Bullseye
BY MARIA KUBACKI
Photo by Andy Holmes/Unsplash.
During the first lockdown, when the pandemic was a novelty and looked like it would only last a few weeks, Ian felt more alive than he had in years. Whereas Anna was paralyzed by the daily tally of the sick and dying, and tuned out as much as she could, Ian was mesmerized by the increasingly bleak reports out of Italy and New York and reported back to her, a macabre play-by-play.
In northern Italy, ICUs were reaching capacity and they would soon have to start triaging patients, the ventilators reserved for the strongest who might have a chance at survival. In New York, morgues were overflowing, and they were stacking bodies in refrigerated trucks.
“New York looks like it’s set to outpace Italy,” he would shout to her from the living room while she made supper, like he was calling out the score in a close game. In Ottawa, the numbers were low, a handful of new cases a day, only a few hundred in total, but a quiet panic was in the air. Grocery stores were rationing toilet paper and flour, and there was no hand sanitizer to be found anywhere.
Ian felt energized, like he was born to live in dangerous times. He threw himself into emergency preparations based on worst-case scenarios of widespread shortages, returning from Costco with 100 rolls of toilet paper, 10 kg bags of flour and giant jars of peanut butter. An early adopter of masks, he made stacks of neatly pleated ones on his mother’s old sewing machine which had stood gathering dust in the basement for years. He was addicted to COVID Twitter and fell asleep doom-scrolling every night.
Anna, a meditative (or maybe lazy) person, lover of luxury and idleness, never planned for anything and avoided discomfort. She was impressed by Ian’s energy, and loved him for his brave, boyish heart. Her response to the lockdown was to withdraw into binge-watching British and Scandinavian murder mysteries, napping excessively and dosing herself steadily with CBD oil throughout the day—a habit she had picked up from their daughter Eva, home from her first year at McGill and also in self-soothing mode. Sam, who had already been struggling in school, took the pandemic as an opportunity to give up on school altogether and lived a subterranean life in the basement, playing video games until 3 a.m. and sleeping until noon every day. Not alone, like a future school shooter, but socially, on his headset with his friends, playing a game where they were all on an island and had to kill everyone else, and eventually each other, in order to survive.
At supper time, Ian would pick at Sam half-heartedly, but Sam played the pandemic card, hinting that he was stressed and maybe a little depressed.
“And it’s only Grade 11,” he pointed out.
Ian and Anna both taught at his school (Ian, history and Anna, English) and knew too much about his life—his friends, his mediocre marks, when he skipped gym.
He was under-performing long before COVID. But it was hard to tell if he was just playing them or really was depressed so Anna told Ian to lay off, just in case.
They were all restless and on edge, suddenly confronted with too much time, too much of themselves and too much of each other. Being alone was sad and boring but so was being together.
In the evenings, when he wasn’t watching the news, Ian devoted himself to researching pandemics, reworking his grade 12 history curriculum to add a module on the Spanish flu, into which he sneakily added as a detour through the Black Death.
While Anna and Eva drank large glasses of chardonnay, he educated them, against their will, on the flu, which killed between 50 and a 100 million worldwide.
“The victims’ skin would turn blue and their lungs would fill with fluid and suffocate them,” he told them as he typed up his notes for his classes, which he delivered via video from the safety of his study.
“Fifty or a hundred million—that’s a pretty big margin of error,” said Eva, sipping her wine. He read with morbid fascination about how the Black Death swept through medieval Europe in wave upon wave, killing healthy young people within hours, leaving piles of bloated, rotting bodies in the streets.
Victims would wake up with chills and a fever, followed by weakness, exhaustion, diarrhea, vomiting and swollen lymph nodes, and, for many, an agonizing death. In urban centres up
to half the population was wiped out. “Imagine if half the population of Ottawa died.”
Anna did not want to imagine. She felt her neck for swollen lymph nodes and read his Black Death notes over his shoulder. A quote from Piers Plowman, in bold, jumped out at her:
“God is deaf nowadays and will not hear us.”
Within the first months, it became apparent that in Ontario at least, it was mostly old people dying in nursing homes. Which was sad, but a relief for everybody else, and with cases coming down, things opened up again.
Everyone who didn’t have a cottage was desperate to rent one or book a campsite. Anna disliked camping, had only gone along when the kids were little because it seemed wholesome and character-building for them, but Ian wore her down. He worried that Sam would disappear further into his gamer lifestyle and made the case that it would help them bond as a family and learn some survival skills. Even Eva was persuaded to go along to distract her from her missing her boyfriend, who had moved back in with his family in Montreal. Anna agreed to go but only if they rented a trailer. They managed to book a site at a lake in Algonquin Park, a relatively
civilized spot with a store and laundromat. Eva, obsessed with tracking her boyfriend’s
social media activity, was reassured that there would be cell reception so that she could
continue her forensic surveillance of the girls whose photos he liked and commented on.
“Look at this one—she’s obese!” She showed Sam a photo of a curvy girl with long fake lashes, hoping he would agree she was fat, but he didn’t.
“She looks like a supermodel.”
The day they left it was hot, hot, hot and as humid as a tropical rain forest. Anna woke up first, feeling bloated and irritable, like she was about to get her period. She had to shake Ian awake but once up he sprang into action, barking orders at them like a scout troop leader or the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. He checked his list of supplies: Deet, alcohol swabs, Band-Aids,
Benadryl, compass, life jackets, flares. Anna was exhausted just from the list.
“Relax,” said Eva, also pre-menstrual, as Ian herded them towards the rented truck that would pull the giant trailer.
“Why do we need a compass and flares?” Sam asked as Ian pushed him out the door.
“We’re going to be in a trailer at a campground.”
They stopped at a gas station a couple of hours from the city but after that it was trees, trees, nothing but trees as they made their way north. When Anna looked back at Sam and Eva, they were asleep, Eva with her mouth open and Sam with his head down and his arms crossed, just like when they were little.
At first Anna tried to stay awake, looking out the window and reading Heart of Darkness,
which she was thinking about teaching her Grade 12 students in the fall. But her thoughts started to meander and float, and she was hypnotized by the trees, road and power lines.
It was peaceful but disorienting, like falling into a dream landscape that has no beginning or end. The fir, spruce and birch they were passing blurred into the jungle from the book as she drifted in and out of sleep, and the civilized world slipped away behind them.
The lake was bigger than it looked in photos and everyone exclaimed how beautiful it was and agreed it was so refreshing to be in nature. Anna thought it was mediocre and not worth the drive—it had a boring shape and the shoreline was flat, the bottom rocky—but she didn’t want to rain on Ian’s parade. As soon as they parked and set up the trailer, Ian was off to scout out canoe and kayak rentals, with Eva and Sam following in search of cellphone reception near the park store.
When Ian came back, he brought Richard and Marianne with him, a couple he had met at the store who, it turned out, were also from Ottawa—academics Anna guessed correctly, based on their Patagonia everything, expensive looking glasses and their pale, nerdy daughter, Olivia, who looked to be a couple of years younger than Sam. They had started chatting at the recycling bins.
“What are the chances!” they all exclaimed when it turned out they had the site next to them.
They should have a fire later, Ian suggested.
“I am not entertaining their hobbity kid,” Sam hissed to Anna, who also resented Ian for railroading them all into what might turn into a nightly commitment. He had a habit of picking up strays wherever he went.
Ian built a blazing fire by the edge of the lake that night after supper and while the professors, as they called them privately, were stiff and boring at first, spouting off about their progressive politics and Olivia’s giftedness, they loosened up after a few drinks. They all drank too much and laughed too hard at nothing, in the way you do with people you have nothing in common with. Eva got drunk with them, while Sam sat in sullen silence next to Olivia, not even pretending to listen when she went on about Harry Potter and her advanced math class.
“Is she autistic?” he asked when they got back to the trailer. “No, seriously.”
Anna, Eva and Sam slept in in the morning, and lingered over coffee and eggs. By the time they wandered down to the beach, Ian was having his second coffee with Richard and Marianne. This became the routine for a few days but as predicted, Ian quickly grew bored and was easily persuaded to try and avoid them. He and Anna argued a bit whether it would be better to start getting up and jumping in the kayaks early, or hide in the trailer until noon and only come out when the others were having lunch. They decided on alternating randomly between the two so that there would be no discernible pattern to their behaviour, and within a few days successfully established an invisible boundary between their two campsites. Anna felt relieved to be free but also a little guilty so she waved to Richard and Marianne from a distance every day, although she made sure to turn away from their hopeful, needy faces and make her way quickly towards the water before they could get any ideas.
The weather was perfect, cloudless skies day after day. They swam or kayaked lazily around or read by the lake with a fresh breeze on their faces and the pandemic somewhere far away like a bad dream. Ian seemed to have forgotten his plague obsession, and Anna was surprised by how happy she was and how much she actually liked camping—even the daily housekeeping tasks, which took twice as long as they did at home but gave structure to the day.
Every meal and snack had to be planned so as to use up all the food they had brought, perishable items first. Just washing the dishes in the tiny sink in the trailer took forever and preparing anything on the little bit of counter was awkward.
At first they all took turns cooking and cleaning but somehow she ended up doing everything by herself more and more often because everyone else would run off after meals—Sam and Eva to the camp store so they could go on their phones, and Ian to dump their garbage or get more firewood, but often he would stay and chat with whoever was hanging around.
Anna enjoyed the break from having too many people in too little space but after a while she resented being a pioneer housewife while the rest of them just lived their lives, like she was the only adult and everyone else was a child.
Towards end of the first week, a heat wave set in and brought with it a restlessness and irritability that descended on them like an invisible fog. The days suddenly seemed endless. It was starting to feel like being in lockdown, but in a trailer at a lake. They only saw each other, being wary of the infectious potential of the other campers, and they had less and less to talk about.
When Ian asked Sam what’s new, Sam said, “Nothing. You were there for all of it.”
Anna and Eva both started their periods, their cycles in sync, which made them grumpy and lethargic. They increased their CBD intake and retreated into the trailer to get away from the heat and watch shows they had downloaded onto their laptops.
Coincidentally they were both watching true crime. “Don’t murder me in my sleep,” Ian
joked. Sam spent most of his time near the store, where he could get a signal and play games on his phone.
In the midst of the torpor and unease, a leopard-print cat appeared at the edge of their campsite one morning, like a hallucination or a mirage. Anna hadn’t had her coffee yet and thought she was seeing things but Ian saw it too. The cat languidly made its way towards them and started rubbing up against Ian’s legs, purring and arching her back. A sleek dog with a velvety grey coat and startlingly blue eyes came next, followed by its owner, a tall, blonde woman.
“LOL, I am so sorry! My babies are so rude,” said the blonde woman but did not seem sorry
at all, and Anna instantly knew that she and her exotic pets would encroach on their campsite again whenever they pleased.
The cat was a Bengal and the dog a Weimaraner, the blonde woman said, unasked, and Anna realized they must be expensive. What would it be like to be that beautiful and entitled, Anna wondered when she saw that Ian was thunderstruck by this apparition of blondness who introduced herself as their neighbour, Candace.
“I didn’t know they allowed pets, or I would have brought our dog,” Anna said sulkily, but thought maybe it was a good thing they hadn’t because the Weimaraner would have bullied their submissive golden doodle.
“Technically you’re supposed to have them leashed,” said Candace, “but mine are usually so good.” In other words the rules didn’t apply to her.
“We’re animal lovers so they can come visit anytime,” said Ian, kneeling down to pet the cat, who lewdly turned her ass up at him.
“You should come over for a fire tonight,” Ian said.
“Yes, definitely!” Anna chimed in, not meaning it.
They discovered over drinks that Candace and her equally tall and blond husband, Kevin, were from their neighbourhood, the more affluent part where the houses were identical and as big as barns. Anna drank to drown her resentment at being forced to socialize with these people and became slightly belligerent.
“You two look like you could be brother and sister! No, seriously, I’m sure you must hear that all the time.”
Further proof that Ottawa is the biggest small town in the world, their son was the same age as Sam and, in fact, was in some of his classes.
“You probably know our son, Matt!” Candace said.
“Yeah, everybody knows him,” Sam said, which made Candace beam with pride but later Sam told Anna he was one of the obnoxious, competitive hockey players.
“Apparently he had sex with an unconscious drunk girl at a party last year.”
Ian protested that was probably just a rumour. Sam was just glad that Matt had stayed home.
“Please tell me these people are not going to be our new best friends for the week,” Anna pleaded with Ian in bed that night.
“I had fun with them. I like them,” Ian said.
“You like everyone. It’s your best and worst quality.” Ian pointed out that he didn’t like their other neighbours and had agreed to avoid them. She couldn’t argue with that, although the professors were starting to seem like the lesser of two evils.
“Anyway, you were sitting too close to them, especially her. We’re in a pandemic, remember?”
But Candace was a close talker and it was hard to keep a distance from her. When Anna ended up sitting next to her at the beach she would find excuses to get up and fiddle with her bags and towels and then would subtly pull her chair over until it was the recommended six feet away. But when Ian was the one sitting next to Candace, she noticed that he did not pull away and did not seem to mind her being so close.
“What if she coughs on you?” she asked, even though Candace was not coughing and was the picture of good health.
Now that the connection was established, they had a new routine featuring Candace and
Kevin. To avoid them, Anna implemented the same strategy she and Ian had devised to confound their other neighbours, setting her alarm for 7 am some mornings and racing to the beach and then going back to the trailer for an early lunch some days, and other days lying in bed bored and restless waiting for them to go in for their lunch before venturing out once the coast was clear.
Candace noticed and jokingly accused her of avoiding them, which Anna denied. Ian was oblivious to their secret, almost imperceptible catfight. He was happy to have sporty, outdoorsy companions and played Frisbee or tossed a football around with them while Anna read or hid in the trailer. Candace, determined to have everyone have fun her way, would sometimes burst into the trailer unannounced, trying to cajole and bully her into joining into whatever game they were playing.
Anna was not surprised to learn that Candace, with her loud, superficial friendliness and unsubtle beauty, was in real estate. She vaguely remembered seeing her aggressive face on for sale signs with her icy intense eyes, the same Aryan blue as her dog’s.
Kevin was fine—he was quiet and not as dumb as he looked. He was a financial advisor but had done a double major in economics and history. He listened with seemingly genuine interest as Ian held forth about the Black Death, and talked books with Anna. Sometimes he would stay on the beach and read with Anna while Ian and Candace took off on a hike or out in the canoes.
“I can’t keep up with her,” he confessed to Anna, as they watched Ian and Candace paddle off across the lake until they became tiny specks off in the distance.
Towards the end of their second week, the weather turned cool and overcast, too cool for the beach, and they were all bored once again.
“I know—let’s do an overnight canoe trip!” Candace said one night as they were sitting around the fire, drinking out of boredom.
She reminded Anna of a spirited horse, always jumping around and tossing her hair.
Anna leaned over and whispered to Ian, “She’s so annoying!”
But Ian wasn’t listening.
“That’s a GREAT idea!”
They would have to canoe to the far end of their lake and then portage to the next one over. Kevin said it sounded hellish and Anna agreed.
“We should just stay here and read on the beach,” he said, but neither of them wanted to stay behind while Ian and Candace had an adventure. Even Sam and Eva were on board, desperate for a change.
The preparations gave Ian the purpose he had been lacking. There were canoes and tents to rent, wilderness camping things to pack (flares, compass, a small axe). The next morning, after Eva and Sam ran over to the store to text their friends and check their social media one last time, they set off.
The lake was clear and still, like a mirror, and they glided across it effortlessly, everyone in their own private morning world, slowly waking up, except Ian and Candace, who kept shouting to each other across the convoy of canoes. Ian thought the portage was up around the next bend in the shoreline, but looking at her map, Candace thought that was the wrong one, that the one they wanted was further. Anna tried to tune them out by reading.
“Who brings a book on a canoe trip? Anna, you are hilarious!” Candace said and laughed
like it was the funniest thing ever, and Ian laughed too.
Around noon they stopped at a rocky little beach to eat and stretch their legs, and like a child Anna asked how much further.
She was stiff and sore already from sitting in an uncomfortable position for so long and was all twisted up with period cramps. Eva also complained of cramps and slinked off to find a private spot to change her tampon.
By now they were quite far from their trailers, which looked tiny off in the distance, when Anna looked back. They had registered with the park office, telling them where they were camping and when they were planning to return, so that if they didn’t come back as expected within three days, someone would come looking for them. Three days seemed like a long time before anyone would start to worry about them.
After some further debate between Ian and Candace about where exactly they were and where they were going, they set off once again and not long after saw a yellow sign indicating they had arrived at a portage, which they thought (hoped) was the right one. It was. According to the sign, it would take them to the lake with the island.
They got out and hoisted their knapsacks onto their backs and their canoes over their heads and started trudging along the trail, which was rocky, uneven and overgrown so that when they came to a fork that was unmarked they weren’t sure whether to keep going or turn off to the left. To Anna it all looked the same—she was blind to whatever meaning the trees and the rocks held, like she was trying to read a foreign language in another alphabet. They turned left and kept going deeper into the dense evergreen forest.
“Are you sure this is the right trail?” Sam asked in a whiny voice, which embarrassed Ian.
“Man up!” Ian said in a booming, fake voice that Anna had never heard him use before. “Don’t be a little bitch,” he added, which made Candace snort with laughter.
“Sorry bud—just kidding,” he said afterward, putting his arm around Sam, clearly feeling guilty.
“Fuck this fucking shit,” Sam muttered under his breath, even though he had no choice but to trudge on.
Eva complained that she had a rock in her shoe and Anna twisted her ankle because she wasn’t paying attention. By now, the three of them were starting to hate Candace a little and, by extension, Ian, who seemed to be a different person when he was around her.
About an hour in, Anna’s ankle was so painful and wobbly that she had to stop and rest. She was relieved when Ian announced he could see the lake up ahead and that they would set up camp on the shore for the night. They ate canned beans and bread, drank shots of whisky and listened to the loons calling.
Ian and Sam shared a tent, and Anna shared one with Eva. Eva couldn’t sleep because they could hear the yip yip of coyotes or wolves off in the distance and she was worried they would smell their menstrual blood and come and find them.
“Don’t worry, they’re too far away and they would never attack a big group of people,” Anna said, as though she knew anything about the ways of wolves and coyotes.
Eva was still worrying about her boyfriend being tempted to cheat on her while they were apart and said she wanted to go back to the campground in the morning so she could text him. Like Anna, once she got something in her head she couldn’t let it go and went around and around in circles.
Anna tried to reassure her they wouldn’t get eaten by wolves or coyotes and that her boyfriend hadn’t forgotten her, but Eva was wound up and starting to have a panic attack, and she had forgotten her CBD capsules back at the trailer. Anna didn’t know what to do so she pulled Heart of Darkness out of her backpack and started reading it out loud like a bedtime story. Eva listened for a long time before falling asleep, and the next morning she said, “Who is Kurtz in this scenario? Daddy, or Candace?” And they both laughed, partly because they were happy to have survived the night.
The island looked magical from a distance as they paddled towards it and they all agreed it had been worth it, although no one except maybe Ian and Candace really believed that. Once they were actually on the shore, it was a bit of a letdown.
“It’s an island with a bunch of trees and rocks on it,” Sam said after wandering around for a few minutes.
They sat down on some rocks and chewed on some beef jerky, and looked back at the shore from which they had paddled, which also now, from the vantage point of the island, looked magical, although it had not felt that way when they were on it. Only Ian and Candace insisted on hiking around to the other side of the island, in case there was something interesting on the other side.
“Like what?” Kevin asked.
They didn’t know, but made the rest of the group all wait for over an hour while they went to find out.
“So, did you find anything exciting?” Anna asked when they got back, flushed and sweaty. No, but it was a good hike, they said, not looking at each other.
A few days later Candace woke up with a chill and by lunchtime she was shivering and felt dizzy. She spent the day in the trailer, slept 12 hours that night and the next day woke up still exhausted, and complaining of a headache and aches and pains. Had she eaten something, had she been exposed to anyone to who was sick, Anna asked. Ian knew immediately what she was thinking and said not to be ridiculous; that Candace had been with them for the last week and there was no way she had been in contact with anyone who could be infected. Cases were so low and no one who had COVID was camping, for god’s sake. But Candace admitted that she had seen her girlfriends the night before leaving on the camping trip and that one of them had recently been to Toronto, where cases were surging.
The following morning, Candace looked flushed and puffy. There was fear in her wide blue eyes, which almost made Anna feel sorry for her, but mainly she was afraid for herself, Ian and the kids, and angry with Ian for insisting on going on the canoe trip. She accused him of letting Candace breathe on him.
“When?” he asked.
“On the island.”
He said it was just her anxiety making her paranoid. No, he had not let Candace breathe on him. Or kiss him?
“For fuck’s sake,” he said.
Anna was not used to him swearing. She asked if he was sure.
“For fuck’s sake,” he repeated, but later when she thought about it, she realized he had not actually said no.
Candace and Kevin left, and the following day Anna and Ian packed up and headed home as well, Anna obsessively worrying that Candace had infected them and asking Eva to check her head to see if she had a temperature.
“Why are you being such a psycho?” Eva asked her, putting the back of her hand against her forehead, like she was the mother and Anna was the child.
“It’s cold. I think you’re dead.”
Even after they were safely back in Ottawa, in their family bubble once again, Anna would lie awake at night nauseous with suspicion, calculating the risk of contagion, going over in her mind all the times Ian and Candace could have been alone together.
Her worst fears came true when Ian spiked a fever. His glands were as big as plums, and he complained of a headache, a rarity for him. He would get up and get dressed but by the time he came down and made a coffee, he was exhausted and had to lie down again. Sam and Eva jokingly referred to his Downton Abbey flu, because he only had enough energy to crawl down to the family room and watch episode after episode for hours on end. He liked it for the history, he claimed.
“Sure, Dad, we believe you,” Sam said. “Maybe you should stop being a little bitch and get off the couch.”
But then he immediately felt bad, because Ian was so weak and vulnerable.
“Just kidding, Dad.”
Anna watched over him anxiously and assessed him against a list of COVID symptoms. “Do you have a sore throat, are you short of breath, does your chest feel heavy?”
She brought him various pungent foods to make sure he hadn’t lost his sense of taste and smell. He hadn’t, which reassured her, but only somewhat, because not everyone had those symptoms. She bought an oximeter and measured his blood oxygen level several times a day, ready to call 911 at any time if it dipped but it was consistently near perfect at 98 or 99.
When the telltale red rash with the white spot in the centre appeared on his thigh, she googled it and was relieved: Lyme disease. He had probably picked up a tick when they were camping. Caught early, it was easily treated with antibiotics and he was back on his feet in no time.
Candace too had recovered, although they still weren’t sure what she had, as she refused to get tested, Kevin told Anna when she ran into him while grocery shopping.
“We have to have you guys over,” he said as they were parting, and they texted back and forth a few times trying to plan it but there was always something, the timing never seemed to work, and they didn’t see each other until the following spring.
They were in another lockdown and everyone was constantly going for walks because there was nothing else to do. Anna was walking their doodle, Henry, at the neighbourhood dog park when she got distracted by her phone and let the leash slip, and Henry took off, bounding around like an idiot and indiscriminately play bowing at every dog. Most ignored him, except for an elegant grey hound, who pretended to be aloof but suddenly snarled viciously and tried to bite him as he bounced by. Henry yelped in pain.
“Control your dog!” the owner of the grey dog yelled from up the path.
Anna was about to yell back, spoiling for a fight, a surge of dog park rage welling up in her, when she saw it was Candace with her Weimaraner.
“Oh, it’s you!” Candace said, laughing, as she approached holding her beast on a short leash, encroaching on Anna’s invisible six-foot bubble of personal space.
“Oh, Anna, always daydreaming,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry he got a little aggressive, but he does react to untrained dogs.”
Anna felt at once both enraged and embarrassed for herself and for Henry. And then she saw it: a bullseye on Candace’s leg, just above her knee. For a moment she was disoriented, but then she realized it was just a coincidence, that Candace and Ian had been bitten separately, almost a year apart. Candace saw her staring at her leg and said it looked worse than it was, that thankfully she had caught it in time and was on antibiotics.
“It’s the tall grasses,” she said. “You have to be careful.”
Afterwards Anna told Ian she had seen Candace and that she also coincidentally had Lyme disease, and she watched his face carefully to gauge his reaction to hearing Candace’s name.
“Oh yeah?” he said distractedly, as though he could barely remember who she was.
But Anna felt a shame she couldn’t identify when she pictured Ian’s rash in more or less the same spot as Candace’s.
“You have to be careful,” Ian said.
“Yes, it’s the tall grasses.”
MARIA KUBACKI is the author of A Plague of Frogs, published by Frog Hollow Press. Her fiction has appeared in The Fiddlehead, and her news and feature articles have been published in newspapers including the Telegraph Journal and Ottawa Citizen. She lives in Ottawa.