Chapter One

Three weeks.

Russell was missing part of his heart. He was born five weeks early, even then a restless soul, and was kept under intense observation. The small hole in his tiny heart caused a huge amount of concern for his parents, Frank and Emily, as well as requiring an array of tubes, tests, and other wonders of modern medicine. A few years ago Russell had been convinced that this life altering defect was a stamp of destiny, that the hole in his heart would be his foundation for greatness.
This romantic vision of absolute individuality had evaporated by the time Russell was sat at the Ikea table poking with his fork at a stack of vegetables. He�d been doing this for the best part of ten minutes now in the vain hope that some composition of the broad beans, squash, and courgette would awaken his appetite. If anything this exercise in abstract organisation had simply added to his sense of nausea. They had formed into the very chaos his darkened thoughts dwelt within � one moment arranged in clarity, the next in tumbling disarray. Russell felt a supreme affinity with these storm tossed greens, the only allegiance he could muster in the extremely familiar but increasingly unnerving apartment that surrounded him. It was closing in on him. He could feel it. The Ikea TV stand was shuffling forward with Herculean effort, the still blaring images of the relic television set sighing in exertion. The second-hand lampshade hanging unhealthily from the cracked ceiling looked poised to abseil onto the table. Even the lightly stained carpet seemed to rustle under his feet, receding like the tide coming further to shore. Russell was trapped.
And she was staring. Still staring. He knew she�d been staring for some time. He checked the Ikea clock to confirm this fear but acknowledged the futility of this once he realised he had no idea when the stare had been launched. Instead he glared at the TV for inspiration, George W�s face smirking out in all its Technicolor glory. The news had been his dinner time obsession and that face seemed to taunt him. It was all back firing. It wasn�t that he felt trapped, it was that he�d been stranded. All the appliances, accessories, and their accomplices he�d spent his hard-earned money on and not one of them could help him. For a split second he thought he heard the dishwasher cackling from the kitchen. The ungrateful bastard!
All these thoughts were redundant as the stare still loomed before him, growing in its ferocious expectations. It had been preceded, however long ago it began, by the question. The subsequent silence and sweat soaked fear engulfing Russell was not induced by an inability to answer the question. The very fact that he could quite clearly articulate a response was the problem. The answer wouldn�t be concise, it would be detailed, annotated, and complete with many foot notes. But its crux, the heart (no hole!) of it would be evident early on. By delaying what he recognised as the inevitable Russell was only sabotaging his own quest to be an all round �nice guy�. He had no fucking idea what a �nice guy� actually was anymore but out of all the ideologies he�d abandoned recently that one inexplicably remained.
Melissa�s nose twitched with impatience and Russell coughed a fake pre-emptory cough. The prologue of his response had already begun in his mind. It quite strangely started with the picture of a father scrambling through the rubble of a bombed house. The photograph, one of those war time shots of a distant reality, had caught Russell�s eye a week before. It was nothing new. Neither was the caption underneath; Three week old baby killed in Lebanon blast. The notion of war, because to those of us who have never experienced it war can only be a notion, was not foreign to Russell. He read, often at an obsessive level Melissa argued, about the never ending conflict in Iraq, the deaths of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, the wealth of violence across the entire globe. But it was the baby. Three weeks. The number rang in his ear like a distant, aggravating alarm. Three weeks. He sat, the paper resting on his knees, a cup of coffee untouched at his desk and he did nothing. It was a rare occurrence indeed that Russell would pause. Restless Russell who couldn�t even wait to leave the womb, who had to be watched like a hawk after some inventive use of a frying pan at the age of three, and who once failed an exam at the University of Toronto for trying to leave early. This same Russell sat in a stupefied silence, hanging in the nothingness.
Three weeks. It echoed in his skull like a fog horn and for a moment he thought tears were going to come. Why did it matter so much to him? He didn�t know this child. Hell Russell was an advocate, a fairly apathetic one but an advocate nonetheless, of necessary abortions. And he had no desire for children of his own. If anything this picture and the story it told should have reaffirmed this position that mankind doesn�t need to bring anymore children into a world it is intent on destroying.
But still Russell sat. He lowered his eyes to meet those of the desperate father on the page. He stared. A chill reverberated down his spine and his mouth dried almost provoking him to choke. A father�s hope. He wondered if the man knew his child, his son, was dead by this point or whether the tears he cried were those of uncertainty. This was irrelevant Russell conceded as reality dictated the death and whatever sparked those momentary tears was lost in the smoke and buried in the rubble. What plagued Russell as his concentration continually lapsed back to this loss was its nucleus. The foundation of where the tears were raised, the seed that bore them. For that instant his righteous anger at a governments mistake, or a fucked up religious political catastrophe, were replaced by a supreme, lingering emptiness. The seed that bore the fruit of tears was love. Three weeks. One bomb. A lifetime of pain.
It was a horrible calculation but one that pricked Russell, alerted him to how this picture, those tears, and three weeks of life affected him. He questioned whether it was a chiefly Western pursuit to search for personal relevance in a foreign news story. However this minor segway was unimportant as he analysed the root of his current gloom. It was not the long hours and unforgiving boredom of his job at the Social services filing centre that had crushed his natural sense of optimism. It wasn�t even a rebellion against the Ikea ad-campaign of his strained city lifestyle. It was grander and more romantically rooted than such throwaway youthful concerns. It was the fear � yes he was modern man enough to admit that he lived in fear � of that seed bearing fruit.
For life can be a comfortable nuisance he thought to himself. Man can exist in a created community and live a neat and horribly ordinary life. A bomb most likely won�t be dropped on his modest Toronto apartment. He is not anticipating a shift through the rubble while he glimpses up at the CN Tower in the sunshine. And maybe this sense of stability could be considered an arrogant assumption in a post 9/11 world. But Russell was confident that he was safe, that man � in this case himself � could lead a horribly ordinary life with lots of complaining and a bundle of comfort.
Three weeks. It lingered. There was something heart-breakingly animal that was spearing through Russell�s diagnosis of the normal life. It was the cry. He could almost hear the father�s disbelief screaming from the paper. The seed that had been planted was being watered by the tears and drowning in this stream. And as if in a flash flood Melissa�s face, her morning face, fresh and beautiful, struck in his mind. He realised in that moment that it would have been better if the seed had not been watered at all. Three weeks. And with that Russell chose to retreat into himself and gave his notice to the world.

�
He was uncertain at what point the unspoken prologue had morphed into the speech of the first Act but judging by Melissa�s vaguely startled eyes some weighty words had already been delivered. He paused to allow her to digest, maybe even respond, but she remained glued to her silence.
A deep breath. Shifting awkwardly in his seat Russell began (or continued) his answer.
�When we�re young it starts. The whole idea, this belief that this �thing� is pre-conceived. We�re dropped into this crazy world and somehow it is dictated to us that we must have affection for each other. A proud parent has to count the toes and brush the wisps of hair on our little forehead. We have to have our first kiss and our last fling. These scripted moments teleprompted into our lives that often seem so disparate from the mechanics of this �ordinary life�. And then people are perplexed at how many souls suffer from depression. The statistics of teenage suicides keeps rising. I mean, how many people do you know that harm themselves? Some would say it�s an epidemic, a disease that inflicts the troubled. But maybe it�s just normality. Maybe a fractured existence that doesn�t conform to the spoken script is actually the ordinary life.�
Russell felt himself growing in zeal as his attack � if an attack on everything can really be considered an attack � was gaining momentum. He looked across the table at Melissa, his eyes bulging and pulsating with vitriol while hers were now buried in her plate. Was she crying already? He felt his heart jumping unhappily at this prospect but he was too far steeped into his discourse to turn back now.
Another deep breath.
�Now I�m no religious person, you know that, but they do have something I think with the whole faulty from birth thing. Us supposed humanists are actually just well-wishers singing a happy tune while the ship is sinking. At least the religious nuts have a capacity to understand that we were fucked to begin with. Call it destiny or whatever but it�s fact: we love to hurt each other. And maybe that�s all we are.�
He was losing any semblance of a prior grip on the �nice guy� front. Her back was shaking now undoubtedly tears were leaking onto her potatoes. It must have been the hurt line; Russell had spat that out with surprising acidity. His intentions were falling apart and he split in two; the �nice guy� preservationist and the cold point maker. He suddenly stepped outside of his ranting self and saw the sad portrait of a sweat stained Scooby Doo t-shirt wearing twenty six year old, preaching existential pointlessness to a tear stained congregation of one. With this unflattering picture came a shrivelling of his previously towering stature. Russell faltered before the next breath.
�It�s like Starbucks.� Oh this was going to be a good point Russell thought as he regained his icy composure. �You know, before Starbucks people drank coffee. It�s a fact. We all lived our lives perfectly well without any knowledge of this entity. But now? Well now they�re on every corner, in every crevice of every city and Starbucks is our lifeline for coffee. Walk past five Starbucks on one street and I guarantee there are people in each one.� Russell was wavering, concerned that this point, which was one from the soul, was seeping into an anti-capitalist tirade. He became acutely aware of a nagging ache in his neck and glimpsed out the corner of his eye that her back was no longer shaking. Was that a good sign? He had no answer so he dived back into his important point.
�The point is that we�ve been convinced that as far as coffee goes Starbucks is normality. In essence we�ve deified the chain as the Chief High Priests of our coffee needs. But this is an unsubstantiated� (he felt like a lawyer using this word, a crooked lawyer perhaps) �recreational myth and we the lowly actors have read the script and bought it hook, line, and sinker. Because that is what we do, the clumsy animals that we are. We buy assumptions and coat them as certainties. And why wouldn�t we? After being fed the supreme assumption from birth that this �thing� called love really exists. Well, I refuse to buy it. But that�s just me.� He was disappointed at how he had blown the finale by trailing off and qualifying his argument after such a well fought case. As he slumped back into his Ikea chair Russell was slightly disgruntled too by the feeling that was clawing away at him. He had made his point fairly erudite and a lot more concise than his usual rambles. Yet he felt like shit. A big pile of stinking shit festering on the cheap wooden chair. And then it dawned on him. Of course he felt like shit. As well articulated and sublimely executed as his answer had been it was an answer nonetheless. A definitive answer at that. And now Russell sat sullenly almost hearing the funeral dirge proclaiming the death of this two year relationship. Where was the �nice guy� now? He�d hammered the nails in the coffin and hadn�t even realised that he was inside it all along.
She was staring again. Still staring. But it was a different stare this time, devoid of expectation, resigned to the end, and brimming with disgust.
�So.� She was speaking. Russell braced himself. She took the large inhale this time as the silent preacher squirmed. �That�s it.� He wasn�t sure if this was a question or a commentary. He had no idea if he was meant to reply. Fortunately she began to speak again saving Russell from his dilemma.
�You really are a selfish piece of shit you know.� She swept up the plates haphazardly, pieces of crumbling potato plummeting to the floor, a sole bean left sprawled across the table, and headed to the kitchen. Russell had anticipated a frosty, maybe even explosive response but nothing could have prepared him for its raw anger. A pain lurked in his gut. Was it the tears bursting through on �shit� that pained him or simply the acknowledgement that this really was it? Russell couldn�t help gawping at the fallen vegetable helpless before him on the table and feel that camaraderie rekindling. The clutter from the kitchen and its tearful soundtrack were as clear as sign posts.
Aching, and with an air of defeat, Russell rose from the table and walked to the door. She sensed his movement, clearly in tune with his intention, and the clutter quietened down. He slipped on his sneakers methodically with no sense of urgency but every understanding of importance. He reached over to the hanger and removed his jacket suddenly jarring his already fragile state by his awareness of outside�s cold February wind. Once the jacket was on there was a pause. It was long and signalled the gravity of this moment. Her face was smudged with sadness. His was ashen with fear. At that moment they both wanted to hold each other. At that moment Russell Hornby opened the door and left.
He hovered after the bolt clicked shut behind him uncertain of why he didn�t just walk across the corridor to the elevator. He could hear her cries growing in volume, her wild tears erupting in anger. And in the midst of these moans and wails he heard a venomous shout punctuated by the thunderous crash of a plate on the door behind him.
�Happy Anniversary you fucking asshole!�
He crossed the hallway and left. And so the relationship was over. And so the seed drowns.