The Full Catastrophe

Méira Cook

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781487009953
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

Winner, 2023 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

Finalist, 2023 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

A compassionate and funny novel about defining yourself, the communities that support us, and the journeys that secrets propel.

Charlie Minkoff, a thirteen-year-old boy born with intersex traits, would be happy to be left alone. Living with his artist mother in a derelict loft in downtown Winnipeg, perpetually wondering about the father who abandoned him, and tormented in school because of his differences, Charlie navigates the assorted catastrophes of his life. He's helped along by the love of his beloved grandfather, Oscar, and the makeshift family who surround him: his mother's best friend; a couple of elderly shut-in neighbours; a mysterious girl in his class who has secrets of her own; and his desperately needy and perpetually hungry dog, Gellman.

When a school project leads him to discover that Oscar never had a bar mitzvah, Charlie decides to right the historical wrong and arrange a belated ceremony. But this quest will be more than he bargained for, and meanwhile everyone from his doctor to his Ancestry Studies teacher keeps insisting that Charlie needs to learn to tell his own story.

Margaret Laurence Award winner Méira Cook's The Full Catastrophe is a story of psychological complexity, tenderness, and humour.

Also by the Author

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Fiction

The House on Sugarbush Road

Nightwatching

Once More With Feeling

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Poetry

A Fine Grammar of Bones

Toward a Catalogue of Falling

Slovenly Love

A Walker in the City

Monologue Dogs

Copyright © 2022 Méira Cook

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Published in Canada in 2022 and the USA in 2022 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The full catastrophe / Méira Cook.

Names: Cook, Méira, 1964- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022013393X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220133948 |
ISBN 9781487009946 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487009953 (EPUB)

Classification: LCC PS8555.O567 F85 2022 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

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Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

Text design and typesetting: Lucia Kim

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House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

And can a Scarecrow not have, occasionally, a bright idea?

Can a Tin Man not suffer a broken heart?

— Ethics of the Fathers

(Look it up.)

Boy Wonder

Tuesday, September 5, 2006

The trouble with Charlie was he couldn’t make up his mind. But as his grandfather, Oscar Wolf Minkoff, pointed out, it wasn’t the poor kid’s fault. Indecision wasn’t necessarily a matter of choice. The fact that the doctors were struggling to assign the newborn a gender, to declare an “M” or an “F,” was just one more example of vacillation that was surely not, at this early stage, Charlie’s fault.

The way Oscar told it, Charlie Minkoff came into the world shrieking like a banshee, the proud possessor of ten fingers, ten toes, two neat ears, a comically snub nose, a well-developed sense of outrage, and a healthy pair of lungs. A tonsure of pale hair stood out around the infant’s head like dandelion fluff, and two large, slightly protuberant eyes completed the picture. “Little frog,” his grandfather exclaimed fondly, stroking the baby’s cheek.

The child was perfect, Oscar thought, sincerely puzzled by the doctors’ insistence that something was wrong, gravely wrong, with the infant’s genitals. Neither one thing nor the other, they insisted; too small for a penis, too big for a clitoris. Wincing at the unfamiliar words, Oscar remained phlegmatic. “He just needs time to make up his mind,” he said. “Give the little frog time.”

“That’s not how time works,” snapped the surgeon, a ghastly man. Distastefully, he asked if Oscar was the father, and Oscar had to explain that the father was no longer in the picture.

“He’s fallen in with a bad crowd,” he allowed, which was true insofar as Oscar had always viewed religious orthodoxy askance. But the surgeon was uninterested in Oscar’s complaints about the New York Hasidim — the Black Hats, as he called them — reiterating that the family must come to a decision about surgery, the sooner the better. The truth was, with Charlie’s father having deserted them, and Oscar’s poor daughter in a state of what he persisted in calling post-nasal depression, the decision came down to Oscar — Oscar, with a little help from Weeza, who wasn’t a blood relative but, credit due, would always have Charlie’s best interests at heart. Weeza, Charlie’s godless godmother, as she would call herself, was of one mind with Oscar. In the end, he decided he was disinclined to meddle with perfection.

He had waited too long and too anxiously for this grandchild. His daughter was a change-of-life baby, born when Oscar’s dear wife, Chaya Rifke, was in her forties. Now Jules, herself nearing forty, had given birth to this perfect child. The Minkoff women could not be hurried, Oscar thought fondly. They took their own sweet time, time becoming sweet, dripping like honey from a wooden spoon. But who holds the spoon, Wolfie? Chaya-Rifke-in-his-head prompted him. She was always reminding him that their lives were in the hands of the Almighty — a gift.

A gift! That was how Oscar had viewed his baby daughter, even when his beloved Chaya Rifke succumbed shortly after labour to a blood infection sustained during the long and complicated birth, a birth in which two children were born although only one survived. Broken-hearted though he was, Oscar had raised his little daughter as best he could given her perverse nature, her fiercely independent spirit, and her flagrant disregard for convention, all of which Oscar understood was because Jules was an artist, had been since birth. That was how it was, he reflected: you began as you meant to go on.

But when he tried to explain this point of view to Charlie’s surgeon, the man convulsed with rage, banging his fist into his palm and speaking so emphatically that he bit each word off at the root. Perhaps this was why it took Oscar a moment to realize the terrible man had called his grandchild a ticking time bomb whose controlled detonation he was willing to oversee but whose “artistic success” he could not guarantee. Sarcasm would never be enough for some folks, Oscar reflected. In addition, they had to use finger quotes to express their disgust.

In response Oscar brought up one of his favourite stories: “Cat in a Box,” as he called it. The short of it was that if a cat got stuck in a box you could never be sure what was happening in that box until you lifted the lid. Cat could be asleep, cat could be awake, cat could even be, God forbid, passed away. The trick was to let cat make its own decision, with the understanding that whatever happened, the cat could never go against its nature. It could never, for example, become a dog or — here Oscar turned the finger quotes he’d resented back upon the surgeon — “a bomb.”

Fascinated by Oscar’s highly original interpretation of Schrödinger’s thought experiment though she was, Dr. Jabbour felt obliged to intervene. A pediatric endocrinologist, she’d been called in for a consultation and, like Oscar, had taken against the surgeon’s harrowing sense of emergency. In the flurry of chromosomal testing and analysis of genital tissue that the surgeon had insisted on ordering and the ensuing brouhaha about what to do, what choices to make, hers was the voice of reason. “The decision is up to the child,” she said. “I look forward to watching him grow into an extraordinary young person.”

“Or her,” she amended hastily.

Now here was Charlie, thirteen years later, still at sixes and sevens. But despite what Jules had written on the Wonder Wall, the boy wasn’t angry at God or mad as hell. He didn’t hate his mother, he hadn’t given up on his deadbeat father, and he hardly ever wished he’d never been born. On the contrary, Charlie was hopeful, prone to hope as others are to asthma or allergies. This dogged optimism verged on foolishness, his grandfather sometimes thought. But foolishness, as Oscar knew, wasn’t the absence of light. It was the absence out of which the light could be separated from the darkness and the heavens from the earth.

River

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

The night before his thirteenth birthday and his first day at Assiniboine High School, Charlie couldn’t sleep. He lay awake listening to the ancient building settling around him: the knocking of pipes in walls, gurgle of water through drains, distant ping of the elevator stopping randomly on one floor or another. The few tenants left in the old GNC Building had settled in for the night, but still the elevator roved up and down the creaky backbone of its shaft, emitting electronic signals of effort and distress. Ping, ping, ping.

Fall had come early, the wind seeping through badly sealed window frames, radiators giving off a faintly clanking, wholly unconvincing warmth. For once Charlie was glad of Gellman snuffling at his feet, sharing his kibble-breathed, doggy fug, his fur electric with static.

As always when he was exhausted and twanging with nerves, Charlie felt a creeping nausea build in him until his resolve not to vomit flared up in response and, with effort, overcame the queasy sensation of saliva flooding his mouth, sweat beading along his hairline, even the way his stomach punched through his diaphragm like a fist. He hadn’t thrown up since he was a young kid (five-and-three-quarters, stomach flu, worst three days of his life). The experience of being at the mercy of something nastier and more violent than he could ever hope to be gave him something to aim for: a throw-up-free zone of deep breathing, judicious swallowing, and distraction. A life in which one particular indignity could be controlled.

It had been seven years since the last incident, a winning streak Charlie saw no reason to break. Breathing deeply, he swallowed down the nausea as well as a mouthful of pre-throw-up phlegm and turned his attention to his birthday card. His father’s card had arrived, as it did every year, in an envelope postmarked New York City, NY. Charlie had torn it open with barely controlled excitement (was this the year that his mysterious father would reveal himself?) f...

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