Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good Read online

  A Novel

  SEVEN GOOD REASONS NOT TO BE GOOD

  JOHN

  GOULD

  For my sister, Anne Louise Gould,

  and in memory of my friend B.E.

  Two photons that have interacted at some time in the past must be treated as an entangled whole, even if they have traveled far apart … It is as though the two particles remain connected by an invisible link that depends neither on space nor on time, and they cannot be conceptually separated.

  —Étienne Klein and Marc Lachièze-Rey,

  The Quest for Unity: The Adventure of Physics

  Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

  CONTENTS

  FRIDAY

  SATURDAY

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  TUESDAY

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY

  EPILOGUE

  FRIDAY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  FRIDAY

  Dear Zane,

  REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #1

  Virtue means sacrifice, and sacrifice is always about ego. A priest gives up sex to get into heaven, a husband gives up poker to get sex. Virtue is selfishness, and selfishness is a vice. Virtue is vice.

  Get it?

  Matt

  The airport’s automatic door goes shhht, and Matt steps out into the held breath of midsummer in Toronto. Yeck. He plants his feet, waits for the wooze to pass. At the end of each arm a suitcase tugs at his slippery grip.

  Come on down.

  Matt raises his eyes. A jet slopes up into the fuzzy dusk over the parkade. “Lucky clowns,” he mutters. Where might they be headed? Back west where he’s come from, into earlier, into the afternoon? Or east, eveningwards? Away from this place anyway, where past and future are both clonged on the anvil of the present.

  Jeezuz aitch, he really is feeling odd. It must be more than this hasty escape, this batty mission …

  Shhht. “‘Scuse me there, bud.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Matt shuffles forward a few feet, obliges himself to breathe. It’s been a while, he usually times his visits to avoid this nonsense. During the descent the captain crackled something about thirty-three degrees Celsius, forty-four with the humidex. There didn’t used to be a humidex, did there? There didn’t used to be a kajillion cars huffing hydrocarbons either. Or maybe it’s just that he’s older now. Maybe it’s just that he’s old.

  Forty-four, is that old? Hey, if he were dead he’d be young. Only forty-four, that’s so sad! Some comfort. A curious age, forty-four, neither one thing nor another. Or call it both. A dollop each of life and death whirred up together and served with a silly cocktail straw.

  Unless he is dead, could that be it? When your life’s over, what else do you call it? In which case what he’s looking for here is a rebirth, a reincarnation. Will Mariko be around this time too? Will she be his wife again, and put him through the same ordeal? “You keep coming back to earth till you learn,” she’s told him, but she hasn’t told him what. Or maybe she’ll be his sister this time, or his father, or his friend.

  Forty-four degrees, that’s hot. What would it be in real numbers, in old-fashioned Fahrenheit? Multiply by one-point-something, add whatever. Matt puts down a bag to swipe at a tickle of sweat on his forehead. He’s been stewing in his own brine for hours, feverish, shaky—it’s a relief to have an excuse now, and to see everybody else dissolving too. Melting, Wicked Witch of the West–style, into the foul puddle of themselves. If he’s sick, well, so’s the city. If he’s going to burn, at least he won’t burn alone. Hey, we’re all in this together …

  It’s so weird. You journey from where you live to where you once lived. Are you away? Are you home? Why did you leave? Why have you come back?

  Matt cranks his head slowly left, then right, wary of the whirlies. Cars and shuttles jockey for position at the curb; travellers dart and weave, each one a rattled survivor towing his or her black box. A paunchy guy in a crossing-guard getup stumps over his way. Matt has the bewildering urge to embrace him.

  “Cab, sir?”

  “Right, you bet. But first a question. Where’s the … what have you done with the air?”

  The limo lummox favours him with a rigid, end-of-shift smile. He beckons an idling car with a flick of his walkie-talkie. “First visit to our fair city, sir?”

  “Actually, I was born here. I grew up here. Sometimes—”

  “Enjoy your stay, sir.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks.”

  A cab pulls up and a youngish man in a purple turban emerges from its far side. Matt gratefully, almost tearfully relinquishes his bags and folds himself into the back seat. Leather, cold against the wet lumbar of his shirt, cool beneath his palms. The leather’s creased like a palm too, fissured with history. So many fannies. Matt makes a few Brando-like noises (pained, impacted), thinking On the Waterfront, the primal cab scene. I coulda been—

  “Sir?” The cabbie jabs some buttons, sets the meter clicking.

  Matt has to crane to make out the guy’s name on the dash decal. Mariko once told him you got better service if you used names, and though Matt generally resists her little blurts of wisdom—not because they’re misguided but because they aren’t, because they’re so effortlessly true—he’s glommed onto this one. Waiters, tellers, clerks, he chums them all. It doesn’t work, at least it doesn’t open them up much, but it does something even more miraculous: it opens him up. It calms him, collapses the distance. “Yeah, um, Jatinder?” Too close, is what he feels today. Over-close to everybody. “I’m thinking … I need to lie down soon. Very soon. Could you recommend a hotel nearby?”

  “Of course, sir. No trouble.” A quick shoulder-check and they zag into traffic. And there’s that girl from the flight, the Unaccompanied Minor. Hey, why didn’t he get her name? She’s got her father with her now, a big scruffy brute, not quite Matt’s height but broader, beamier. About the size of Matt’s dad before he hit eighty (can it be almost a decade ago?) and swiftly shrivelled, like one of his own tar-caked lungs. Eighty-eight. A big year for the both of them, the boy starting to catch up now, half the age of his old man. A presage of some sort, so says Mariko. A turning point. The girl stalks the crosswalk, permits Pops to lumber along beside her with her suitcase. He’s had her about ten minutes and you can see he’s already flummoxed. Matt registers a slight tremor of relief—in advance of the customary quake of sorrow—at the thought that he has no kids to panic about. He palms the window, hoping for a high-five with the girl, but she’s gone.

  “And what brings you to Toronto, sir?”

  “Pardon me? Oh, an old friend.”

  “Ah.”

  “My plan was to drop in on him, surprise him. See, he’s sick. He’s letting himself die.” Matt shakes his head, wishes he hadn’t. “I have to stop him.” Wow, that does sort of sum it up. Has it ever sunk all the way in before? “But now it looks like I’m sick, so.”

  “Ah.”

  Do you tell people what’s really going on with the guy? Do you keep it to yourself? “Yeah, cough on the man and I’d probably kill him. Not much of an immune system.”

  They were lounging against a pair of tombstones, he and Zane, the day Zane told him—about being positive that is, not about his plan to pack it in. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a favourite hangout back when they were teenagers. “Don’t panic,” Zane reassured him once he’d hit him with the news. “You can have my albums.”

  “Seriously?” said Matt. “Even the Abba?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Wow, thanks.” Matt went to slurp from his peanut
butter jar—they’d brewed up rum and Cokes, old times’ sake—but his hand had gone wobbly on him. “Just my luck you’ll live or something, though.”

  Zane shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “Never know,” said Matt. He had another go at his drink, both hands. “These new drugs, you take them and you’re good, right?”

  Zane nodded. He did nod, didn’t he? Then he started bopping around, trying for an Abba-type effect, the mickey as microphone.

  “That’s Freddie Mercury,” said Matt. “You really can’t do anybody but Queen, can you?”

  “Fuggoff,” said Zane.

  “You fuggoff.”

  Which was what, two years ago? Almost, it was autumn 2001, Matt in town for his dad’s eighty-seventh birthday. Eight plus seven is fifteen candles, five breaths to blow them out.

  Jatinder’s taken to humming to himself now, something sweet and poppy. You could imagine it was Abba—“Mamma Mia”?—if you really put your mind to it. “Hey,” says Matt, “so you’re … That accent, India?”

  “Correct, sir. Mumbai. It used to be Bombay. Shit-for-brains.”

  “Hey there, buddy, I was just … Oh, I see. Sorry. Toronto drivers, eh?” Matt flinches as Jatinder tight-squeezes past the offending vehicle. “So, Mumbai. Hot, I guess?”

  “In the humid season, very hot. And crowded.” Jatinder tsks, performs an odd shovelling motion with his free hand—he might be scooping spilled ash from a countertop. “Take about half the people in Canada? Now crush them into Toronto.” A fist.

  “Yikes.” Matt’s never really been anywhere. Well, Europe with a backpack after high school, he and Zane, the done thing in those days. Late ‘70s. Matt flashes briefly on that arrival scene, not at Heathrow but at Calais, he and Zane staggering off the ferry after their riotous trip across the Channel to France. They’d checked off England and were ready for the real thing, a big world in which nobody else would understand. Bonjour. Guten Tag. Ciao. Hola. Al-salaam alaykum. They’d shared the ferry with a gaggle of French school kids, all busy barfing up Coke and chips. A chain reaction—one spewed and that inspired the next, and so on. Matt and Zane spent the whole trip tuning up their gagging noises, translating them into various tongues. By the time they docked they could ralph in most European languages, plus Russian, Japanese, a few others. Matt’s mum had a friend from Iceland so that was his specialty, hœööööörrnnn …

  But other than that one big trip? Not much. A couple of Vegas weekends with Meg, an Alaska cruise with Cat, two or three daiquiri-infused getaways with Mariko. Nothing to help Matt fathom the kind of human density Jatinder’s talking about.

  Movies, of course, and TV. Zane’s documentaries have come closest. He’s covered three continents so far, South America, Asia, Africa, each piece a fresh fusion of rage and dismay. There was Rio, there was Jakarta, and now there’s Lagos in Nigeria, Shanumi’s story. Always with the stats: this many infected, this many dead, this many orphaned. Numbing numbers. Say-uncle numbers.

  “Anything in particular you’re looking for, sir?”

  “Not really. Someplace not too scuzzy but not, you know, crazy either. I’m on a budget. Actually no, I’m not on a budget, that’s the problem. So what’s my best bet?”

  Jatinder—Jat to his dear ones, Matt figures—imparts a pensive tilt to his head. “Well, there’s the Delta.”

  Matt adores this accent, Jat’s accent, which he thinks of, for some reason, as spherical. Planet-shaped. And hey, maybe there’s something to that. Toronto, Mumbai, they’d be pretty much opposites, wouldn’t they, pretty much antipodes? Put a palm on each and you could hoist the whole world, couldn’t you?

  But what Matt loves most about this accent is that he can do it. Well, he can come close. He and Zane picked it up about thirty years ago (criminy) from their beloved Mr. Kumar, the wry chess wizard who push-broomed the halls of their high school. Mr. Kumar was an unrecognized genius, so when he recognized them, recognized Matt and Zane—fired a wink their way when they’d been smoking in the stairwell, scooted them in the back door when they were running late—didn’t that mean they were geniuses too? Too soon to say what kind of geniuses (they both sucked at chess), but that would come clear in time. Mr. Kumar was their man, and they’d mimic him whenever they were alone together, taking on his mystique, they hoped, through a kind of sympathetic magic. They’ve been doing it over the phone again recently, conjuring the past as the future goes bizarre on them.

  Tonight Matt has the almost unmasterable urge to give that accent a go, see how ol’ Jatinder takes it. With any luck he’ll come right back with a Matt-like accent, a honky Canuck, rude and unremarkable as it may be. Couple of oots, couple of aboots. They’ll switch, they’ll swap, they’ll become one another.

  “Then there’s the Holiday Inn. The Quality. The Comfort.”

  Light standards strobe past in slo-mo (traffic’s at a tetchy crawl tonight), shadows slap Matt’s wincing face. The dusk is deep enough, now, for a gibbous moon—just about full? just past?—to make its appearance low over the oncoming lanes. The moon? Here in the city she’s just another street lamp, the poor old girl. She’s just another bulb that wants changing once a month.

  It’s so different at home. At home—the other home, the little patch of west coast paradise Matt still shares with Mariko—the moon’s a great big deal. One evening every month or so Mariko will snuff out all the artificial lights, tease Matt out into the field at the heart of their tiny forest and get him to squat with her in the “loon-light,” as she calls it. Play primitive, play primordial. Far from the city’s smog-glow there’s nothing to hide the universe from them, or them from the universe. There’s nothing between skin and sky, between their two bodies and that obliterating bigness.

  Has Sophie been initiated yet? Tonight, maybe. Yeah, maybe tonight. Under this very moon she and Mariko will sink into some goddess-worshippy trance, some pagan sacrament or ceremony. Crone-song, crone-dance, who knows. All that holiness will get them good and horny, and they’ll troop together up to the moon-streaked bed …

  “The Courtyard. The Crowne Plaza.”

  India’s next, apparently, in terms of body count. Right behind Africa and gaining fast. Odds are Zane’ll be heading there before long, with his conscience and his movie camera. That’s assuming Matt can convince him to live, of course. A million cases so far, did he say? A billion? A kajillion?

  “The Sheraton. The Sandman.”

  Matt shivers, suddenly sno-cone cold. “Jat, you know what?” he says in his own nothing voice. “Wherever. Just take me there.”

  He was fine when he left home this morning. Mariko drove him, an in-town day for her anyway. He was fine as they crept onto the ferry, fine as they churned across that half-hour of docile sea, fine as they crept off again in Vancouver. He was fine as they effected their no-big-deal goodbye at the departure gate, jets rumbling in and out overhead.

  Fine? Fine-ish. Only moderately freaked out. They shared a dry smooch and the sort of back-patting hug you’d normally reserve for an over-clutchy colleague. Such is the stringency of the current setup at home (Matt batching it on the futon in his study, Mariko alone in their bed) that this whisper of contact was enough to conjure a brief, pointless perk-up in his cords. No sense bumming either of them out any further, so Matt steered her away before she could detect his arousal, there under the smirking scrutiny of that Native nature god. Musqueam, maybe? One of those coastal bands. It might be a raven up there, or a beaver, or a bear—Matt never remembers to focus, so he’s left with just the bulging eyes, the heaped slabs of red and black. The imagery was bang on, Mariko’s spiritual deal being so mystifyingly Indigenous these days—a sort of New Age shamanism, as best Matt can figure it, entitling you to wear beads and bits of buckskin along with your hemp and your hanging crystals. All Sophie’s doing, no doubt, though she’s about as Aboriginal as the Queen. On Mariko, more’s the pity, this cultural mishmash looks like some sublime union, some transcendent synthesis. It�
��s as though adepts of every faith have laid hands on her, hung her with their symbols. And then the high heels …

  Bloody hell.

  She said, “Give my love to Zane, eh? I know you’ll change his mind.”

  Which brought on a brand new squirm of doubt. Matt had pretty much persuaded himself that Zane’s death was reversible, that one-on-one he could compel his friend to see the obvious: that letting yourself die was lame, that even the most saintly motivations were pathetic. When Mariko put it like that though, expressed it as an act of faith, Matt suddenly lost his. At what stage had their marriage started to work that way?

  “But if not,” she said, “you’ll be all right, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  That would have been the moment. If she were going to cry, that would have been the time. You could see her refusing—an act of kindness, you could see that too, her sparing him the scene.

  She said, “Got some gum?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”

  He was busy picturing it all in reverse. He was busy picturing a future in which this past would be perfectly rewound. He’d be home again, boomeranged across the country and back. She’d be there to meet him and she’d instantly read the new conviction in his eyes. The old conviction. It was this very airport, after all, into which they’d walked together the day they met on that flight from Toronto. Seven years ago? Almost exactly, that was summertime too.

  MAH-ree-koh. Matt practised it on his bus ride alone into town that day. Chanted it almost, MAH-ree-koh, his new mantra, his one and only mantra. Next morning he checked it out in a baby-name book. “Rounded. Circle. Complete.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “I hope you get a decent movie. Something you can really tear apart.” She grinned, and she gave him one last peck, and she backpedalled into the crowd. She looked … what did she look? Sad, sure, but I’ve-changed-my-mind-don’t-go sad or have-a-nice-life sad? Maybe he should have asked. Was she waiting for him to ask?