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Watching the Lions
by Michael Bryson

Maury's mother called us the One-in-Three. Inseparable, like the Holy Trinity. One organism with three bodies. United in spirit, united in purpose. We shared all things equally. Our love of hockey, a taste for vodka, that warm, tight place Maury's little sister sheltered between her legs. For years I did what I could to forget the events of that Sunday afternoon. Even when Maury's sister (Gloria was her name) drifted silently out of this world, out of her pain, after swallowing more than the required dosage of her mother's tranquilizers three days before her sixteenth birthday. I was gone by then, out of town, out of province, studying economics, a set of laws I believed were rational, a set of principals I believed had weathered the storms of time. Maury informed me of Gloria's suicide in a letter.

"I got her diaries," he wrote. "They're gone. Destroyed."

It was the only letter he ever wrote me. For years I hid it with my university papers, which I kept stacked in a closet until I dumped them in a recycling bin five years ago. About to get married, I wanted to rid myself of any evidence of my former life, my former lives.

Maury and I met as infants. We lived across the street from one another. Our mothers would pass us back and forth, back and forth, trading diaper duty, nap time and mid-afternoon shopping. When I was old enough to walk to school and my mother returned to work, first as a secretary at our parish and later as a librarian, I would take myself to Maury's for lunch and after-school television. Bob came into our lives a few years later when his family rented a house down the street. His father was a plumber who was perpetually unemployed. His mother worked for the federal government. Bob propelled himself through school on a bevy of scholarships and landed a tenure track position in the depths of the recession. My mother has never tired of talking about Bob. He had a book out last year about the history of happiness as a philosophical idea. About Maury my mother hasn't spoken in years.

Maury dropped out of high school a month into grade eleven. By then he had a steady income selling and supplying drugs to his friends and Junior High kids. He played bass in a band, too, until he tried to organize a coup to remove the singer and found himself tossed out on his ass instead. Our coterie had fallen apart two years earlier. Bob had moved to Toronto to live with his uncle and attend the high school affiliated with the university there. Maury dropped out of school and hooked up with a punk band from Halifax who needed a driver for their 'cross Canada tour. When he turned up on my door step the following summer, sporting a moustache and beard, cigarette in hand, grinning wildly, he looked ten years older.

"I've been to the mountain top," he said. The phrase came from Bob. It had been part of our code. The speaker had got laid. The speaker had got drunk. The speaker had a cool time. Listener be jealous. "I have been delivered."

"Like the mail," I said. The standard comeback, though the truth was Maury's reappearance made me uneasy.

The previous week I had run into a girl I knew. Lisa. I ran into her at the mall. She had a job selling popcorn at the cinema. I hadn't seen her in about six months. She had dropped out of school just before the pre-Christmas exams. I thought maybe she moved away, but when I saw her in the food court sipping coffee she told me a different story. Hadn't I heard? That friend of mine, Maury, made her pregnant. But Maury hadn't told me. No one had. Maury was known as an easy fuck, and he boasted about many of them, but I had never heard anything about him and Lisa getting together.

"You're a mother?" I asked her.

"No," she said. The next question never left my lips.

That Sunday afternoon.

Maury's parents were out. We were in their basement. Drinking.

Gloria sat watching us. She started wrestling with Maury. He held her down.It happened.

It happened.

I used to trace the explosion of our triumvirate to that event. I used to blame that Sunday afternoon, but it wasn't that way. That Sunday afternoon we tried to stop time.

"You and Bob, you'll do all right," Maury said to me once.

We were about fifteen. He had all I had; he was no different from me. But he was right. He who led us on shoplifting raids. He who procured dirty magazines, videos. He who started us boozing.

When Maury returned from touring with the punk band, he had a swastika burned into his left forearm. Branded into his flesh.

He made no attempt to hide it.

"It ain't nothin', man," he said. "It's a joke."

We were on our way to a party in Parkdale at a house owned by Maury's "friends of friends." I didn't say anything more about it. I didn't believe him.

At the time I had a steady girlfriend named Tina whose parents didn't approve of me because I wasn't Italian and I hadn't been confirmed. Looking back, my time with Tina was one of the most beautiful periods of my life. I loved to startle her with a kiss on the ear when we sat in darkened movie theatres. She would nibble on my bottom lip when we necked. We spent most of our time together in the library studying, each determined to go to a good university, get a solid education, launch a successful life. We talked about sex, but we didnÕt do it. It scared me. I wanted simply to be safe with Tina. Away from MauryÕs darkness. I wanted to be redeemed, purified.

Our relationship survived into the first year of university. Until Tina found someone who would sleep with her. She cancelled our dates. She stopped returning my phone calls. Her brother told me the news. I started drinking then. Drinking like I hadn't in years. One Friday night I got thrown out of the campus pub for leaping over a chair and arguing with a bouncer. Drunk, I roared into the night, wandered into a residence keg party, found myself with Jessica, an 18-year-old blonde beauty, first on a couch, then gliding down the hall. To her room. Her bed. Her body.

Jessica came from a Westmount family in Montreal. She was studying French literature, but she wasn't doing well in school. She suggested a weekend trip to Florida, and I agreed, but when we got there I couldn't leave our hotel room.

I had a breakdown. Everyone agreed.

"A minor psychotic episode," my doctor said. "Learn to relax."

My parents thought it had to do with Tina. Bob, I think, knew better. He drove out to visit, and we sat in a coffee shop, smoking cigarettes, talking sports.

I threw myself into my studies, did my best to learn the intricacies of supply and demand. A system within which the whole adds up to the sum of its parts.

I met my wife through the first job I had after graduation. I landed a post with an accounting firm. Norma was a painter. Revenue Canada had trawled her tax returns for irregularities, and she came to our firm for help. I met her in the lunch room. She invited me to one of her shows.

She was the first person I told about Gloria. I told her after Maury returned to the scene. We were into our second year of marriage. Maury was arrested for a murder in British Columbia. I saw the story on the TV news and froze. Norma asked me if something was the matter, and I couldn't respond. I couldn't respond.

I froze.

"I know that guy," I said. "We were pals."

I've talked a lot to Norma about what happened. About the way things were. About my guilt and my feeling of helplessness. When I try and think now about Maury, Gloria, Bob and me I can't focus. I feel like I'm caught in a wind storm, a tornado. Spinning beyond control.

"You're out of it now," Norma says. "You're with me."

She's wonderful and calm, but I'm unable to move on.

Norma and I went to the zoo recently. Every weekend we go for a walk in a different part of the city. Norma takes her camera. Snaps images she stores for future paintings. It had been years since either of us had been to the zoo, so I packed a picnic lunch and Norma loaded a fresh roll of film into her camera. As we stood watching the lions sleeping in their pen, it started to rain.

Norma said she had a dream about Gloria.

In the dream Norma was walking through a park. She came upon a bench. On the bench was a young girl. When Norma approached her, the girl vanished. Norma said she had had this dream three times in the previous week.

"I'm thinking of painting her," she said.

"ThereÕs rainbow," I said. It was a big one, broad, beautiful and deeply hued.