The Withdrawal Method

  THE WITHDRRWRL METHOD

  THE

  WITHOPRWRL

  METHOD

  STORIES

  PRSHR MRLLR

  CONTENTS

  The Slough I i

  Big City Girls 1 43

  The Film We Made About Dads 1 59

  Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out 1 67

  Long Short Short Long 1 91

  Dizzy When You Look Down In 1 107

  Being Like Bulls 1 137

  The Love Life of the Automaton Turk 1 175

  Pet Therapy 1 213

  The Past Composed 1 241

  Timber on the Wheel of Everyone 1 263

  Respite 1 283

  When Jacques Cousteau Gave Pablo Picasso a Piece of Black Coral 1 315

  THE SLOUGH

  i

  "1 SHOULD PROBABLY tell you," she said, swallowing coffee, "that I'm about to lose my skin."

  "What? Is that an expression?"

  "No, not an expression. People's skin cells rejuvenate every seven years. Usually it's gradual, but I've been using something to make it happen all in one go."

  "What?" He put down his knife and fork. There was something suddenly disquieting about the idea of bacon. "How does this work? What do you use?"

  "It's a topical cream," she said.

  "Topical? Do you mean like up-to-date? Current?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "No, but this cream - where do you get it? Do other people do this?"

  Her arms, those two pink Ls that began at the sleeves of her T-shirt and ended clutching cutlery on the tabletop, seemed normal enough: not peeling, not cracking, not even dry. "I got it at a specialty store. It's - "

  "Is this going to happen like a snake? Like you'll just drop your skin and then it'll be sitting there in the shape of you?"

  "I can't believe you're making a big deal of this. It was going to happen anyway."

  "Right, so why not make a goddamn spectacle of it? Jesus." The lump of scrambled eggs on his plate was a jaundiced brain. The bacon looked like strips of pig, sliced off and then fried in their own sizzling fat. "When is this going to happen?"

  "When?" She shrugged and took a bite of her toast. He waited, watching her jaw work. Nothing flaked away from her chin or cheeks; no skin snowed down onto her empty plate. She stared back at him. "Any day now."

  "Like, maybe tomorrow?"

  "Like, maybe today."

  HE HAD FELT, lately, that his life had become a raisin - if only he'd got to it sooner, when it was ripe from the vine and bursting with juice! But no, it had shrivelled. If he handed out his life to trick-or-treaters at Halloween, a retributive bag of feces would appear flaming on his doorstep. Or maybe someone would pee on his mail.

  She, on the other hand, was always up to something new. For the past few months she had been working toward a distance-education master's in film something, film and feminism. So there were countless DVDS that needed viewing. That evening they sat on the couch together to watch the next off the pile. It was a Hitchcock picture, and after some business in a hotel the action moved to a train.

  "Oh, I know this one," he said.

  "No, you don't," she said, putting on her glasses, getting her notebook ready. "Hush."

  "No, I do - it's the one where the one guy kills the other guy's wife or something, and the other guy has to do it too. Kill the first guy's wife, I mean."

  "That's Strangers on a Train. And you only know it from that Danny DeVito movie."

  "Possibly."

  "This is different. It's about a woman who goes missing. She's a spy."

  "Oh, right," he said, and within minutes was asleep. The dream he had involved Alfred Hitchcock and something about a riding crop, and snakes, everywhere, shedding skin after skin. He had to fight his way through the papery wisps of them hanging like streamers in the air. Was she in it? Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to find her.

  When he woke it was to a puddle of drool against his cheek and her undressing.

  "What's going on?" He sat up and wiped his face on his shoulder.

  "The movie's over. I'm going to take a shower."

  "No, not with the movie - with you, with this skin business? What is this about?"

  "You're still on about that?" She sighed, standing there in her underwear: the pink of her body banded twice in white cotton. And then she disappeared down the hall and the lock on the bathroom door went click and the shower went whoosh and he was left alone with what was on the only channel they got on their broke-dick Tv: figure skating.

  "Why?" he yelled at the bathroom door, the shower hissing back at him. "Why?!"

  WHAT WAS THE reason they had moved in together? He couldn't remember. Peer pressure, maybe, from married and responsible friends. Or mutual coercion. Or Catholic guilt, although they weren't Catholic.

  At any rate, here they were, and there shouldn't be secrets, not in relationships - wasn't that a basic tenet, like not poisoning each other's smoothies and alternating turns cleaning the oven? What had she been getting up to in the bathroom? In the mornings something would happen in there and she would come out riding the gusts of an expensive smell. In the evenings the shower would come on and fifteen minutes later she would emerge towel-turbaned and otherwise naked. But now there was this business with the cream and the shedding skin - not the life he had signed up for. They'd engaged in talk of "some space," sure, but he also felt a right to know, after seven years together, what was going on.

  The following night she disappeared into the shower while he sat watching figure skating again. Twenty minutes later here she came, a rosy fakir, all loofahed and nude and clean with steam billowing behind her. She sat on his feet and got out a bruise-coloured nail polish, while on the TV the figure skaters ice-danced and he waited for one of them to fall. He looked down at her feet, up her legs, her stomach and breasts, all the way to her face. From head to toe her skin glowed in one taut, moisturized, perfect piece. Back on the TV, a fellow in a sequined pantsuit was spinning an equine-looking woman by the legs, round and round, to "Devil with a Blue Dress On."

  "Come on, fall," he said, slapping the coffee table. "Fall, you fuckers. Fall, fall, fall!"

  One by one her toenails went purple. By the time they were dry the skating program was over. Someone had won: there were flowers and a microphone thrust at the winners' weird smiles. He switched the TV off, and unspeaking they clasped hands and stood and went to the bedroom and had sex there, on the bed. He climbed on top and she said, "Plow me, baby!" and he said, "Okay," and plowed her for all he was worth.

  But the plowing seemed mechanical. They were doing the right things and making the right noises, but there used to be a time when she'd flip him over and grind away on top and they would come together like champions. Now, not so much: she lay there with her knees in the air and when he finished it was onto her belly with a gasp. She patted his back, twice, and he rolled off and she rolled away, wiping his sperm from her body with a T-shirt.

  They lay there side by side in the dark until her breathing slackened and he knew she was asleep. He began sweeping the sheets for flakes of her. Nothing, not even that improbable bed-sand he had experienced with previous lovers, way back when. But who was to say that he wouldn't wake to a husk of a woman beside him, the new version off in the kitchen crafting a morning latte?

  He reached over and ran his hand along her thigh, up her stomach, her breasts, shoulders, neck, face, the skin smooth all the way. He felt for a rift from which the whole thing might be beginning to peel away, like cling-wrap from a ham. He would flatten down the loose edge, tuck her back into herself, and there would be no more talk of new anything and that would be that. But there was nothing; she was seamless. Casually, his hand drift
ed to her crotch, to the soft frizz of her down there. Her chest rose and fell, steady as waves. He lay his palm like so and eased a finger in, just to see: things were damp inside, and warm.

  "WHAT I WANT is a record. A document."

  Finally, they were getting somewhere. "Explain," he said.

  "Think of all you've done in the last seven years."

  He thought for a while, and then stopped, because it was depressing.

  "Okay, notyou specifically, but ... anyone. People."

  "You."

  "Me, sure."

  "I would think of all you've done in the past seven years, but it would involve that yoga instructor who was on the scene for the first few months when we started going around together - before you ditched him, thank Christ - and that makes me sad for you. It makes me want to take you in my arms and kiss you." He shuffled his chair over, leaning toward her, puckering his lips. "Very quickly, and very hard."

  She pushed him away. "Shut up. Seven years of your life, just flaking away, gone. This year I'll have all of them, my whole body, in one piece."

  "And then what? You'll just keep it around? Are you going to press it like a dried flower or something, make a giant bookmark?"

  "I don't know. It might not even work like that. I just..."

  "The thing I don't get is why you'd tell me this now. You've been doing these cream treatments for how long?"

  "I got it just before we met. I started pretty much right around our first date."

  "Oh god."

  "You should be happy! It's like I knew all along that you'd be here for the end." She looked at her watch. "Man, I'm going to be late for work."

  "If it happens there, will you bring the skin home? Or just pin it up in your cubicle with coloured tacks?"

  But she was already standing with half a waffle wagging from her mouth, and putting on her coat, and now the bike helmet, and removing the waffle to kiss him on the cheek, and out the door, and gone. Left with the buzz of the fridge and his half-eaten grapefruit, he registered what she had said: "For the end." What the hell did that mean?

  He went to the bathroom and rooted around in the medicine cabinet for this magical cream, whatever it was. But she had for some reason transferred everything to generic plastic containers. Some of the creams were a mysterious robin's egg blue, others white, others just cream-coloured, the colour of cream. He unscrewed the lid of one and sniffed. And another. And another. They all smelled like her. Or like little fractions of her: coconut + aloe + pink, etc. He crowded all the open bottles together in the sink, took a towel and ducked down and draped it over his head so it formed a sort of cave. With the towel trapping the aromas, he inhaled.

  Close.

  He was late for work. And then, perfect: the fucking subway stalled between stations. After what seemed like ages another train pulled up on the adjacent track and sat there too. He looked in through the lighted windows at the commuters: the frustration on their faces, all those briefcases on all those laps. His own briefcase, on his own lap, had been her idea. "You can't go to work with a plastic bag!" she had told him one day. "But all I take is a sandwich," he had said, to which she had replied, "Well, take your sandwich to work like a man."

  But then there was movement. His train was pulling forward. He watched the other train go by, the faces of the passengers sliding past, the lights of the windows fading until they were gone and nothing was left, just an empty track where the train had been. And that was when he realized that he hadn't moved at all. The other train had left. His still sat in the dark of the tunnel, waiting for some signal so it could go.

  He thought about this skin business, and about the sex they'd had the night before, purposeful and sterile. He admitted to himself: lately things had gone stale. Maybe something new was just what they needed - a new DVD player, sure, but even better, a new skin. And as the train creaked into motion he began to come around to the idea, and then he was excited, and he was checking and rechecking his cellphone for reception so he could tell her, and was doing this with such fervour that he missed his stop.

  By now he was half an hour late for work, so he got out of the subway to call in and let them know - what, that his girlfriend had that morning had an emergency, making implied references to her private parts. That sort of thing worked every time. And then he would call her and say, "Yes, your new skin is just what our relationship needs!" But his phone wasn't working and now the battery was on its last blip of power too.

  He was in that part of town where sweaters made from Guatemalan llamas were sold in abundance and everyone smelled like hash. Making his way to street level, he heard music - a song he recognized but couldn't place, played soft and sad nearby.

  At the top of the stairs sat a fat man playing the flute. Two CDs bearing the fat man's picture were propped against a yogurt container with a quarter and a penny in it. And now a loonie - cling! - and he made his way out, a dollar poorer, into the neighbourhood, acting as though he had somewhere to go, a place where he was needed, someone to see, trying to find somewhere his dying cellphone would work.

  A store to his left was selling bongs and bongos. Out front loitered the expected clientele, who eyed him as he slouched by with his briefcase, phone aloft like a compass.

  Here was a retailer of used clothes with a rainbow of jeans pinned over the doorway. Here was a place called The Anarchist Bookstore with a sleeping cat in the window. Here was a medical clinic of some description, and here was - hello! - Your one-stop shop for natural remedies, and then there was some Chinese writing on the sign.

  The door chimes were wooden and knocked against one another like bones. A woman sat working the counter. "Hi!" she yelled, smiling.

  "Hi," he said. "Do you sell a skin cream -"

  "Skin creams, in the back!"

  "Okay!"

  "In the back!" She pointed past a rack of soaps that were flecked with what looked like dirt. "In the back!"

  "Thank you!"

  In the back were shampoos made from all sorts of improbable concoctions, remedies for ailments he didn't know could afflict human beings, things that were technically foods but you were meant to rub into your feet. And skin creams. A shelf stretched from the floor of the shop to the ceiling, full of skin creams. "Good Christ," he muttered.

  "Need help?!" screamed the woman.

  "No!" he screamed back. "Thanks!"

  But, yes, he most certainly did. All of the containers were the same: a label featuring a bushel of herbs superimposed over an alpine scene and the brand name, Nati.ir. There was never any explanation of what anything was supposed to do -just a list of exotic plants meaningless to anyone except, he imagined, the sorts of people who hugged too long, always.

  But then, right at the bottom, wedged into a corner of the shelf, there was one that was different: Formula 7, in a metal jar. He picked it up and was amazed by its weight - as though the container were filled with pennies. He had to put his briefcase down and hold it in two hands. The metal was cool.

  At the counter, the woman working eyed him suspiciously when he placed the Formula 7 in front of her. This time she didn't yell but spoke in a hushed, crackling voice that suggested Eastern wisdom, or laryngitis. "You know what that is?"

  "I think so. Is it the cream that -"

  She waved her hand. "Four hundred dollars."

  "Oh," he said, and suddenly realized what song the fat man had been playing on his flute: "The End," by the Doors, whom he loathed.

  AT WORK NO one seemed to notice, or care, that he had been missing all morning. From the phone in the stockroom he called her at her office.

  "Baby! I found it! The cream!"

  "Oh, no. You didn't."

  ,,of course, I didn't! It's four hundred dollars! But I'm excited. I think it's going to be good. It's going to be great."

  "What were you doing out there, anyway? I thought you hated that part of town."

  He spoke in a whisper. "Has it started yet?"

  "No. No, nothing. I don't
think it'll happen at work."

  "How do you know? Are there signs?"

  "A woman knows these things."

  Was she joking? Since when did she talk like that? Since when was she "a woman"? But, he realized, she was right. A woman knew things, all sorts of things. Did she? Probably.

  THAT NIGHT HER homework was a Marilyn Monroe picture. He liked Marilyn Monroe - or her bosom, anyway, although he hadn't seen any of her movies.

  "Oh, you'll know this one. That scene of her on the subway grate, with her skirt blowing up -'Isn't it delicious?' That's this one."

  "Isn't what delicious?"

  She gave him a look. "Just put the movie on."

  He did. She took up her notebook and sat there in her glasses tapping her teeth with a pen and occasionally jotting something down. After a few minutes, he fetched a notebook of his own, one with a fancy leather cover her mother had given him one Christmas and he'd never used.

  If after the skin change she emerged a different person, he figured it would be useful to have a record of how she used to be. This he wanted to seem covert but mysterious, and kept eyeing her at the other end of the couch and saying, "Oh!" and then scribbling something down. But she was watching the movie and working and didn't ask what he was up to.

  Stats were first: height, weight, hair colour, birthdate, and so forth. Then he moved into slightly more personal information. Her favourite food was tomato soup, she had lost her virginity at seventeen while watching The Hunt for Red October, her desert-island disc was Graceland, and she could not abide the squeak of Styrofoam against Styrofoam or the thought, even abstractly, of eels.

  And then he wrote this: I like the way she scrunches her eyes up like a little kid when she eats something she doesn't like. He wrote, Sometimes she laughs too loud in public and I complain but really I find it amazing. He added, Sometimes I find her amazing.

  YEARS AGO, FOR their second Valentine's Day together, they decided to eat at separate restaurants - the idea being that loneliness would reinforce their love. It worked: he pushed his food around pathetically with an empty chair across the table, the over-attentiveness of his waiter a poor mask for pity. Later, he clutched her in bed with what could be described only as desperation. It had become a Valentine's Day tradition ever since.