Inflation
by Jonathan Bessette
Steven trips through the front door at 5 a.m. with Kim in tow. He swears the Blundstones on top of the other piled shoes had grabbed him. Carla slinks into the hallway wearing the silk red pyjamas he bought her in Singapore—he promised not to make noise when he got back. Kim and Carla exchange muted helloes standing in the kitchen; no one wants to wake Eve.
“I’m gunna head off,” Kim says while Steven goes to pull out his phone to arrange a Lyft, but he’s lost it, probably back on the overpass when things got desperate and he jokingly compared himself to Young Werther. Carla calls Kim a taxi. Everyone says goodbye. Steven stands next to the stove boiling water. He examines Carla’s puffy eyes—every night for months Eve’s crying made them more unhinged than any of the drug trips they’d ever taken. Now, with some stability and expected bedtimes, they let each other go out occasionally. Strong pour-over coffee settles his stomach. His wife wants to hear about the grime and glam of the night. Orange light filters in through grey drapes. He stares at a boarded-up building where after-hours dance music pounds out dully across Chinatown. He never wanted to be a gentrifier. But he had wanted to be a father.
Carla withholds opinion as he finishes sharing with lots of hand talk over the kitchen table. She caresses his white knuckles, and says, “What are we going to do?” And even though he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, he knows what she’s talking about. All night she’d called—when he goes out, he tends to binge, he blacks out. Her sniffles on the phone could’ve been sickness, sadness, could’ve been a bump from the baggy of MDA a friend had given her as a b-day gift last week. But Carla loves phone calls. The subtle vibrations that haunt the strange auditory spaces, listening to someone’s voice skitter, swirl down the eardrum, touch the brain. Maybe she just wanted to chat? Every day she calls her sister in LA. Her best friend in Montreal. Music was her passion before getting a WFH job at a marketing firm. DJing in underground after-hours clubs on weekends didn’t pay the bills.
“I’ll get a second job,” he says.
“Let’s talk about the old times.”
Carla snorted a little MDA, she explains. Steven smiles, they kiss, tell each other they love each other. His sheepish sighs remind her of his awkward grade twelve mumbling before they travelled Thailand and Cambodia together, drinking magic mushrooms and floating on innertubes. Carla transferred into his grade ten class. The first year after grad, they fell in love at a rave. A year later, they moved into a dumpy basement suite on the outskirts across from Playland Theme Park, trying every drug during evenings after stocking shelves at Value Village—snorting meth, nights on GHB, parachuting pressed caps, bumping K. Afterwards, they spent three years in an open relationship before stumbling into City Hall sober as all hell to John Hancock some documents.
Steven fills up his mug a second time, dips the pot at Carla but she doesn’t want any. He preaches what he’d like to practice, “How come every hetero couple severs from community and friends whenever they have a kid—we could be like the queer community and bring children into a village, instead of using children as an excuse to build kingdoms of isolation.” Carla waves him off. He nods, recognizing a mistake he may have made because he always talks like this after hanging out with Kim, who’s a professor—he wants to have bigger ideas. He prefers quiet anyway. Likes to stay home to clean dishes, make minestrone for the week while singing; he thinks about how Carla washes the floors, sits at the coffee table to write up the meal prep—we’re a launched failure to launch, he thinks. His job stacking shelves at a grocery store and the evening classes he’s taking to learn programming leave him depressed. They used to talk about moving to Colombia, buying a small property and renting it out as an Airbnb—but that was so neo-colonial. She sees how tired he’s been, giving up more friendships, washing dishes by hand every day, becoming an expert in removing clothing stains by massaging powdered peroxide into poop or vomit. Her friend group had dwindled too. She’d blamed Steven—she has outbursts sometimes. They take turns playing saviour/victim. Except for once. That vacation in Oaxaca. Walking the dusty streets at night holding hands, listening to the sounds of families shouting, laughing, singing in their villas—couldn’t we be that thing?
So, they go into the second bedroom. Stand next to the crib.
“Is it a cliché to be proud we made her?” he says.
Eve’s tiny body, no bigger than a laptop, is curled into her handcloth-sized blanket decorated in yellow unicorns. The crib always makes Carla think of a prison—which, it ostensibly is, but for protection. She read Motherhood in her third trimester as a part of her strategy for addressing parenthood. Steven read it too. Both, surprisingly, end up with maternal instincts. But more often, they shout and sigh and throw tantrums. It’s much harder than it looks on TV. They’d repressed the first time they shouted at Eve for crying because they couldn’t escape. When tiredness overwhelmed them, their irritation became explosive. His OCD created organized anxiety. Her ADHD meant they’d always have something new to consider. They blamed each other. Looking down on the cliché connecting them in ways they never thought possible, Carla puts her hand on Steven’s bony fingers.
“Do you think we’d be better parents if we weren’t together?”
They go for a walk with this question—Eve never wakes up this early anyway.
Outside in the empty morning, they stroll up the grassy hill to a park. They hash out a plan on a bench: back to microdosing and CBT therapy, back to inviting friends over instead of going out. Having a second child would give Eve a sibling, make them a real family. When they’re in agreement like this, Steven can’t imagine being with anyone else. She’s the most unflappable person he’s ever met. They hold hands and listen to the squawking seagulls soaring overhead. It’s almost Oaxaca again.
Back at the apartment entryway, Steven searches his pockets for keys while Carla shrugs because she’s in pyjamas and a red cardigan. After briefly sniping at each other’s reliability, they ring the building manager which they haven’t had to do in almost a year. When he lets them in, yawning, he doesn’t speak and they part ways in the lobby full of fake fig trees someone in the building keeps watering. Steven exaggerates his tiptoeing and they start to laugh as they go to check on Eve again. But she’s not in the crib. Staring at the blanket laid out flat, neither understands. Carla closes her eyes and pinches her forearm until it’s pink. Steven examines the blanket to see if Eve’s somewhere in the folds. Hurrying around the room, they lift pillows, peer under the dresser, open the closet, unlock the window to look onto the balcony. Steven hesitates to call her name, as if a lost dog, not that she knows herself by name yet, but he whispers the syllables afraid Carla will hear him treat Eve like a pet.
For the next hour, they search inside every drawer, the oven, freezer, everywhere. They hadn’t locked the door when they left to go to the park, they couldn’t have, because they’d forgotten their keys. Someone must’ve come in and taken Eve.
They start knocking on doors. One opens. Then another. Upset neighbours grumble until Steven and Carla stutter the phrase, “Someone took our baby.” It feels comically baffling to say. A few join the search party. Someone offers to call the building manager, the police. Carla starts and stops crying so many times she’s faint. Steven bottles the pain but his knees hurt, and he wants to blame his parents for some reason. After an hour of disrupting everyone in the building, most returned to their apartment. The police meet them at the entrance and take their statement in the lobby next to the fake fig trees. An older couple stays around to see if they need anything, offering tea and breakfast.
“No thanks, we need to rest.”
Anxiety keeps them pacing on the black and white kitchen tiles. They call their startled parents, ask if they’re babysitting. Without explanations, they hang up. Each set of parents sits stiff in bed not sure whether to call back—embarrassed, worried about their children’s child.
Steven wonders if he should retrace his night—he’d lost his phone, forgotten his keys, maybe somehow, he’s lost his baby? Carla says, yes, even though this train of thought is scary. She says “yes” because what else are they going to do? Sit in their empty apartment and wait for someone else to do something? Inactivity seemed bad parenting. Searching for a delusion felt more real.
With hyperextended emotions, they get dressed, walk to the SkyTrain. The rough rails screech as they turn toward the chalky mountains, twinkling under the night rolling off the back of the tired earth—a group of young men dressed in Carhartts and orange vests shout neologisms and shatter Alex’s daydreams about washing Eve in the plastic baby bath, scrubbing her dry while she giggled. It’s Saturday, why are they going to work? Everything feels absurd. A recording of Seth Rogen announces the next station. Steven points toward the first pub a few blocks away, where he and Kim sat at a roundtable, and a white-bearded patron made advances. He stares into the shadowy room of stacked chairs. Carla looks at him like he knows what to do.
At the next pub, he talks about a middle-aged cover band with matching checkered shirts, who played Willie Nelson and Loretta Lynn. Everyone swayed hips like rusty barn doors. That’s where he’d met Charlie, the cute bartender Steven tried to kiss in the bathroom after several whiskeys. Carla loves this pub on Hastings where the music is a cloud, an ocean, a warm body. Steven narrates his night as if there’s a clue here. Carla holds her breath and counts to ten.
At a corner store, they stop for greasy heat lamp pizza and eat outside while getting offers for heroin and crack. Oil drips all over their hands. A tiny white lady with orange teeth asks Carla for money.
“How much do you want?”
“Oh, I could use about ten dollars, or fifteen if you had it, or even twenty,” she says and laughs, “The price of drugs is even going up.” Carla hands over a green bill with a frowning Queen Elizabeth soon to be replaced by a reptilian Charles. The glassy sheen of the plastic polymer reminds her of how oil is the new gold, soon to be overtaken by information, soon to be overtaken by disinformation, soon to be overtaken by gold.
“You can even buy gold bars at Costco now,” she says to no one.
Wandering into a parkette to finish their breakfast, looking up at the Ponderosas furry with needles, they find a bench. Steven explains the heart-to-heart he had with Kim here, about being a bad father, a bad husband. It’s easier sometimes to sit and not say anything. He thinks about the chemically-treated softwood lumber cut into bench planks and its proximity to the growing trees in the boulevard. Carla is probably going to leave him. He’s never really treated her like she deserves—and sometimes he doesn’t care that he doesn’t—and sometimes she doesn’t care that he doesn’t. And they both think they are horrible people.
They stand outside a nondescript warehouse on the block Chip Wilson is slowly buying up with money from his spandex empire and rebuilding for posh kids from the suburbs—kids they once had been. Steven found after-hours music that loosened his heart as the THC gummies relaxed his bones. He wiped sweat and tears off his face as he turned to liquid in front of the speakers. They trek east past the warehouse. In the middle of an overpass, his phone lays face down against the cement barrier. Miraculous. His shaky fingertips fumble at the password. Carla opens it with her calm gestures, checks his messages, texts, social media—no word from their baby.
They’re the only people on the bus. They hold hands.
It’s almost like they’d shared the night together.
Slumping in through their door, they hear the chirps of Eve’s crying. Running into the baby’s room they grab the doorframe—there she is, wrestling herself awake. Horrified, passing her back and forth, cuddling, they try to stop her, because, she’s upset, because, maybe they’re bad parents. Did they have to call back the police and tell them what happened? Steven holds Eve against his chest and strokes her back the way that soothes best. Carla massages her tiny raisin-sized toes and shakes her head uncontrollably. Had there been some optical illusion that made it look like she wasn’t in the crib? How had she managed to sleep through all the noise of them searching the apartment?
Tired, still drunk and maybe a little high, Steven blames himself. But Carla feels mania coming as they sit on the couch while she feeds Eve, watching the news about forest fires, atmospheric rivers, landslides, sea temperature rise, another wave of COVID, war, the nearing recession, the price of food. Nothing happened. And searching for delusion somehow brought “nothing” back to normal. But their decision from earlier, before the disappearance, when they walked around the dewy park decided on a second child, becomes a painful ripple in the pond of their relationship. Maybe they should’ve renounced having children in the face of climate change. When neither can keep their eyes open anymore, they put Eve back into the crib which causes her to start crying.
In bed, letting their child cry it out, Carla wonders if she’ll ever tell Eve about this night—about how she disappeared into thin air. How they searched the world for her but she’d never left the crib. Carla promises that this won’t ever happen again. But what did happen? Steven holds his wife’s shivering body under the sheets. The alcohol and THC finally metabolize. His muscles and bones solidify, steady. She nods off asking if he’s okay. Are you okay? Are you okay? Yawning, midday light fills the room but he’s so exhausted he can’t respond. Carla is already wheezing. Eve’s sad moans turn into a murmur—the anxiety of her parents diminishing. A family quietly asleep on a Saturday afternoon in their one-bedroom apartment. The soft sirens of fire trucks, police cruisers, and ambulances almost reassure.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Jonathan Bessette is a hobby astrologer, gamer, gardener, and anarchist. He lives in the unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nations. He’s a founding member of Held Magazine and published writing in The Antigonish Review, Adbusters, Quil and Quire, CV2, and The Capilano Review. @jonathan.m.bessette on Instagram. jonathan-bessette.com