weight and deposit them back on the ground, and the poet brings it around to a wish that he might leave the earth for a while—take a little time off—then return and start over.

  You wake at noon to a dormitory that no longer feels like an opium den. Less than twenty-four hours left. The atmosphere: like a classroom on the second-last day of school, mid-June, the air tender, teachers lenient, bullies lazy. A smell of coffee. The cafeteria brew, dispensed in polystyrene cups, tastes like instant decaf, but now the smell is palatable, even appealing.

  Wen is sitting on her bunk, chatting with Sunetra across the room. Han is on her cellphone talking to her boyfriend—that’s plain. Her voice is inaudible but her face is a billet-doux. Eleanor is helping Hong again and now even Ruth the cranky paralegal is involved.

  Hong, a terrible newsprint colour but still diligent, reads out another verse, something about violence no longer being heard in the land, nor wasting nor destruction within the borders. She says, “I understand not this wasting. Not like the garbage? Or spendthrift?”

  “Hmm,” says Eleanor. “That’s a toughie. I think maybe it means no more good things will be wasted. What do you think, Ruth?”

  “I love you tons, Rick,” Han whispers under the ambient bustle. “Tons.” She looks as though she might weep—and this doesn’t destroy you.

  Ruth is talking now, talking like someone who has been trapped solo in a mineshaft for a month and is spilling out her tale. Today’s the first day she has felt able to talk, she says. The cravings are easing off—for a smoke. The work, she says, is high pressure and it never backs off. “Never felt I could work without a cigarette. I figured if I came out here and quit cold turkey and slept for three days, through the worst of the craving …”

  “And now you’re through it, aren’t you?” Eleanor says.

  “Getting there. Plus, I knew it would be hard to get smokes here.”

  “You could’ve bummed off me,” Wen says, entering the conversation late and missing the point. “I was going outside for one now and then.”

  “I know, I could smell it on you. That’s why I wouldn’t talk to you.”

  “I quit smoking once,” you announce. “It was the second hardest week of my life.”

  “What was the hardest?” Wen asks.

  “Tough question,” you say.

  “Anyway,” Ruth says, “I can see my way clear.” Her hands are folded tightly in her lap. Han whispering, Don’t worry, I don’t think I’ll go back this summer. Her accent revives some, though it doesn’t seem conscious. One summer of London was enough.

  “My hardest was last week,” says Wen. “My boyfriends found out about each other. I’m kind of like … hiding out now. What about you, Sun?”

  Sunetra’s cheeks and ears darken. “Oh, it’s too much like asking what’s my favourite kind of wart. Are you scared they’ll come after you?”

  “They should cool off after a couple of days.”

  “It was when my father died,” says Eleanor. “It was recently.”

  “I thought you said you were taking care of him,” says Ruth.

  “Oh, did I?”

  In the silence, Hong shakes her head—not Job-like but with a bemused air—and says, “Too many hardest to pick one.”

  “I was,” Eleanor says. “I’m sorry. It’s such a thing when somebody dies under your care! I mean, when you have convinced yourself you can keep him alive. I always thought I should have been a nurse, not a secretary. Now I’m neither. I’m no longer a daughter, either. It’s something you’ll notice about aging. One by one, your … your … what is the word now, Roddy? Your attributes, they are withdrawn. Finally, I guess, you’re nothing but yourself.”

  “Then not even that,” Ruth says.

  And you think: to be stripped down that way, at least for a brief period, might not be all bad. You say simply, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and the others nod and murmur concurrence and you feel that in this moment—shortly before going your separate roads—the seven of you have become a group.

  You wander out into the hallway, hungry at last. Is the bitter taste going, or are you just getting used to it? The moussaka is out of the question but you might try the special. Hot turkey sandwich with baked potato and peas. You pass the lone window and it hits you—swallows eat insects and migrate to warm, brighter places for the winter. The bird you saw before must have been a figment caused by the drug, a waking dream … You order and go to the payphone and dial your uncle at the restaurant. You don’t think you can face waitressing for him again, but you know he pays his cooks decently and you’re going to have to start saving. Nurse Nkwele, though she appears old to you—forty, at least—seems undaunted by the prospect of going back to school for another two or three years, or more. And this shames you a little, shakes you up.

  “Roddy!” Uncle Lambros cries with heartbreaking joy. �
�It’s you!”

  [ NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ]

  Some of the stories in this collection have been previously published in magazines and anthologies. The author is very grateful to the editors.

  “Those Who Would Be More” appeared, as “Dialogues of Departure,” in the United States in Tin House and in Canada in The New Quarterly.

  “A Right Like Yours” appeared in the United States in The Black Boot and in Canada in Maisonneuve and was anthologized in The Exile Book of Canadian Sports Stories (Exile Editions, ed. Priscila Uppal). It appeared also in Douglas Glover’s online magazine, Numéro Cinq.

  “Shared Room on Union” appeared in The Fiddlehead and was anthologized in 2010: Best Canadian Stories (Oberon, ed. John Metcalf). The story received the 2009 gold National Magazine Award for Fiction.

  “OutTrip” appeared in The Malahat Review.

  “The Dead Are More Visible” appeared in The Walrus and in The Albawtaka Review (Egypt); it was anthologized as an audio story on Earlit Shorts (ed. Susan Rendell and Janet Russell). The story received the 2007 gold National Magazine Award for Fiction.

  “Noughts & Crosses” appeared in The Walrus and was anthologized in The White Collar Book (Black Moss Press, eds. Bruce Meyer and Carolyn Meyer).

  “Fireman’s Carry” appeared in Geist.

  “Heart & Arrow” was first published in the United States in The Northwest Review and in Canada in the short-story collection On earth as it is (Porcupine’s Quill, 1995; Granta Books, 1997; Vintage Canada, 2001). It appears in this book in a different, somewhat shorter form.

  “Nearing the Sea, Superior” appeared in Descant and was anthologized in 2012: Best Canadian Stories (Oberon, ed. John Metcalf).

  ——

  As always, I thank my family and friends. Let me list with gratitude the names of people who have made specific contributions to this book over the past few years, whether by reading drafts of individual stories or by talking over ideas with me: Mary Huggard, Rich Cumyn, Grace O’Connell, Jared Bland, Judith Cowan, Mark Sinnett, Ingrid Ruthig, Sandra Ridley, Michael Holmes, Angie Abdou, Alvin Lee, John Metcalf, Jenny Haysom, Ginger Pharand, Tim Conley, Michael Winter, Michael Redhill, Alexander Scala, Alison Pick, Natalee Caple, Rachel Sa, and Jane Warren.

  Thanks to Sue Sumeraj, again, for her exacting eye.

  Special thanks to Anne McDermid, Martha Magor, and Monica Pacheco of Anne McDermid & Associates.

  Above all, I wish to thank my editor, Amanda Lewis.

  THOSE WHO WOULD BE MORE

  In 1992 the Porcupine’s Quill published a book of my short stories called Flight Paths of the Emperor—stories set mainly in Japan. For the next decade or so, I kept feeling that I should have written another story for the book; there were three bits of Japanese material that I regretted never having used (one being my experience of learning Japanese from a bizarre primer possibly authored by a psychopath), but none of these strands of narrative DNA seemed enough, in itself, to tease out into a story. Nor could I see any way of braiding them together. Then, a few years ago, I figured it out. Raising a daughter was probably the main thing that made the braiding possible, but I don’t say that with any certainty, and in fact I’ll say nothing more on the subject. It’s disingenuous for fiction writers to pretend they know how their stories really gestate.

  A RIGHT LIKE YOURS

  Some years ago I ran across a website brilliantly called Runs With Dog—hence my idea for the name of the dog (Runs With Man) in this story.

  OUTTRIP

  For their assistance and advice, I am indebted to Arlen Baptiste, of the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre, and his grandfather, Richard Armstrong, of the En’owkin Centre, Penticton, BC. These knowledgeable men are not responsible for the presence of coywolves—properly an Eastern phenomenon—in my hallucinatory version of the Okanagan Desert.

  FIREMAN’S CARRY

  My thanks to firefighter Doug Caldwell for carefully checking over the story.

  STEVEN HEIGHTON is the author of the novel Every Lost Country, which was a national bestseller, a Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca and Maisonneuve Best Book, and a finalist for the Banff Mountain Book Award, and which has been optioned for film. His novel Afterlands appeared in six countries, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice as well as a Best Book of the Year selection in ten publications in Canada, the United States, and Britain, and has been optioned for film. He also wrote The Shadow Boxer, a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Best American Poetry, TLR, Agni, Brick, Best English Stories, and many others. Heighton has received four gold and one silver National Magazine awards (for fiction and poetry) and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. Visit his website at www.stevenheighton.com.