The Weight on Friday

It began, as most catastrophes in Ottawa do, with a bilingual memorandum. The Ministry of Psycho-Somatic Compliance issued the decree on a drizzly Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning, citizens of the capital were waking up with their emotional baggage physically attached to their bodies. A retroactive biological amendment.

Bylaw 448-B, "The Somatic Manifestation Act," was framed as a transparency measure. If you carried the unresolved grief of a divorce, it was no longer a polite, repressed sigh at a dinner party. It was a forty-pound, violet-hued hump of gristle hanging off your left shoulder, running a low fever. If you harboured professional inadequacy, it manifested as a series of wet, heavy sandbags dragging from your ankles, scraping against the linoleum of government hallways.

I, Barnaby Rutch, Junior Analyst for Agricultural Subsidies, woke up that first morning expecting to be crushed.

I had spent thirty-four years building a garden of neuroses. I was a man who apologized to automatic doors. I masturbated with a sense of grim duty. I assumed my trauma would be a sprawling architecture of flesh, a cathedral of angst requiring a custom-tailored suit and eliciting hushed reverence in the elevator. I was, I believed, dense with damage. This was the lie I had balanced my entire adult life on: that my restraint was depth, that a small life fully controlled was a life fully felt.

I ran to the bathroom mirror, heart knocking at my ribs.

There, protruding from the base of my neck, was a nub. Beige, lukewarm, gelatinous. The size of a clementine. It didn't pulse. It didn't glow. It sat there, giving off a faint smell of boiled cauliflower, the kind that seeps into cheap laminate and stays.

Humiliating. In a city suddenly crowded with tragic, operatic growths, I was wearing a spiritual pimple.

I tried to hide it under a scarf. The office culture had shifted overnight. The hallways of the Sir John A. Macdonald building smelled of ozone and damp wool and the specific copper tang of adrenal output. Previously grey and stiff, the bureaucracy had become a carnival of grotesque vulnerability. People wore their burdens like haute couture.

Gordie Heneghan, Director of Canola Policy, arrived with a jagged crystalline growth erupting from his chest. It shimmered with the icy blue light of a suppressed gambling addiction. When he breathed, the crystals chimed. He had to turn sideways to get through the boardroom door. Everyone waited. Awestruck by the volume of his hidden darkness.

"Morning, Barnaby," Gordie boomed, crystals vibrating. He clocked the feeble bulge under my scarf and offered a pitying, tight-lipped smile. "Light load today?"

"Just a stiff neck," I said. My face was hot enough to cook on.

I hated him. I wanted a burden that required structural support. I wanted a trauma that communicated: I have lived, and I have suffered, and my suffering has mass. Instead, my manifestation suggested my greatest spiritual struggle was indecision in the cereal aisle.

The social order of Ottawa had inverted. The well-adjusted, the happy, the shallow were pariahs now, moving through the city with smooth backs and light steps. Ottawa belonged to the damaged.

It was in this climate of competitive suffering that I met Sloane Pasternak.

She worked in Archives, two floors down. I first saw her in the cafeteria, struggling at the salad bar. She was breathtaking. Not just her face, which was sharp and framed by dark curls going their own way, but her baggage. A heavy, velvet-textured mass draped over her shoulders, deep crimson, pulsing with a slow rhythm. It had the weight and color of stage curtains from a theatre where tragedy had been running for three years without a break. Grief Too Big To Name. The doctors probably had a three-part Latin name for it.

She reached for the tongs to grab a cucumber slice, and the mass shifted, and she staggered. I moved before I ran the numbers.

"Let me," I said, sliding her tray along the rail.

She looked up. Eyes wide, rimmed with exhaustion. "Oh. Thank you. It's. Heavy day."

"I can see that," I said, keeping my voice at a register I hoped read as solemn rather than desperate, hoping she wouldn't look too closely at the cauliflower-nub under my collar. "The humidity makes them swell."

"God, yes," she said. A sound from the bottom of a cistern. "It feels like it has teeth today."

We found a table near the window, overlooking the grey sludge of the Ottawa River. The cafeteria was a sea of lumps and protrusions. A woman from HR wept softly into her soup, stroking a furry growth on her forearm that purred back. Loneliness, turned into a companion animal. The whole room smelled of roasted vegetables and something sharper, like the inside of a heating duct.

"I'm Sloane," she said, adjusting the mass on her shoulder with a grimace.

"Barnaby." I kept my back pressed against the plastic chair to flatten my inadequacy. "That's. Quite a manifestation. If you don't mind."

"My brother," she said, stabbing a cherry tomato. "Five years ago. Then my divorce. They fused. Doctors call it a Compound Melancholy Structure. It needs daily moisturizing."

"It's beautiful," I said.

She looked at me, chewing. "It ruins all my shirts. I can't sleep on my back. It starts up around 3 a.m. telling me I'm forgetting the sound of his voice."

I was so jealous I could taste bile at the back of my throat. My baggage was mute. It didn't have the decency to haunt me. It just sat there, a dumb, warm lump of clay.

"What about you?" she asked, gesturing toward my neck with her fork. "You're hiding something."

I froze.

I could lie. I could claim it was an ultra-dense singularity of existential dread, small but infinitely heavy. But deception under the Act tended to produce sudden, itchy rashes on the eyelids.

"It's new," I said. "Still germinating. Very complex. Mostly internal."

Sloane squinted at the topography of my scarf. "Small ones are dangerous," she said, with the authority of someone who had done the reading. "Dense. Like plutonium. You must be very repressed. I like that. A containment vessel."

A containment vessel.

She misread my absence of depth as stoic containment, and I let her. I felt hope arrive, and behind it, immediately, the specific weight of fraud.

"I'd like to take you to dinner," I said. "There's a place in the market with extra-wide booths."

"I'd like that," she said. "I need someone to help me up if I fall over."

The date was set for Friday. That gave me three days to acquire better trauma.

I needed mass. I needed gravity. I couldn't show up to dinner with Sloane Pasternak, a woman who wore her tragedy like a Renaissance cloak, carrying a benign polyp. I needed to cultivate suffering. I had told myself for thirty-four years that I was suffering quietly. Now the city had called my bluff in gristle and lymph.

I took three sick days.

My apartment in Sandy Hill smelled of lemon furniture polish and books I hadn't opened. I sat in the kitchen under the fluorescent tube and began my regimen.

I called my mother.

"Barnaby?" Her voice thin and tinny over the phone speaker. "Is everything alright? Do you need money?"

"No, Mom," I said, gripping the phone. "I called to ask why you never loved me as much as you loved the dog."

Silence. A confused rustling. "Barnaby, don't be absurd. Buster had hip dysplasia. It's apples and oranges."

"I felt the cold wind of your neglect," I said, squeezing my eyes shut. "I was a child alone in the tundra of your affection."

"Are you on drugs?" she asked. "Is this about the girl from the dental hygienist's office?"

I hung up. Checked the mirror. The beige nub hadn't grown a millimeter. If anything, it looked smoother.

I escalated. Twelve consecutive hours of industrial accident documentaries. Sad cello music and photos of my ex-girlfriend, the one who left me for a semi-professional disc golfer. I forced myself to sit with the heat death of the universe, the mechanics of factory farming, and the fact that I had never learned to properly whistle.

By Friday afternoon I was dehydrated, headachy, my eyes raw and gritty. And there, in the full-length mirror.

It had worked. Something.

The beige nub hadn't grown. But a second growth had appeared on my left ribcage. Grey. Wet. Spiky. It looked like a ball of dryer lint packed with broken glass. It snagged my shirt. It hurt. It was the physical manifestation of Insecurity About Generally Not Being Sad Enough. Meta-textual. Parasitic. Entirely self-generated.

But it was volume. It pushed my jacket out. I looked like a man carrying something real.

I put on my best blazer, wincing as the grey spikes dug into the lining, and went to the Byward Market.

Le Poids was acoustically dampened to absorb the squelching of its patrons. The air carried roasted garlic and something else underneath, a faint acetone quality, like old grief metabolizing. Sloane was already seated in a cantilevered booth rated for four hundred pounds of emotional residue. She wore a black dress cut low in the back to accommodate the crimson mass, which was pulsing now in a soft pink, bioluminescent in the low light.

When I slid into the booth, the grey spiky ball on my ribs scraped audibly against the table edge. Scritch-squelch.

Sloane's eyes widened. "Barnaby. You've changed."

"It's been a rough week," I said. I ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir. The grey growth dug into the side of my lung. It felt real. It felt earned. I was in pain, therefore I was interesting. This was the calculation I'd made, and I felt it now with clinical clarity, balanced on the table between us like a bill nobody wanted to pick up.

"It looks painful," she said. Her hand hovered over my ribcage. "Can I touch it?"

"Be careful. It's sharp."

She brushed her fingertips against the grey spikes. I went cold and hot simultaneously, the sensation running from the kneecap up.

"It feels synthetic," she said, frowning. "The velvet on mine is warm. This is cold." She withdrew her hand. "Barnaby. What is this?"

The waiter arrived with the wine. Young guy, a weeping growth on his forehead the size and color of a bruised persimmon. Failed novelist, clearly. He poured with trembling hands.

"I just wanted to be on your level," I said to Sloane. I took a large gulp of wine, felt it land hot in my sternum. "You carry that cathedral around, and I'm walking in with a carry-on bag."

She sighed. The crimson mass rippled. The sound it made was a cello string being tuned in a wet room. "Barnaby, you idiot. You think I like this? I can't fit in economy seats. I buy two tickets to the movies. I'm here because you looked light. I wanted to borrow your lightness."

My stomach dropped.

The grey ball on my ribs lurched.

"You wanted me for my lack of depth?" My voice cracked on the last word.

"I wanted you for your stability." Her eyes were wet. "I thought you were a safe harbour. But you're as messed up as the rest of us, only you're trying to be. That's worse. That's so much worse."

Then a sharp tearing at my side. I dropped my fork.

The grey growth was moving. The anxiety I had manufactured, the recursive loop of feeling bad about not feeling bad enough, had reached critical mass. It was no longer content. It had run an audit of its host and found the accounts empty.

"Barnaby, your shirt is ripping," Sloane said.

With a sound like wet velcro, the grey spiky ball detached itself from my ribs.

It didn't fall. It hovered, suspended by its own self-importance. A nasty, spinning tumbleweed of artificial angst. The restaurant went silent. The novelist froze mid-pour. Gordie Heneghan, eating a steak two tables over, his crystal chest-piece chiming, put down his knife.

Guidelines for Bylaw 448-B were clear: manifestations were permanent unless the trauma was resolved. This wasn't resolution. This was rejection.

The grey tumbleweed rotated slowly. It seemed to review me, the way a contractor reviews a job that isn't going to pay. It saw the beige nub on my neck. It saw the checkbook balanced to the penny, the doors I'd apologized to, the suffocating safety of a life kept exactly at room temperature. It made its assessment.

It drifted across the table toward Sloane. Circled her crimson mass, sniffing at the edges. But even Sloane's tragedy was too genuine to host it. The entity rose, bobbed toward the exit, and floated out into the frosty Ottawa night in search of a host with more artistic integrity, or at least a worse childhood.

"It's leaving," Sloane said. "Barnaby, your trauma is walking out on you."

"Wait." I stood up. Knocked over my wine glass. The Pinot Noir spread across the tablecloth like a gunshot wound. "Come back. I can be sadder. I can think about the heat death of the universe again."

The grey ball ignored me.

It went through the open door and into the dark.

I stood there. Shirt torn. Ribs bare and smooth. The beige nub on my neck gave a small quiver, then went still. The tablecloth was soaked red around the overturned glass. Nobody moved.

Sloane looked at me. The disappointment in her eyes was heavier than everything she carried on her back.

"You're completely clean," she said. "There isn't a mark on you."

"I can explain."

"Check, please," she said to the waiter.

I walked home alone. The streets were full of people hunched under their glowing shapes. Couples with baggage that had grown around each other like vines. A man on the corner feeding a sandwich to the mouth that had appeared on his knee. The air smelled of cold concrete and the faint metallic note of other people's adrenaline.

I moved with my head up. The wind came through the torn shirt and hit my ribs directly. I was freezing. Aerodynamic.

At the canal locks I looked down at the dark water and tried to summon something. Loss, dread, the pang of watching the grey thing leave. Nothing arrived. Just the beige nub, warm and small and steady against my collar, putting out its low, toneless frequency.

Mild discomfort. The size of a clementine.

I could not manufacture the thing I actually needed. That was the problem, and knowing it changed nothing. The nub would not grow. It would not pulse or acquire teeth. It would sit there, generation after generation, smelling faintly of boiled cauliflower, while the rest of the city suffered enormously and in public.

I buttoned my coat over it. Turned away from the water. Went home to floss.

The nub was grating warm against the collar the whole way back.