There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Chapter One Vic didn’t have much luck with women until he met Paula. He’d been offered s*x by the pimps on Pine Avenue. He had a young woman kiss him for a cab ride after the folk music night, once at a bar. And there was the time he once tried to kiss a woman but she slapped him. He learned to live by himself, loving the lake and the stars and he didn’t like coffee much when he was younger, but he began to drink several cups of coffee every day, and eat a bagel and biscuit every morning in his fourteenth year of college. Paula’s bass guitar and laptop computer were stolen by some roommates, thugs looking for a fix. Her sister was an alcoholic that helped Paula move to Toronto from their hometown of Winnipeg, but, looking for something safer, her sister moved north of Toronto. Paula was looking for her first residence in the city where her sister now lived, just north of Toronto. Toronto had become a filthy place in Paula’s mind. She had a habit of befriending, under her sister’s guidance, the destitute people with addictions and bleak philosophies. Vic met Paula and her sister on Etherington Crescent, both waiting for the landlord to arrive to show the rooms. The three of them stood at the doorstep smoking cigarettes. Paula didn’t say much but her sister spoke on her behalf. They made pleasantries. They hoped the place was nice. It was the middle of the summer, 2014, and the end of Vic’s twelfth year of college. “That’s a nice ring you have, are you close with your dad?” Vic asked. Paula had on a gold ring with the word DAD engraved in it. “No, not really. I really liked it because I thought it said Dan when I bought it.” “Oh! Who’s Dan?” he asked. “Is that your boyfriend?” She didn’t respond and Paula’s sister looked at Vic surreptitiously, with eyelids gravely swooning to closure. She opened her eyes and gave a bright, crooked smile. He wondered what the gesture of Paula’s sister represented. Eventually he would find out. The landlord arrived and Vic chose the room upstairs almost immediately while Paula didn’t speak, her reticence afforded her the musty room in the basement. There was a kitchen upstairs and a kitchen in the basement and on that day they were both tidy. The basement and upstairs were split into two separate, but unlocked apartments. When they moved in, the front door always stayed unlocked. Paula locked the front door every time she went in and out. The other three roommates, including Vic, didn’t care to lock the door. The neighbourhood was safe. Paula had had too many encounters with dangerous people to have felt safe almost anywhere, even in her new home on Lake Simcoe. Vic was spending his days reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the couch upstairs in the first couple of months they lived on Etherington. Paula would go upstairs and lie down on the couch while Vic read. “Do you read a lot?” she asked, on the third time they were together. He admitted he did, every day. Their togetherness, in those days, was serene and brought them comfort, but conversation was sparse. Vic had started making an effort to wash his hair and shave his face regularly. He started buying nice used clothes to look good for Paula. He hadn’t been habitually cleanly in his pleasant solitude, but as her presence became more common, he learned to keep better care of himself. He was walking home from the used clothing store one summer day when he saw Paula walking toward him, wearing a light shirt that looked painted-on. It made Paula’s small breasts more significant. Paula and Vic spoke there, briefly. “This is the first time I’ve seen you outside of the house,” Vic said. “Yes, it would be nice to more often,” she said. “We should go for a walk sometime.” They exchanged phone numbers and eventually arranged a time to walk together. Vic had just been released from the hospital for his schizophrenia and was planning to lock himself in his room for a few months. He got caught urinating in a McDonald’s parking lot uptown because he hallucinated that someone had moved the McDonald’s someplace else. He went looking for the McDonald’s to use the men’s room but when he didn’t see the restaurant in its normal location, and saw no one where the McDonald’s usually was, he exposed himself while relieving himself. Of course, everyone who was there was invisible to Vic in his hallucination, but actually a couple of small children saw Vic expose himself. The police saw a video recording of the incident and caught up with Vic to take him to the psychiatric unit at the hospital. He felt no need to tell that story to Paula, despite thinking about it when she asked where he had moved from, but they walked together to the heart of the city in the sun-beating heat of a late July afternoon. As they were downtown, Vic suggested he needed several l****s of water to bring home with him. He went into the convenience store and bought two six-litre jugs of distilled water. “It’s hot, but do you really need that much water?” she asked. “I need the jugs. It’s for something.” He was planning to use the jugs as urinals for over a month. She offered to carry one of the jugs when the two of them took the wrong bus home and got lost walking back. Paula became tired and overheated and had to lie down on their search for home. She fell onto someone’s lawn in the shade of a tree on one of the passing street corners. Lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff, was a line from a Fleetwood Mac song that Vic coincidentally remembered in that moment. Vic sat in front of Paula in the shade. “This heat is too much,” she said. Vic stroked her thigh. “Is this too much?” he said. She put her arms around his waist. “We should have some drinks sometime.” Paula felt having drinks would appeal to Vic because the men she had known in her past led her to believe that a man’s only pastime was drinking alcohol. “I don’t remember the last time I had alcohol,” he said, and it pleased her that Vic had spent a long time without alcohol. They found home. Paula went to her room to rest. She was tired and sweaty from carrying the heavy water jug for several blocks. Vic left his water under the deacon’s bench at the door. Paula celebrated her birthday with her sister in the middle of August. Paula didn’t drink that night but her sister did. Paula complained to her sister about feelings of loneliness, that she hadn’t met a new man since she left Toronto. Her sister offered to introduce her to some men, but Paula refused to accept the offer because her sister was an alcoholic and knew primarily other alcoholics. “I’m looking for a certain type,” Paula said. Two days later Victor was having a cigarette on the step outside the front door and Paula was on her way out. “I was thinking I might get some beer on Friday,” Vic said. “Sound’s good, I’ll be here. We can drink in my room,” Paula responded. Paula didn’t show the apprehension to their arrangement that she truly felt, but she didn’t have to travel very far to be close to Vic, and she felt the need to be close to a man, particularly a man whom she admired for spending significantly less time drinking than reading books. Paula at one time in her life had a passion for books and reading. Late in the afternoon Friday, the day of their date, Vic brought home twelve beers. He thought that might be enough for the both of them. Paula didn’t remember they arranged to meet, so Vic knocked on her door around seven o’clock at night. She invited him in but she didn’t want any beer. Vic started drinking and they sat together listening to music on the mat she used for a bed. They had in common taciturn personalities. Vic turned up the music when the song Message in a Bottle started playing. “I want to be a writer,” Vic said and turned to her where she lay on the mat. “Have you always wanted to be a writer?” she asked. “I wanted to be a doctor first.” “Why didn’t you?” “Well, I wasn’t so good at school, and they said I was a good singer, and it’s a whole convoluted story, and now I want to be a writer. I’ll write you letters.” “I guess that’s writing. I want you to sing for me sometime though.” “I don’t love singing anymore, but I will.” “What do you love then?” “I love poetry, the lake, the stars, and—” Vic became pensive, looked at his beer. “I love the lake too, and the stars,” she said. Vic noticed he had drunk eleven beers. “Here, you keep this last one, I think I should go to bed,” he said. It was nearing midnight. “I’ll drink with you next time, maybe at the lake,” she said. Vic went back upstairs to bed. When he woke up in the morning he felt a hangover sickness and remembered that he didn’t like alcohol very much. He went out to the front step for a cigarette then went back to bed until the afternoon. Vic didn’t read that day. There weren’t any lights in the living room and by the time he felt like reading, the sun had already gone down. Vic was disappointed. Paula woke up around noon, and noticed the beer Vic had left in her room. She ostensibly heard the guy that lived in the room next to her yelling at her and mocking her. She picked up the beer and hid it in the back of her closet. Her closet had no door, but there was a pile of dirty clothes where the door was supposed to be. She noticed stains of excrement on several pairs of panties lying in the pile. She had the thought to wash her dirty laundry but she just lay back down on her mat and turned on the television. Paula watched television religiously. She watched funny shows, cooking shows, home remodeling shows, interior design shows, but her favourites were the horror movies late at night and any kind of documentary about The Doors or Jim Morrison. For about an hour she watched television then went upstairs to the doorstep for a cigarette. Another b***h-stick, she thought. She was glad Vic wasn’t around, but then the roommate from the room beside her walked up to the driveway carrying a bag and eating a coconut chocolate bar he had just bought from the dollar store several kilometers away. “Nice day,” he said as he walked past her on his way into the house. Paula barely noticed his presence. She was deep in thought, and after he went inside she realized someone had been there, and recalled his words. “Ya,” she replied. Paula had bleached blonde hair, grey eyes, stood just over five feet tall, weighed a hundred pounds, ate sparingly, and thought nothing of skipping breakfast, lunch and dinner on most days. She didn’t have much money for food, let alone money for the overpriced, long, slim cigarettes she found aesthetically pleasing to smoke. She went inside and continued watching television shows. A rerun of Family Feud was supposed to be starting in five minutes. Before Vic went to bed he went out for his last cigarette of the day. He noticed in the ashtray on the step that Paula’s slim cigarettes had been discarded there. The mark of her presence satisfied him. He finished his cigarette and went inside to sleep. In the morning he was excited that he had a chance to finally read again. He waited patiently, building the excitement of seeing her again, until the sunlight came though the large picture window in the living room. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was there on the end table when he curled up on the couch to read. The air conditioning in the house was perfect and he planned to go out for a walk later in the day. Paula came upstairs and curled up on the other end of the couch while Victor read his book. The feeling of her presence elevated the pleasure of his reading. They didn’t speak. They didn’t say hello or goodbye. Vic finished three relatively long chapters by the time the day had turned to dusk then he slowly got up, trying not to disrupt Paula’s peacefulness, leaving to go for a walk before making supper. He grabbed his phone, went out to the doorstep, plugged in his earphones, lit a cigarette, and went for a walk. He walked to the lake to find a good spot to take Paula.