Excerpt from Every Night I Dream I'm a Monk, Every Night I Dream I'm a Monster, by Damian Tarnopolsky

March 11, 2025

Excerpt from “Like Triumph,” in Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster (2024) by Damian Tarnopolsky. Used with permission of Freehand Books.

Damian Tarnopolsky. Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster. Freehand Books. $22.95, 272 pp., ISBN: 9781990601804

I was eating my dry Corn Flakes as Annie got ready for work. I think she said she loved me; she kissed the side of my head. Then she was calling out, Knock ’Em Dead. Then she was gone and I was alone with the baby. We didn’t see each other much, at that time, me and Annie. There was her work, and when she got home from work she was all about Cassie and that made sense, and there was always the smell of kitty litter in the apartment. I heard myself say goodbye, but she was already gone. Already in my head I could see her at the bus stop, the wind fiddling in with her blondey-grey hair as she untangled her headphones. So I went to the sink to fill Cassie’s fat neon sippy cup, and I saw a see-through plastic sheet on the kitchen door: Annie must have taken my suit to the cleaners for my interview, and I said Whoa, that’s an expense, to Cassie. Then Cassie was saying Ca, this was her word for cup. Then she was screaming it.

This was a few months ago. I hadn’t worked for a couple of years by this point and to be honest I was starting to wonder if I was really alive or not. Previously I’d done various kinds of communications projects, mostly around e-learning product breakthroughs, when my writing didn’t work out, and I thought my experience was okay, but the only interviews I got were when the job description was a series of bullets written about me exactly, Mark Ferguson: gluten-free, Habs fan. Does not own a Vespa. Likes to have his neck pecked. Mildly obsessed with the travels of the Jesuits. But then something always went wrong in the interviews. I’d lose the use of my tongue and lips, for example, I mean I’d find myself physically unable to speak, as if some other version of me only not in a suit was standing there behind me, above me, spooning sand into my mouth. Or the opposite: I’d find myself talking about Self-Regulation, but too much, not able to stop talking about Self-Regulation, even as I found myself walking backwards like a black-clad modern dancer towards the elevators, smiling about Self-Regulation. I’d forget the basic tenets of my field—my own educational history, seemingly tailored to this moment, became a black hole to me. Or I’d just be thinking about Bella.

Annie said Don’t worry. She said it was the economy, she said it was demographics. But the interviews slowed, and then the interviews stopped. That was my life I saw when I went running late at night: that train, stopped on the tracks, forgotten, lights on, emitting a high-pitched whirr through the windows.

We knew it was crazy to have Cassie, madness pure and simple. No one said it but we knew. Their eyes said it. The faith Annie had in me! At first it made me glow: Something’s just around the corner! Then it scared me. It should have been her with Cassie, not me, and I walked around the apartment seeing dollar signs sprouting up out of Cassie’s onesies, her multicoloured plastic kitchen furniture, her many tiny shoes that Annie always seemed to be exchanging with other mothers for slightly larger ones, her diapers, as if you could hang her on the door by them. She called for me, she clung to my shoulders, that warmth! But I wanted to be on my phone, alone with my thoughts. But I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, because they were bad, at this time. It’s not like in the movies where you put the baby down and read a book or screw your wife up against the banging bathroom door. When I had five minutes I thought about baking bread. I tried to improve myself, start running again. Meanwhile my brother-in-law Roger bought a boat.

When you look at yourself, when you look at your life, do you see a pattern? Do you see a thread? I pick up these moments, and I look at them now, but somehow I can’t connect them, somehow I can’t see them as relating to me. Like beads or marbles, there’s no necklace. My moments are not my moments. They rest on the night table, by the call button that I press when I get the terrors and my nurses all ignore. Annie once said this way of thinking about things, it wouldn’t help me any. But it bedevils me. It keeps me up at night. More than the beeping does, more than the whirrs. It’s four in the morning and I’m thinking, Who am I? Who is this? Mark Ferguson. Is this just a way of thinking, really? Is it just habit? At least it stops me dreaming.

We used to play pool on College street: one ball would hit another.

At this time, I wasn’t really sleeping. I never had that much sense of my own freedom, I suppose. The result was that I nearly died. I tried to kill myself; I got lucky. It could have been me lying shallow in the ground there, instead of telling you this. Six months in a hospital bed. Why’d they put a funeral home across the way from a hospital? Who does that? Do I need to apologize to you all? I’d need to get to know you first. Annie most of all. But yeah, it’s probably too late.

Four-five months ago, so a coupla months before the interview, that is before I shot myself in the head and blew out a good quarter of my pre-frontal cortex, or so I am told, though it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to anything, my brother-in-law, Roger, took me camping with his friends. They all brought rifles in these immense, ornate cases like for pool cues, like for special chef-brand knives. They were all expert. For some reason I wasn’t expecting that, though I’d been told in the past that they liked to kill small animals in the woods. I guess I thought they were kidding about what camping was to them. But I wasn’t understanding things as well as I used to. Not hearing instructions clearly. You know. That and my incipient deafness. My dizzy spells.

Hey, it’s hard for me too, Roger admitted.

He was a huge guy, I’d say three times my height, my weight I mean, ex-police, now he’s a bigshot defence lawyer but he drives a pickup truck. I pretended like I didn’t know what he was talking about. A lot of the time, I just say nothing. I felt about an inch tall next to him, and I hated that. He’d learned a lot on the Force about Process, he said. What to do when things go wrong.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, we said together.

Jinx, he said. You owe me a Coke.

This loud and sudden crack came from the fire. These other guys were all asleep, visions of heavily armed hookers dancing through their heads. They’d ragged Roger about Erica until his puffy white neck got red. Your wife’s so hot I have to wear sunglasses just to look at her. She rips the sky a new one. Your wife’s so hot I—

I been there. You know that, said Roger. I’ve had times in my life. We all have.

Suddenly I wanted to be back in the city.

Roger flicked his can of Old Milwaukee off into the woods manfully. It went miles into the black. Even here by the crackling fire, the sky was so thick with stars that it looked like the sea. Or was it the other way around?

Roger checked his phone, muttered something about a stupendous restaurant he’d finally got Erica a table at. Vaping in the woods he looked like something out of that show about the highly sexed dragons that everyone was talking about the whole damn time, that I’d never seen.

Sometimes you’re gonna want to pretend to be that guy, said Roger.

What guy? I asked him.

A man’s glory is to ride roughshod into his enemy’s lands, behead his enemy, enslave his enemy’s sons, and make wash-shirts out of his enemy’s wives and daughters, I thought.

Mark-o, he almost sang. You gotta let yourself be part of things. Take it easy on yourself. Why do you always push? You feel me?

I was back in that moment when they let me hold a rifle. I could have pointed it anywhere. It was lighter than I expected. It felt like triumph.

I’d had a fucking ball that day, I don’t mind telling you. They were good guys. Roger said it was nice to see me smiling.

Roger’s tiny lupine eyes were orange now. Around them, his stubbly jowls were huge and demonic in the pumpkin-shaded chiaroscuro. I thought he was going to tell me something very personal, so I got in there first and said it was simple. We all have this voice in our head, I said. There’s something wrong with mine. It’s angry with me. I don’t understand it any longer. It speaks to me in a language all its own.

I was lying, of course.

All you’re doing is telling yourself stories buddy, Roger said, after a pause. It was as if he knew, as if I were transparent. As if he could read my mind. He scratched at himself in the sleeping bag. You might as well make them good.

Sometimes I’m so confident. I’d cut you all to ribbons. But sometimes I couldn’t even look you in the eye.

Through a big huge yawn he asked me what I thought about this investment opportunity, the land for sale on the drive up we’d seen, his rifle range idea. I said nothing. Some days it’s a victory to get my shoes on.

How’s our girl? said Roger. I didn’t know which he meant.

Good, I said. She just started on solids.

Then he was asleep.

I could have stayed out there forever, just the lickety flames and me. I could have walked into the forest and never come back.

He’d said he had an in at Callway. Guy on his hockey team. We’ll look after you, he’d said. Nothing bad ever really happens, was what he said. I know a guy, he said. We’re gonna make you whole again.

It seems to me possible that when people talk about heaven and hell and call them superstitions they’re missing something obvious, which is the temporal dimension. It seems to me eminently possible, likely in fact, that our great era, with our ability to see via location tracking where in the grocery store our personal fucking grocery shopper Rahul is standing, is basically Marx’s hell. But that in turn the Dark Ages was the cold wet Hades of the Greeks; the solitary life of the salaryman is the hell of your social cave-dweller. This life I’m living now, with my toddler and my recycling: to my nineteen-year-old poet bike-riding snooty self, it would be hell.

Shortly after or before Roger’s hunting trip I said to Annie these last two years have been just fucking horrible just entirely horrible just hell I’ve been falling down a mountain in burning hell for two years and I’m alone and I’m burning up. These interviews, I said. I don’t sleep.

She said nothing for a while.

Then she said, Not entirely horrible. I knew she was talking about Cassie.

The size of her eyes. Like saucers. My wife and my child! What was I doing to these people? I didn’t want Cassie to end up like me.

This needs to stop, I thought. I didn’t want to end up like my dad, reeling out my own madness. Who was I kidding? I missed Bella. I missed talking to her. She was the only one who really read my stuff, too, and I always listened to what she said, because it was like she got me, and now she’s gone. My sister on the boat. My sister in the water. Whereas Laura doesn’t give a shit about us. She never did. She was always on her own track.

Do you think there’s part of you that wants to make it worse, Annie said. Do you think that’s something you could try to change maybe? Sweetie?

I resolved to, that day, and it helped, for a while. I stopped drinking, I prayed, I started on the little pink pills, triangular. I did some woodworking, I did Tai Chi, I learned to cook, I meditated, I stopped complaining, I stayed in the moment, I read. If we’d had a piano I’d have learned to play it. I stayed off the porn.

It helped, for a while, but, you know, it was still me doing it.

What did I do next? On the day of my interview. What the fuck even happened? I put on a show for Cassie On Demand. Callway hadn’t called to cancel, that was something. Out of the smeary window it was contractors in white cargo vans, a hearse with its long tail of black town cars and little purple Funeral signs stuck into the hoods like birthday candles. Jogging moms pushing strollers tutting at the mail carrier’s truck parked halfway up on the sidewalk. You’re going to hurt some little kid! It’s the law! I guess to the rest of the world the day your life nearly ends is just another day. I saw the hypnotherapist cruising ever so gently up the street the wrong way in her cream-coloured Merc, and the moustachioed local painter who provided home painting solutions we couldn’t afford. The day’s recycling bins stood gaping like baby dinosaurs in the nest. It was high summer but already golden leaves were falling, spiralling, all their little loves dying; and still the sun failed fully to pierce the branches of the chestnut tree, as, delicately, a red-tailed hawk spread his white underwings wide to come into landing on the rusty skewed spire of our church steeple. Twitching, he glanced over his great territory once more, and prepared to hunt again.

See? I fucking told you. Poetry.

An episode of Backyardigans lasts twenty-four minutes and eighteen seconds, from character reintroduction to final handholdy goat song. I showered with the door open, under the broken light fixture, going over my Strengths (they’d said the interview would have various steps: after the usual sit-down, a practical element with a verbal-oral component). Then the bathroom went white, like the space behind my head, and when I came to I was in the fetal position, the water spraying my back. I almost killed myself sliding out of there, that would have been funny, and of course I wasn’t dressed or shaved yet and I called out coming sweetheart! She was still inert though, in her own world. And it was okay, I didn’t want to see my big head, older than it was supposed to be, my red eyes, anyway, so maybe it was better not to shave. I’m not going to show them I care. Annie had instituted a one-show limit for brain development, but I had to find a fucking tie so I put on another show, thinking I’ll be able to do more for her brain development if I can afford to buy her some books, okay? I grew up in a house full of books. But the TV was always on in the corner, that was my mom, the corner of the kitchen, in front of the fine china, and I turned out okay. Cassie has the softest hair in the world, the sweetest smell. I’m going to do better, I promised.

Her mouth was moving funny. Or I’d had a stroke. No, I was fine. Out of the side of her mouth, Cassie said, Describe a client conflict you recently resolved. Where do you see yourself in five years? she asked me. What makes you laugh? Do you believe in luck?

Kind of, I said. I guess. I thought about it. Well, bad luck maybe.

Can you make me a list of your triumphs and disasters?

Sure just let me—

Make me a list of your triumphs and disasters.

I looked for them around the apartment. I needed a car to drive through the city to find them, but without a job I couldn’t afford a car. There’s really no way out. I was by the door, trying to kick the stroller open, still in my boxers. I really had to remember the wipes this time. Cassie was gnawing on her own fat arm, basting it in a layer of spit. Oh kid, I said. Then my phone rang and I didn’t recognize the number. Congratulations! said a girl who sounded about twenty and kind of into me. You have been selected to win a free Taiwanese cruise! Stay on the line for more details. So I did.

I got a feeling, Annie said, before she left.

Stop twitching, Roger said, in the forest hide. It’s not a dance party.

I didn’t love anyone that much. People are a lot of work. My life at this time, it was all cortisol, all shoulders.

This is the problem. With Cassie it was a long walk from the bus stop. Their house was brighter, the lawn was perfect. A black balcony stuck out like a surveillance post. Orange trim brought the windows out garishly, Erica’s latest improvement. Sometimes a set of plates would suddenly appear in our apartment after she visited, a lime-green chest of drawers for the baby would be delivered as if by magic, fully assembled. Suddenly I felt exhausted.

Hey Ric, I said.

Hey Gorgeous, Erica said to Cassie, Hey Nibs! And then, Tyler’s in the playroom with Milinda. I’ll take her. Let me take her. And then, over her shoulder, You want something? Coffee is on.

Milinda’s voice soared along to us from some cavernous reach of the house and then closer and closer, like a siren. How did she move so fast? Could she float? I wondered silently if she had help; she might need divine intervention, with Tyler. She was standing in the doorway now, impassive, red-panted, red-lipsticked, the Queen of the Nannies. Once I walked into this hallway and she was doing CPR on one of Tyler’s stuffies, a pink dinosaur, and he was doing it alongside her on another (a Labrador pup). They looked deranged, and it was not a little disturbing. I was not a little disturbed.

Coffee is on? That didn’t sound like English somehow, that phrase.

We laughed at Cassie laugh at Milinda. She had instantly forgotten my existence.

Erica was speaking. What’s with your coat? It screams don’t hire me. I’m wearing a beige trench coat from the seventies. Meet me in a parking lot for tips on Watergate but whatever you do, don’t hire me, I billow. Seriously, Mark, take one of Roger’s jackets. I got him some new finery at Harry Rosen’s for his birthday, and he’s never going to wear it, he won’t know. Take it! It’s upstairs. It’s big around the shoulders, it’s fine, it’s better than that goddamn blanket you’re wearing to push your grocery cart along. Jesus Christ Mark do you want this job? Now tell me sit down are you all set? Are you focused? Are you centered. Sit, you can get it later, just tell me what you’re feeling now. Sit. Her voice was like caramel.

It’s an index perhaps of the confusion I was feeling at this time in my life that I sat, meekly, with Erica, whose roots were starting to show in a way that made her look even more like our impression of her at Roger’s stag party, a few years before all this, I think, when everyone dressed up like her, and Roger’s best buddy Astor duct-taped metal mixing bowls across the front of his fluorescent lemon gown and we did karaoke. Fuck, that was a night to forget, too.

At her kitchen island, the two of us at this silver island in a vast expanse of kitchen ocean, just across from each other, with all her Mexican suns on the wall watching me, some of them smiling, some of them scowling, like the masks of ancient dead comics and tragedians, her hand on my forearm now, her bracelets jingling, this is Annie’s older sister, they love each other, they talk in the evenings. She’d just come from her trainer. She knew way more than I wanted her to about my day, my plan, and she didn’t let me get a word in, she was all yoga pants and glossy orange lycra and exuding good things, good energy, the sweat she’s sweated out, the sweat that still dappled her lovely shoulders, I guess they used to call it vibes or chakras and your place in the energy circle and she was kidding around with me, too, she was super earnest and then she was kidding around with me (what is it with people and their ability to speak? I barely say anything, anymore. I keep my counsel), she was making cute faces, saying this coffee maker cost us a thousand dollars, and I don’t know how the goddamn thing works! and talking to it like it was voice activated, and yet somehow I knew how human she was, how desperate, underneath it all, like all of us, how much fear she felt, like all of us, but then fuck, I watched her turn away from me like we were in a nightclub like when once in a while, two hundred million years ago, a girl would turn away from me only then to grind against me thinking maybe I had pills for her because of my reticulated way of dancing, it’s not that long ago we used to go dancing, the four of us, and she reached up to grab two tiny espresso cups, the ones with the goat and a fawn on them they’d bought in Italy and I was like, fuck. I just wanted to grab her, all your laws and customs be damned. An incredibly rich smell was filling the room. It’s grinding, Erica said to me, and winked, and I wiped the fucking idiot grin off my face or I tried to. Could she read my thoughts? Was I actually made of glass? Somehow I had the craziest sense of déjà vu.

Photo cred: Diego Altamira Olvera

Damian Tarnopolsky is a writer, editor, and teacher, whose novel Goya’s Dog was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean). His short fiction has appeared in The Puritan, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Audeamus, and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for the Journey Prize, as well as the CBC Literary Award. He lives in Toronto.