Free The Disinherited by Matt Cohen

fitted him into a new history.
    “It’s the sleeping pills,” the nurse said.
    “Nothing else,” he said. The sentence dissolved his present, and left him standing on a Toronto street corner with Miranda, declaiming with a sweeping gesture that included the whole city, the lake which had brought it into being as a one-night stop-over for weary canoeists. Miranda took his outstretched hand and held it to her mouth. She ran her tongue along the tips of his fingers and nibbled gently at his veins.
    “It’s the sleeping pills,” the nurse said. “It takes a while to get used to them. Sometimes, when I change shifts, I take one the first night.”
    “The day my father died I was in town, visiting him. He asked me to go to the store, to get some soup. When I came back he was dead. The doctor said he’d had a heart attack. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been there, he said. There was nothing to be done. Ripped his chest right apart.”
    “My mother died the same way,” the nurse said. “She was eighty-six years old and had gone senile. She wouldn’t walk to the bathroom anymore. She did it on the bed and then crawled around in it, on all fours, playing with it. I have some pills at home and if I ever start to get like that I’ll know what to do. I guess she was happy though.”
    “They were always trying to sneak one over on me,” said Richard. “One time we planted two acres of tomatoes, one for me and one for them. The night before we picked them, it rained so hard they were all nice and clean. Worked all day putting them into wooden crates to take to the cannery. At the end of the day, we’d picked it all, and I noticed that they had more crates than I did. Little buggers, when I wasn’t looking they were stealing my tomatoes. I didn’t say anything though, until I’d made them load their share into the truck.”
    “You see?” Erik had said. He was standing beside the truck and had just passed the last crate up to Brian. “I told you he’d figure it out if we took too many.” For his answer Brian jumped onto Erik from the tailgate and they both went sprawling in the dust. There was a moment: they were rolling over on the ground wrestling when suddenly Erik was on top of Brian with hishands around his neck. “I could kill you,” Erik whispered. He was thirteen and Brian was fourteen. They had long ago traded their toy pistols for real .22’s and boxes of brass bullets.
    “I dare you,” Brian said. He stopped resisting, stretched his long scarred arms out on the ground, and smiled confidently up at Erik. Erik hesitated; this was unexpected. The scars on Brian’s arms showed pink through the dust. Three scars: one on each arm and one on his left cheek, a pink triangle. He could remember when they had brought Brian home, his arms bandaged and the burn on his face bright red, like fire. “Chickenshit,” Brian shouted, clapping his hands into Erik’s face.
    “I had a patient,” the nurse was saying, “who thought he was a monkey. That was when I was working out. You wouldn’t believe who his family was, they lived in one of those big stone houses on King Street, and kept him locked up on the third floor. He wouldn’t eat anything except bananas and red river cereal. It was all one big room and he had it done up like a zoo, with wooden huts and sawdust on the floor. He was very clean; he didn’t shave of course but he kept his nails short. His favourite place was a little stool in the corner. He’d crouch on it all day, making funny noises. There wasn’t anything wrong with him either. I guess he made them nervous and they wanted someone to keep him company. I wouldn’t work at night though and that’s the worst when you’re alone.” She rubbed his hand sympathetically. “My husband was a baker at the penitentiary. He had to get up in the middle of the night to go there and start the bread. Then he’d come home at noon and sleep. After a while he started going earlier, playing