Free The Bourgeois Empire by Evie Christie

COMA. Your deep level of unconsciousness was good for your health in many ways. Insomnia, anxiety and fear were no longer a bother. No one was troubling you with questions, and it was probably fairly true to say that everyone felt very sorry for you. On the outside, people moved around you. You seemed invisible —maybe it was the tubes and bags and curtains. Nadine was likely in and out, looking after you as she always did. You would want to know if her wedding ring was gone—but I couldn’t say.
    A magazine left by one of your kids might be of interest too. It read
Buna or Bust!
A sexy new Canadian reality show in which young girls and guys live the lives of Holocaust victims and perpetrators. In the press photo, Young Charlie posed stoically. What a melodramatic little bitch, you would probably think. She’s the third girl in, if you’re looking for her.
    When they do the Glasgow Coma Scale test they may decide there’s a chance you will come out of this—wouldn’t that be something? As it stands, everyone thinks you were suicidal. You were found in your car, in the garage, holding the gun you were shot with, heavily drugged by your own hand after having missed a thousand or so appointments with your analyst.
    Your wife had said some stuff as well.
    Your timelines were becoming messy, but you had a good memory’s eye for the pretty things. It’s possible you thought about other times, eras, there in your adjustable, courtesy-of- OHIP -and-St.-Mike’s bed—about your circumcision dreams, all the shit that went down between Nadine and you and Richard. (You had argued for years about who left whom, and who still loved each other, and maybe more importantly, who didn’t.) It was possible you’d thought about the early days with your young children and a healthy Bern. That you’d wished you could’ve been different, how you’d never lived, with them, anyway, in the goddamned moment. How it was true, yeah. You were a bastard.
    Or your parents. The bike they humiliated you with when you turned thirteen, its cheap chrome and rubber gleaming as you tossed it off the Bluffs so no one would see it. The unreturned phone calls and finally promising them you would bring your first child to see them and no, you didn’t in the end, all right? Of course you’d wanted to be different, someone else, don’t we all? But what could you have done differently? You’d been manufactured this way. Anything else was simply a physical impossibility. (Blame it on God, for not being there for you.)
    You probably thought again about
The Magnificent Rinaldo
, the magic act your mother took you to when you were feral and raised by the knotty spruce suburbs that could hardly be called suburbs. Where had it been? The Bathurst Community Centre? All of your boyhood friends and their mothers were there; that kid who disappeared from his bedroom (it had a mural of deer in a forest—you felt bad for saying it looked like a “dumping ground”). What was his name? Lester! Goddamn him! The rabbit and hat, silk scarf and big golden box, swords, chains. The minutes before the lights went out:
This is for the ladies; shut your eyes, boys and girls!
Rinaldo, a man—you wondered if your father and this man were the same species—with a chest and sword and hairstyle. You opened your eyes. Could your mother feel your eyelashes against her palm? Your eyes were open. Rinaldo, breaking the chains across his chest with raw power, slashed at his trademark satin-and-velveteen pirate shirt until it fell to the ground, you assumed.
    And his tight black pants which buckled at the zippers (for years likely)—they were gone, somehow—a pull string? Was it supposed to be comical? No. He brought roses to the women, some in his teeth. He came toward you and you felt your mother tense. Was he that disgusting? He was. Your mother was kind and accepted, saying, “Thank you, sir.” There’s nothing
about
Rinaldo, no charisma whatsoever, nothing that justified a