Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good by John Gould Page B

thing is over and done with.
    Hey, I once asked you what matters. We were in bed at your place, remember, before it was our place? And I all of a sudden had that sad feeling you get when you’re too happy, when things are too good and you get scared. I wanted you to say something so I said, I wonder what we are? and you said, What? and I said, I wonder what matters? and you said, Making. That’s what matters, you said, making love, making sense, making good, you had this whole list. Making babies probably, I’m not sure. Anyway, my point is, you’ve made something.
    Keep me up-to-date on the real estate stuff. xo M
    And hits Send.
    There’s a wedding on today. The lobby’s lousy with men in suits, women in don’t-spill-on-me gowns, little girls in taffeta dresses. A bunch of teenage boys stand together, ridiculous in their blue blazers, each nodding to a different tune—white wires trail down their necks, earphones to iPods. About half the guests wield cameras, and film each other filming. In the old days Matt was the only one with a movie camera, now he’s the only one
without
a movie camera. What’s with that?
    He pushes through the crowd, muttering apologetic “I do”s, and revolves out the door.
    Ah, the heat. He’d forgotten about the heat, hunkered down (hunkered up?) all goosebumpy in his air-conditioned tower. When he arrived yesterday the sun was already knocking off, kicking back, but today it’s most definitely on the job. Well hey, that’s fair. Matt’s come out for a stroll, and if he has to take it on the surface of some other planet—Venus, say, where the greenhouse effect is said to be pretty intense—well, so be it.
    He shuffles down the Starlight’s circular drive, chooses a direction, or tries to let it choose him. Can you call a place a suburb if it has no homes?
Nowhere,
that’s where Matt seems to have found himself. Overhead there’s the sound of labouring jets, sheet metal being shook hard. A stinky wind chucks bits of trash around. Nobody else seems to be in the mood for a constitutional on this fine Saturday, so Matt has the place pretty much to himself. The odd car whizzes past, but the drivers are far too city-savvy to risk an open window. Their machines are all hermetically sealed, each passenger a King Tut or a
Mona Lisa.
    The shitty air out here—what if Matt were to make it his thing? Zane’s already grabbed AIDS, what if Matt were to take air? Breathing, we’re going to
miss
that, aren’t we? The way the Dadinator must miss it already? So yeah, something for Matt to go justifiably crackers about. He’ll need a good stunt, of course. Zane’s refusing to take his pills. Matt will refuse to breathe.
    Hey, what’s this now? A patch of, for want of a better word, “nature.” It must be ten feet by twenty, all green except where it’s gone brown in the heat—which, okay, is pretty much everywhere. There’s a juniper bush with a jay-sized bird hopping around in it, picking bugs off branches. It’s one of those birds that looks black but isn’t—when you get up close you see that no, it’s actually an iridescent purple and bronze. Green, even. Grackle? The suburban bird
par excellence,
a bird that must have spent its whole evolutionary history praying for the bulldozers to get started. It’s beautiful, it’s maybe the most beautiful creature Matt’s ever seen, or at least it’s the most beautiful he can see at the moment, and the moment’s all he cares about just now. Why is that? Why is this ludicrous bit of creation, this parody of the living world more compelling to him than the verdant paradise in which he’s most of the time condemned to live?
    The grackle tips back its head, emits its cry—squeaky clothesline. Come fight me? Come fuck me? Hey!
    The last time Matt saw his sister alive it was on an urban nature-walk like this one. Erin was extra-agitated that day, so Matt hoisted her into her wheelchair and steered her out into the mild June afternoon.