Free The Adjustment League by Mike Barnes Page A

Information Age, there’ll be few spars to cling to. You’ll just eddy in the data, dissolving in bits.
    In the middle of the torn-down room, head cocked. On alert. Hungry for orientation, scoping the human terrain. Are you on an adjustment? Tinglings of a familiar space opening up between my brain and the top of my head, a fizzing lightness that in time will turn murky, as if a swamp is releasing bubbles of gas that have nowhere to go and so build up in pressure. And the sense, basic— something wrong here . Something not right. Itchy, pre-twitch crawlings between my shoulder blades, the muscles there preparing to announce their need to lash out and hit something, grab it and shake hard. Rage heralds.
    Which yield to, or become, a feeling of utter peace. Cool fingers cupping my skull. Hand cap of calm.
    At moments it makes me wonder about myself, this peace I feel with the dead, with empty rooms. It isn’t morbidity, or not just, because at moments I’ll find it with the living and with fully furnished spaces as well. That’s rarer, though, more elusive. Usually the living are like the mall seething around Judy and me yesterday—an insane noise and welter of aimless movement, a ceaseless surf of scams, fool’s errands, and skulduggery.
    Opening the sheers, I stand with Maude at my side—her head coming to just below my shoulder—staring a last time at the trees rising from the swamp, half bare, stretches of dark bark between their coloured flags.
    Searing endless blue. Ash heaps of cloud.
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    At the storage place off Laird in Leaside, Max has left “oral instructions” that “family only” are to accompany the movers inside. Not a man slow to avenge a dial tone . “Sorry, sir, but direct authorization is part of our security package,” says the balding, Brit-accented manager, his voice strong for the stacked receptionist he goes back to ogling. Who by her revolving gum and glazed eyes couldn’t possibly be interested in any package he might produce.
    It’s fine by me. Over their shoulders, I see, on the first of a row of black-and-white screens, Judy and the Strongbacks men unloading the elevator. Tiny Judy float-walking ahead of the two men pushing dollies as they exit through the edge of one screen and appear on the next, walking in light towards carpeted dark, ceiling strip lights coming on ahead of them. Turning corners, more corridors, dark doors to either side, the lights quivering on. Like a girl in a spacecraft’s corridors, her beefy astronaut sidekicks. Like something from 2001 . Or Solaris , the mind-planet plucking people from memory and setting them to run down corridors, sit weeping in metal compartments.
    And takes me back, too, to my four months at U of T. The similar lights in the stacks of Robarts Library. Fort Book. Automated cameras, light strips going on as sensors pick up your approach. All that knowledge sitting waiting in deep dusk the rest of the time. Just four months. September to December . Time enough to awe Lois’s parents, nourishing wild dreams. Lois a bit awed too by the A+ papers and tests coming in on schedule, though she’d never admit it, went catfish-jawed and shook her head, insisting she’d known it all along. Time enough to awe, time enough to appall. What goes up must come down. At least at certain velocities.
    The camera can’t quite see into the Wyvern unit they unlock, roll up the door and start unloading into. Just corners of boxes and totes, a lamp. Probably waiting many years now in the dark, presumably from when the family home was dissolved.
    Alzheimer’s, old age by any name, a retreat under fire, finding smaller and smaller refuges as the enemy advances. Until the last cave, where they find you with your back to the wall, out of ammunition. Butch and Sundance . But Newman and Redford white-haired, supported by walkers? Would never work.
    A better fantasy starts to form but pops