Free Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good by John Gould Page B

to
arrive
in Shangri-La. You sip your caffeinated sludge on the ferry and watch the city shrink astern. You survive the gauntlet of malls and name-brand burger joints and you witness the roadsides gradually greening up around you, thickening until you’re enshrouded in forest, a primeval realm in which various creatures—that deer, for instance, captured mid-leap on the diamond-shaped warning sign—might be imagined to live out their brief lives. Sure, getting there’s a pleasure. The problem is staying put. If you’re Mariko you rejuvenate the gardens, build benches out of burls, fashion Aeolian chimes from old forks. You found a reading group, raise funds for the local halfway house. But what if you
aren’t
Mariko?
    Well, you play house. Matt’s a better-than-decent cook, and prides himself on blindsiding his wife with rare flavours and textures. Thursday night, the night before he set out on this little quest, he hit her with a dandy, Squid in Its Own Ink. A trifle tough, but it still got to her.
    “Whoa, weird,” she said after her first bite. “I can feel his poor little suckers on my tongue. And what a great name.”
    “It’s a metaphor,” said Matt.
    “Huh.”
    So there’s that. When Mariko isn’t around, Matt also does a little gardening of his own. He does it elf-style, weeding and whatnot in an almost undetectable way. This is a habit he picked up from his mum, who’d do little chores for you—clean the cat box when it was your turn, that sort of thing—without ever letting on. “Elf-love” she’d call it if you busted her. Matt’s so crafty he pretty much never gets caught.
    Other than that, though, how do you keep yourself occupied? You sit around, soak it all up. You congratulate yourself on being shrewd enough to buy—okay, to let your wife buy—before prices went crazy. Actually, Matt sank his own cash into the place too. He once calculated that he owns two of the five front steps, plus the entire outdoor shitter. Many mornings he’ll shuffle out to admire this fine, rough-planked structure, maybe roost for a while over its black hole. It’s awfully dark out there though, mushroomy, mossy. The trouble with nature, Matt’s discovered, is that it has all these
trees
in it, and trees turn out to be total sun hogs. Trees, for all the swooning of their bandana-ed huggers, are the ultimate ladder-climbers, great big phallic shrines to ambition. The Lair’s just a couple of hundred yards from the ocean, but between it and that big sky hangs an impenetrable curtain of fir and hemlock. Fuckers.
    On a break from whatever “work” he’s doing, Matt will sometimes “play” his cello. This is pleasing for a bit—it’s okay to be bad, that’s kind of the point—but in time it grows painful. Then he’ll take a stroll down to the beach, wobble along for a while on its kiwi-sized stones. Waves will keep coming in and collapsing, each one a wee catastrophe. It’s a great time to think, but about what? His job? His relationship? His life? That isn’t thinking, that’s just fretting, that’s just freaking out.
    What he’ll do instead is he’ll imagine it all gone. The beach, the high-end, glass-prowed homes that line it, gone. Swamped, swallowed by the sea which will rise soon, as the planet warms and the glaciers and ice caps revert to their liquid selves. This, at least, is what he’ll strive to imagine. Most times he’ll fail. Matt’s just no good at making things go away. His wife, for instance—she’s flagrantly stepping out on him, yet no part of him will credit the notion that he’ll lose her, that she’ll ultimately slip from his present into his past. The Dadinator is dwindling, yet Matt dismisses the image of himself as an orphan. And as for Zane, as for
that
loss? Dream on.
    There’s a faint clamour outside the door of Matt’s suite, a cart creeping past with Starlight-type discretion. Everything’s hushed here, muffled by the inch-thick underlay, the acoustic