Happiness of Fish by Fred Armstrong Page B

slow way around the mall out of plastic air.
    Gerry hopes today’s cowardice is temporary. On other days he has stopped where March sits Paul on the wide ceramic edge of a flowerbox while she fetches them cups of tea. She blows on his, making sure it’s cool enough, like a drink for a small child. On other days they have spoken, although it is the same conversation each time.
    â€œIt’s Gerry,” March says, nodding at him, willing him into existence for her father. “Gerry Adamson.”
    â€œGerry?” It is always a question.
    â€œYes, Gerry,” Gerry says helpfully, joining in to see if force of numberscan help win the argument behind the furrowed brow.
    â€œOh yes, Gerry... That’s right.”
    Paul is always pleasantly surprised, even relieved. He always says that it’s right, as if to convince himself that he’s solved the puzzle. Still, he seems a bit shy, a bit embarrassed about how long he’s had to let Gerry’s name wander in his mental pitted no-man’s land before it could be recognized as a friend.
    The mall has been redecorated now, but some years ago it was hung with huge banners of puffins. Gerry used to jot down notes about them. They struck him as immensely remote, ethereal and smug, looking down on the mall with their heraldic silken eyes with the accent
çirconflex
marks over them. Quizzical, avian Groucho Marx stares followed Gerry as he waltzed a sense of his own mortality around the mall.
    In another bright January some years ago, Gerry got confirmation that he was not going to die right away. He had suspected as much, but the fact that there was doubt had created what he still thinks of as “The Longest Fall.” It’s a bit of a silly play on words really, fall the season and falling, vertigo dream-falling where you watch the world rush up, at, and past you. He pictured falling where you waited an agonizingly long time for it to end with a thump, a splat, some cartoon noise or sudden black silence.
    â€œThe Longest Fall” actually began in late July in a fit of conceited altruism that Gerry now thinks of as tempting fate. The blood donation centre called to remind him he hadn’t given blood in more than a year. It was the summer holiday season. Wouldn’t he please drop by?
    Gerry was babysitting early morning newscasts that summer while someone was away on vacation. He went to work early and had the summer afternoons off. He would shiver in shorts at four-thirty in the morning and emerge into a noon like a warm shower. Warmth and steady work made Gerry feel benevolent in a summertime-smug sort of way, full of life, sneakily inclined to flaunt it. It was good to be finished work for the day and the only one in shorts and boat shoes among the people in ties giving blood on their lunch hours.
    He filled in the new, longer questionnaire at the clinic. He was vaguely smug that none of the dangerous behaviours of the past decade seemed to apply to him.
    Certainly not the last decade.
    Gerry gave his pint quickly, chatting with a man from the offshore business in the next armchair. Gerry had interviewed the man a couple of times, but on this day they talked about boats. The little agitator machines rocked the blood bags beside the chairs as they chatted. Afterwards he ate a couple of doughnuts and drank a cup of sweet tea. Then he drove to the sailing club and spent the afternoon fitting a new oil lamp in the cabin of his elderly sailboat.
    The letter arrived about three weeks later among a handful of bills and fliers. It was bravely bureaucratic.
Anomalous result in test for humano-T-cell leukemic virus
, it read. The writer told Gerry he shouldn’t worry. He should contact his family doctor for another blood test. If that came back the same, a DNA test should be arranged. The writer jumped to a wrong conclusion about what might be worrying Gerry just then.
We regret we are no longer able to accept donations of your