Need Help
BY Gil Adamson
Illustration by Gord Wiebe
I knew it was wrong that I didn’t feel anything looking at it, but I didn’t. I knew exactly what I should be feeling like a recipe: shock, outrage, pity. But, for a long time, my emotions had been strangely inappropriate.
The problem was simple enough; I could fix it myself. The little silver pyx was damaged and the communion wafers inside had all been crushed. Some unknown hand had tried to wrench the lid right off, and one small hinge pin was badly bent. It could be bent back if I could get a set of needle-nosed pliers. The church didn’t have the budget to buy pliers, so I decided the pyx would have to wait until I found someone who could lend me a pair.
For reasons I could not explain I had not been sleeping very well for several months, waking each night with disturbing and mundane dreams. Finally, about four days ago, I stopped sleeping entirely. People have been known to stop sleeping for the rest of their lives; I read that somewhere. I thought about that at four o’clock in the morning as I did my laundry and the neighbour’s dog woofed. It had been woofing all night and I was a little glad I wasn’t trying to sleep through it. Still, it was very strange having all this time on my hands.
I took my laundry upstairs and sat on the couch, folding my shirts on the coffee table. Since I’d stopped sleeping, I’d been struck by how long it takes to do the simplest thing. Trudging upstairs. Waiting for the dryer to finish. Preparing food. And that’s another thing: I’d ceased to taste food, no matter how strong. And yet the scent of things sometimes offended me. I took this change as a strange little warning from my body. I did my best to ignore it.
Trees hung over the streetlamps outside and I sat for a while and stared through the window at them. The leaves were perfectly still and looked wet in the sharp light. I’d noticed the night before that the wind picked up just before the sun rose and the trees began to rustle. I waited for it to happen again. In the hallway, the wooden floorboards creaked, sounding much like someone creeping toward me, but I knew it was just because I had walked along earlier, and the boards were creaking back into place. My shadow following me.
When I arrived at the church the next morning I found a note under the door and, reading it, discovered that it was from the person who had broken the pyx. The note was crazy-looking. I stared at the handwriting as if I were assessing it, but really, I felt like it was assessing me.
It was not a pleasant morning. A man came about the carpet in the cloakroom, which was old and shabby and long past its life. I showed him where it was and stood over him as he bent and tore up the stained carpet, small tacks flying at his shoulder. The carpet peeled back like skin and the floorboards began to show as he worked. I started to feel a horrible fatigue, so I left and sat in the vestry. I looked out the window, turning the note over and over in my hand. It said, “I m sory. I dirty crist body” and some other crazy stuff about how his or her eyes cut people. A very sick, guilty person had been back there, walking around without my knowledge, touching the pyx, perhaps dropping it and hurriedly putting it back where it was. Did this person touch anything else? How often, I wondered, do people come in and I don’t know? This person needed psychiatric help. What if he or she wanted my help?
Later that night I sat and watched the fireplace in my living room. It wasn’t nearly cold enough to justify building a fire, but I felt I deserved the chance to stare at one. I had begun to dread the nights, and yet once it was dark I could simply sit there for hours doing nothing, just thinking. About four o’clock I would decide that it all seemed so normal and it was the daytime that had begun to seem like a chore.
Certainly I had a few problems, like short temper and sudden flashes of pain. But that’s just a body complaining. Staring one day at the cauliflower I’d bought two days earlier, which had turned bad, I had a very physical sensation of anger. It came up through the middle of me and stopped at my throat. Sometimes, too, I would feel unsafe, exposed, but unable to pinpoint what it was I thought might hurt me. And one morning very early I saw a face before me and made a little startled yell. It was a small face, a man’s. It was gone just as quickly as it had appeared, and I stood there, my heart pounding. I realized then that the lack of sleep was beginning to have an effect. I decided to speak to my doctor about it.
“I dirty the body and blod of christ, I want to see jesus, I want to go to jesus, I have comit a sin against god and dirty my body, thanks to jesus the lamb of god, thanks to god, you will too, and everybodie will have sin in me.”
The note was tacked to the church door. I wondered if anyone else had seen it. I pulled it off and went inside. I held the tack in my hand, looked at it. For some reason the tack horrified me. I went into my office to throw it away, but even after I had thrown it away I could still see it in the trash can. The cleaners had been in already and the tack was the only thing in there. I put the tack in an envelope so I couldn’t see it anymore and put the envelope in the trash can. Then I stood and stared out the window. I wasn’t scared. I think of sick people as birds that have been stunned by passing cars. They may fly at you and you may be frightened, but they don’t mean it. If I could see the person and say: “Oh, it’s a young man,” or: “Oh, it’s a woman.” If I could see the person standing before me, everything might make more sense.
I went to the bathroom and after I was done I looked at my face in the mirror. The lack of sleep was certainly showing. I seemed unequipped to smile, and when I tried, my face looked so ghastly I stopped. What was happening to me? It was unthinkable that I hadn’t locked the pyx in its usual drawer. And why had I left it full of wafers? How many other mistakes had I made? I knew I had to go to the doctor. I called her office and got put on hold for 15 minutes. While I waited, I looked out the window to where a couple walked across the grass under the trees outside, and I wondered if people as normal-looking as that were capable of breaking into a church. I wondered what in a person’s life makes it possible. Having faith didn’t seem to help this lunatic; it only made him or her more sick. When the doctor’s receptionist came back on the line I was rude to her. I could hear myself doing it but couldn’t stop.
The doctor gave me some very strong sleeping pills and asked me about my diet and my family. She said insomnia is sometimes a by-product of serious illness, but I told her I felt fine.
“Yes, I think you are fine. But if these don’t work in two days I want to see you again.” I agreed and left holding the pill bottle in my hand. When I got back I found I’d missed a meeting with a ladies group at three o’clock. Of course, there were phone calls I should have made, there was a pile of paper on my desk I hadn’t done anything about, and I couldn’t imagine how to begin. I had been waiting for the sleeplessness to end so I could get on with my work, but it never ended, and so my work waited. I felt like I’d been removed from real life and everything around me was a movie, just interesting enough to keep me watching, the conclusion constantly deferred. I sat down in a chair and looked at the phone. I knew I should have called the ladies auxiliary woman right away, apologized, and made another date. But I just sat there.
I thought about the words “everybodie will have sin in me” and realized with a nasty start that my lunatic had done something to the host—opened the pyx and done something to the contents. It was so childish, digging around in a little box, perhaps saying blasphemies. Had the host been crushed on purpose? I felt I should go and look but instead I just sat there. You are responsible for your own life, for the things that happen. You can’t be a coward about it. I was responsible for my life and the lives of others as well, and yet I really wished that something could come between me and this person. I wished he or she was someone else’s problem and not mine.
It was no use staying at the church, so I decided to go home, take a pill and try to sleep. There was a glimmer of hope in me that this insomnia would end and I would wake up the next day and be myself again. I walked down the steps of the church and the sun fell over me in spots through the trees. When I was on the grass I looked across to the parking lot and saw that I had parked my car very poorly. It was right across two spaces and the wheels were turned sharply to the right. I never park that badly. I walked toward it and tried my best to remember parking, but I couldn’t.
When I got in the car I smelled something, a faint odour of plastic, like a child’s beach ball left in the sun. I opened the window but couldn’t tell if the smell was coming from outside or inside. Suddenly, disastrously, my mind barked that a stranger had been in my car. I swivelled around, but the back seat was empty. Of course it was empty. I turned the key and the engine started. I put it in gear, pushed the accelerator; the car hurtled forward and struck a signpost at the gates to the parking lot. The pole disappeared under the hood.
I sat back and felt my forehead. There was a hard, hot point where I had hit it on the glass, and there was a mark on the windshield. And yet I felt nothing.
A person is never safe, I thought, because it comes from inside. All the good and all the bad. These words came to me as if they were a quote, “All the good and all the bad.”
The man who had been doing the carpet had just arrived in his truck. He ran toward me across the parking lot. He was smiling. What I’d done must have looked funny to him. His hands were big and square, and his face was square too. He ran up and, as I watched him through the windshield, I knew I could trust him, I could tell him about the notes and about how I wasn’t sleeping. I watched him coming, and for once I wasn’t frustrated at how long things took, how slowly time went by, because I needed time to think, to put the facts in order, so this man could understand me, so he could help me.
