The Adjustment League by Mike Barnes Page B

she would never come into it.
    â€œI’m severely ill, Ken. I’ve worked in the past, but I’m unemployable now. That door’s closed.”
    â€œYou seem pretty lucid to me.” Straightening his tie, then bringing his eyes back up to mine. A suspicion that I might be able to trust him after all beginning to germinate. I could feel its tendrils, thin as hairs, somewhere under my breastbone.
    â€œSeeming lucid is what I do. And can almost always do. It’s how I get by.”
    â€œSurely there must be some treatments… I’ve known people who… … depression makes a poor advisor…” I let him go on murmuring these bromides, which in ninety of a hundred cases might be true or partly true, because I knew he needed to get them out of his system.
    â€œKen, I wouldn’t be sitting here if I hadn’t tried everything. Riding a broken merry-go-round and dreaming of the high plains isn’t hopeful, it’s dumb. Especially if the plastic ponies are booby-trapped.” Just confusing him now. No metaphor . “Now, I need you to tell me what, on average, you can make two hundred thousand dollars bring in a month.”
    â€œI can do that. But I’ll tell you before I do, it won’t be enough to live on. Not even close. Especially not in Toronto.”
    â€œI’ll make it be enough.” Arrangements. And hitting me, belatedly, like cold rain after clouds, the surprise that I wanted to make it last. Wanted to live. Just what I’d denied, time after toneless time, to the heads without faces, smooth ovals, on the ward.
    â€œAnd the principal stays put for a rainy day? For an eventual retirement?”
    Stays put for a tsunami . But don’t hit Ken with your world all at once. He’s done well. Better than well.
    â€œFor retirement. You got it.”
    Â§
    Just after 8:00. Ken starts early. So do I. Up at 6:00, after a few hours on the couch that are less like sleep than like mildly sedated wrestling. Eyes open, closed, open—there’s not much difference, the same coiled thrashing. So tired, so fucking bloody tired, so so… and yet. Tired’s only what you’re supposed to be, all you’re supposed to be. Only part of what you are. What’s this now? Like a three-hundred-pound doorman heaving a whiny drunk, energy bounces the drain. Force that surges from within, blooms bursting from your chest and limbs like the Hulk exploding the natural boundaries of Bruce Banner. You’re here .
    Not calm and rested, heavy-feeling. You’ve had the occasional solid shut-eye, eight hours of nourishing oblivion, and there’s no mistaking the difference. This is adrenaline laid over exhaustion. A snort of meth or coke jacking a steady drop.
    Tingling with energy you know should not be there, but still it feels so good, better and better with each second, depletion a cranky neighbour whose moans grow steadily fainter.
    With just that nagging sense of guilt, shitbird cawing erratically from your shoulder—warning that the surge is wrong, to be other than flat-out wrecked is wrong, a violation against input-output regs reliable as gravity.
    Which the first sip of coffee shoots you past, far out into there and neutron star doing. Fatigue and hesitation falling out of view, lifeless planetoids not worth recalling.
    No lobby glass today. This morning’s harvest is tipped recycle bins. Blue maws spilling cans, bottles, newspapers, pizza boxes, takeout cartons, and untied bags of trash passersby chuck in rather than wait till the next city bin. Tenants do, too, some of them. Flip it where it doesn’t belong on their way out, save the ten steps down the hall to the garbage room.
    The other nightwork’s a huge black tag sprayed onto the concrete beside the garage door. A huge square, maybe eight by eight feet, it makes the perfect canvas. Primed by Owner-ordered attempts with wire brush and soapy water to remove previous