Free The Disinherited by Matt Cohen Page A

poker with the guards I guess, so for the last five years I hardly ever saw him. I moved to my mother’s: it was a week before he even knew I was gone. One Sunday he asked me to come back but I wouldn’t. Said I’d rather be alone in my
own
bed if it came to that. I never saw such a man for eating doughnuts.”
    Richard had gone to Toronto to visit Erik once. He hardly recognized the city, it had over-run its old perimeters and gutted itself of most of its trees. The house he had lived in, a threestory redbrick house with an always freshly-painted verandah, had been torn down to make way for a zoology building. When Richard Thomas went to university he was older than most of the other students. There had been two winters when it snowed too much for him to be able to get to school. He had spent them with his father, Simon Thomas, on the other end of a bucksaw, taking firewood out of the elm swamp. And the year after he finished high school his mother had been very sick, so he had stayed home that year too. He was to be a lawyer but first, Simon said, knowing but not knowing what it meant, he was to become a gentleman. They studied the university calendar with the same care as the Eaton’s catalogue, trying to familiarize themselves with the whole thing before making a selection: finally history and philosophy were selected as those subjects most conducive to gentility.
    “It’s different when you’re young,” the nurse said. “It hurts but you know it’s going to go away. My mother used to say that the grass comes up green every spring. That was before she went strange. She didn’t want me to go back to him, either. She said he was playing around up at the hotel. And here I’d thought he was just playing cards.” She put her hand around Richard Thomas’s wrist again. He could feel her fingers sliding around, dissatisfied with his pulse. “I guess most men are just animals. Even with the monkey-man I didn’t dare turn my back: he was so
fast
, I don’t think there was anything wrong with him at all.”
    He imagined his body was divided into zones, like a butcher’s diagram of a cow. But there were only two kinds of zones, pain and numbness, and gradually the pain was migrating through the dotted lines, occupying new territory. His chest was still sore: from shoulder to shoulder and down to the bowl of his stomach. His rib-cage felt like it had been shaken and rattled by a steam drill. His left hip, for no reason at all, seared every time he moved. Perhaps he had been limping on the way home, had somehow irritated a nerve. His legs and arms hardly seemed to exist. He felt the nurse’s touch but from a great distance: he might have been watching it on television. As always when he had a fever, he was strangely aware of the points of connectionbetween his hair and his scalp. The movement seemed to be downwards. The pain would infiltrate his right hip and then continue down into his genitals and legs. The only place finally exempt would be his left arm. He had tried to move it earlier, for the doctor, and had barely been able to lift it off the bed.
    She was speaking again but he couldn’t hear individual words. Her voice jumped and faded, turned harsh and grating, then was just a thin background noise. She was holding a glass of water to his mouth. He could feel the rim cold against his lip. He stuck out his tongue for the pill, dry and chalky, then let his jaw relax so it could be poured down him. He opened his eyes and saw earth banked up on either side of him. There was a slit of light at the top and as he watched it widened into a rectangle of sky with bodies stretching far away from the line where the earth met the air.
    “Doesn’t he look nice,” a voice said. Other voices murmured; they bent down to examine him and dark round patches blocked the grey light. They had folded his hands across his stomach, stretching his fingers wide apart so they could be meshed together like a child in