Water Snake

by M.G. Warenycia

“Somebody forgot to put their headphones on?” The question provoked mischievous snickering around the chaotically communal office. The huffing and sniffling, however, was not emanating from a not-safe-for-work website which someone had been amusing themselves with while forgetting to mute the volume. Minnie’s tanned and rosy cheeks blanched from embarrassment at the attention suddenly surrounding her: she, in fact, been deliberately exaggerating her discomfort, hoping to draw sympathy without having to make a direct complain to higher-ups. It didn’t help that, with her too-small scarlet blouse and lycra-infused pencil skirt, she was a perfect fit for a couple of popular search categories on just such websites. Nor did it help that in her ‘work’ she was basically acting as an ornament waiting for a husband.

Mind, the same was true of most everyone in the office, female or male. Johan was finishing a book; Ting-Ting did homework for graduate courses, while Lucas rambled about recent dates and planned future ones out loud. There wasn’t much work to do, not only because it was summer but because the office itself was in a state of flux. One week, the department sent word down that they would all be removed to new quarters on Russell Street. By Friday, this would be revised, as someone whose existing office space in the aforementioned location would be shifted protested the move, lest there be competition for parking spaces or their prize ficus plant, growing since the Mulroney era, be deprived of its accustomed portion of sunlight. Their boss, a wild haired, wilder eyed bachelor who’d plunked into the tenure track almost directly upon completing a few years of intensive fieldwork in the cocaine-route jungles of the southern and the Boreal woods of the northern halves of the American hemisphere, was kind and understanding. He expected little from his numerous underlings, and, since he wasn’t paying their salaries, their mental well-being was his chief priority. For their part, the office staff dutifully collected their paychecks and made no comment on the irregularities of their situation.

Indeed, especially in the lazy days of summer when the University as a whole ran at a slower pace, the building felt like their own private castle. It certainly looked the part. It wasn’t the only grand Victorian structure which some guilt-ridden heiress had willed to the University, but it was unique for its unitary bulk and stature, cleanly separated from the crowding of neighbouring buildings and free of the barnacle-like additions imposed by architecturally ignorant modern planners upon those structures situated on the main campus grounds.

Instead, it stood alone and unmolested by modernity, stalwart and solemn on an unusually circular island in the middle of Spadina Avenue. Pedestrians were kept at a distance by default, for the sidewalks on either side of the broad avenue did not cross it and traffic hardly slowed at the pseudo roundabout created by the premises.

There was definitely something eerie about the place; some ingredient which distinguished it from other buildings in the neighbourhood which were of similar vintage. Something more than mere oldness seemed to spread a musty veil over it, darkening the mood of those who gazed upon it, regardless of hour or season, though residents and frequent visitors to the area rumoured that this unique character was weakest in dry, sunny weather and strongest in darkness and rain, or when the winter snow-heaps melted into mud.

The rain had been rolling off the bushy canopy of Norway maples like off of giant umbrellas, regular thunderclaps shattering what had been a prolonged heatwave. Dan Rodgers, of Annex Plumbing Co. Ltd., was rare in not minding doing jobs in these hot, humid conditions. Many years of an unbroken sequence of exhaustion, treated by binge consumption of the LCBO’s most generic prescriptions, themselves fulfilled by the very paychecks that rendered them necessary…Add on top of that a general disconnection from society beyond that cyclic rhythm of toil and succour for toil, and Dan’s senses were comfortably dulled. If there were pipes that needed fixing and a steak and a cold six pack at the end of it, then he might sweat litres, scuff knees and knuckles till they bled, sewing in the grime all around him until the last nut was tight and the H2O flowing again, he would do it – full of curses, perhaps, but no complaints.

He had not, however, ceased to hate being called to office-hour jobs in zones like this one, where you were away from any big parking lots and also from any street which wasn’t parked up 24/7 on account of being built before automobiles were a thing. Whatever tools they needed had to be lugged a full block from where he left the hulking white Econoline. He would have said he was lucky to have an assistant, except that the kid was a placeholder sent out from one of those temp agencies which Annex Plumbing Co. (which he was merely an employee of) had begun dealing with. Bright-eyed, full of energy and enthusiasm,; no way in hell he would be working at this job in five years. You could just tell. By the time a kid was old enough to work – legally, that is – you could tell which ones went to Maple Leaf Gardens and the demolition derby on the weekends, and which ones were examining bugs and bones in the R.O.M. and Science Centre when they were in primary school. The latter might sincerely want to ‘learn a trade’ when they started, but, in all his decades of experience, he’d never met one who didn’t run as far as they could from any kind of manual labour, straight into the softly upholstered bosom of academia or one of the hoity-toity office professions. Not one.

“The batteries on the ground mic and the angle grinder are topped up? I get the feeling this’ll be a big one,” he asked his assistant without making eye contact.

The temp fumed silently for a second before answering. “They should be okay.” He wondered why Dan hadn’t asked before they drove out to the job site. It was like this, what, two or three times already; like Dan was testing his diligence – or his nerves.

“They should be? I didn’t ask you whether they should be; you’re supposed to know that before they send you out here. Anyway, how do you spell your name again? For the time sheets; gotta fill this out…” Dan echoed back each letter, his affected airy pronunciations hinting at his view of the inefficient, illogical appellation that was Estêvão Cerqueira.

Once Dan had completed the documentation which would be too fatiguing to check carefully after the workday was done, the pair made their way into the half elegant, half dismembered lobby of the old building. “That’s what happens when parents don’t let their kids do Boy Scouts anymore, or Cadets or anything like that,” Dan remarked for the benefit of an imaginary audience of plaid-clad roughnecks holding conclave over a Coleman full of Molson’s, referring to the sorts of people, both staff and the handful of grad students who were milling about. “Anyway, let’s see who’s in charge. You’d think it’s gotta be some undead count who has to hide from the sunlight, eh?”

Estevao chuckled softly. By this point, at the end of the week, his feet only moved by purposeful and continuous command. To set the toolbox down, he had to rotate his shoulders and hips to bring it lower, then he dropped it, hoping it would not fall so far as to make much noise, considering it a success when he managed to perform the maneuver without bending back or knees.

It was easy enough to find the huge main doors, but with all the piled boxes, stacked chairs and extension cords snaking haphazardly around the lobby, it was hard to tell where exactly people did the regular office work and where renovations were being carried out.

Dan, mindful of his assistant, planted his feet firmly and scanned the room. He knew someone would notice their tradesmen’s clothes and tool boxes, then direct them where they were needed.

Clacking heels and balancing a heap of styrofoam boxes of pad Thai and curry, Minnie came up on them from behind. “Hey, hello, you guys are the plumbers?” she chirped.

“What do you think?” Dan thought to himself. “That’s right, Miss, just, ah, we are from the plumbing company, but nobody from here spoke to me personally. You would have been talking to the receptionist, but Mable, our regular gal in charge of dispatching everyone, like nine-one-one, y’know, she’s off on maternity leave and we have a temp filling in.” Estevao stared at the floor. “All anybody told me was there’s a leak or a smell or something. Don’t even know where exactly we’re supposed to be looking at, what unit or whatever.”

“Oh…oh, no, no, it wasn’t me that called your company, no,” Minnie said over her shoulder as she hurried to her desk to lay out the feast for her and her office mates. “You have to speak to Professor Cardinal, in room 118. He was saying he was going to call a plumber, and right now he’s in charge, so…”

“Okay, Miss. Hey – “ Dan hissed at Estevao, seeing where his eyes were wandering. “What are you lookin’ at? You want an HR complaint to get filed on us? Come on.”

The two plumbers waited a good fraction of a minute before the aforementioned academic opened the yellowish wooden door, though he welcomed them with hearty hospitality – quite the opposite of most of these ivory tower types, both workmen thought to themselves; the usual rule being to presume that tradesman are an unnatural and unwelcome intrusion into their sacred spaces – a sentiment rarely concealed.

The Professor wore a sober dark suit which contrasted in a way that he must have known people would notice (yet be afraid to admit they noticed) with the beadwork jewelry he wore, elaborate in design and emphatic in colour, as well as with the multiple necklaces of leathern cord bearing amulets visible in place of a tie. Estevao, who was a scholar no matter how he tried to deny it, observed that this surely deliberate contrast extended to the Professor’s bookshelves, which, like all tenured academics, were as fulsome with symbolism as with references. Binders bearing prosaic labels such as “Cadastral Survey: Simcoe County, 1898”and “1969 White Paper,” and dour old colonial works like William R. Caniff’s History of the Settlement of Upper Canada were juxtaposed with ideological tracts like uTOpia, The Poverty Wall, and Prison of Grass. Exotic and yet, therefore also appropriate, were esoteric volumes (based on the covers alone; Estevao had never heard of them before) with titles such as The Golden Bough and Necronomicon.

“I apologize that there is no building manager – as you can see, organization here right now is, well, there’s none to speak of!” The Professor smiled, gesturing to the activity outside the office, invisible behind the door. “This ‘ancient ruin,’ as you can probably figure just from looking at it, needs a whole lot more TLC than the administration has been giving it.”

“Yeah, you can say that again,” Dan had already made mental notes of the various patches of moss and discoloration due to dampness on numerous portions of the exterior stonework.

“They’re not even sure what to do with it.” Professor Cardinal rose from his chair, pacing thoughtfully in front of the obsolete map of the City of Metropolitan Toronto framed upon his wall. “You have to ask why they built it here,” he mused. Dan and Estevao both picked up on the unusual emphasis and were confused by it. The master plumber was oblivious, but Estevao’s imaginative eye fell upon a feather-draped circle divided into red, yellow, white and black quadrants. “They put a road – this road – right here, exactly in a straight line to the wetlands up north – and then they insisted on putting this circle, which is a terrible waste of land, if you’re thinking of developers and profits, which they usually are, and then they plunked this colossal monstrosity of a building on top of it all. Even in horse and buggy days, it must have been noisy, traffic running all around in a circle. What can I say? I’m just the messenger. So, people around the office have been complaining about weird smells lately.”

“Sewage leak?”

“Not sure, really. Nobody seems able to agree on what they’re smelling, but that’s the funny part, nobody says anything like sewage. Musty, musky, sour, cheesy, ‘dusty,’ if that’s a smell. Noises, too.”

“Uh-huh…and what kind of noises?”

“Rushing, gurgling, hissing.”

“Hissing? We talking water or a gas leak?”

“That’s just what Minnie and Tina said. Couldn’t say, myself.” Professor Cardinal stared calmly and lifted a spiral bound course reading from the shelf. Dan was flipping through the notebook he’d use to calculate the charges, but Estevao was mesmerized by the Professor – and astonished to see that the pages of the ‘course reader’ were manuscript, not printed. Alas, he was too shy to ask questions. Indeed, he was beginning to grow sorely envious of his peers who were sitting down in lecture halls and reading pdfs on their computers at home instead of mucking about in the moldy bowels of an assuredly asbestos-stuffed, lead-painted edifice. “Notes on Guiana Trip…G.H. Belzer – N.P…” Estevao could not discern the rest of the title. N.P.? Not printed, he guessed…or not for publication? Ugh, how his muscles and joints cried for a soft mattress…

Professor Cardinal led the plumbers down a long flight of stairs to a basement corridor which branched off into numerous rooms, some covered by grates, others by steel utility doors and still others were bare niches in the wall of the corridor or, to be technically precise, gouged out of the foundation itself. As he left them to their task, hunching forward and lowering his voice, adding that there may be…”dangerous animals” – he enunciated the phrase slowly and suggestively – down in the basement. “Two of the secretaries claimed to have seen something in the washroom closest to the stairwell…rat, raccoon, it was a power outage and they were hysterical; one of them was sure it was a snake or a lizard; couldn’t tell. ”

“Eh, sorry to hear that, buddy, but that’s more of a thing for animal control,” Dan dismissed his warnings.

Cardinal stared gravely, explaining that he did not want to make such a call because, based on his experience as an amateur naturalist as well as a property owner, there might be all kinds of hassles if the creature in question turned onto be on one of the “Red Lists” of endangered species sought by different government agencies and environmental activists – which practically every native reptile, from Nerodia sipedon to Pantherophis spiloides was – then it could be an enormous headache for the property owner. He reassured the plumbers that a large, enclosed concrete building was not the natural habitat of any of these species, in case they were feeling squeamish, and, therefore, they had likely come in to escape harsh weather and were likely few in number and trying to escape, if they hadn’t already.

“Not poisonous though? Not scared; just checking.”

Cardinal answered that there was nothing in this part of Ontario that was venomous – they merely bit when manhandled. “It’s beautiful in a way, when you think about it,” he reflected. “They built this City – huge, millions of people, cars, so big you can walk till you’re tired and not reach the end of it – and there’s still this highway; this network of interconnected natural highways…all the creeks, rivers, meadows running through everything like a spider web…it used to be highways for people, too; still is for Nature.”

Dan walked slowly, following the tight circles of the narrow corridor, occasionally stopping to shine a flashlight into a darkened space. There were not many of those, since the lighting was up to code, or at least the standards of the mid 1990s; no LEDs but not too bad. Every now and then he mumbled a truncated phrase or let out a restrained breath…

Estevao forced himself to stop looking at his supervisor’s face so much. “What the heck is he talking about?” Estevao wondered to himself, fretting that Dan must be making observations for mental notes regarding stuff from the chapters Estevao had skimmed over in his apprenticeship classes. Gradually, he realized, he was being overtaken by anxiety; muscles twitching sharply in irritation, forehead tense – if only Dan would just tell him what they need to do, and to get down to it, then he could push everything else out of his mind.

Dan studiously consulted the moisture gauge as he went. “Funny,” he finally confessed out loud. “Maybe it’s because this whole huge foundation – gotta be what, hundred ‘n thirty years old – probably doesn’t breathe properly…they didn’t build that in; just cared about keeping the heat inside in winter.” It appeared to both his eyes and to the meter he used for detecting subterranean water – it worked something like a sonar – that there was a pipe of some kind, and a substantial leak. Yet when he would reposition himself to investigate more closely, all of a sudden the ‘damp patch’ on the concrete would appear to blend in with the rest of the wall, as if it had been a mere trick of the light.

“He was right, that guy. I can definitely smell something…can’t say what kind, but something animal; something living,” Estevao piped up, doing his best to show Dan that he really was learning the ropes. “Eugh! It’s like…like a sewage leak or something? Right?They mentioned the office washroom, I remember, though I guess we’re way too far down the hall now…” He trailed off, realizing that, in their wandering inspection, they must have travelled at least a dozen metres from where they entered the corridor.

“Sewage leak?!? Do you smell sewage?” Dan’s tone told that only an incompetent temp would believe that a sewage leak was, in fact, the problem. On the other hand, there was definitely an odour to the place. Estevao wasn’t about to ask until he was 100% confident he wouldn’t be made to look like a helpless noob. Dan would know…What was this basement used for, exactly? None of the rooms were classrooms, nor did it appear they had ever been used as such. Furthermore, what storage there was seemed to be mainly incidental: the piling up of leftover materials from construction and renovation projects begun and finished or abandoned over the decades, along with cheap and battered tools deemed not worth the effort to haul back to the surface. No one, Estevao reckoned, had ever spent much time down there except out of necessity and in the presence of numerous colleagues. He shuddered, hoping Dan didn’t notice. The place gave him the creeps, yet there was nothing specific he could cite as a reason why this was so. The only thing he could put his finger on was the smell: revolting and indecipherable, while somehow strangely familiar…

The corridor undulated left and right at 90-degree angles but always holding the same general direction. Dan made no mention of it, but he was following the info on his moisture meter, as well as the smell and his lengthy experience which had rendered his senses finely attuned to the faintest changes in temperature and humidity.

Abruptly, just beyond the next kink in the passage, the lighting failed. Only a single, flickering fluorescent tube in one plexiglass rectangle of a drop ceiling illuminated the section.

“Huh…” Dan vocalized something for the first time in a couple minutes. He’d become suddenly aware that he had imperceptibly ceased to banter and comment, even unconsciously modulating his breathing to make less noise. It felt like an unforgivable slip-up, to have not been dispelling the silence in those past few moments. “Hmmm…” He scuffed his boot over the separations between the tiles on the floor, expecting the edge of his sole to catch on something. If there was a longstanding water or sewage leakage issue, there should have been some significant buckling. He checked the batteries on his meters and gauges. The hygrometer indicated humidity levels were rapidly increasing as they progressed down the corridor, while the groundwater detector shows that a major water flow was very near, whether man-made or natural. And the smell was almost overpowering. Taking another ‘reading’ with his nose, Dan perceived that it was not the stench of compost or decay, nor the fetor of old cheese, nor the sour reek of the residues dripped by a skip bin or garbage truck in summer, yet it possessed some of the character of all of these. Heat, rocks, stink, darkness…

“M…my brother’s gone out west…” Estevao spoke timidly. He must have been feeling the Silence, too. “I remember, you said you sued to live in Winnipeg, too. You were born there, right? He’s, uh, going into trucking…got his…whatever the license is for if you’re driving a tractor-trailer.”

“AZ.”

“Huh?”

“The license you’re talking about. AZ; class A, Z is for the air-brake endorsement. You want me to give him advice?”

Estevao opened his mouth –

“Sorry bud; that was a long time ago.” Dan’s voice suddenly grew wet and hollow.

“Yeah, but you were saying…never mind, sorry.” Estevao turned, poked around at the walls, lest Dan catch the pained expression on his face. He felt doubly stupid, since he honestly didn’t need to ask any questions about his brother or anything personal like thiat; it had simply seemed like a positive way to fill empty space in the conversation and to subtly show Dan that he respected his opinions and advice. “I dunno, thought’s maybe he could learn something from your stories, if I let him know, that’s all.”

“You did, did ya?” Dan snorted. Estevao’s hands were feeble and his hands shook on the flashlight he was holding – he was accustomed to the gruff, tough-guy attitude from his supervisor, but Dan’s biting response to his earnest attempt at building a mentor-mentee relationship were genuinely hurtful. “Can’t say he’ll learn much. ‘Cept that you oughta show up on time, keep your mouth shut, and pick up your cheque. And if you get fucked up while you’re at it, it’s on you then, buddy.”

Estevao gulped. He had been binge-watching those gruesome ‘work safe’ clips on Youtube and felt that his job of mostly holding tools and fetching coffee for plumbers was pathetic compared to what those guys who live out in the woods while chopping down trees with chainsaws, or drilling oil on the prairie do for a living.

Dan didn’t mean to snap. He was on edge, though. There was something about this gig he didn’t like. Plus, he hated multi-tasking and this was too many tasks at once. He had half a mind, in fact, to go back up, get into the outside air, drive back to the company office and get his meters and gauges tested. It was sometimes a thing – rare with professional grade equipment, as opposed to the junk you buy at Canadian Tire – but it did sometimes happen that equipment malfunctioned. Likewise, after enough practice, you could tell roughly what the readings you’d expect to get should be. When they were so out of bounds as to be unbelievable, then you knew there was something wrong with your gear.

Trouble was, all of Dan’s devices were reading total nonsense. There was no way relative humidity was 99.999%. Shutting the monitor off and restarting it didn’t help. The groundwater detector – a device which resembled a sci-fi ray gun – also appeared to be on the fritz. “Huh. Well, screw that,” Dan grunted. “If you believed this thing, we’re already underwater.” He spoke with exasperation rather than anger. He didn’t bash his tools or stomp his boots, as Estevao had seen him do losing his temper before. Estevao found this most unsettling. Cautiously, Dan packed away his tools, except the flashlight and a heavy wrench. “At least my watch still works, heheh,” he laughed weakly. Estevao was too modern to wear a watch, instinctively checking his phone instead. No signal. Dan said nothing more, but Estevao noticed he tightened his grip on that wrench and flexed his knees slightly. A curious energy had flooded into his supervisor; an energy and an attitude etched on his face that altered his mien such that Estevao barely recognized him. “What are you?” Dan whispered out of nowhere.

“What am I?”

“You’re family; where you’re from.”

“Uhh…” Estevao wasn’t ideologically trained by university to answer, perversely, ‘Canadian.’ “Brazilian Portuguese on my dad’s side and, on my mom’s, white Canadian. I think Scottish, Irish, maybe something else.”

Dan was visibly relieved, for no reason that Estevao could guess. Switching topics, Dan asked: “It’s tense, you know; don’t you feel something’s not right here? Like we’re wandering in circles? Wish they had given us a floorplan…Where the hell is that smell coming from? Fuckin’ stinks.”

“Now that you mention it…I guess it is dark and kinda creepy, yeah…” Only now did Estevao recognize that he had been walking with smaller and smaller steps as they proceeded. He dared not express just how uncomfortable he was in that situation, not because he wanted to sound tough per se, but because he feared that, if he was honest about his feelings, Dan would keep them down there longer and perhaps force him to crawl into some claustrophobic space to search for whatever (really, of course, to show dominance and boost his ego).

“It hasn’t gone away, has it?”

“What?”

“The smell.” Now and again Dan would stop and sniff the air in different directions, as if to catch the scent while it was unaware. “It hasn’t gotten much stronger since we came down here, but it isn’t going away, either.”

“Which, uh, means…?”

“Which means?!? Which means?!? It means we’re not getting any closer to the source of whatever it is, or any farther away, either. How the hell does Professor what’s his name…how does he expect…” he trailed off into indecipherable mumbling.

Right then, something squirmed past Estevao’s boot; something with roughly the mass of a cat or a Yorkshire terrier, but much longer and lower. The muscular force of its motions, easily felt through the material of his boot, startled Estevao. “Snake!” he cried out, for their could be no doubt about what it was, although he hardly saw anything before it wriggled into the shadows of a heap of stored furniture.

Dan maintained the appearance of calm, but the way he asked Estevao if it was true what he saw made the young temp afraid for his life. “W-which way was it coming from?” he asked, tongue shaking. Estevao answered that it had come from in front of them. This simple bit of information threw Dan into a shivering fugue…yet, verbally anyway, he evinced decisiveness. “Suppose we should tell him, it’s definitely a problem for an exterminator.”

By mutually understood implication, at this point they both turned around and began walking back the way they came. The smell. Estevao realized it now, the glimpse of the slithering reptile having jogged memories which had lain dormant for years…memories of how he and his siblings would go to their grandparents’ property up near Barrie for summer holidays and how they would capture all kinds of wild critters and keep them in jars and clear plastic tubs (if small insects) or a mesh-fronted wooden crate for larger beasts, including frogs, toads and snakes. Garter snakes. Brightly coloured, nonvenomous – though nonetheless sufficiently exciting quarry for pint-sized biologists. Nonvenomous, but not without their own method of repelling unwanted intrusions…Once, holding a prize specimen for photographing by his brother, the stubborn serpent defecated upon Estevao’s bare forearms and hands, filling the air with a pungent reek that required half an hour of scrubbing with dish soap to get rid of.

That was what he smelled here. Curiosity overpowered revulsion. Estevao set to lifting boxes and kicked drain grates to startle any lurking reptiles.

“Quit pokin’ around!” Dan huffed through his teeth. “Whatever died in this guy’s vents or where the leak is, I think I better get a hold of the plans, ‘cause we’re just shooting in the dark. It’s too…too…” He sneezed loudly, twice, straightened up then sneezed a third time. Estevao stood awkwardly, unable to decide for himself how to proceed.

They were in a bulge in the tunnel – where, exactly, Estevao had not the slightest inkling anymore. A wall treatment of palm-sized rectangles of glossy beige ceramic – like you find in some old TTC stations – had fallen off in places, taking mortar and cement with the tiles. Here and there, a few bundles of copper piping were partially exposed, like ribs on the inside of a rotting whale carcass which he and Dan happened to be crawling through.

“Everything okay?” Estevao couldn’t think what else to ask. Dan’s eyes were bloodshot and there was an unprofessional amount of emotion in the way he held the claw hammer which he used to clear away excess material for a better look at the pipes.

“Allergies…” Dan whispered. “Goldenrod. Along the highway. Pine trees. The pollen. Take some Benadryl ‘n I’ll be fine…Listen,” he paused, glancing over at Estevao couldn’t tell what. “You hear them…”

“Huh?” Estevao struggled to understand Dan’s speech, which was all up and down in pitch and volume, sometimes clearly directed at him, sometimes apparently mumbling private thoughts to himself.

“…It must connect to the office…where those girls are working. Yeah…yeah, the voices, coming through the pipes. If this connects to a sewage like…”

Estevao hunched over the exposed piping, then over a nearby vent, trying to act involved, but he honestly had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. It was oppressively humid, like a bus at rush hour in summer. He waged a battle between the panicked wish to appear busy and useful, and the urge to flop down on a soft surface and relieve his legs and spine from their onerous duties.

“Hey, E-Steve-oh,” Dan called out, his eyes tracing the wall like magnets on a track.

“What?”

“It’s past 4:00.” He held his watch to his face without regarding it. “Your shift’s up.”

“Already?” Estevao was about to check his cellphone till he remembered there was no reception. “Yeah, but, then you’ll be working by yourself.” He felt strangely sorry for Dan.

The latter sneezed savagely again. “Sorry, nah…What did they just say?” He spun round, hands at the ready like he was planning to combat some unseen assailant.

“Who?”

Dan relaxed somewhat. “Ah, thought maybe they were trying to shout instructions or something down to us through the vents. Guess not. Anyway, probably just need to replace the leaking section…must be around here somewhere…can’t be too bad; there’s zero sign of a big hole anywhere. Choo!” He stifled another sneeze with his wrist.

Estevao rode the TTC home. He would have much preferred the Econoline – as anyone who has ridden the bus after a day on their feet will agree, from their heel-bottoms to their coccyx. Oh well, money in the bank – it was brutally hard to convince himself to be chill about money he hadn’t noticeably damaged his body to obtain. It was only when he was home and showered, setting out a meal for himself, that he realized it was only 4:35 pm. The bus ride, plus the wait at stops, plus checking the mail, cuddling the cats, showering and dressing – it was absolutely impossible that he had left work at 4:00. The initial explanation he told himself was that he’d moved so efficiently he didn’t notice. However, he knew this was BS, so he turned to the hypothesis that Dan’s watch must have been off; that Dan had forgot to adjust for daylight savings time or something. This, he accepted for about half an hour until it popped into his mind again. He’d forgotten, because he owned no clocks that weren’t part of a self-adjusting digital device, but he knew from childhood memories that you set the clocks for daylight savings in the spring and again in the fall.

The lighting in the basement, where he’d retreated to watch TV in peace, was professionally laid out according to a consultant his parents had actually paid money to. It served its original purpose fairly well, but it proved insufficient at dispelling those shadows which are seen by the soul as much as by the eye. He switched off the TV, wanting his senses unobstructed by any interference, then hurried upstairs, where he opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the patio. The fence was low and the street was set high relative to the surrounding area, so he could see spread out before him a school and its yard, including a soccer field and basketball courts, but it was August and no people were using them. He quickly put on his shoes and went for a walk. It was well that he wouldn’t have to work the next day, since he knew it would take a great deal of walking – to the point of mild exhaustion – to clear his head. With the armour of the long summer day and the healthful vitality of the cozy suburb bubbling around him, he felt brave enough to ponder things.

On the face of it, there wasn’t anything wrong with a professor of anthropology (Estevao read the info on the little brass plaque on the door of Professor Cardinal’s office) giving them directions. They’d listened to the reports of dentists and lawyers on other jobs, when those were the people responsible for their particular workplace at the time the plumbers showed up. On the other hand, on those occasions, it was always just an exasperated “the toilet’s blocked!” “Help! There’s a leak in the wall!” “The ceiling’s dripping!” Everybody simply wanted things fixed as soon as possible and didn’t want any more questions or hassle than was absolutely necessary. Then, they wanted Dan and Estevao gone from the premises as soon as possible.

That Professor was different. Heck, he had them sit down, in upholstered chairs, to give them that speech beforehand…the leaky, fetid basement appeared to have a special fascination for him, which he was driven by some psychological compulsion to explain, at least in part, to two guys who were just there to fix whatever the problem was. Estevao’s mind’s eye kept returning to the wall map of Toronto and Spadina: how it was shaded in a colour to indicate that one of Toronto’s many ‘extinct’ underground rivers ran along it, from a lake up north (he didn’t look too carefully), down to Lake Ontario at the City’s southern rim. That would explain the absurd humidity inside the subterranean halls, though the instruments which Dan employed should have been able to endure rough environments like that, or otherwise tradesmen and surveyors couldn’t use them in places like Brazil or Florida.

Ugh. He could feel his shirt sticking to his back even now, remembering it. His supervisor’s sneezing made less sense, though, since the absurd humidity and the fact they were underground should have eliminated the source of any pollen allergies. What was it he said he was allergic to? Goldenrod? Nothing at all grew in that somber basement except mold, but there was little or nothing of that and it was kept quite clean otherwise. The goldenrod was blooming now, though – on the surface, that is; in the parks and, most of all, along the highways: once you got out of the City, it was everywhere. And the thunder and rain…the underground river…There had been no sign of any leaks, though, now that he thought about it….

…Which made it a surprise when, three days later, Estevao read in the Toronto Star a headline about a tragic workplace accident. No photo accompanied the article and his mind, which had already switched focus to selecting courses for an as-yet ‘undeclared Liberal Arts’ major which would begin in the winter semester, was no longer in tune with the rhythm of boredom, fatigue and danger which he’d briefly brown accustomed to as a blue collar temp. The article was oddly guarded in its disclosure of what would normally be printed as basic relevant info. Moreover, the crusading ethos which the Stat notoriously gushed with at every local tragedy was completely absent, replaced with an uncharacteristically restrained lament for the unfortunate situation.

Indeed, Estevao had to think like a detective to realize that the ‘veteran plumber’ whose lifeless body was discovered by dog walkers, hung up on a breakwater, was his supervisor during those days at the temp agency which he wished desperately to forget. As far as Estevao could tell, the coroner had experienced immense difficult in identifying the body, in spite of it being fully clothed and largely intact, except for a couple small puncture wounds, which different medical examiners disputed as being from a taser, implying foul play or police brutality, needles for drugs, or the fangs of a good-sized snake. In light of this uncertainty, the police asked the public to report if they knew anyone who kept exotic pets, worked as a plumber and had recently gone missing. Estevao knew it was Dan Rodgers from the description of the clothes, physique and so on; he knew it in his gut, but he was damned if he was going to go into a police station to get questioned by the cops, given that, for all he was aware, he was the last known person to have seen Rodgers before he ended up in the water on the Lakeshore, several kilometres away from the Spadina Circle job site.

Later in the week, at a press conference, the police chief finally confirmed the identity of the body, exactly as Estevao had surmised, though nothing was made of it in the papers beyond the perfunctory sympathies always published on such occasions. Estevao was mercifully spared (by the palm-fringed beaches of Puerta Plata) the transformation of his already unpleasant work experience into a cause for psychotherapy. Dan Rodgers had exacting standards for his temporary assistants, most of whom never appreciated the difference that a professional attitude can make.

He was not so old, the Toronto Police Service discovered, to have established his career before DNA became a widespread forensic tool. However, he was wise – wise enough to do his work where forensic tools were used sparingly, if something was even found to use them on. More than one RCMP officer, hands in his pockets, a bemused whistle crossing his lips, consoled himself that folks drove so fast along that stretch of highway MB-1, and you didn’t want to stop at night, what with the bears and other dangers. Heck, to stop on the roadside in broad daylight would sometimes send a chill up your spine, if you happened to be the only vehicle in view. Laypeople in Toronto and Vancouver wondered how the mysterious Suspect could be so lazy, not even bothering to dig a grave nor to take his quarry deeper into the forest. The RCMP men, and anyone with long experience of Trans Canada Country, did not wonder. They understood that the fellow who did those things tool all the necessary effort – the goldenrod and phragmites grew so thickly and the shadowy spindles of spruce crowded so conspiratorially that nobody driving by would ever observe anything. Only the rare individual, drawn by incomprehensible chance to take a leak or pick up cans at precisely that pot – perhaps five, ten, or twenty years later – only they would find anything, long after the wind and rain, and the rodents and foxes had found it first.

The fact nobody in Manitoba had ever suspected Dan Rodgers except his wife, who knew of his predilection for ‘squaws’ and who hated them for it, was proof of the efficacy of his methods. If it were not for the faded Polaroids, their margins scribbled with almost hieroglyphic notations, the detectives gathered in the hastily set-up task force room at Toronto Police headquarters on College Street would not have suspected him, either.

The digital records were scarce and incomplete. Detective Inspector Julius Ngai, tasked with liaising between the RCMP and local personnel, as well as with the officers from Saskatoon and the OPP, secretly enjoyed that the project went beyond the capacity of the office peons – who ought to have remained where they belonged, at a nearby LUSH, H&M or Starbucks. No spreadsheets converted to pie charts in Excel; no PowerPoints: for their colleagues, Ngai and his team prepared a good old fashioned photo slide presentation. After all, some of the original material was in that form, and a map – huge and topographical, with colour-coded pins and annotations. “It’s only a theory, of course,” Ngai cautioned, index finger and thumb wrapped around his jawline. “But it makes sense. Plus, you have to account for the season; for his habits and his mind…how one creates the other, and vice versa.” Ngai’s office mates gazed on, worn out from putting everything together on short notice, though nevertheless intrigued to hear his lectures, which always left them feeling either excited with puerile curiosity about the shocking labyrinths of human wickedness, or else shuddering with a fretful desire not to believe, triple-checking their door locks when they got home.

“If only…” he continued, “If only they’d saved and better stored the material from these three” – he tapped three pins situated between Lake Winnipeg and Lake of the Woods with the butt end of a Sharpie – “Martha Gilford, August 1991, Shawna Jane Morris, July 1992, and ‘Jane Doe,’ discovered May 1993 but probably put there August or September 1992 – I am sure there are a couple other Jane Does that only the wolves and the sasquatch know about…” Someone raised a hand. “I know, you’ll say that’s before he came to Toronto. Years before. And he was employed full-time as a paint mixer, or as a shipping driver when required, for the paint plant. Real workaholic; busy beaver; no free time. But, keep in mind, the early ‘90s recession had begun then, and, I suspect, he wasn’t really working full hours…maybe no hours at all, at least for a chunk of that period. The paint plant closed at the beginning of 1992, never having gotten over the recession, thus ceasing to exist before the internet was born. With the twenty-odd years since, no one will have kept every yellowed time card and every rotting binder of schedules. Many of his former coworkers are long since dead.”

Ngai was wrapped up in his presentation and did not notice how some of his listeners’ shoulders sagged, their eyes and lips overcome with weary expressions. Before that moment, none of them cared much about the record-keeping of any particular family-run industrial paints and coatings factory in south-central Manitoba during the early 1990s. It was inevitable that such things did not matter more than a year or two beyond a small company’s cessation of operations, and equally inevitable that this process, occurring in society as a whole, must cause immense frustration as sooner or later some of those stories became relevant long after they had vanished into the ether.

“…I reckon his docile, prim, permed housewife knew he was not at work mixing paint, though she would never admit it aloud, even to herself, that he was on the prowl, further and further afield. Maybe if she ran into someone of the sort she imagined hitched rides with her husband, this individual would be confused by her unexplained rudeness and nasty looks. He focused on the warmer months, I imagine, because hitchhiking is more common in those seasons, because footprints – especially with a struggling victim – going into the bush are obvious in snow, and because his rear-wheel-drive Oldsmobile Cutlass – no ABS or traction control in those days – would not have handled snowy roads well, especially if he felt compelled to take detours along poorly maintained side roads. Note that when Shawna Jane Morris went missing, her friend, who did not get into the car because she ‘got bad vibes’ from the situation, described a vehicle essentially identical to the 1987 Cutlass Supreme coupe, colour listed as ‘light copper’ with a tan interior on the registration.” Ngai pointed to a photocopied poster containing a police sketch of the suspect and also the car, which was squarish, moderately sized, and black and white – though the text on the poster described it as ‘brown or tan.’ “A man like Mr. Rodgers cared deeply about his job…even if he made plenty of cash, at least, enough to survive alright off his itinerant plumbing and handyman work, plus the loot off of his victims – cash, they might not have had, but, certainly, things he could sell. He craved the image of steady, honest toil. Moreover, it meant he was in control, whereas, if he was fired by his company, deemed incompetent; inferior…well, you can imagine how his woman knowing that would have damaged his self image, yes? Good. Then you see…the increasing instability and power in one area of his life, why, he balanced it by taking more in another. Then the divorce, and, well…” The other investigators nodded. Those who had interviewed Rodger’s colleagues at Annex Plumbing noted how he took his work very seriously. The HR department logged more than a few complaints from temps who had to work with his ‘cut-the-crap,’ red-blooded blue collar uncle style, but the company loved that he never drank, didn’t steal their property, and got the jobs done fast. Ngai ceased speaking for a moment to run through several slides on an old projector. “The old-school footage almost makes it more gruesome-looking, not so? You will notice that the victims…mmhmm, he had a type, like most do. Three quarters were Aboriginal or Métis, all of them had dark hair, usually a tan or olive complexion – drug addicts, clearly so just from their mugshots – and, naturally, Rodgers probably stalked his quarry or at least chatted them up before making his move.”

Now that everything had come to light, obviously, it was a matter of a day, at most, before the information became a flurry of headlines and flashing cameras. In accordance with the general rule, the public would seek to pin every unsolved murder of a woman aged 16 to 60 on this particular alleged serial killer, unless and until another singular boogeyman was offered in his place. “…I expect we will have to review a lot of unsolved homicides here, or disappearances where they match the victim profile, seeing as the public aren’t going to believe he simply became inactive, living quietly as a bachelor in Toronto all these years.”

“Way ahead of you!” Constable Singh proffered a Manila folder, its bulging guts braced with elastic bands…

The RCMP delegation sat through the press conference, wearing masks of benevolent patience as reporters from Global, CBC, APTN and even the Scarborough Mirror recounted the generously abbreviated biographies of beloved daughters, sisters and mothers who had met with unfortunate or unseen (though readily presumable) fates at some point vaguely within the plausible timeframe, while the TPS fed their vain hopes. After the crowd had dispersed, a droopy-eyed captain who had worked one of the Manitoba cases whispered in Ngai’s ear: “Don’t wanna be insensitive, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Ngai took the advice as an affront; a declaration of a turf war. “Eh? You weren’t even aware of his identity until you finally decided to do DNA tests on the evidence you hadn’t chucked. If you wanted the glory of identifying him, one, you should have done it while he was alive to be paraded and punished, and two, you should have done it while he was in your jurisdiction.”

The Mountie chuckled. “Cool yer heels, buddy!” incensing Ngai. “Nah, I can be pretty sure half these cases you were talking about here are our guy, unless you’re holding something back from me?”

“What? No, why would we do that?”

“Just in case, you know, policy…I guess we’re all on the same team, eh?”

“So?”

“Whelp, as always, when we suggest it’s a serial offender, we always hold something back. Had two schizo drifters try confess to your boy Rodger’s work -”

“ – He’s from your province.”

“Yeah, well, they didn’t know the signature of the killer. The signature; every serial killer’s got one. That’s what we held back. Sure, most of the killings were manual strangulation, but not all of ‘em. ‘N the brown coupe wasn’t consistent between witnesses; we hear taupe sedan, beige two-door. What all Morris, Gilford and a couple of the Jane Does had in common was these evenly spaced puncture marks on the body, neck or inner thigh, usually.”

“Vampires?” Ngai grinned sarcastically.

“Nah, from a syringe, we figured. No evidence of exsanguination. We were thinking he wanted it to look like they OD’d, just to put us off the scent. The bruising and so on might be overlooked with women living, y’know, certain lifestyles. A psychologist we consulted said it was a mental thing. Maybe a commentary on social harm or something, like how some of these guys feel they’re avenging angels, cleaning up the streets. I figure just a red herring, though.”

“Hmmm.” Ngai was perplexed. Mind, none of the bodies in Toronto, being touted by media and families as potentially related, bore such marks. Gunshots, yes, stab wounds, yes, but no pricks…none except Dan Rodgers himself, which didn’t make sense. Pricks like teethmarks of a vampire…or…a very large snake.

The late summer thunderstorm came down on the City like a sounder of famished boars upon an apple orchard. Flood warnings were issued. Even with the wipers at full speed, driving was madness and many were the employees calling in sick. Professor Cardinal excused his staff, though a dutiful Minnie showed up. Cardinal managed, somehow, to walk in dry and presentable, though, even with an umbrella, he had to have changed clothes. The environmentalists, usually all doom and gloom, were pleased to note some signs of an increasingly healthy urban ecosystem. For instance, the ready flow of water north and south which benefits summer-scorched vegetation in the City’s central corridor, and the endemic wildlife whose numbers were visibly growing, as evidenced by the turtles, toads and even rare species of Nerodia enjoying the weather and showing populations much dense than predicted by research in recent years. Luckily, too, no serious flood damage was reported, a piece of fortune which not a few downtown dwellers, echoing the ancients despite their urban modernity, attributed to the mandalas or Native trinkets they adorned their condos with, or to the general offering of spiritual energy by so many thoughtful minds which meditate and sacrifice to restore the balance of Nature.

終

Gandhara

Gandhara

by M.G. Warenycia

The palette was all earth tones, each one muted like if the artist had blended a good deal of titanium white into the ochres, purples and daubs of terre verte – the effect of dust hanging in the stagnant air of the broad, level valley. Only the sun was bright – cruelly bright, scorching the sand, the stunted trees, and the line of low mud-brick houses, and the eyes of the soldiers who dared meet its merciless stare. Kyle imagined the paints; the actual, physical paints one would have to use to paint the scene, because it was one of his last clear memories of the life before he found himself clad in CADPAT, riding in a LAV through this Benadryl fever-dream of a land…

There had been a classroom discussion; the Art teacher’s position could be easily surmised, but the students were left to go at each other, provided there was no swearing or insults. They had been studying Neoclassical and 19^th century art, generally. Much money had been forked out for beyond-budget-allocation supplies. The debate must have broken out because of something in the papers that morning. Everyone’s family got a newspaper back then. One faction said it was Imperialism; Neo-Liberalism…the military-industrial complex needed an enemy, after all. Mahmoud, whose family immigrated from over there, told about the British and the Russians…Gabriela and Masha, indignant and keen to display their erudition, countered with a revisionist narrative of the immense social progress – hydro dams, atheism and girls’ schools – brought by the noble Soviets, inspiring Mahmoud to mutter a curse and Lukasz to drop his pen and plan a rebuttal. Jenna mentioned that she’d seen that newly-released documentary-movie about the Canadian citizen who traveled to visit her sister right before the war…Kyle saw through them. He said his peers wanted high-status jobs, with big salaries and bigger titles, which going to university would get them (so everyone believed). They knew they were going to run straight to that, so it was ridiculous to see them struggling to act like they really cared and were somehow authorities on events happening ten thousand kilometres away, given that actually participating in resolving any of these problems or helping any of these people they claimed to care about was the last thing in the world they would ever do. Kyle flung down his paintbrush like a judge slamming down his gavel. They, he told them (everyone was well aware that the army offered a great salary and job benefits), would sooner be homeless and begging on the street than pick up a gun and go achieve any of the grand global political goals they talked about as being so essential to the salvation and progress of the world.

Masks of outrage appeared around the huge, U-shaped arrangement of connected desks at which the three dozen teens sat to draw and paint, but no articulate speech rose to counter Kyle’s. He smirked, knowing he was right. So tedious…and they were going to spend four more years congratulating themselves, competing to dress the part of artists and activists, before they jumped into the rat race, just like their parents, whose blasé materialism they so loved to critique!….

Between that debate and this was a gigantic blur, less real than the sweat-drenched dreams he got in base before each patrol…

…Jean-Léon Gérôme, Edwin Lord Weeks, Horace Vernet…

Kyle wiped his goggles with the sleeve of his glove. It was better sitting on top than buttoned up inside. Bullets could one one easier, true, but the sense of being sealed in and blind was more unnerving than a somewhat elevated risk of a gunshot. The LAV moved as fast as it could, which was not very, keeping scrupulously to the centre line of the “road.” The dusty line narrowed and their vehicle slowed as the houses clustered densely – curious, in light of the vast, wild space stretching in every direction, limited only by the snow-capped fringes of the Central Highlands to the north and east, and, to the south, the Registan Desert, which flowed into others of its kind, farther than the eye could see or the mind fathom walking. It was as if the houses themselves were afraid of something, huddling together like that. Strangely, Kyle had observed no ruins nor even mounds or middens to indicate that anyone had ever lived in the vastness beyond the little hamlet. The wars had been going on for thirty years; surely something would have remained at least a few decades in the arid climate.

“Cresswell!” The sergeant’s voice barked from inside the hull.

Kyle snapped to attention.

“Check the goddam map again. No way in hell this is the right road. ‘Sposed to be a straight run to the ANA base once we got off the highway.”

Kyle pressed the map flat against the LAV’s roof to stop it from flopping as they bounced along. “Uhhh…yep, Sarge…”

“Yep what?!?”

“Yes, you’re right. It’s supposed to be a straight run…supposed to be. I guess we’ve just been moving slow; road probably isn’t what it was when they drew the map.”

The sergeant paused, then grunted. It was as much of a concession as one would ever get from him. They had, indeed, moved more slowly than they might have in a rugged and well-maintained vehicle over the dry ground. The schedule was planned precisely in advance, but, unconsciously, there had been a silent collective decision to do otherwise. The LAVs and Nyalas which comprised the convoy were harder targets than the Humvees of the Americans or the hapless supply trucks which careless Soviet commanders dared to dispatch along these routes, but this was not a place one could feel safe in, no matter how heavily armed or armoured. Kyle now and again doubted the wisdom of trying to see see as much of the country as possible. Knowing is supposed to alleviate fears, but, he’d discovered, it doesn’t always work like that.

Many people lived in the village: that was obvious from the tidiness of the dwellings (notwithstanding the abysmal poverty of the place). Someone ate the fruits heaped in polychrome pyramids and someone made use of the kaleidoscope arrangements of copper pans, silver teapots and gaily enameled thermoses stacked and hung in narrow shops whose awnings extended to the street. One could be forgiven for assuming that women were an extinct species in the area: not a single one was visible. Here and there, male figures were glimpsed, squatting in doorways, leaning on a windowsill, singly or in wordless conclaves of three or four, cross-legged and brooding over tea upon a dais behind unglazed windows. Kyle squirmed under the sun’s spotlight, straining to make out the details of the faces of his audience.

Somehow, he decided, it would have been less threatening if they’d been confronted directly by the village headmen, or if they’d found the valley abandoned. That would have been creepy, if they came through at night, but not so much in the afternoon, or so he reasoned with himself.

He carefully registered each watchful figure, establishing a type for his memory. The country was a collage of images; images whose meanings were inscrutable as ancient hieroglyphs: whether they spoke Dari, or Pashto, or Uzbek, he could not tell and would not understand…

“The broads are smoking hot underneath those sacks they wear,” a ruddy, distillery-scented corporal had insisted in a Kabul hotel where they’d gone for some training symposium, part of the eternally vague ‘hearts and minds’ strategy – mostly sitting through PowerPoint presentations by cherubic do-gooders from overfunded NGOs who’d leave the country as experts after three weeks. Kyle was intrigued. It had been drilled into them in training that they were to behave themselves. On the other hand, the idea of a war zone – especially a Third World War zone, as a place where men – especially men who, in their own country, were, to put it bluntly, not high up on the social ladder – could satisfy their every desire without consequences had been taught to him by endless reruns of ‘80s action movies set in ‘Nam (which the Americans always won on the silver scree). None of the delays, pesky and expensive courting rituals, interactions with in-laws, and other pretenses which might prevent one from having his way with even a small town diner waitress…no separation between Will and Action, he philosophized. Some Japanese samurai writer he’d first learned about in karate class had a quote to that effect…

The frequent risk of violent death was the bargain that justified the fantasy; made it believable according to a cosmic sense of justice. Unfortunately, soon after arriving in country, Kyle understood that there was no “me love you longtime” here, and his commanders were simply trying to minimize the amount of men who died or caused their comrades’ deaths on account of irresponsible recreation. Not that tantalizing rumours didn’t float around the smoke pit from time to time…

Kyle was shaken from his meditations by a subtle alteration in the terrain from what he must have subconsciously expected. Neither he and his buddies nor any foreigners in decades had driven upon this stretch of unpaved road, but Kyle had been on enough journeys in country to recognize that something was not as it ought to be – if things were ever as they ought to be there…

When his brain finally processed it, his next thoughts were fear as to what he’d missed in those tens of seconds which had elapsed right before. The fields on either side of the road were lush. Obscenely lush…In most of the region, wheat or barley was the principle crop, but, increasingly, the farmers here and in neighbouring Helmand Province had taken to planting corn…”Food security,” all those UN initiatives…the real reason was because corn grew fast – if you grew corn, you could get a food crop in before winter, on top of the cash crop, which was opium. Wheat or barley weren’t fast enough to beat the Afghan winter and, if, conversely, you went all-in for opium, you might get cash, but cash couldn’t always guarantee food in a land which was wracked by famine only a decade earlier. And, if western and ANA troops came by, you might end up with neither cash nor food.

Yes, grow corn, the officials nodded in approval. They didn’t need to be so many convoys or air drops of food – always vulnerable to insurgent ambush. A few weeks earlier, Kyle’s unit had supervised a platoon of ANA troops as the latter whirled metre-long canes like slo-mo lawnmowers, moving up and dowin in a line, severing the heads of the flowers which had been the only guaranteed income of the farmers. The kevlar and ceramic plates Kyle sweated under didn’t protect him from the gazes of the locals; gazes which oozed a hatred he could never understand because he had never experienced a world in which a momentary decision could condemn someone’s children to destitution. The mood of relief lasted until summer, when the corn was dense and eight feet tall. Then, it was time for regret…

An epiphany rolled into his head as they rumbled along: “Civilization is the state of being in which one’s ideas exist separate from material consequences…We are civilized…”

* * *

“You break it, you buy it!” The hoarse, thickly accented exclamation caught Stepan and Sophie off guard. Everyone had heard the line somewhere, but usually from stock TV characters in movies which could not be produced today.

“Sorry, ‘scuse me,” Stepan’s hands were numb with terror lest the sculpture touch anything else on that cluttered, seemingly deliberately wobbly shelf and thereby precipitate a domino effect, shattering both porcelain and Stepan’s desire to show his face in there again.

The sculpture attracted him because it was such a unique version of something so commonplace – commonplace, at least, for Chinatown, or, for that matter, in any self-consciously ‘spiritual’ bourgeois house downtown as well as unconsciously sincere ones in the suburbs to the north. It declared itself through use of the basic artistic canon that it was Buddhist and represented either Buddha himself or one of the bodhisattvas who more or less fill the role performed by saints in Catholic Christianity. The material, however, was unusual: a kind of slightly waxy stone, or earthenware rendered to resemble stone, with a nearly uniform yellowish-grey colour…not the jade, fake jade, glazed ceramic, agate or bronze which were typical for sculptures of such subjects. It could pass for an antique easily enough, especially in the less-than-ideal conditions for analysis present in the cramped, dimly-lit curio shop.

There was something in this sculpture, though; something ‘about’ it that achieved a powerful response somewhere deep in Stepan’s soul, though he hadn’t the slightest interest in Buddhism and only superficial knowledge of it. The sculpture possessed an essence akin to, yet not the same as, that of the red lacquered chests with brass-fitted drawers, or the worm-eaten, vinyl-bound copies of sutras and Maoist exhortations, or the tenebrous inkstones which some silk-robed scholar might have used to write the Qing imperial examinations – items left by those who long ago left this world, or sold off by their children; a quality inexplicably both creepy and entrancing.

Supper was very late, to allow for the darkness to become complete and everyone to finish with the business of the day. Their shopping hauls were laid out on or around the coffee table, which, as it was in the house of Sophie Belzer’s Beaches-dwelling dentist and psychologist parents, was huge and carved from solid Javanese teak. A mutual buddy, Delilah Brunton, had come after doing overtime at a community centre in distant, derelict Etobicoke, to share in the smorgasbord of snacks and to watch the screening of Death on the Nile (the David Suchet version, of course) in 65-inch plasma screen glory.

The movie had barely established the jealousy between the nervous socialite and her new husband’s ex-fiancé when Sophie’s father entered to fetch something from the adjacent computer room. “Don’t mind me, just passing through…Hey! Where’d you guys get this?” He halted, transfixed. The movie watchers turned to see that his attention was directed towards the Buddha head which Stepan had purchased.

“Uh, I don’t remember the name of it, but it was one of those narrow little trinket shops in Chinatown, the ones that sell all kinds of antiques and knick-knacks and things,” Stepan answered.

“Gosh,” Sophie’s father exhaled meditatively, tapping, then gently rubbing the sculpture with the tip of a finger. “Me and Sophie’s mom, before we got married, we traveled all over there – Afghanistan, I mean.” He shot a sideways glance towards a small rug hung on the wall behind the dining table. “The Hippie Trail, they called it, because, I suppose, that’s what we were. Traveled – adventured, really, you could say, because it was all on camels, or beat-up old Land Cruisers and those hand-painted buses…no electricity until you got to a city. It was safe, too, which is the craziest thing about it…learned to play the rubab – like a hybrid of a guitar and a mandolin. Well, I tried, anyway.” The younger folks could tell he savoured the stories which were obviously playing themselves out in his head, though it seemed he was describing not just a strange locale but an alternate dimension. Snapping out of his reverie, he asked, “How much did you pay for it?”

“Uh, twenty-five bucks?”

“Twenty-five bucks?” Mr. Belzer inquired of the sculpture, which stared mutely back at him, unbothered by his material concerns. “Nooo! You’re joking?…But, this…” He tapped it some more and held it to the table lamp. “Gosh. If your grandpa was still alive, Sophie, I’ll bet he’d have loved to have a look at this. Honestly, for the life of me, it looks like it’s genuine. You know they had a Greco-Buddhist kingdom then, before Islam? Their art was a mix of east and west…Huh…” He walked off in a daze. Sophie, Stepan and Delilah did not really believe in his speculations. Regardless, an exotic perfume seemed to suffuse the atmosphere and, while nothing changed about the room or the movie on the screen, they felt themselves subtly connected, as if by an invisible portal, to something else – not merely an ancient kingdom, and not quite the place on the news, but, maybe, to all those things and to something more which the mind could only almost imagine…

* * *

The Nyala was pulling ahead…well within sight on the mostly straight road, but it wasn’t how they’d been trained. Instinct was taking over the convoy, Kyle saw. Sarge didn’t see it, or at least nobody said anything. Kyle double-checked. Not imagining things, nope. His LAV’s driver also didn’t notice it. It was as if the drivers of the nimbler and the more sluggish vehicles were unconsciously adhering to the exact same level of of urgency on the steering wheel and gas pedal.

The orchards weren’t too bad – the spaces between the trees didn’t grow grass, couldn’t hide much. The melon fields were harmless, as were the wheat and rapeseed. Endless ribbons of green and yellow under an endless, milky cyan sky. Kyle was going to ask Corporal Alexander, the driver of their LAV, if they were going in circles: how did the road keep going on and on as it was? He waited for someone else to ask first. Noone did. He kept silent.

In a moment too gradual to notice and too swift to reach to, the level of the ground rose and the road began to move left and right, then left and right again. Not sharp turns, but the world before them began to shrink and what was behind them disappeared. A settlement came into view. Not a cluster village; just a double line of houses that shared an affinity with each other because they had nothing else to associate with, besides their people-less fields. These fields were small, divided by banks and hedges, hemmed in by outcroppings of dusty stone topped with thorny, dwarfish trees. The villagers grew much corn, and, behind the tall corn, undoubtedly there were poppies. Only the verdant health of the crops persuaded Kyle and his squadmates that they hadn’t, in fact, wandered into some parallel dimension or haunted zone where they were the only human beings. The architecture didn’t help. Everything was disturbingly timeless. Kyle searched in vain for a pane of glass, a plastic signboard, a scrap tire or sheet of corrugated metal roofing – something to prove they were not lost within a waking nightmare.

And nobody said anything! Were they blind to it? Was he mad? As these thoughts rushed in, Kyle noticed that the vehicle ahead of them had vanished around a shallow bend – who knew how far? He went into panic…

“Hey!” A voice of salvation. Corporal Alexander hit the brakes. “Listen, Sarge, Cresswell, this ain’t right…” The three men held conclave atop the LAV, various maps unfolded for comparison. Reading and rereading aloud the place names and plotting the distances with their fingers and the map legends, the two NCOs came to the same conclusion, confirming to Kyle that he wasn’t insane. They should have got in sight of the ANA base by now. Otherwise, they must have made the wrong turn somewhere. This, they agreed heartily on, yet Kyle could not help witnessing that, for all the increasingly insistent jabbing of digits on paper and despite the ever more voluble recitations of topographical names, none of the mentioned routes really resembled the one they had taken and no marked place quite matched the habitations they were now moving amongst.

“You think somebody should go ask one of them?” Kyle whispered.

“What?” Alexander barked back.

“I…” Kyle coughed, forcing his voice higher: “I was thinking, maybe we could ask somebody where we are,” nodding towards the low earthen courtyard of a farmhouse.

“These damn maps, eh,” The Sergeant opined with an unsettling amount of confidence. “Half of ‘em are from when the Russians were here. The way these people live, stuff’s bound to look different. Some of them highways are probably nothing but dirt and grass now.”

An exchange of glances decided that Kyle and the Sergeant would go inquire while the rest of the crew waited at the ready – the Sarge, for authority and the smattering of Pashto phrases he could string together, and Kyle for an extra gun. The farmhouse was the biggest in the settlement. It offered the best prospect of an owner who knew something of the territory beyond the boundaries of the village fields. Too, the wide courtyard – whose walls, on closer inspection, were composed largely of integrated outbuildings – offered a clear field of fire for Corporal Alexander and Private MacEachern as they kept watch, fingers on the triggers of their C7s.

Neither Kyle nor the Sergeant spoke at first. Anyone inside would know they’d arrived. The silence of the courtyard made the powdery dust crunch like gravel beneath their boots. A quern-stone sat under thatched eaves; a low well occupied the center. The unglazed windows and doors were of rough-hewn wood set in the clay of the walls. No flags to show allegiance. Inside his head, Kyle was still longing for a hubcap, a motorbike propped against a wall; a radio sitting on a window sill, anything to share the eerie sensation which he knew, yet could not trust, was a paranoid delusion.

The Sarge calleed out, “Salaam Aleikum! Umm, khe-chare! Za da Canada pauz. Canada army!” Without turning to face Kyle, he argued, “Somebody lives here! They gotta…”

“Scared maybe?”

“Or…Whatever. Doesn’t it bug you?”

“…” Kyle could not, under the constraints of the moment, articulate why the place creeped him out, even if he had a clear picture in his thoughts, no adequate verbal explanation could make it through the pounding of his heart in his throat. His hands clutched the rifle tighter, as much because of its polymer and aluminum nature as its lethal functionality.

“Like somebody took away all their animals…” The Sarge hissed.

“Animals?”

“You know. Farms. Should be animals. Goats, chickens, donkeys. Don’t look at me like that. You think Hadji’s plowing his fields riding around on a frickin’ John Deere?”

“No, I…hmm…” Kyle swept his rifle side to side, imagining shadows. The five p.m. sunlight was playing inscrutable tricks. It was so unnatural, even though this was as close to Nature as anyone had lived since the advent of agriculture. They finally stepped past the well – neither was ready to try the main entry yet. “You ever listened to Art Bell on the Radio?”

“Art Bell?”

Kyle shivered from embarassment. “You know. Or George Noury. Coast to Coast AM, that kind of show.”

“Satellite radio?” Kyle at each step expected a stingy rebuke form his Sergeant but, instead, the more experienced soldier was surveying the house, eyes darting left and right, back and forth, never resting, never finding what they were hunting for. As if with great exertion, he took a step back. Speaking coldly, “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about…”

The pair stood, guns at the ready, unsure how to deal with the situation. Walk back to the vehicle and tell everyone they didn’t get directions because they got the heebie-jeebies first? Then again, they both understood they would not find anyone inside to ask for directions.

“Hey, Sarge,” Kyle tilted his head to the left. The Sarge followed his lead. “Look!”

In the far left of the courtyard, perched on a gnarled and ossified apricot tree, was a small object, evidently animate though barely distinguishable from the tree itself. A second later, the two men made it out: a small tawny owl, sleepy, watchful…

Kalashnikovs rattled all around, multiplied in echoes off the walls. Somewhere, behind them, an ancient Enfield boomed and there was a fateful ‘whoosh.’ They dove behind the coping of the well, as it was the only solid cover in the middle of the courtyard; rifle muzzles seeking for something to shoot at. Then there was an explosion like metallic thunder, and Kyle knew a rocket-propelled grenade had found their LAV.

* * *

The museum employee beamed with pride as he strolled, hands clasped behind his back, through the interlinked rooms. The ceiling appeared almost black; the outside world did not exist once visitors were drawn towards the items, hermetically sealed under glass, bathed in lights that glowed rather than shone. The sober pediments, the fortress-like doorless gates that opened from each chamber into the next – he savoured the cocktail of coziness and intrigue which had made him fall in love with the R.O.M. as a child: thus, he knew he had succeeded – if, after a stressful adolescence and meandering career path, the magic found him again, it would find others, too. He turned to his companion, who was not a fellow R.O.M. employee but rather a longtime friend invited for the occasion: a journalist who worked at the Toronto Star. A third, a woman who taught international relations as an adjunct professor at the U of T, had come as the plus-one of the second.

“I wish you’d put on something this nice for some of the other, er, ethnic-themed exhibits,” remarked the journalist. “I mean, the lovely things you’ve done with the walls and the specific décor, and blending the displays of the artifacts with things in the present day. Time is a spiral, or whatever the saying is.”

“What? Oh, I’m afraid it’s an exceptional case.,” the curator confessed. “The plasterers, painters – even though a lot of the decorations are just styrofoam and plaster underneath – running a museum isn’t exactly a high-profit-margin business. We decided it’s time for a retrospective. It’s not every day, or even every decade, honestly, that Canadians find themselves enmeshed – like it or not – with history. We kind of live outside of it most of the time, if you think about it. And, too, it’s sort of a way to show that we have a role to play in the community, as a site of shared learning, shared memory; the idea that history and science shouldn’t just be something shoved to the side, just for the ivory tower, scholars and school trips, you know?”

“I always felt the same way myself,” the adjunct professor jumped in on the side of the curator. “All those years and we never really confronted things. We never really understood what we were there for or even where we were, if you get what I mean.”

“Totally agree,” her journalist companion insisted, seeking common ground as he pointedly examined a millstone and an arrangement of copper utensils backed by an explanatory text plaques and black-and-white photos of Soviet helicopters and troops patrolling the very site where the items were dug up. Alongside these images were others, in colour, but otherwise no different except for the models of the helicopters. “They had me help out with the Remembrance Day coverage for a couple years; twenty-twelve, twenty-thirteen. Half the interviews you couldn’t use, or, I felt we shouldn’t. Jingoistic patriotism. Everybody believed in ‘the mission,’ or else they had to pretend they believed in it, to be polite to everyone else there. ‘N, like, okay, I get it, thank you for your service and all that, but not one of the veterans I interviewed – I’m not exaggerating – not one single one of them could speak any of the languages they talk over there. I’m not talking fluently, I mean at all. None of them knew anything about Islam, except no pork, no booze, and cover your women. And I have to keep a straight face, all polite, but the whole time I’m thinking to myself, ‘we were over there for how long?’ What a shit show…”

“Ugh!” The professor grunted in disgust. “I’m sure the local customs didn’t stop them if they wanted something. You, your buddies, all with guns, no police, nobody to interfere…That’s the problem with armies in modern democracies. Aaah, whose book is it I’m thinking of? Maybe it was on JSTOR? There’s these lofty goals, but as the people sent to execute them are, you know…Of course, even if it was all educated experts that we sent over there, they would struggle with how to implement ideas like ‘nation building’.”

“And we hand the task over to the kids who, when we were studying in class, they were blowing up frogs with firecrackers and dropping out in Grade 10,” the curator lamented, perusing inlaid Qajar pen boxes.

“Exactly!” the academic huffed. “A lot of the kids who sign up just want to get away from their stepdad’s belt and to go kill people, legally. How do you build a nation, win hearts and minds with that? It was a pipe dream! I’d be scared if I found out someone like that was living in my building.”

“That’s partly why we put on the exhibit,” the curator offered. “We never asked, collectively, what to make of it.” He smiled slightly at the dense cluster of attendees, eagerly milling about, looking as if they might divine some secret of their generation’s national identity if only they contemplated the art and artifacts with sufficient intensity.

“I’m just glad we weren’t stupid enough to go down the road the Americans did in Vietnam,” the journalist declared.

“We couldn’t have,” the curator affirmed. “We’re more educated now. People ask questions. Plus, it went on so long. If you can’t tell anyone why you’re there and what you mean to achieve, you’re not going to get a whole bunch of university graduates with a future ahead of them rushing to sign up, especially not for what’s not really such great pay anymore.”

“The hubris of Empire,” the curator mused, with audible capitalization. “Alexander. Kublai Khan. The British. The Soviets. What did we think we were going to get out of it, when they all met the Fate they did?”

“Hm,” the professor cooed agreeably. “You know, you could say this exhibit you’ve put on, and in the Royal Ontario Museum of all places – it’s really about us as much as it’s about all these lifeless things plucked out of the empty sands where we were groping for meaning. All for ourselves, in a way. No?” She was extremely proud of her cleverly turned phrases. Everyone smiled, but no more than was appropriate for the mood of the event.

* * *

The rapid and ongoing cacophony of explosions had temporarily deafened Kyle. He was not cognizant of how he had come to be inside the building, but he recognized that his belly and ribs were sore and his gloves were scuffed down to the lining in places. His rifle felt light. He reloaded. Guiding the magazine into the mag well was like unlocking the door after staggering how from a bender at the clubs. He had as much control over his limbs as a puppeteer with a string puppet: his body wasn’t quite his anymore – he had enough rights to it to receive fear and pain, yet overall possession of its substance was clearly in dispute.

A ragged wave rattled the walls and roof, smacking a wooden window-beam down towards his feet – he was laying down and didn’t even try to evade it. The enemy was at least squad-sized, probably more, since they liked to have one group shoot while the other maneuvered around for a better vantage or to disengage and escape. However, these were probably local militia, not full-time Taliban regulars, judging by the motley assortment of weapons, which Kyle could differentiate by sound, plus the fact they didn’t seem to have anything heavier than the one RPG. If he could keep from getting killed, sooner or later (probably sooner), backup would roll in from base and push the guerrillas out. Somebody had to be looking for them already, the way they’d been last out on the road among the convoy. Helicopters, perhaps a Specter gunship – that would be even better. Revenge entered his mind – he wasn’t sure why. Now that his chance for heroism had come, he left it untouched like salad at a buffet. Medals didn’t matter, only making sure there was as low a chance as possible that none of those bullets hit him. He pressed his body into the carpet that covered everything on the floor, undulating like a caterpillar until he was in a niche, sort of a closet without a door, between two rooms whose purpose the lack of familiar furniture prevented him from speculating on.

Having no idea of the layout of the structure and where somebody might enter from in pursuit of him, he instinctively fell back on basic training for urban warfare…or tried to. Don’t poke your rifle out of the windows; hang back so you’re in the shadows…works, if you have buddies to watch your flanks. How many of his squad had survived the initial ambush? He listened for voices, but all he heard was some far-away cheers and orders that definitely were not English. None of the reports echoing around the thick moulded-mud masonry was a 5.56 of any type that he knew; only the distinctive ‘pop’ of AK47s and the occasional boom of a sniper rifle. Everything sounded pretty close; no further than the shrub-topped hillocks which his hazy recollection told him marked the natural boundaries of the village. The windows in the room he was in were all absurdly high off the ground. Bandits must be common in this district, he figured. The next room, though, which was larger, had a big, bright window that he guessed might look behind the house, right up to where the bulk of the shooting was coming from, and it was low enough that he could lie down and see out of it while barely raising his body. Or, better yet, peep out using a signaling mirror. The gunfire was just sparse enough that Kyle feared making noise by moving too speedily. This was fortunate, as, right when his helmet was about to pass through the space of the large room, a single powerful bullet tore a plank out of the window that held the shutters, throwing jagged wood splinters everywhere and gouging a bone-white scoop from the azure-painted interior wall. Kyle shuffled back into the previous room, keeping his eyes on the bullet impact. In what must have been three or five seconds, he did a minute’s worth of reasoning: he definitely had not been visible – he was sure he wasn’t deceiving himself here. None of his buddies, alive or dead, were holed up in this portion of the house. The enemy ‘marksmen’ were squeezing off precise single shots at…nothing. It was possible that the enemy didn’t know how many of Kyle’s guys were in there, or where they’d all scattered to, and they were simply dumping suppressive fire in the faint hope that they might hit something. The Talibs were brave enough for suicide bombing but the ones not set on that ending weren’t known for storming buildings with NATO troops still inside. Kyle huddled into a recess where the floating dust sparkled in the noonday shadows. So many vehicles…so many radios…someone would have put out an alert about the engagement and called for backup, he reminded himself again. Hell, it had taken them so long on the road, someone must have started looking for them already. They had to. If he could sit tight, undetected, the relief force would come barreling through in twenty, or ten minutes If he could survive that, or maybe even five minutes without the Afghans finding him…

* * *

Sophie launched into a brief lecture about Kammerer’s theory of synchronicity. After all, wasn’t it true that they had all been in a retrospective mood lately and none of them quite knew why? (Stepan mumbled something about events in the news). And, was it not also a fact that Stepan had only a day and a half earlier found that sculpture in the curio shop – been drawn to it by inexplicable impulses (“I didn’t put it that way,” Stepan cautioned)? Which was, astonishingly, genuine, as they were informed when they brought it to Professor Weisbrot at the U of T’s Department of Anthropology. So what if it was mid-20th century rather than 2^nd century BC? It was still genuine in the sense of being a folk craft, probably produced by the same methods as the ancient original and likewise imbued with the spiritual energies of its place of origin? (The University lab had not tested for the latter characteristics, but both Sophie and Stepan shared popular beliefs about haunting, feng shui and so on in a real, albeit doctrinally imprecise sense).

Now, to top things off, they had been invited to an unofficial reunion dinner, hosted by their ex-classmate, who had become (assistant…) curator of antiquities at the R.O.M. Not the best paid job among alumni of their small, academically focused high school, but certainly one of the coolest. Too, there would be Heather, who’d parlayed her bubble blonde charm into a reporter gig at the Star, Kenneth, who’d become an academic making a high salary on worthless predictions about geopolitics, and Charmaine Ngai. And the venue was the Pomegranate Restaurant at 420 College St., the same one where they have the booths on raised daises with low tables where you can sit on rugs instead of chairs.

“How did you get your invite?” inquired Stepan.

“SMS,” Sophie replied matter-of-factly.

“Eh? The text you got didn’t say anything…cryptic, did it?”

“Why? No.”

“Okay, because mine definitely sounded like something trying to be all cryptic, James Bond-y, like for fun.” He pulled out his phone to be sure of the words. “Lessee…’the four winds may scatter’ – it’s all in caps, by the way – ‘the four winds may scatter our willful souls, but the wheel of samsara spins, spins though we’re blinded by greed and sin, calls us in, bound in an eternal whole.’” He showed the message to Sophie. “I had my data turned off, got mine a couple hours late after you told me. When I tried calling the number back, I got ‘not in service.’ Figured it was a reference to the mandalas we painted in…was it grade 11 art class?”

A doubting Sophie tried calling the number on her phone, with the same dead-end result. “Huh. Look at my message history. It’s actually a different number from the one that messaged you. They’re obviously talking about the same event invite, though, so, I dunno. Maybe like someone using a secret number, like a VPN for your phone?” Her cynical grin switched to a confounded frown when she attempt to call that number which had texted her. It, too, was out of service.

They hypothesized about a hacker, but couldn’t conceive of a motive. Meanwhile, Charmaine and a couple others had messaged to say they were on their way and, knowing some of the guests would be using the subway, Stepan and Sophie knew they would have no cell service to respond to inquiries about potential phone hackers until they were all at the restaurant together.

Confused they were, but there was nothing weird about an informal high school reunion in of itself. Indeed, they’d all talked about doing one now and then over the years. Only, Delilah wasn’t going to come because she was laden with cases that evening; refugees experiencing integration troubles and an addiction ‘workshop.’ Everyone commented on the lovely and exotic atmosphere of the Pomegranate. Only the museum curator, Geoffrey, picked up on the coincidences, sparking a discussion. Stepan still had the Buddha head in his bag. The curator gave his verdict: “See the even pore structure and the even tones over the whole of the head,” he pointed out, scrutinizing it with the magnifying glass in his Swiss Army knife. “On the other hand, there’s no tool marks, like from a Dremel tool. So, none of the stains or patina you’d expect from something that actually dates to the 1^st century AD, which it matches stylistically. But the look is spot-on and there’s no doubt in my mind, this was worked and polished by hand. You’d think they’d at least have sandpaper and lathes. Somebody sure went the extra mile. Bit of a waste for a tourist-trap souvenir.”

Charmaine, whose father was devoutly Buddhist, remarked on how little we can learn about our world merely by looking at its present here-and-now, and lamented the recent politics which split apart people who should be appreciating how much they share together across distance and geography.

“I also got a strange message,” the Star reporter, Heather, sought to be the centre of attention. “But it must have come when I was in the subway. I didn’t think it was related to this here,” she jabbed a fork towards the table, “Hmmm…” She read the message on Stepan’s phone. “No, this was something different; it was about a scoop downtown today, to be near campus to meet an informant talking about sleeper cells and terroristic activism in ethnic student groups downtown, but they never called. I’ve been killing time in a cafe around the block for like four hours. This is a different number, too.” Someone brought up hacking of phones, and the journalist in her fired up. “”All those powers they gave themselves after 9/11, basically demolishing the Charter, did they repeal any of them?” she asked rhetorically.

“Well, the alternative was a danger to public security,” the IR prof conjectured. “You remember how freaked out everybody was back then. Nobody knew when the next one was going to be.”

“Umm, never?” Sophie rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, that is why we were in Afghanistan, after all, wasn’t?” Stepan joined in, deliberately sarcastic. “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here?”

Sophie, too impassioned to grasp his sarcasm, clapped down her teacup. “Fight who? Fight Mulhim? Fight Aksa?” She named two of their fellow alumni, currently distant but remembered fondly or at least without complaint. “That was the argument for Iraq, by the way.”

“Sorry, mixed them up.” Stepan shimmied his glutes upon the rug. “Sophie’s right,” he pleaded. “Gosh, I couldn’t think of killing Mulhim, or Aksa. Ugh, just, ugh.”

Heather stunned him with an angry retort: “So you’re saying their sacrifice was in vain, then?” leaning in, as if she was trying to get his hot take on the mic.

“Of course it was in vain!” Sophie replied for her friend. Looking to the curator, “We chose, or, our political classes chose to send soldiers to die, in the same failed adventures like so many other empires had done before us and which had been a disaster for all of them.” The curator nodded.

“Wha…excuse me,” Heather hadn’t planned on being other than a noble icon of impartiality in any matter of virtuous retrospection. “You don’t think women’s rights, schools, healthcare, safety, all the things we have; you don’t think it was worth it? To bring it to them?” She pouted.

“You don’t win ‘hearts and minds’ by burning villages and raping the local women and boys.”

“Did Canadian soldiers ever do that?”

Sophie hadn’t expected a debate when she accepted the invite, but was now caught in her role, which she felt even more strongly as she noticed that their waiter and the wife of the couple that owned the place seemed to be listening, hovering at the cash desk, curious to hear what the diners on the dais were arguing about.

“Not off the top of my head, but if you are part of an occupying force, and it’s a widespread activity among your comrades…” Stepan, his courage fortified by Sophie’s stand and eager to curry favour with his friend, gave a riposte. “You know, too, what kinds of people join the army…”

“Tell me,” the reporter snorted.

“Uhm, well, like we had this girl at the Starbucks I worked in back then. She went to U of T like us but she was from Thunder Bay and her brother joined the army then, during the war, and she wasn’t having it. Said he was a psycho that she’d never let near a gun. He said straight up, she told us, that he wanted to kill people, legally. That’s it. That was his reason for joining. And other, err, things that go along with that…situation. It got him real excited, apparently. She said it’s basically a system the government designs to get them out of society when they’re young, because, if it wasn’t Afghan villagers, it would be Native hitchhikers on the Highway of Tears or something.”

“Not like the government would care either way, except prison costs more than a soldier’s salary,” Sophie gibed.

“Yep, and she also told us, it’s worse when they come back alive, because they can’t adapt to normal peaceful society, and will just act out all those violent impulses on the public back home.”

“If you found yourself treated like a stranger in the country you were born in and fought to protect, especially if you had PTSD from fighting terrorists with AK47s in a literal hellhole…” Heather refused to abandon her sudden, hawkish position; she who had never seen a gun except on TV or in a cop’s holster. Her friends were taken aback; they had seen the contrarian ‘shit-disturber’ side of her before, but not the apparent sincerity with which she challenged them, on what they had all believed were perfectly mainstream, socially-approved understandings of the events of their formative years.

“More like, abused civilians so the villagers take up arms to get you out of their village…” Sophie scoffed. “As for hellholes, I would rather live in a self-sufficient farming community, if it was my own culture, than how our homeless and addicts and people in assisted housing live. If you want to blame something for crime…”

Charmaine was utterly ignorant of foreign affairs and had been stuffing her face quietly, was triggered into action by the talk of crime. “Actually, my dad is a detective,” – as if this was news to anyone who knew her – “and I remember him mentioning that guys who served over there are hugely over-represented not, like, in murders, but among, like, homeless people or the druggies living in those run-down old house apartments that are like four stories high and brown and ashy on Sherbourne and Jarvis Streets.”

“Trauma,” Heather whispered mournfully.

“But yeah, no, what Sophie or Stepan said, my dad agrees, it’s a psychology issue with the people they send; they’re already a selected group before they go over there. Explains why we didn’t have an explosion of psycho hobos after World War Two, even though way more people served in the army then.”

“Classism, gotta love it, eh?” Heather drawled.

Stepan wondered to himself, ‘what has gotten into you?’

“It’s not rich or poor; it’s psychology,” Charmaine insisted. “The same kids would be growing up to beat their wives, do drugs, get drug, sexually assault if they stayed here, too. At least over in Afghanistan, Somalia or some place the people can defend themselves.”

“You’d shoot a homeless veteran if he asked you for money?” Heather had forgotten her kuku sabzi, nourishing herself instead on moral superiority.

“If I could, oh my God, yes,” Charmaine answered frankly. “Right when I was coming here, walking like fifty feet away from the restaurant, just across the street, this crazy guy stopped me and asked for change. And when because I was startled, I said, ‘change?’, like asking him, he got pissed, ‘You promise? But you can’t deliver!’” She mocked a gravelly male voice. “Accusing me like I’d committed some crime against him or something. I was thinking, what the fuck, I was just, you know, surprised, like anyone would be when some horrible-smelling bearded guy jumped out at me and asked me for money. Then he went on about how my money can’t buy the change he needs and he’s already paid me more than I can return to him, and I’m over it at this point; like, no way, I don’t owe you shit.” Her dining companions listened in worry or awe. “I mean, I don’t mind giving people panhandling some money as an idea, but don’t come at me as if you’re friggin’ entitled. Anyway, I pushed him aside – washed my hands at least five times after I got in here, don’t worry.”

“He touched you?” Several mouths gasped. “That’s assault!”

“Not really, he stood in my way and I had to brush past him or else walk into traffic. It was gross, though, even if you can’t say it’s on the level of sexual assault. The creepiest part was how he laughed when I went away from him and he said ‘enjoy your meal,’ but, I hadn’t even moved to go inside the restaurant yet, and there’s so many other stores and food places on the street.”

“Lucky guess? Dinner hour?” Geoffrey attempted to demystify things.

“I dunno, maybe I telegraphed something with my body language.”

“How did you know he was a soldier? Or are you just bringing it up because of what we’re talking about now?” Heather asked.

“Uhhh, because of his army clothes and boots. Head to toe, only, with all the flags and rank-symbols ripped off.”

“You can buy those clothes at the surplus store in Kensington.”

“Whatever. He gave me that vibe. I don’t think he wanted to hurt me, but it felt like he enjoyed scaring me, or hoping he could scare me.” Charmaine was equally stubborn as Heather. “A menace to society. Women should be able to protect themselves.”

“Hmm…” Geoffrey uttered, trying to keep space open in the conversation while he processed his thoughts. “I am pretty sure I saw the same guy, but he was at the entrance to the subway, leaning against a building near where the steps come out on the sidewalk. Army clothes, sort of a duffel bag but I guess you could carry it as a backpack, with the shoulder strap. I paid special attention to him because he was sitting there, just sitting there, meditating, like a Buddha. If it is the same guy, he wasn’t bothering anybody. Perhaps it’s because your dad is a cop; usually they have had a lot of bad experiences with the law by the time they’re at that stage.”

“How would he know, though?” Charmaine laughed.

“I…I don’t know! Could be it’s the way you carry yourself. People can always tell an undercover cop.” It was hard to claim that the spunky, gregarious Charmaine – all five-foot-three of her, came across as in any way suggesting “police.”

Nonetheless, in her mind, she was very much her father’s daughter. A Facebook post by Stepan both depicting and describing the latter-day ‘artifact’ he and Sophie had purchased in Chinatown the other day was fresh in her thoughts. Buddha…White-people-influenced Buddha…Hipsters, who are sane to the highest degree of boring herdmindedness, will sit cross-legged atop some special, pigeon-haunted nook or pedestal, palms on knees or fingers clasped in a gesture everyone passing by will assume must be a symbol of some principle relating to the energy flow of the universe or other mumbo-jumbo. They do it for attention, fleeing either direction interaction or a thin and disinterested crowd. One never encounters their pseudo-Oriental spiritual practices in the Rouge, let alone Muskoka.

If a hobo is sitting silently, demanding nothing, decrying nothing, then he is either stoned out of his mind or he is attempting to appear utterly shattered and catatonic, that he might excite more pity and faster fill his coin-cup or upturned baseball cap. Neither possibility fit either of the descriptions of the man.

Whatever argument there had been was smoothed over with the geniality induced by a full stomach. Contrary to the norm for reunions of old fellow schoolmates, no one who had bothered to show was established enough in life to inspire soul-crushing shame, nor was anyone poor enough to feel shame and lose all desire to propagate the nation. This state of affairs did not go unnoticed.

Due to the coincidence of their residences’ location and their friendship being maintained better than in former times, Sophie, Stepan and Charmaine left together as the diner party dissolved with much affected adjusting of clothes and patting of bellies.

Charmaine raised the idea before it could escape her: “Which of us was it, d’you think, invited the rest of us?” The others stared at her dumbfounded. “Think about it, nobody was really the ‘host.’”

“Huh,” Stepan was enlightened. “You’re alright. I guess we didn’t notice because we all know each other and nobody’s got a beef, or jealousy or anything.”

“Think harder! You don’t think, maybe, somebody wanted us to beef?”

“Wanted us to have a reunion, and turn on each other? Like something out of Gossip Girl?”

“Well, we all have a history, things we never resolved; went our different ways…” Charmaine’s mental energies surged like a storm-fed river but could not find the right channel to flood into.

Sophie smiled politely. Yet, she bought it. It all did seem too much for mere coincidence. “Was anyone supposed to come who didn’t make it?”

Stepan shrugged. “Don’t know, except Delilah but she wouldn’t do some crazy psychological scheme. And there’s no easy way to figure it out now, is there?”

In silence, trying to think of something else to banter about, they strolled along Dundas Street, taking in the evening tableaux. Stepan meant to pop into an LCBO, since it was nearly closing time and he needed some Taylor Fladgate for the cupboard. Sophie stuck an arm across his chest. “Better not…”

The LCBO was bustling but the sidewalk between them and it contained drama that intrigued, as long as one didn’t smell or touch it. There was one of those stairways flanked by brick abutments which lead to below-street shops in certain old districts of downtown, like College and Dundas-Spadina, usually stores that sell niche goods which don’t pay for above-ground rent, such as anime DVDs, Chinese books, and pet supplies. It was clear from the discussion that this matter involved Tung Hoi Fish Centre and not Star Video, which may have been a defunct shell as far as anyone could tell from the darkness and the sun-faded posters covering the windows. A cold breeze reminded the wandering trio that it was not yet summer and of the importance of regular showers, also…but, for all of them, though only Charmaine would admit it, this was too spicy a scene to walk away from. One participant, backed against the abutment, was a classic downtown ‘street person’: disheveled, ruggedly bearded, clad in an olive drab coat (better burned than laundered). The other participants appeared to be a father and daughter who ran a family business.

The hobo seemed to know both of the shopkeepers – and the law. Only snippets of the conversation were legible past the effects of alcohol, madness and traffic noise. “…See, that’s where you’re wrong, pal,” the hobo said, in a voice strangely familiar. “You can’t do citizens’ arrest!”

“What you mean? I can’t do!” The man, a stout Vietnamese or Cantonese in a striped polo, growled. “This my store! I catch you robbing my store, I arrest you, wait for police.”

“That’s right!” His daughter advanced menacingly, stopping as she wrinkled her nose. “We won’t hurt you, okay, but you can’t just break the law. This is our family’s livelihood!” She had obviously been to university. Her father’s glare suggested he didn’t agree with his daughter’s restrictive use-of-force policies.

“Doesn’t work like that, pal, sorry. To make a citizens’ arrest, you have to actually see me commit a felony and not lose sight of me at all between then and when you make the arrest. If you took security training, that’s exactly what they would have taught you.”

“He’s right, you know,” Charmaine whispered to her friends.

“Smart hobo,” Stepan nodded.

The trio clunk back beyond the corners of a side street where the light of a restaurant patio and a rare ash tree partially concealed them when a cruiser rolled up. Someone had called the cops. There was a broad, confident smirk all over the hobo’s face; his soulful eyes glinting, trusting that reason would prevail over pettiness and paranoia.

The three friends were transfixed. Of course, there was the morbid curiosity of a little drama which affected none of them personally…but there was something extra; some undisclosed ingredient to this moment which gave it a truly irresistible savour…

One of the two cops in the cruiser stepped out and dealt with the situation in textbook fashion, walking between the parties. As the conversation developed, his voice dropped and his eyes widened. He must have handled plenty of weirdos and freaks already, but this was something new.

“Did he say what I think he say? The store owner, I mean.” Stepan was incredulous.

“Yep,” answered Charmaine. “The shopkeeper said the homeless guy is stealing fish. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“Is that a metaphor for harassing his daughter?”

“Nope…”

As if to double down on the insanity, the shopkeeper demanded the cop search the accused’s pockets to detect if there were stolen tropical fish being smuggled out in them, or perhaps a lionhead or oranda. “Sir, you can’t arrest somebody, as a citizens’ arrest, for something you say happened on a prior occasion, over a week ago.”

“Told ya.” The hobo jabbed his chin at the shopkeepers. “I fought for your rights. But I guess you people miss living under tyranny.”

“Check his pockets!” The shopkeeper demanded, unplacated.

The cop sighed, clearly not wanting to have to handle the suspect or breath the air emanating off him for longer than he had to. “Sir, could you turn out your pockets, just so we can see ‘n be sure for this gentleman’s sake, that you didn’t take anything from his store.”

A barely noticeable tension shot through the officer as the hobo complied with a slowness and deliberation that were a fraction beyond the normal…The trio noticed, too; it was as if the guy meant to manipulate his jacket pockets in such a way that they appeared to be opened, while a small pouch of fabric remained inside the lip of the jacket shell.

If it that was the case, luck was not on the downbeat man’s side. A small transparent object ‘clicked’ on the pavement. The officer picked it up. A vial of something. “You mean to tell me what this is? Hashish oil?”

The hobo maintained a cold silence for a moment. “It’s not a fucking goldfish now, is it?”

“No, no, looks like hashish oil to me. What do you use this for? For yourself? Sell it?”

“To forget the nightmares by which I earned your ingratitude,” the hobo spoke with startling eloquence. “All of you.”

Stepan shuddered. The hobo did not twist his head far enough to actually look at them. Regardless, it felt like he meant to address them; like he knew they were there, although Stepan made sure not to ponder too much whether he was interested in them as mere spectating pedestrians, or as something more…

The policeman did not seem to grasp what the fellow was getting at. His facial muscles twitched nervously; he motioned for his partner in the car.

“…Don’t be scared; I’m not asking you to be scared,” the hobo begged the cop as if he felt sorry for him. “Gosh, eh, isn’t it funny how we can share so much, then some experience comes along; some twist of Fate, and we just…change, man; different directions…and we can’t see the other side. We don’t want to.” Again the man turned, with his shoulders too, this time. For the barest second he made eye contact, or, at least, Stepan imagined he did.

Yeah, for sure, life can be rough sometimes like that.” The cop concurred, edging backwards, hands held ever so slightly away from his hops, elbows starting to bend. “I’m gonna have to take this here though.” He indicated the vial in his hand. “We’re not gonna arrest you on simple possession; I’m okay to leave you with a warning, but we gotta figure out this thing between you and Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen here, ‘kay buddy?”

“You checked my pockets. Did you find anything that could possibly have been stolen from this man’s store – unless he wishes to admit to being a drug dealer?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“He stole my fish! More five, six fish!” Mr. Nguyen fumed. “You have to arrest him, send him to jail, make him pay back my money!”

The notion of a shoplifter purloining ranchus and cichlids by stuffing them in his coat pockets was food for thought: did he eat them, perhaps cooked in some camping stove made from discarded tin cans? Alas, scholarly reflection on the fascinating topic was interrupted by a new twist in the situation, less bizarre but more likely to make it onto the news. In response to the cop’s gesture requesting assistance, his partner stepped out of the cruiser, hands near holstered nightstick and tazer.

Presumably, the cops intended to prevent escalation by demonstrating to the smelly, belligerent suspect that ‘overwhelming force’ was ready in generous portions and he would be wise to remain passive. It had the opposite effect. Stepan perceived that the hobo’s body and gaze turned to confront the sudden challenge; the shopkeepers were forgotten as if they weren’t there.

“You!” he half-yelled, half-bawled, throat crackling wetly. A wildness overtook him, his character transformed from disruptive yet pitiable street person to a pure, primal threat. The only possible reaction was to stop the threat as quickly and firmly as possible, or, in the case of Stepan, Sophie, Charmaine and the bystanders who’d broken from their commuting and trinket shopping to gawk at the proceedings hoping that someone braver and better armed than themselves would put a stop to things.

The policeman was feeling overwhelmed. He wasn’t worried, though – frequently, more than one sane and fit cop was required to subdue an unruly individual jacked up on alcohol, drugs, and traumatic flashbacks. Nobody was anticipating what happened next, least of all Constable Sutraj Singh Malhotra, who was caught off guard when this one among countless unhoused CAMH clients he’d politely shooed off of commercial premises in his young career would snap like an overstretched elastic, pressing him on top of the hood of his own cruiser before he’d finished telling the miscreant that he understood his difficulties but he had to move along now…

The warping sheet metal, the swearing and shouting of the cops and the chatter over the police radio plunged that section of sidewalk into a vision of urbanity befitting the early season of Law & Order. The three friends’ knees flexed, heads bent low, but nothing save a gunshot ringing out could have driven them from their excellent vantage point. “O-M-G!” Sophie squealed.

“Do you think they’re gonna…?” Before Stepan finished his question, a bursting hissss’ was added to the orchestra of crude violence and the hobo was rolling only the curb, knuckles grinding into his face, throat gagging. The cop he’d just assaulted was still lying bent backwards over the hood, holding out his can of pepper spray with one arm while shielding his face with the other. His partner quickly moved to cuff the offender and drag him into the back seat. Stepan thought about a song he’d encountered on YouTube some years prior: “That’s why I’m riding on the Cherry Beach Express; my ribs are broken and my face is in a mess…”

* * *

Sophie tapped the cannister delicately so that she would not feel compelled to rush to wash her hands after feeding the fish. The swarm of guppies materialized out of the groves of Anacharis and driftwood arches, devouring the ochre flakes like a wind-blown fire devouring a prairie farm. She stepped back and admired the aquarium and its surroundings: the stalwart faux ebony cabinet, the weighty books, the rug with woven Kalashnikovs and Mi8’s behind it carrying a warm red-purple colour scheme to contrast with the greens in the fish tank, and the alabaster sculpture of the ancient sage’s head. Sophie approvingly, then began sorting through DVDs on a nearby shelf. “Brideshead Revisited? The Heat and the Dust?…I’m feeling something languid and glamorous…”

“Sorry,” Stepan wore his anxiety on his sleeve. “I was thinking…”

“Of something depressing? Not allowed here! So we need something to get lost in. Either the Heat and the Dust or…The Night of Counting the Years? Oooh!”

“Not depressing, I suppose, just…do you remember the homeless dude fighting with the cops after we left the restaurant the other night?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t he look familiar to you? His face, if you took off the beard and dirt, of course?”

“Maybe, I dunno.” Sophie pressed a finger to her lips.

“I couldn’t help thinking, afterwards, there was some relationship to his being there, after all of us had reconnected, caught up on old times…”

“I see it, now, hmm…” Sophie’s eyes rested upon the Buddha, sitting impassively in disembodied meditation.

“I couldn’t help thinking, how different our lives would have been, if we’d made a single different choice back then. Agh! Where have I seen that face before?!?”

“It’s…” Sophie mused, barely audible, gaze not moving from the enigmatic sculpture. “It’s a lesson from the universe; a ‘sign’ not to take the path of anger and breaking our own reason with drugs and resentment. Don’t you think? We received a lot of lessons from each other growing up, you’re right. Makes us grateful we weren’t in some factory school.”

“Oh, I was gonna say,” Stepan corrected her, “That he looked like the hobo who used to harass patrons outside the Reference Library, but I think that was someone else. Ate the pigeons, supposedly – at least that was the rumour.”

“Eww! So, The Night of Counting the Years it is.”

終

Gandhara

by M.G. Warenycia

Between that debate and this was a gigantic blur, less real than the sweat-drenched dreams he got in base before each patrol…

…Jean-Léon Gérôme, Edwin Lord Weeks, Horace Vernet…

“Cresswell!” The sergeant’s voice barked from inside the hull.

Kyle snapped to attention.

“Check the goddam map again. No way in hell this is the right road. ‘Sposed to be a straight run to the ANA base once we got off the highway.”

Kyle pressed the map flat against the LAV’s roof to stop it from flopping as they bounced along. “Uhhh…yep, Sarge…”

“Yep what?!?”

“Yes, you’re right. It’s supposed to be a straight run…supposed to be. I guess we’ve just been moving slow; road probably isn’t what it was when they drew the map.”

An epiphany rolled into his head as they rumbled along: “Civilization is the state of being in which one’s ideas exist separate from material consequences…We are civilized…”

* * *

“Uh, I don’t remember the name of it, but it was one of those narrow little trinket shops in Chinatown, the ones that sell all kinds of antiques and knick-knacks and things,” Stepan answered.

“Uh, twenty-five bucks?”

* * *

“You think somebody should go ask one of them?” Kyle whispered.

“What?” Alexander barked back.

“I…” Kyle coughed, forcing his voice higher: “I was thinking, maybe we could ask somebody where we are,” nodding towards the low earthen courtyard of a farmhouse.

The Sarge calleed out, “Salaam Aleikum! Umm, khe-chare! Za da Canada pauz. Canada army!” Without turning to face Kyle, he argued, “Somebody lives here! They gotta…”

“Scared maybe?”

“Or…Whatever. Doesn’t it bug you?”

“Like somebody took away all their animals…” The Sarge hissed.

“Animals?”

“You know. Farms. Should be animals. Goats, chickens, donkeys. Don’t look at me like that. You think Hadji’s plowing his fields riding around on a frickin’ John Deere?”

“Art Bell?”

Kyle shivered from embarassment. “You know. Or George Noury. Coast to Coast AM, that kind of show.”

“Hey, Sarge,” Kyle tilted his head to the left. The Sarge followed his lead. “Look!”

* * *

“I’m just glad we weren’t stupid enough to go down the road the Americans did in Vietnam,” the journalist declared.

* * *

“How did you get your invite?” inquired Stepan.

“SMS,” Sophie replied matter-of-factly.

“Eh? The text you got didn’t say anything…cryptic, did it?”

“Why? No.”

“Well, the alternative was a danger to public security,” the IR prof conjectured. “You remember how freaked out everybody was back then. Nobody knew when the next one was going to be.”

“Umm, never?” Sophie rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, that is why we were in Afghanistan, after all, wasn’t?” Stepan joined in, deliberately sarcastic. “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here?”

“Sorry, mixed them up.” Stepan shimmied his glutes upon the rug. “Sophie’s right,” he pleaded. “Gosh, I couldn’t think of killing Mulhim, or Aksa. Ugh, just, ugh.”

Heather stunned him with an angry retort: “So you’re saying their sacrifice was in vain, then?” leaning in, as if she was trying to get his hot take on the mic.

“You don’t win ‘hearts and minds’ by burning villages and raping the local women and boys.”

“Did Canadian soldiers ever do that?”

“Tell me,” the reporter snorted.

“Not like the government would care either way, except prison costs more than a soldier’s salary,” Sophie gibed.

“Trauma,” Heather whispered mournfully.

“Classism, gotta love it, eh?” Heather drawled.

Stepan wondered to himself, ‘what has gotten into you?’

“You’d shoot a homeless veteran if he asked you for money?” Heather had forgotten her kuku sabzi, nourishing herself instead on moral superiority.

“He touched you?” Several mouths gasped. “That’s assault!”

“Lucky guess? Dinner hour?” Geoffrey attempted to demystify things.

“I dunno, maybe I telegraphed something with my body language.”

“How did you know he was a soldier? Or are you just bringing it up because of what we’re talking about now?” Heather asked.

“Uhhh, because of his army clothes and boots. Head to toe, only, with all the flags and rank-symbols ripped off.”

“You can buy those clothes at the surplus store in Kensington.”

“How would he know, though?” Charmaine laughed.

“Huh,” Stepan was enlightened. “You’re alright. I guess we didn’t notice because we all know each other and nobody’s got a beef, or jealousy or anything.”

“Think harder! You don’t think, maybe, somebody wanted us to beef?”

“Wanted us to have a reunion, and turn on each other? Like something out of Gossip Girl?”

“Well, we all have a history, things we never resolved; went our different ways…” Charmaine’s mental energies surged like a storm-fed river but could not find the right channel to flood into.

Sophie smiled politely. Yet, she bought it. It all did seem too much for mere coincidence. “Was anyone supposed to come who didn’t make it?”

Stepan shrugged. “Don’t know, except Delilah but she wouldn’t do some crazy psychological scheme. And there’s no easy way to figure it out now, is there?”

“What you mean? I can’t do!” The man, a stout Vietnamese or Cantonese in a striped polo, growled. “This my store! I catch you robbing my store, I arrest you, wait for police.”

“He’s right, you know,” Charmaine whispered to her friends.

“Smart hobo,” Stepan nodded.

“Did he say what I think he say? The store owner, I mean.” Stepan was incredulous.

“Yep,” answered Charmaine. “The shopkeeper said the homeless guy is stealing fish. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“Is that a metaphor for harassing his daughter?”

“Nope…”

“Told ya.” The hobo jabbed his chin at the shopkeepers. “I fought for your rights. But I guess you people miss living under tyranny.”

“Check his pockets!” The shopkeeper demanded, unplacated.

The hobo maintained a cold silence for a moment. “It’s not a fucking goldfish now, is it?”

“No, no, looks like hashish oil to me. What do you use this for? For yourself? Sell it?”

“To forget the nightmares by which I earned your ingratitude,” the hobo spoke with startling eloquence. “All of you.”

The policeman did not seem to grasp what the fellow was getting at. His facial muscles twitched nervously; he motioned for his partner in the car.

“You checked my pockets. Did you find anything that could possibly have been stolen from this man’s store – unless he wishes to admit to being a drug dealer?”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“He stole my fish! More five, six fish!” Mr. Nguyen fumed. “You have to arrest him, send him to jail, make him pay back my money!”

* * *

“Sorry,” Stepan wore his anxiety on his sleeve. “I was thinking…”

“Of something depressing? Not allowed here! So we need something to get lost in. Either the Heat and the Dust or…The Night of Counting the Years? Oooh!”

“Not depressing, I suppose, just…do you remember the homeless dude fighting with the cops after we left the restaurant the other night?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t he look familiar to you? His face, if you took off the beard and dirt, of course?”

“Maybe, I dunno.” Sophie pressed a finger to her lips.

“I couldn’t help thinking, afterwards, there was some relationship to his being there, after all of us had reconnected, caught up on old times…”

“I see it, now, hmm…” Sophie’s eyes rested upon the Buddha, sitting impassively in disembodied meditation.

“I couldn’t help thinking, how different our lives would have been, if we’d made a single different choice back then. Agh! Where have I seen that face before?!?”

“Eww! So, The Night of Counting the Years it is.”

終

«Ashes of Trevor» *(TEASER)

The first dozen pages of, Ashes of Trevor, a novel-length detective mystery infused with the stories and spirit of Toronto at the peak of the City’s confidence and prosperity, right on the cusp of the Great Recession. The novel will be up for sale on Amazon when editing is completed in the summer. Featured cover art by Brisbane-based graphic designer Steven Warenycia.

Ashes of Trevor

by M.G. Warenycia

The impasto swirl of lavender and ultramarine which compassed the span of human sight told of life and energy; the same vernal vitality that plumped the maples like sprung umbrellas and painted fuchsia clouds over the blackened skeletons of the crabapple and cherry trees. The surf lapped with uncharacteristic timidity against the stone piles which held back the waters more sea than lake. Soccer moms jogged alongside playful retrievers, truants took a respite from their studies; the boardwalk which ran the length of this and adjoining beaches, while hardly crowded, had an extra complement of visitors eager to enjoy the first spell of really pleasant weather since Boreas plunged the great metropolis into shivering demi-twilight some six months prior. In the distance, a silvery glitter poked above an umbrous willow.

“Another one going up!” an aged voice of inconclusive accent muttered beneath brows more gloomy than the southerly stormclouds. “How can anybody live like that? You know, fifteen or twenty years ago, they said we’re all gonna have to start living like the Japanese? ‘Rabbit hutch’ apartments, people getting squeezed into subway trains like meat into a sausage casing. I said, nah, that’s stupid. And, if you visited Japan, you’d know that’s mostly just Tokyo, anyway. Even the Japanese were realizing it was a mistake, too. And what’s their excuse?” he pointed to the tower, which loomed too close for comfort. “There’s no reason I can see for it.” He swept his arm across the horizon to suggest the foolishness of people choosing to dwell in tiny rented boxes in the sky when there were vast swatch of undeveloped land all around the City.

“Gosh, I dunno; guess they want ta be like folks in New York ‘er Tokyo, like you say,” replied his companion, a tall, younger man whose scalp and brawny forearms were both covered with coarse ginger hair. “’Course, I’m from Up North myself, eh, so I could never get used to it.” Then, almost apologetically, he added: “Then again, maybe, people are working so much these days, you don’t have ta worry about cutting yer lawn, or shovelling snow.”

The older man’s grumbling was the equal of any Craftsman yard-clearing device. “Still, it goes to the root of civil society. Believe me. The architects and developers can say whatever they want. Vertical communities, ach! We humans don’t operate in vertical spaces; we operate horizontally. You need mixed-used neighbourhoods, mixed-class too, if you can. People encounter each other naturally in day-to-day life, interact. The public spaces are always visible, owned by the residents –“

“’Defensible spaces,’ right, we learn that in Situational Crime Prevention.”

“Right! Crime, too. When you know your neighbours, can see…take your tower block apartments, and compare them with a farming village in Guya-uhh, a fishing village on Sint Maarten or a feudal settlement in northern India. But, hey, gives you guys more work, doesn’t it?”

“Heheh, yeah, guess you could say that!”

“Yeah, which people like me pay for…”

“Don’t universities get most of their funding from the government, though? Which would mean that yer salary is…”

“Vertical communities!” The old professor waved his hand, simultaneously dismissing the off-duty policeman’s argument and drawing his attention to a tree, an especially large specimen that stood out among the beachside grove. “I’m not saying they don’t exist in Nature. Ehh, right in front of you. If you think about it, a lot of different cultures have got architectural ideas from Nature. Domes, beehives. The whole idea of cement, debatably. Wattle-and-daub walls – just need to have watched some species of birds building their nests. But that – that?!?!” he jabbed his chin at the distant tower. “Where’s the analogy to, say, a mature healthy tree, in these condo towers? It’s mere space. And hideous!”

The policeman nodded, holding his tongue regarding how the professor had purchased a charming Victorian house a few blocks from where they stood, while enjoying a globe-trotting, socially rich life that would now appear obscenely irresponsibly to any high school guidance counsellor, let alone to a struggling young couple. Times were different now, the officer reflected; what’s more, most people didn’t seem to have the slightest awareness that a change was on the horizon; a change of such overwhelming magnitude that the very complexion and direction of people’s lives would be altered by the millions without them noticing.

“It’s the subtle things, see. Those are the differences that really count. Yeah,” the professor tapped the tree’s bloated trunk with a stick. “You realize, even if we don’t chop down a single tree, the urban forest – the vegetation of the City, taken as a whole – it’ll be unrecognizable in a dozen years. I mean, to someone who knows one tree from the next. Most people won’t have a clue. Wonder if it’ll play with people’s psychology, the change in the ‘average green’ of the landscape or the ratio of sunny to shady spots – depends on what they replace them with, of course.”

“Wha…what d’ya mean?”

“I’m talking about this.”

“Gosh, geez…”

“Bah, it won’t hurt you.”

“Sure, but ya don’t have ta shove it in my face. It’s a…?” The policeman bent to inspect an object on the end of the stick the professor was holding. It was tiny and caught the sunlight like a forbidden gem.

“That,” the professor cocked his head towards the tree; “Is a glorious specimen of Fraxinus americana, common name: white ash. That is a Agrilus planipennis, the emerald ash borer.”

“The beetle?” the constable asked redundantly.

“The beetle!” The professor flung the stick among some hummocks of bunch grass. “Eugh! About nine percent of all the trees in this City, one for every three residents, is an ash tree. Because of that iridescent insect, they’ll all be dead. I told them at the Ward Committee meeting. They said they have no records of emerald ash borers here; have to send out researchers, form a subcommittee. You watch, though – in two, three years, heck, maybe next summer, if the winter is mild. Then, they’ll be sending out tree removal teams. They’ll have to cut them down. Every single one. There’s no resistant strains, no effective treatment.”

“Hmph. S’pose they’re worried about liability, if one of ‘em fell on somebody’s house. Lots’a real high-end properties around here. Heheh, I tell ya, Doc, hangin’ out with you is like going ta university fer free.”

“Better. Anyway, you were going to tell me about some cases you’re working on? When are they gonna give you that promotion?…”

II.

“Good morning to you, too, Peter. I’m Rita Ramachandran, reporting live from the Scott Mission at 502 Spadina Avenue, which is one of the last reported locations where anyone saw or heard from Dylan Coleman. Staff and guests here both recall Dylan staying at the Mission intermittently during the past four to six weeks and he may have been here as recently as last Thursday night. However, none of his personal effects remain for police to examine for clues and a police spokesperson says it is too early to comment on any leads.”

The photogenic, blazer-clad Tamil maiden held the microphone awkwardly far from herself, hoping that viewers would not notice her efforts to restrain her breathing. Mercifully, the camera shifted focus to a grizzled man wrapped in a couple soiled windbreakers. “I know when I saws the posters. I says a myself, Christ, eh, just saw him like, oh, a couple days ago, eh. ‘Cept everybody here called him Justin, if they knew him. I mean, I didn’t really know him, ya know. He was a quiet kid, kept to himself. Come ‘n go when he needed. Ya don’t really ask questions, ya know.”

The camera switched to a hopeful-looking young shelter worker, labelled “Rev. Peter Houseman: “We provide a refuge, mainly. We’ll help facilitate access to counselling and treatment, but we don’t enforce it. Persons come here of their own free will. If you’re asking whether Dylan seemed troubled, yes, he did, but people do not come through our doors because they are healthy and their lives are well in order…No, no, he never talked to me about feeling threatened or scared, personally. I would have contacted police, but there was nothing like that.”

“Well, Peter, there you have it,” Rita gasped. “There’s just so much about Dylan’s life in Toronto that’s a blank page at the moment, it’s difficult to draw any conclusions.”

“Thank you, Rita,” Anchorman Peter Marlborough’s sober accents acknowledged. “Perhaps we can learn more about who Dylan Coleman is by talking to those who knew him best.” The anchor flinched, wanting to curse himself for the Freudian slip, but he carried on seamlessly. “We have on the Colemans on the line live from North Bay. Let’s go there now.”

The screen focused on a grainer feed, evidently starting somewhere in the middle of an interview being conducted by an on-site reported. The camera focused on the obvious parental couple. The text on the screen read “Rob Browning – Sue Coleman (Parents).” The man, who had a stern military bearing, sign of his employment at the local RCAF base, spoke first. “I don’t agree with the direction the police there are taking, sorry. I’m not an expert in psychology or anything like that, but Dylan would not simply ‘go missing.’ We know our son and, frankly, the cops in Toronto, he’s just a number in a case file to them. I don’t know how you can think somebody would want to disappear by choice, for no reason at all. He was a good kid, hard worker, never got into any trouble, besides the usual stuff, growing up. Half the question they’re asking us, I don’t know what it’s for, except so somebody can make overtime.”

“I just…” Dylan’s mother’s voice broke with sobs; “I just want my baby back in one piece. That’s it; that’s all.” Her mouth moved as if she wished to say more, but no intelligible words emerged.

The newsfeed returned to Miss Ramachandran. “There you have it, Peter. The parents are not happy with the way police are handling this investigation.”

“It certainly seems like that, Rita. We should give credit though, to the Toronto Police Service for taking prompt action on even imperfect reports coming out about a potential criminal event that would have been neglected or ignored only a decade or two ago. At least that was the statement of AEqualis Toronto on this story. Now we bring you live to 52 Division headquarters, where police are giving an official statement on this case…”

From the appearance of the Superintendent standing behind the podium, one could be forgiven for thinking it was high summer and the AC had broken down. “…It is my regret to say so, but unfortunately, if that is what the family are telling you, I must say there is nothing we have found to support it…No, I am saying we do not believe this was a voluntary disappearance and we do believe foul play is involved…Obviously, we cannot release all the evidence publicly at this time; goodness, we’re right in the middle of…Yes, evidence…Both statements of witnesses – probably witnesses – and the circumstances, all indicate…” A reporter asked a question, inaudible on TV, which the Superintendent must have found impudent in the extreme. “The community? The Community! Consulting? With whom?…We keep residents informed, yes, but at this stage…Impact? Public perception? I don’t know, ugh! We don’t even have a suspect yet, so I can hardly comment on what the impact of the investigation will be on the Community…Yes, relations with the police have been strained in the past, but the policy of conciliation and cooperation of the last fifteen or so…” His voice grew weak and dull as he repeated a script learned by rote…

III.

“Disgusting! It’s disgusting he thinks we’re disgusting! Look at the way he curls his lips, fat sausage lips. You wonder what shady business he gets up to in his spare time.” The bar patron was fuming over his Lakan Extra Premium Lambanog. He was balding, bespectacled; a dense beard, cropped tight, ran around the circumference of his face. Muscles bulged under his sleeves and a paunch swelled over his belt buckle, but his cheeks were sunken and papery.

The bartender and the other patrons eyed him with an uneasy mixture of deference and disapproval. They were mostly well-to-do and pale. The lips comment, ehhh…and ‘shady’? Why, in the context…There was much shuffling of glutes atop barstools, absentminded tapping of coaster rims on wood, and ploughing of cold condensation with fingertips.

“You shouldn’t…people might take it the wrong…” a drinker half-heartedly mumbled without finishing the thought.

“It’s good they’re representing more diverse communities now,” offered another, to which the ranter snapped:

“Do you feel represented by any of those guys up there, huh? Do you know what it feels like to see those badges and jackboots crashing in on you when you’re in the steam room, vulnerable…argh! Yeah, yeah, bet you know what a nightstick on your ass at three a.m. feels like. And did anyone stick up for you?” Him…and him, and her – all of them, they represent Mr. and Mrs. White Picket Fence, the burbs, respectability. They wish you didn’t exist. But, hey, who cares about history, right?”

The other patrons hung their heads, humbled, but the bartender, a man as venerable in the Community as the bearded haranguer, took umbrage. “Nobody’s saying don’t care about history, Matt. Come on, look at me: I was writing articles for Q-Dition, back when it was printed once a month on a mimeograph in a schoolteacher’s garage. Didn’t pay so good as this gig, either, and that’s saying a lot. I got harassed, got put in lock-up a couple times, had to deal with all that shit. Point is, though, it’s history. I’m happy – we all should be happy – that those days are gone and people like this guy –“ he jabbed his chin towards a younger patron, a university student – “Don’t have to go through what we did. I mean, if they did, then what did we fight so hard for all those years?”

The ranter finished his drink hastily and stomped out. The others did not share their neighbour’s blind hatred of the police. They were concerned by the news playing on the ceiling-mounted television, though they’d been but dimly conscious of the goal. When he went home and slept that night, the bartender would dream a long and vivid dream. He was in a park, thickly wooded but well maintained. He was not sure how he got there, but it was the sort of place he enjoyed jogging or cycling in, so he set out to explore it. Rain was on the way. He had no umbrella. There were houses, subdivisions; he could see their roofs and chimneys protruding among the treeline. But it would take him quite a while to reach them. There was probably a mall, with a food court, too. His stomach felt hollow. With the rain coming down now, he could foretell that his pants would become soaked through and his loafers would become slop buckets, so he sought shelter in a grove of trees, whose massive crowns of saw-toothed, generically-shaped leaves were conveniently broad and spreading, forming perfect vegetable umbrellas. The leaves caught almost all of the droplets. Unable to wander around and explore, and with no companions nearby, he grew instantly bored and focused, as a bored man often does, on the minute details of his surroundings, so as to provide coal for the boilers of his mind. The grass was evenly trimmed. One would naturally expect a great deal of leaves, twigs and other arboreal detritus upon the grass, given the setting, but the lawn was picked clean as a wheatfield in a time of famine. Everyone else must have see the stormclouds approaching, or else he would have encountered people shuffling hastily towards the hidden parking lots, hoodies drawn up over their heads or newspapers shielding their eyes and hairdos. A hundred and fifty years and more the trees must have grown there; a place preserved and protected, and not a belated attempt to rectify the sins of Man by declaring a park after strip mining or clearcutting. Birds there were; he could hear them. Robins, awaiting a meal of post-shower worms; starlings. As the sky grew darker and the rain fell heavier, the amount of water getting to him through the leaves did not appreciably increase, but the birdsong changed. The cheery songbirds of the day were replaced by the hooting, barking and whooping of the birds of the night, who, as if in deference to human prejudices, wear a sinister aspect. As he listened, the queer whistling and whooping grew louder and louder, till he was not sure whether it was birds he was listening to, after all. The appearance of a pair of luminous red eyes a couple feet from ground level, unsettled him. A coyote? Luminous they were, literally, for, like a highway patrolman’s MagLight in the eyes of a pulled-over inebriate, their glow washed out the form surrounding them, although it was clear that it blinked and ducked behind the trunks of trees and the rims of boulders. Soon after, other pairs of eyes, likewise glowing and red, emerged from the nocturnal blackness, only to disappear and reappear in a more disconcerting spot. He felt a strong sensation of familiarity, alongside that of fear, though where that familiarity came from in time and place, or whether it was a delusion, he could not be sure. He felt scared enough that he wasn’t embarrassed to cry out, though he stopped after the first sputtered moan, aware that the folks in those distant houses would not hear him, especially in this rain. His tense gaze shifted increasingly quickly left to right and back again, playing a game of whack-a-mole with the blinking and shifting lights. The trunk of the ancient tree gave him reassurance; four feet at least, across the middle. That he could not see behind him gave him comfort that no threat was present in that direction…until he felt the undulation; the rattling and pulsing transmitted into his spine through the wrinkled bark.

His reason slipped and he let out a loud, futile wail, cut off by the sound of the tenants on the floor below shutting their windows, filling him with shame and confusion.

IV.

“Oh my friggin…!” The barista had already been tired, white rings of sweat salt and antiperspirant staining the underarm of her black uniform t-shirt. She was wearing it for the second overtime shift in a row because she’d been too worn-out to do laundry when the machines in her building were free. Her fingers were the colour of a hided watermelon from the bleach, Ajax and other cleaning chemicals she could not pronounce. Judith, the floor manager, could see that and obviously knew the hours everyone was schedules. Yet, Judith assigned her to clean the men’s room, first thing after she had come back from break. The Z-Teca burrito was lying hot in its foil wrapping upon the counter. She’d carefully suited up with gloves, apron…she needed a hazmat suit. The urinal cakes were fresh, the porcelain therein clean-scoured, but the stall…what must have been the entire roll of toilet paper…how could anyone…The edges of the outer sheets fluttered like feathers in the current from the vent and the open door. The bulk of the sheets were held firm to the floor by liquid mass, and by the adhesive action of the said liquids towards the tile as they slowly gummed. Spray or splatter covered the inside of the urinal door, flapping loosely on its hinges. Handprints, full handprints of blood, still bright crimson, marked the white walls and, by the sinks, a certain quantity of it had been used to trace crude symbols – they were definitely symbols, or intended to be such – probably with a finger, though Amy couldn’t be sure.

Dazed, Amy retraced her steps, watching lest she accidentally come into contact with some hitherto unnoticed residues. A parka-clad student shoved past her in obvious urgency. “N-nooo!” She seized his sleeve.

“Hey, what the f*ck are you doing?” he shook her off. He should have listened. He and his coffee companion fled from the café seconds later.

“That’s the fastest clean on record,” Judith snarled from behind the cash. “Ummm, you can’t just leave the mop and bucket, unless you’re expecting the customers to clean it for you. Actually, that does sound like you.”

“N-no, Judith…I’m not…I can’t…”

“If you’re such a spoiled princess, you shouldn’t have got a job in food service. Leave the money for people actually willing to work for it.”

“Judith…I…I think we should call the police? Maybe? Like, if there’s that much…something must have happened. I mean, right?”

“Police? What happened? Nobody made a report.”

Armando, who was restocking the pastry case, looked up sheepishly. “Umm, ackshually, there was dis homeless guy that ran out like ten minutes ago. You were in the back. He had like, six or seven coats on him.” Armando spun a finger around his ear. He had not glimpsed the inside of the restroom, but he could put two and two together.

The two or three customers ordering drinks and food who stood nearest to the counter could overhear the employees’ conversation. Worried looks passed between them as they contemplated how close to completion a frappe could be before they cancelled their order. Those farther from the counter stiffened with alertness, perceiving a sudden change in the mood but unsure of the cause and too timid to ask.

No one noticed yet another deranged, disoriented homeless man shambling along Dundas Street. That was, of course, until he stood for a time which even to the casual passer-by and the more so to the staff and patrons inside, staring gape-mouthed and trance-eyed at the window, or the sign, or the people inside of the Tuen Mun BBQ restaurant. Eventually, the creeped-out head chef set down his cleaver and shoved his nose against the window, giving everyone else the unconscious signal they needed to justify abandoning whatever they were doing to gawk. The few who possessed cell phones with cameras drew them out to snap grainy pictures for posting to internet forums. The panicked manager called the police.

Questioning of the lunatic was abruptly suspended when the officers became aware that he was seriously injured, as evidenced by the bloodstains on his lower pant legs and the fresh defensive wounds visible when he finally removed his hands from the Michelin Man ensemble of coats and scarves enfolding him. There was no way to tell what happened to him, gibbering as he was, plus certain aspects of his appearance led the officers to believe he might infect them with something, or some animal living on him, should they attempt to wrestle a pair of cuffs on him. They let the paramedics take him away. They’d barely finished calming down the restaurateur and feeding him the perfunctory advice on accommodating the presence of disturbing vagrants when eh bulleting came to go back and do a proper questioning of witnesses. Other officers would see the ME. Dylan Coleman had been located…and it looked like a homicide.

“You ever have a problem with homeless people around here before?” Constable Lambrakis waited patiently for the obviously never-fully-assimilated owner of the restaurant to process the question.

The small man, dapperly dressed in an out-of-date black suit, grabbed hunches of his long hair. “No, no. Yes, sometimes, go in garbage, looking food we throw away. In back. But never make trouble.”

“Yah-huh,” Lambrakis scribbled in his notebook. “Was this one of the men you saw poking through your trash before?”

“No. Nevah see him before. Neh-vah.”

“You sure? They all kind of look alike, sometimes.”

“Nevah, sorry.”

The customers had proven hopeless. At most, they tried to exaggerate details plainly within the officers’ memory, to make the incident seem more graphic than it was. None of them knew it was a homicide investigation – what could they have ‘seen,’ then? Lambrakis wondered…

Spring is a slow time for murder in Toronto and thus a good time for detectives to take a holiday. Detective Constable Doulas McMurtry, with his experience operating in the area, was assigned to the case as soon as he began his shift. By that hour, in the late afternoon, there was no sign at the Tuen Mun that anything out of the ordinary had occurred, a light rain having washed away any stray droplets of blood. Constable Jennifer Koo, McMurtry’s partner, looked inquiringly at him as they stood below the neon sign depicting a sampan, red on yellow, alongside the like-coloured block script and bold calligraphic characters. Her eyes asked permission to go tear into the restaurant staff. There were a number of businesses in the Division where she was forbidden, if not when in uniform.

“Lambrakis doesn’t think anybody here has any connection to the victim,” the Canuck mused, recalling the briefing he got from the initial investigating officers. “Says everyone they talked to came across honest, and none of them were much help. I tend to agree with him. I mean, sounds like this Coleman kid was really off his rocker.”

“Why?” Koo asked in a thoughtful whisper.

“I figger from how he was yammering like a maniac, when he talked, if he was saying words at all. That and his appearance. Y’know, hasn’t shaved in five days, wrapped up in enough coats ‘n jackets to roast a normal –“

“Argh! You’re like a brick, sometimes! I meant, why do you think he ended up like that?”

“Well, ya know, a lot of these guys – not the Indians, though – a lot of them were hard working guys once, feedin’ their families, payin’ their taxes. But then they got hurt, ‘n workman’s comp’s not enough. Wife leaves ‘em, he gets on the bottle. Or the mine, or the factory – all the good union jobs, eh – they all close down. Yer seeing more ‘n more of it now, with all this offshoring stuff going on. Comes into Toronto ‘cause he gets a little work fer a while, or thought he could, or fer some kind of treatment, maybe. The homeless shelters are full-up, and you’ve got a ten, twelve year wait fer assisted housing, but ya need it next month, eh. Then, you find yourself fighting fer a warm spot on a sewer grate. Not like there’s anywhere else, is there?”

Jenny’s contrarian instinct revolted, yet her brain struggled to come up with anything. “Wait, though…”

“Huh?”

“That doesn’t sound like this guy, though. He was just a kid, not some Baby Boomer factory worker.”

“No, guess it doesn’t. Huh. Bad home?”

Jenny hurried him along on their work, sparing him from getting deflated by further argument. “CAMH is right down the street,” she suggested, but that line of inquiry was ended at the front desk, as no Dylan Coleman appeared on the institution’s records and none of the sane individuals on duty recognized his photo, except from the news.

The City was beginning to twinkle in the first shades of twilight when Constables McMurtry and Koo strolled back south on Spadina to 52 Division headquarters. A spark of inspiration, or rather accumulated years of open-eyed experience hit McMurtry. “Should have checked in here before anything!” He smirked, forcing Jenny to follow as he ducked into the tile-fronted LCBO on the corner of Baldwin and Spadina. In a country with much unacknowledged Puritan blood coursing through its veins, ‘The Liquor Store’ carries unsavoury connotations by name alone. However, as LCBO locations go, the Baldwin-Spadina outlet has a uniquely notorious reputation almost on a level with the McDonald’s at Dufferin and King. Despite apparently deliberate attempts to compensate with frequent renovations and a conspicuously bright exterior colour scheme, all the porous surfaces of the building are stained and reeking as soon as they are pressure-washed, and cigarette butts and other, more disquieting refuse collect with the dust and road salt in the seams of the concrete and asphalt. It even has its own temporary tenants; an Air BnB open to the sky. While history has generally proven the Prohibitionists wrong, if one ever wished for a place in Toronto to showcase the scourge of Daemon Rum, there could be few equal and none better. Here, the dregs of the downtown lumpenproletariat flock to purchase Oblivion with the residue of welfare cheques, the pay of brutalizing labour jobs (‘an honest day’s toil’) and the coinage deposited into coffee cups by pedestrians rich in misguided guilt. One might ask if the provincial government feels at least a little bit embarrassed having their name stamped above such a morally questionable trade, but it is too lucrative to privatize.

As on every Friday during Rush Hour, the place was packed, the regulars outnumbered by university students stocking up for the weekend’s recreation. Behind the counters were an acne-faced lad barely old enough to drink himself, a Madrasi housewife with perpetually startled eyes, and a rock-jawed matron who spoke with the Ulster-tinged accents of the orchard country beyond the metropolitan borders.

“Do you know this guy?” McMurtry showed the photograph to the cashiers.

“Yes, I see, news, ka-henh,” Lilawattie muttered, nodding her head as fast as the syllables left her mouth.

“No, no, I mean did you ever see him in here? Buy stuff, steal stuff?”

“No, no, I-I don’t know here,” the cashier tried to serve the next customer, terrified of appearing unproductive to her bosses. The customer shifted awkwardly on his feet – he could see the cops were doing something and, what the…he was supposed to shove a uniformed policeman out of the way, or rush around him or something?

Jenny peered over the cashier to examine the array of personas non grata, of which there were many tiny security camera portraits stuck on a bulletin board.

“Let me see what’cher lookin’ at,” the other cashier rasped, forgetting her work entirely. “It’s the kid on the news, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Jenny confirmed; “But we don’t want to put it out there too obvious, because people bog us down with fake tips, if they think we’re investigating.”

“You found him?”

“Uhhh…I’m not at liberty to…”

“Well, I’ll see it on the news anyhow, tonight, won’t I, eh? I do know him, if ya want ta hear it. Seen him a few times, yeah. Polite little feller, quiet. Wouldn’t say I know him personal, but you know. Right, Lil? He’s been in here, right? The kid in the picture they got there.”

Lilawattie moaned and hummed in incomprehensible anguish, shaking her head.

“Did you check his ID?”

“…” The apple farmer’s daughter shrunk. She remembered hearing something about that kid’s age on the news, which meant…

“What did he buy, usually?” McMurtry asked. There was no way of tracking who sold what to customers with apparently valid ID, who paid cash on unknown occasions, months ago. The woman was shaking in her boots over nothing.

“Hmm…Lili, do you remember?” the Canadian tried subtly (she thought) to shift responsibility, as if Liliwattie must have for some reason been Dylan’s ‘regular’ cashier.

“Eee-ugh…” Much hissing and muttering.

“Hmm, well, I didn’t serve him too often, but, I seem ta remember…coolers? Rosé? Sweet wines, pink wine, that sort of thing.” She forgot herself watching the handsome cop scribbling on his notepad. “Oh, and there’s this, this special wine, from Hungaria? Sweet wine, too, I think. He asked fer it by name once. I remember, because it’s one of those things that never moves off the shelves. He had ta write it down fer me. Unusual tastes, huh?”

“Uh-huh. Do you, uh, if you remember from any ID, maybe, know where he might have lived? Maybe he had a shelter card in his wallet? They’re light blue pieces of paper with the City logo on ‘em.”

“Shelter?”

“You know, fer homeless people.”

“I never figured he was homeless, I guess. I dunno.”

“You never figured? His appearance didn’t, uh, give you any hints?”

“Well, I mean, I didn’t think he was a student, because, y’know, not ta judge, but the way he talked. Like he hadn’t got a lot of education. But he was always clean shaven, and…” she leaned to whisper to the detective: “He didn’t smell, y’know?”

“He didn’t smell?!?” The detective practically bellowed in surprise.

The cashier looked with nervous terror at the bearded, drowsy forms wrapped in stained overcoats standing further back in the line and imagine the righteous indignation they were surely feeling. She whispered even more quietly, “You know, the smell those people have? You can tell; musty, yick!”

“He didn’t smell?” McMurtry tapped his chin meditatively, then threw his colleague a meaningful glance. “It’s just a hunch, but tell me if ya think this makes any sense. So, this is things I heard, growing up, or from older guys on the force…”

VI.

The electric beat was pulsing as hard as the veins in Cyrus Gilani’s temples; the fog of cologne and vodka and sweat seemed to conduct electricity as well as vibrations like Tesla’s ether. The resurgence of a late winter flu had made Cyrus sluggish and cranky since he woke up at 2:45 pm, and he was not pleased to have to step out in the bracing night air, but the constant vibrations of his phone were driving him mad.

He didn’t recognize the number. It was in his contacts as Maitland Grange, but the yammering voice on the other end of the line did not sound like a ‘Maitland.’ “Ah-halloh, halloh, stop talking so f*cking fast. What is it? Who are you?”

The caller sounded half asleep and wholly drunk. He identified himself as Jurgis Mindaugas and claimed to have been hired by Cyrus’ father two years earlier to superintend one of his properties. This Mr. Mindaugas described it as a medium-sized apartment building; a block of dark bricks that preserved archaic features, like iron fire escapes and windows with real sills. “Right, right, I remember my dad showing it to me once,” Cyrus assured him, though he had no memory of the place. However, the address and age of it rang enough of a bell for him to infer that it must have been one of the properties he’d inherited from his father.

According to Mindaugas, while his tenants were normally discrete (which was how he preferred it), over the past two days, first the theatre manager by the fourth floor elevator, then the Mexican ‘students’ in the rearmost unit on the third floor had been complaining about a smell, though they could not agree on what it was nor on the source. It was possibly on the third and maybe on the fourth – sickly sweet, or rotten, a blocked drain or a rat in the walls. The superintendent himself could swear he scented something as the elevator doors were opening on both those floors, but, then, the elevator shaft runs the length of the building and the scent, which he struggled to describe, was absent from the halls.

“Whah..shit, okay, do you have any idea what it is? Why are you calling me now?”

The superintendent’s voice fell soft and deferential. The Mexicans claimed to have heard a banging or a loud popping. Mindaugas offered that it might be the retired chemistry professor also on the fourth floor, conducting experiments which the superintendent had observed on a past visit to his unit. Why didn’t he just knock on the door and find out?

As the liquored Lithuanian layered on the excuses, Cyrus began to see that he was afraid of his tenants and had no real understanding of the knowledge one reasonably expects a building superintendent to have. He was probably given the job as make-work by Cyrus’ late father, as a favour in recompense for some now-forgotten assistance rendered to the elder Gilani during his first years in Canada, before he became an obscenely wealthy businessman. Mindaugas didn’t live at the building. The place was not very particular, but the residents…how to say? Mr. Gilani, senior, had explained it to him when he was installed on the job. The residents were very particular about each other, and, while all colours, ages and occupations were tolerated, a man like Mr. Mindaugas would make the residents ill at ease if he was always there, listening and poking around.

“I see…Okay, and, I guess, you can’t go doing unit inspections, if the tenants aren’t there when you are?”

Oh, absolutely not, the super insisted. Even if there was a dripping dark leak coming out of a unit’s pipes, you didn’t just knock and ask to come in and have a peek. He’d made that mistake before. “I never know who is the real tenant unless I check the book!”

“Argh! Okay, okay. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Well, I, ah, I ask you, because you, you are the owner. I don’t know, I listen, whatever you say.”

Cyrus hung up and got a mate to drive him back to his apartment, where he would repose for the next couple days. Business! Sickness was a refuge; maybe people would stop bothering him for a while. Did it matter, this maintenance issue in one of his many, many buildings? Urgh! But the tenants there did pay some fat rents, and the margins were fantastical, given the abysmal standard of maintenance and the generally sturdy nature of old buildings like that. Maybe someone’s door needed to be unlocked? Ahhh, but that would be someone with a hidden nanny-cam, who would sue him before the Landlord and Tenant Board. TREB would take his license with another of these cases. So, he would need a warrant, but a warrant meant involving the police, which he was loath to do. But how ‘involved’ could they bem heh? A piece of paper, get it stamped…Then again, the inescapable inference asserted itself: folk who insist on such secrecy and discretion would undoubtedly have things – or people – in their dwellings that would be of more than passing interest to the police; that would be ‘in plain sight’ and then excuse further investigation, which would bring news cameras at some point…He wondered how soon he could get a contractor to cart away the illuminated “Gilani Developments Ltd” sign from the building’s lawn…

VII.

Toronto is not like New York, for it definitely sleeps, although its hours of slumber vary with the day and seasons. This Friday night felt so long that Kwok Chung Yee found himself imagining that it was summer, a delusion temporarily dispelled every time he went out for a smoke break, which was even more often than usual tonight. No respectable foodie blog would declare it, but customers eager for a plate of char siu fan and the crispiest, most luminously red siu mei goose were drawn in like moths to his heat lamp display and the neon glow of the Tuen Mun BBQ sign. The very tackiness of it and its seemingly retro (though actually quite accidental) linkages to certain zeitgeistal images of ‘Chinatown’ in Western popular culture acted upon the unconscious minds of passers-by (other than students at the nearby campuses and personal friends from the suburbs, no one ever actually sought out the Yuen Mun BBQ). The atmosphere and deliciously grisly display window did its part on the more conscious whims of any who had read too many vintage National Geographic articles about Hong Kong or watched too many subtitled Cantonese movies on the OMNI network or pirated VCD. Business was good, and he could not toss out a packed house; not till twenty or thirty minutes after posted closing, at least. A full clean was not done; the staff were shoed out, and Kwok Chung Yee finally got to clear his head – though first he had the head waiter move Chung Yee’s minivan to the curb out front. He didn’t mention that it was because he did not want to be starting it – or running to it – in the shadowed demi-courtyard out back.

Chung Yee merged with the still-abundant current of walkers on Spadina – it was a clubbing night. The bright lights and coarse commercial vitality were like a blanket to a fearful child. He was afraid of the dark, and he knew it. A dragon fruit that strayed from one of the polychrome produce pyramids struck the top of his shoe right when the thought resurfaced. A sign? His sister believed in such things and that’s why she hadn’t gone into business with him all those years ago. Or, rather, she had, but backed out. He began weighing up the relative luck in life of him versus Chun Fa, and, owing to his mood, found his own side of the scale tipping aloft. It was true that Chun Fa and her friend Hsiao Foong’s florist shop earned much, much less than the Tuen Mun BBQ, but her husband was a lawyer and they had not suffered the obvious and dramatic events of great misfortune that had befallen Chung Yee and his ex-wife. There was the divorce, first of all. He hadn’t intended for ‘Apple’ to be anything more than the immediately forgotten massage parlour entertainment she was. He had forgotten her, literally. Alas, the piquant pixie worked nearby…There were massage parlours everywhere, and he had a car, yet he’d been so lazy! Being conveniently close, Apple and her colleagues fuelled their nocturnal industry near their work, and, on a white and wicked January night, the radiant glow and lung-warming fumes roiling out of a busy char siu joint are salvation itself. It was a busy place, Apple and her pals observed; so many customers, buying so much food, and at prices that were not excessively economical. Neither meat nor sauce betrayed the faintest trace of corner-cutting in their succulent savour. At first, the restaurant owner did not recognize Apple in her parka, but Apple recognized a potential goldmine – the creed of her class being to try every shot, no matter how shameless or hopeless – and Mrs. Kwok, who was eating there, after shopping on the town, recognized adultery.

Apple paid for her meal, while Chung Yee paid for Apple with approximately half his earthly property. He sought sympathy from his sister. He had forgotten that she had ever told him so. Oh yes, she had, she insisted, back when he bought the restaurant, or, rather, the equipment needed to set up a restaurant, along with the business license. She’d never had any objection to the premises itself, which, though not ideal from a feng shui perspective (it was laid out, after all, by a penny-pinching Edwardian Scotsman), was not objectionable either.

The ranges, ventilators, one of the freezers, the original supply of silverware and pots, even the signs and trading name, he’d all purchased from another restaurateur, a Viet who, it was said, had lived in Tuen Mun as a refugee a couple years before coming to Canada in ’83. Why they were abandoning ship was not something he recalled, though he never heard from them after the purchase and had long since lost their names and contact info. All the equipment was in top condition – the original owners seemed strangely reticent about the work of cooking and serving food to people, though there were enough of them in that family to make a slender custom light work indeed. He’d tried to guess their real angle, but they didn’t seem to have the charisma and robust constitutions for underworld work. Their social skills, even among locals of the neighbourhood, were dreadful. Then again, they dressed unassumingly and economical little Nissans, so maybe there was no other angle to the situation. The curious thing was that they were selling a restaurant, effectively, and a decent one by neighbourhood standards…yet they were not selling the premises. It seemed pointless to move everything a block and half away, but they did the work, so Chun Yee couldn’t complain. He would have preferred the location he got, anyway, even if he’d bad to source everything full price.

The first restaurant to bear the name of Tuen Mun BBQ was in one of those stand-alone structures that still bear a commercial aspect, but are a block or two back from the rowhouse shops on the main Dundas-Spadina strip. Twenty or thirty years ago, there were more businesses on these linden-shrouded side streets, but commerce has become concentrated and the few establishments that remain watch lazily through dust-browned windows and faded signs as their partners leave and the family houses and Chinese hometown associations are transformed into overpriced sharehouses for students and hipsters.

Chung Yee had naturally passed by the ex-Tuen Mun since then. He saw that it had been converted into a restaurant supply distributor, thou he could not see past the rude stacks of pots, rice sacks and cooking oil drums to divine what manner of people operated it. When the wholesaler was moving in, he saw a car replacing the Viets’ and asked one of the white workmen, who worked with the renovation company laying down cobbles and replacing shrubs in front, but they claimed to know nothing. Nor, in all his many years running the Tuen Mun, did je see any person entering or exiting the distributor’s. It might simply be timing, of course, as it wasn’t a retail location. Regardless, the way it squatted there, taking up valuable real estate, arrogant and threatening to amateurs who dared meddle with it; it reminded him of a great tree, its wood grown dry and corrupt with the years, yet whose dark presence discourages even sensible men from lingering near and whose spidering roots reach points unfathomed, denying its neighbours any chance that a lucky breeze should rid them of its curse.

He slowed his steps when he reached the deserted side street, though he did not stop nor turn his body to face the building squarely. The place was still apparently used as a wholesale restaurant supply store, still apparently devoid of any activity, the general air of neglect intensified ever so slightly since the last occasion he saw it. He hurried on, circling round to reach back to his car, not wanting to return by the route he’d come.

On the highway home, he rehearsed asking his sister’s opinion, but, upon reaching the quiet house in the somnolent subdivision, his courage drained. Watching a movie with his second wife, who would understand nothing of his early days as an entrepreneur, could not satisfy his urge to vent his worries and grope for answers, but, with extra lights left on in the halls and dining room, it was enough to get through the night.

VIII.

The cold wet air passing through the perversely open window made Jenny’s feet curl, her body yearning for the shelter of heavy blankets which were, alas, once again for her alone. Meh, more time to devote to work. If she wasn’t serious about being a police officer, what was she doing it for, glorified cosplay? She would never admit it, but she was glad to be on a major case, gruesome as the raw material was. It’s not so easy to tell yourself that your focus is rightly on yourself, when your daily task is pushing paper or flipping burgers. The Inspector had given her a business card for an animal rescue before he went on vacation. As a result, she’d not communicated with him since, although she knew this case was right up his alley. A bluff got her what she was looking for, but the spoils rotted of their own richness.

The story she told Codrington was that a publican, a Queertown stalwart, had made some remark about a similar case, or series of cases, occurring in the late 80s – or maybe it was the early 90s? Codrington had enough experience to know what Jenny was suggesting: that the same person responsible for Dylan Coleman’s demise had been acting during that earlier period, perhaps not coincidentally the era in which the murder rate peaked just as the City was shaking off its gritty, grimy previous incarnation. This felt like a good idea – that is, that they could at least look like they were doing something to satisfy ‘the Community.’ The Colemans did not appear to have the money to feed a drawn-out lawsuit or any but the trashiest private investigators; they would reign themselves in when an easy windfall was no longer likely, thus extinguishing the sole reason for caring about their son leaving only righteous resentment for the shame he’d brought them. But those who lived under the rainbow banner, oh! They were a different story…

Codrington had inquired of his mentor, the long-retired ex-Chief Inspector Malone. With a string of expletives and tasteless jokes that hinted at why the force back then was not able to crack the cases, Malone recalled that indeed there had occurred cases, in the time period indicated, which more or less fit the fact patter of the Coleman case, at least as regards the identity of the victims. These words Codrington relayed, having located the files, to Jenny.

The darkness was seeping in, intruding into the space guarded by he table lamp. It was better the files stayed at the office, yes, or else even a quick dash into bed after flicking off the light might not have been enough to save her. Sleep came slowly, and she did not like the simple realism of fatigue’s mirages: the bulges in the drywall that emerge and recede; the solitary knocks on the door which one thought one heard. The eyes cannot be trusted and the mind suspects itself. She really wished she had taken up the offer of a cat…

Undine

by MG. Warenycia

If it weren’t for the row of houses – old, small, yet fiercely guarded against development – she could have been watching the Lake as she ate, but the little donut shop, decorated in a rainbow of browns back when the first Trudeau was Prime Minister, was not meant for pleasurable dining. Gemma Bledsoe, who never wrote her surname except on government forms, liked the place for its authenticity. For a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design, authenticity was of prime importance; something one sought and claimed sole authority to determine. Dingy independent establishments over which the atmosphere of vintage malaise hung like cigarette smoke were perfect, although, ironically, there was always a suspicious shortage of actual working class folk (to say nothing of the exotically sketchy lumpenproletariat) in the spots where her middle-class hipster peers gathered to claim street cred. Gemma was different, at least when she needed a breather from the endless run of projects, dates, dinner parties, gallery shows, drinks, more drinks, and, above all, the shifts without a workplace of which only the fruits appeared on social media. Facebook and Instagram she checked frequently but updated less and less. She came to the donut shop because none of her friends would bother to venture so far from their own haunts to slurp coffee that was mere “coffee,” and the closest thing to a latte was adding extra creamer to the Stygian liquid that the swarthy, mustachioed owner brewed up in an ancient urn.

The shop had never been reviewed by BlogTO or NarCity, but its customers were unlikely to read either publication, if they were aware of their existence. This customer base was utterly unchanging through the decades and completely different depending on the hour, beginning with construction and municipal workers arriving before the late autumn sun, then office workers, students, cops, retirees from lowly professions, students again, drunk partygoers, cops again, homeless schizos and workers in the oldest profession, before it all started again. One wondered what Stavros, or Radovan, or whatever his name was mixed into his own coffee, or whether he derived certain mysterious powers from the stern-faced figures whose gilt and cross-emblazoned images adorned the wall beside the counter along with stock photos of whatever southeastern European country he hailed from. Gemma used to be able to relieve her mind by just sitting and observing people while she worked halfheartedly on an assignment or doodled in her sketchbook. At some point – she wasn’t sure when – she’d imperceptibly lost the intriguing sensation of being an observer and had started to see herself as being part of the same painting, so to speak, as all the other characters for whom the shop served as a connecting node. She ceased to feel strange and out of place. This disturbed her, because the world she was presently munching a crueler in was not the same world as existed, physically, in the space around her. Not as far as she would admit. Instead of visiting this world like a tourist, the gallery shows and gastro pubs were becoming excursions into a territory which she knew but which was slipping away from her, like a cake glimpsed through the oven door that is failing to rise even as its crust is well-browned. Even her apartment, or, rather, the room she occupied in a Victorian Bay & Gable on D’Arcy Street was detaching itself from her universe, as if it had a mind of its own.

“Ugh!” She banished the thought with a growl that noone noticed and smothered it with a Boston crème, the crisp dark chocolate and sickly sweet custard doing an excellent job of restoring her mood to confident ignorance. It was rare for Gemma to touch any of the crude pastries sitting in ranks in their plexiglass case. It was rare that she ate what most people would consider a ‘meal.’ Today was different, however. With relish, she mashed the remaining portion of the crueler into her pale, thin hand and gulped it down. A hum in her handbag told of a phone call. Gemma waited. Several short throbs: text messages. In enough time for someone to get slightly bored and put their phone in their pocket, she drew out hers and read, ignoring the backlog of emails, ‘likes’ and other alters cluttering the top of the screen.

It was Brittany, as expected. She said she was at the beach where they were supposed to meet. The next message said that it was cold. She hadn’t brought her parka. Gemma gazed out the window. The Core’s glassy spires stabbed into a faience void, pure as a colour swatch in a booklet of paint samples. However, her artist’s eye noted a subtle variation of tint towards the south, over the Lake. More than one among the pedestrians walking by unconsciously tucked their hands into their pockets or pulled their zippers closer to their chins. The trees still wore their green finery, but the scent of fall, which, in Toronto, is basically winter, had crept into the air. Without haste, Gemma wiped her lips, balled up her napkin and left. On the way out the door, she knocked shoulders with a face familiar yet forgotten: a former high school classmate, now a TA up the street from OCAD at Ryerson. He, for his part, did a double take, which caught the eye of his companion. Interrupting their discussion of the job market and their respective girlfriends, the one explained to the other why he stared, who Gemma was, along with two or three anecdotes from school which seemed to reveal why she was only ever glimpsed by him and the other alumni of those days in fleeting and wordless encounters. It was all well that the other fellow also saw something worth contemplating in the almost spectrally lean figure that strode past them with unflinching purpose, shawl flapping in the northward-blowing breeze, eyes burning yet without a trace of warmth…for this momentary distraction prevented them from noticing the inordinate amount of time the proprietor took to respond to their order, giving his attention instead to the gold-embellished pictures on the wall, mumbling stilted words…not “how can I help you?”…not even English. If they had noticed, they might have had a lot more questions with their meal.

Brittany revealed herself before she saw her friend. Of course, it was difficult for her to hide anywhere, the more so on a temperate beach on a weekday afternoon with nobody but the odd dog-walk, jogger, or melancholy poet passing along the strand. It is possible for a woman to capture the attention of men by the possession of certain large and dramatic elements of her anatomy, often coupled with expensive and scanty clothing. It is also possible (though less common) for her to capture the attention of both sexes by a whole-package type of beauty; the sort which provokes an impression based on stimulating a vague but profound plethora of thoughts, concepts and passions, very few of which are comprehended by the one who experiences them; a beauty that perfectly embodies an ideal and is desired as such, completely irrespective of anything like personality or history. Those entranced or envious of such beauty probably cannot describe it or why they are drawn to it, and it is from this uncertainty that the majority of its power derives. A smaller but significant component originates in the aspects more amenable to description by words, such as the toss of butter-blonde tresses, the pout of glossy rosette lips, a glimmer in a naive and adventurous eye, and a quirk in the step and the smile.

“Sorry I’m late, Gemma flashed an uncharacteristically apologetic smile. Half stumbling as her chunky heels dug into the soft sand, “Sometimes you just get into a mood with something, you know, and it takes forever to work yourself up to do anything. Didn’t expect it to be so chilly…”

“It’s okay,” Brittany grinned, bouncing as she spoke, as if to reassure her friend that she wasn’t being sarcastic. “Really. I don’t get down to the beach, like, at all anymore, I mean, since the summer, but, you know. Yeah…” She cast her eyes outward, to where the impenetrable grey-green waters curled and frothed over the jetties and breakwaters of concrete blocks and wire-caged stones. A painter – which both women were – would have seized upon the contrast between the sublime gloom of the landscape and the golden smile of the subject whose already-eventful life had somehow not yet fully changed her from ‘girl’ to ‘woman.’ Gemma saw, and remembered sketchbooks she’d filled years ago, when the two lived in a sharehouse on Baldwin Street with five or six other students; how they had sat up into the wee hours on rainy nights, rendering each other in charcoal and aquarelle. Gemma had been the first to present her work. Brittany, delighted, immediately posted it to social media and was deluged with likes and comments about the talent of the artist who so perfectly captured her contradiction of angelic warmth and wild vivacity. The comments boosted Gemma’s ego. It took all her rigorously cultivated reserves of self-control to preserve her mask of gratitude when Brittany, who worked more slowly, handed Gemma her own sketchbook forty minutes later. There was some skill in the pen and brushwork, to be fair, and this made it all the worse to see the precisely depicted lines of fatigue and the sallow hues on cheek and brow, as well as the purplish tints under the eyes and where the network of tattoos merged on her throat. A trip to the bathroom and the mirror confirmed Brittany’s cruel gift for observation. Shortly thereafter, Gemma moved into her condo, paid for by a professor who was also a gallery owner. Many things happened, but she kept the sketches…

“Ah, ‘scuse me, is this your friend?” A stooped, turban-clad youth, eyes wide as dinner plates called out, approaching them from the direction of a clapboard cabin that sat atop the beach, not far from where the girls stood.

“Oh, hey, yeah, listen – “ Brittany waved as he came up to them. “I don’t mind if there’s a mix up and you can’t find the reservation. I don’t mind paying the different.” She nodded towards the Lake. “It doesn’t look like we’ll get many more weekends before winter, and I’m dying to get out on the water.”

“Huh,” Gemma stammered; “Who is this guy?” But a glance at the sign on the shack told her the gist of what must be the case.

“I, uh, I work here. Your friend – “ the sheepish man was crowded out by Brittany’s energy.

“I told him we had a reservation from last week. I figured, if I could fill out the paperwork for the canoe rental, I could save us a bunch of time and we could just head right out once you got here.”

“Oh,” Gemma quickly composed herself, trying to communicate her reluctance.

“It’s alright. Anyways, I saw on your website it’s a 20% discount for reservations. ‘She works hard for her money,’” she chuckled, hands firmly on her hips. “So…if you could check again maybe?!?”

“Oh, no, yeah, you’re right, that’s company policy,” the boat rental employee was easily overwhelmed. Too, he was cognizant of the slowing of business during the recent spate of bad weather and that he was still in his three-month probationary period. He sized up the racks of brightly coloured kayaks, canoes and paddle boards that surrounded his crude ‘office’ and hurried back, shouting over his shoulder: “I…I’ll check the accounts from last week; maybe your reservation will show in in there…sometimes we forget to update the schedule; change of shifts ‘n stuff like that, eh?”

As the attendant disappeared beneath the signboard bearing a pastiche of the Jolly Roger with two crossed paddles in place of the bones, Brittany turned to Gemma. “I forgot. He said I should be wearing a drysuit? Like the scuba diver outfit or something. They rent them for twenty bucks. I mean, it’s not mandatory, but, he said, if this got wet – “ she tugged at her layered outfit, comprising denim vest, cotton sweatshirt hoodie, and an array of necklaces and bracelets. Her expression suggested Gemma, too, might consider renting a drysuit, given her present wardrobe.

“Nevermind.” Gemma took her friend by the arm and led her to a grove of shaggy willows, so that they were out of sight of the boat rental shack. “Why did you talk to him already? We don’t have a reservation.”

“Huh? But I could swear…”

“I said, I’d reserved a boat, yes, but when did I ever tell you it was at these people, Paddle Pirates or whatever?”

“I dunno. Come on, it’s the only canoe rental place on the beach.”

“Ugh…” Gemma continued leading her friend northeastwards up the shore. The houses moved further back as the sense of old money permeated the atmosphere. “You remember Sophie?”

“Sophie Belzer? From high school? Def.”

“Yes! Okay, so, I knew her grandpa from community events…” Gemma relayed an anecdote of an NDP rally during the previous federal election, when the favoured part of downtown activists and academics valiantly captured 37 of the 308 seats in Parliament, much to the cheers of those in the riding of Beaches-East York who didn’t sell out and jump on the Liberal bandwagon. The late Professor Belzer’s granddaughter Sophie was friendly with Gemma as with almost everyone from their tight-knit school circle and had offered the use of a canoe – a charming 16-foot Peterborough that the Belzers normally used as a collective resource whenever any of the clan was going on one of their excursions to a cottage or Provincial Park up north. Brittany had kept in touch with Sophie, albeit not closely: after high school, they’d sometimes met at dinner parties hosted by a mutual friend in Scarborough and, though they went to different universities, the worlds of Film Studies majors and Fine Arts have a great deal of overlap in Toronto.

The canoe was stored in a shed overlooked by a lot on which stood a slightly whimsical old house bulging with bay windows and decorated with painted wood and knickknacks. “He left Sophie the house, but she’s working this weekend,” Gemma explained.

“Oh…” Brittany cocked her head this way and that, like a bemused cat, as Gemma wrestled open the lock guarding the canoe they’d be ‘sailing,’ for lack of a better synonym on her mind. Sixteen feet sounded like a lot, although, in real life, it seemed so small and delicate. Regardless, the canoe was a thing of great beauty; a condensed fragment of the authentic Canadiana that City-dwellers often cherish and identify with but seldom ever manage to get more than a fleeting taste of. Its gracefully upswept prow, basketwork thwarts and gleaming hunter-green paint evoked memories – some one’s own, some imagined – of moose, maple syrup, beavers, catching sunfish from the dock, wood smoke, and the mournful cry of the nocturnal loon. Adventure, with just enough distance and risk of danger to excite the heart and facilitate self-discovery. Brittany knew she had made the right decision to skip yoga class for this.

It was a feat of acrobatics to climb inside the canoe without tipping it, but, once they were inside, two young women of slim build and good coordination had little difficulty in keeping the vessel upright and steering straight. Gemma, under protest against her mom (who needed her kept busy while she toiled at the office) had been forced to do her time in the Girl Guides in childhood. Now, she was grateful for the bushcraft skills she’d been taught which, though very basic, were infinitely beyond the ‘nothing’ that most of her peers and neighbours knew. Once they got away from the shore, the slender vessel cut the waves admirably and it didn’t take much effort to make swift progress on their westward course towards Toronto Island. There were plenty if inlets to land at there, if they got tired, and Gemma’s boyfriend would pick them up – he had an SUV they could strap the canoe on top of to bring it back.

Meanwhile, the two girlfriends, aided by the supremely meditative experience of paddling a canoe, fell naturally into the purpose of the voyage, which was not to travel (the subway would do for that) but the meditation itself; to savour the beauty of the City from an angle, literally and metaphorically, that their busy, stressful lives blinded them to, and to rekindle bonds grown cold amid the rat race.

After much small talk, Gemma set her compassionate eyes upon her friend’s deceptively buoyant visage as if to place her hand upon her shoulder: “Is everything okay?”

Stunned by the change in topic, Brittany did not answer at once, though one might have perceived a relaxing of the corners of her lips and a faint blush upon her cheeks.

“I understand…”

“You’re right…not everything…” Brittany asked herself, how could Gemma know, given they hadn’t met up or had a serious talk in almost a year?!?

As though in sympathy with their desires, the wind died down as the two girls shuffled as close as the needs of managing their craft would permit towards the middle of the hull, the better to talk about private and serious things, though there was nobody to hear them besides two or three cabin cruisers visible in the distance.

Those who knew Brittany best would have known how alien it was for her to pour out her heart to someone. Emotional though she was, she didn’t brood. She began by thanking Gemma for all she had taught her when they lived in the sharehouse together. As they struggled through the first year of OCAD, Gemma had warned that the classical oil painting of an Ingres of Delacroix (as much as a new student could imitate those old masters) would not go over well with the professors. And, of course, it is impossible for any creator to remain aloof from the theory and ideals of the movement they identify with aesthetically. Romanticism is the sworn enemy of the cynically secular, obscenely materialist souls that preside over the modern-day Academy in all the metropolises of Western Europe and the Americas. Gemma lamented the situation, but, it was what it was. Nonetheless, she encouraged Brittany to follow her passion, based on the thought that it would be easier for Brittany, since she was perfectly willing to earn her income from working at Starbucks or answering phones in an office, leaving her artwork as a hobby, whereas Gemma, by contrast, was not the sort who could live a life of compromises. “Probably since grade 10, 11,” Gemma reminisced in one of those midnight girl-to-girl sessions,” I knew that nine-to-five, whatever the job, it just wasn’t happening for me. And a husband? Hell no. Even then. I knew I just couldn’t. I live for me.”

Brittany listened with rapt attention. Despite the closeness of their ages – Gemma had been one of the wise and worldly grade 12s when Brittany entered grade 9 – there was an enormous gap in maturity between the two young women which must have been rooted in their fundamental natures. For, while Brittany had come from a rough and impoverished childhood and thus would (wrongly) have been assumed to possess abundant street smarts, Gemma grew up in bourgeois comfort (notwithstanding the lack of love between father and mother), and, while her family was not rich, she never had to impede her journey of self-actualization by flipping burgers in order to pay rent. Yet, the former was as a bright-eyed child before the austere sagacity of the latter, the Big Sister. Further credence to Gemma’s advice was lent by the fact that, as Brittany was well aware, there was no shortage of men eager to step in and ensure that Gemma would never have to earn her own avocado toast. Their promises (for, at that age, in such an expensive City, they could be only promises) however, did not interest Gemma, who scoffed at the perfume-seller’s son and even more at a fellow artist who spoke about becoming a lawyer, as though the daydreams of an inferior would taint her and prevent her from entering the Paradise which could only come from monkish devotion to an ideal.

Brittany may have been weak in religion but she was strong in faith: she took her ‘big sister’s’ advice, converting her room into a studio and hammering away at her craft even as she toiled for minimum wage. The failures piled up. Gemma nodded gravely as she listened…Yes, she had gathered things were not going well when she didn’t see a “graduated from – “ on Brittany’s Facebook, and when Brittany did not appear at events – the galas and shows where Gemma would be, dressed in one of her cocktail dresses, glass of rosé in hand, heels like daggers and eyes like a wolf; events which often carried on past when the AGO or R.O.M. closed and those who weren’t chained to mundane responsibilities would move the party to a townhouse on a leafy boulevard in the Annex or a luxury condo by the waterfront. Gemma felt for her poor eager friend and told her she could not blame herself. She knew that if you wanted to swim with that crowd, there would be many occasions when the next morning or, for that matter, the following evening, you could not stray far from bed (yours or someone else’s). As pleasant as Brittany was, no one was bidding for the chance to pay the rent on a condo for her…

“You lack…vision; you are but a technician, not an artist. I care about your happiness, which is why you should find some other outlet for your energies.” The words were said by the gallery director at the last occasion when Brittany was able to get her fine arts professor to vouch for one of her works to be included. The professor did not want to help her, but she had paid her tuition and, if she was not given the same assistance as other students, there might be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit. The gallery director meant his words with every appearance of sober reflection carved upon his face. Brittany’s chest felt hollow. Two or three big names – who she didn’t know except that they worse suits and tuxedos and received deference from every cluster of attendees whom they deigned to bless with their presence: they all agreed, each with the appearance of the utmost reluctance to condemn…alas! Condemn they must, if they were to do their duty!

Brittany frowned and sighed retelling it in the canoe. She had poured out hot tears on her walk home that fateful day. Her words softened till only her lips moved. Gemma suddenly heaved into her paddle and corrected their course with vigorous strokes that one would not expect her frail body to be capable of. “Go on, it’s okay,” Gemma reassured her companion. “Some of us, hey, it’s luck, Fate; call it whatever you want, nobody should judge you for what you have to do to make things work. Fall down, get back up. All we can do.” After making sure they were in no danger of being washed into the shoreline and that there were no other boats nearby that might ram them, she let the canoe drift and gave her full attention to her troubled friend. “And, you know, nobody will blame you for changing course. “Gemma recalled how she had not seen Brittany on any of the last few occasions where she had dropped in at the studio on campus, nor at the coworking space where she sometimes brought mostly finished works, that she might be seen to be labouring on something impressive. She thought, too, of Mr. Stein, of the bar in King Street – and a firm on Bay Street. Not that she knew the firm or cared whether it was accounting, law or real estate, and she was quite sure his real name was not “Bo” as she had heard his friends and the other girls at the Silver Flamingo call him. She grew uneasy, thinking of the swelling threat in her belly and how “Bo” did not respond to her texts, sometimes for a whole night. She asked herself, “But what if I told Lawrence that it was…?”

In apparent synchronicity with her mind, Brittany revived from her tearful stupor and spoke of the very man of whom Gemma was thinking. “ understands, at least…” This was known to them both for years. More recently, to Gemma, he was known as someone who ‘liked’ her posts religiously and was convinced that every work she did was a masterpiece, and that every photo she posted was speaking some profoundness of creativity and pensive beauty. She would not even consciously remember him without prompting, except that Mr. Stein from the King Street bar had not returned her last message for two days, did not follow her on social media, and the familiar discomfort in her stomach was becoming more insistent. She thought of her wardrobe and the photo shoots, which Nguyen was no longer given her the extra discount on. He said it was because the cost of developing film had gone up, but she had a mirror in her apartment. She knew the real reason. Once, two weeks ago, she had become so enraged that she scoured the Estée Lauder palette with the tip of her fingernail, gobbing it on the way one applies oil paint to canvas with a palette knife. Yet no quantity of cosmetics could enliven muscles slack from late nights and vile habits and no makeup has yet been produced with can return the impish sinfulness of a 17-year-old freshly entered upon the Big City’s scene – and market – to eyes which have seen much experience and been forever stained by practical concerns and frugal planning. Lawrence was dumb and desperate, though…he liked to feel like he was helping someone…how much more, if he could build a life with them, at least, for as long as they needed him…

“You’re right,” sighed Brittany. “You wouldn’t have seen my at the studio or the coworking space. It’s way too distracting. Like, people just go there to show off. You can’t actually get any work done. All the noise; people coming and going.” A look of disgust crossed her face.

Gemma smiled to herself: “Sour grapes,” she thought.

“Yeah, and OCAD, okay, so, full disclosure, I never graduated.”

Gemma squeezed the gunwale so hard that her tendons were numbed. If it weren’t for the letter from her landlord, she might have become worried by the umbrous cauliflower clouds rolling north. She grunted softly as she fought to hold herself from breaking out in laughter. “It’s alright. Oh my God! If you can’t let it out here, where else?”

“Thanks,” Brittany sneezed, pulling up the hood of her sweatshirt. Gemma hadn’t noticed before, but now she saw it was emblazoned with an illustration of a ram’s head and lettering in the blue and gold of Ryerson University. Odd, as Brittany had only ever attended OCAD, whose students consider themselves a breed apart. “Actually, I didn’t fail, I dropped out.”

“Yep,” Gemma confirmed in her mind. “Well, if that’s your way of trying to find a ‘win’ in life…” She would let Brittany have it. It was too late to break her own resolve now. The mood-lit rooms in hotels she couldn’t remember the names of; the parties in penthouse condos from which she’d returned the next afternoon. The boyfriends she’d driven away because, arrogant as they were, they thought that she would (for them!) sabotage her climb to…herself.

“Yeah,” Brittany paused, seemingly reliving events. For a split second, she furrowed her brow and tightened her grip on her paddle. “Are we going the right way?” She shrunk down to shelter a little from the wind that was gusting strong and chill, bearing scattered drops of rain.

“Yes,” Gemma stared meaningfully to her right. “That’s Ward’s Island there.” She chuckled. “If you want, we can pass by Hanlan’s Point, but I don’t think anyone’ll be on the beach this time of year.” Gemma didn’t mention it, but she was recalling the day – this exact day, several years ago – when she had first seen herself on a poster when she emerged from the subway at St. Andrew Station. How she’d wished she’d been with a group of her friends – or any other human, for that matter – for that triumphal moment. Originally, she was only supposed to be one name among many listed only in text. Peter…was his name Peter? Had overruled the committee on which crotchety Saul Gwartzman and Muriel Wong had conspired to sideline her. But Peter…it was Peter? Or Brian?…had calmly threatened to pull his company’s donations at the last minute. It would have been a breach of contract, true, but the committee knew that no lawsuit could recoup the loss of having to cancel the annual event that year. Grudgingly, the committee obliged and Gemma headlined the event, although none of her works sold at the auction following the show, except one bought by Peter – an experiment in post-structuralist feminist cubism which probably now adorned a dentist’s waiting room, if it wasn’t in the landfill….A copy of the poster hung in her own room, until it became laden with too many memories and was rolled up and sealed in a closet. How powerful the photographer – hired by Peter – had made her look! The interrogatory gaze, lips the wine-crimson of ripe cherries, accentuated against the Gothic pallor of her smooth, round face; the impudence of her pouty chin and upturned nostrils against the blackness of the backdrop and the blood red of her dress and heels…It was not yet a decade ago, but it was an eternity.

Reassured, Brittany resumed her tale: Yeah, so, okay, I didn’t fail, technically. But I stopped going to classes.”

“Dropped out.”

“I know, okay? I dunno, there was a ton of shit going on in my life. I didn’t know what I was doing any of it for. All I could see, I mean, realistically, was me in some office like 80 hours a week or not even that, like, just at McDonald’s or something worse…”

“You need to think outside the box.” Gemma observed her friend withdraw something on a necklace from within the collar of her hoodie, rub it between her fingers and kiss it. It was a crucifix, in rosewood and grey metal, with the tortured mini statue of Jesus on it. Gemma sighed benevolently. Ah, religion! Refuge for those who cannot make it in life and need to be told that this is somehow a virtuous thing. It would be like Brittany, too: she was always doing silly things to show off how empathetic she was. Rescuing abandoned kittens at the animal shelter; serving food at the soup kitchen in winter. The foolish girl hadn’t realized that no man actually cared and, honestly, she would have been noticed a hundred times more if she had simply spent those precious hours slinging drinks in a bar – any of them would hire her. Even one of the gay bars on Church Street might, just for her sheer joyful charisma. It was a sign of Brittany’s weak will that she did not seek to better herself, yet she destroyed the hopes of so many of her peers merely by existing as her beautiful, envy-inspiring self. Gemma knew, though, that not everyone could make the sacrifices needed for the climb. They were not to be pitied. They would be forgotten.

“Yeah, so, Lawrence and me were pregnant.” Brittany blurted out the news as though she were still embarrassed. And she was, for the public school system in Canada teaches women that their highest calling is drudgery in service of some corporation, while motherhood is a curse.

Gemma could already see the story before Brittany told it. ’ parents were devout Catholics; the Shame would be cast aside and blotted out. No wonder Brittany was dressed so shabbily: the hoodie, a no-name denim jacket, a knock-off Chinatown handbag. She suddenly remembered how, ten months or so previously, Brittany had messaged her, seeking advice in a serious, “help me, Big Sister” way that was highly irregular. She hadn’t even recognized the voice as Brittany’s at the time, and the profile pic next to the Facebook messages was not an actual photo but rather an anime cat. Gemma was admittedly a bit drunk – she was at a New Year’s party, held at an AirBnB she’d rented for the occasion. She had also decorated it with personal effects and brought over clothing: clean to fill the closets, dirty to fill the laundry hamper, along with half-eaten food in Tupperware containers for the fridge. It had a Lake view. Everyone was fooled. She was lolling about the balcony, smoking kreteks – part of a stock carried back from Sumatra by a longhaired backpacker that, unfortunately, Peter found out about. She hardly recalled the conversation or anything else about that night, but she did remember the flattery of being consulted as an oracle. Move out here, she’d suggested straight up. Deal with your problems, forget Lawrence, forget your parents’ objections and move out here, for your own sake. Gemma never gave advice she would not follow herself. Cut the ties holding you back, settle into one of the new condos going up. If you want to attract flies, lay out some honey. She could meet the sort of people – male people – whom she’d need out there, in the lobby, at the local clubs. Forget all the schmucks busily plowing ahead with degrees, worrying about developing boring skills or getting houses in the gross-ass suburbs. “Girl, you are a perfect being already; the universe is within you, you only have to decide to manifest it!” The kreteks were getting to Gemma’s head – she really believed the advice she was giving. The bright lights behind her shimmered on the waves like constellations. She was on top of the City, which was better than being on top of the world.

As far as Gemma knew, the other girl had taken her advice and joined her, pursuing the same dream like so many salmon swimming up the same river. It might have flickered through her head afterwards that the caller had been Brittany. But it might also have been a dozen other pretty, dream-filled girls. It didn’t matter. The more salmon in the river, the more she could know her triumph as those beside her dropped out from exhaustion or were devoured by lurking bears.

Gemma stared at her friend across the canoe with a smile, her heart filled with mercy that was the opposite of love. “I didn’t see any photos of you with a baby…” The anguish on Brittany’s face was palpable. “You did the right thing,” she was about to say, but was saved from awkwardness when Brittany cut her off.

“I told Lawrence, but she’d already died.” Brittany shrugged, smiling painfully.

“You buy all the Church’s propaganda?” Gemma snorted, but soon regretted her cruel humour. The story Brittany told had Gemma balling fists till her knuckles almost burst through the skin. Brittany, it turned out, had not taken her advice. She had told everything. They had gotten engaged and married. Worse, she had abandoned OCAD voluntarily, canceled the lease on the condo she rented, and vanished into nothing out in the suburbs – in Richmond Hill, of all places. She worked a few hours every week in a cafe owned by ’ aunt. That was it? Gemma lashed herself for being such an idiot; for briefly thinking that forgiveness was warranted for this ungrateful creature before her. Brittany wasn’t supposed to do that. It was a betrayal, to leave her friend all alone…

Yet, how could you criticize a girl like that without seeming like a monster? “But…you still have ambitions? Don’t you?” she frantically asked – nay, pleaded. “Tiffany and Roweena miss you. The guys still ask about you at the Silver Flamingo.” The first two were lies, the second was true, except none of the drunken businessmen asked for Brittany by her name because they had never learned it.

“Oh, for sure. We’re going to try again…”

“For the downpayment? If your credit history is established, which it probably is by now, you don’t need the 20%…or, you mean ? Isn’t he working at Tim Horton’s?”

“He was but he quit. Actually, he helps out at his dad’s office part time. He’s studying. His parents are cool with things.” Brittany’s lustrous eyes darted as if searching for the perfect descriptor. “We’re happy.”

“But…why?” Gemma couldn’t contain herself.

“I…well, it’s hard for me to say…” Brittany fidgeted, wringing her cold hands. “The bottom line was…we’re close, I mean, you showed me a lot about life, but…I saw what you were doing; what, I guess, you had to do to get it all: the attention, the shows, your place where you were staying and…what you did to your boyfriends, yourself and…”

“You couldn’t hack it!” Gemma thought to herself.

“…And I didn’t want to be like you.” There was no trace of mockery in her words. Only pure, honest truth.

Gemma was floored. And yet she had been preparing for this moment for weeks. Months, even. In the silence that followed the bombshell words, she witnessed Brittany’s expression change from apologetic, to thoughtful, to concerned as she saw how far out from the shore they were and as she recognized the increasing patter of raindrops spat from the darkening clouds. Gemma saw her friend’s mouth open in pleas, then in a scream, but she did not hear anything as, with laser focus, she reached below the thwart, fumbled and yanked out the plug which she had patched in a day earlier…

It did not take long to find the body but, for half a week, the papers and TV carried the photos of the beaming blonde, glowing with the promise of a Tomorrow cruelly snatched away. A Sergeant McMurtry of the Toronto Police Service informed reporters gathered at the daily presser that there had been a tragic accident, although, privately, as a son of rural Ontario and an avid outdoorsman, the Sergeant was astonished that the girls had made it out so far, in such a small craft, the hull of which had been punctured pretty bad by rocks. Naturally, he went to talk to the Belzer family, who owned the canoe and whom he was familiar with via the late Professor. The parents claimed that no one had permission to access their boathouse besides themselves, and Sophie denied telling Gemma Bledsoe that she could borrow the green Peterborough, although she admitted to knowing both the survivor and the victim socially.

Traumatized by the incident, Gemma sought comfort and attention wherever she could find it – in particular, from a devastated Lawrence. Alas, the idiot would only open up pictures of Brittany on his phone when she tried to console him, and he was cold as granite to her attempted caresses. Then there was the notice from the Landlord & Tenant Board on the door. She went to ask the manager at the Silver Flamingo for help to pay the back rent, but he saw her in the bright light of day and he was sober, therefore she did not get to set foot past the bouncer-guarded doors. With the scribble of a ballpoint pen on the application form at a Tim Horton’s on Kennedy Road north of Eglinton, Brittany’s beyond-the-grave revenge had begun.

終

The Drumlin

by M.G. Warenycia

“Monday, May 4, 1981

To Gordon MacDonald,

Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources

580 Booth St, Ottawa, ON K1A 0E4

Re: Report on Survey of the Fermont-Nitchequon Zone

Dear Mr. MacDonald, Sir:

I regret to inform you that the expedition which was undertaken on behalf of the Ministry under the joint leadership of Dr. Fraser and myself has failed to discover any evidence of the predicted deposits of natural gas, nor of any other hydrocarbon resources in meaningful quantities. Due to the unfortunate absence of Dr. Fraser, I accept, in his stead, full responsibility for the failure of the expedition. All observations indicate that the theory, described in the paper co-authored by myself and Drs. Sacher and Catudal hypothesizing the presence of economically significant natural gas deposits along the passive margin at the confluence of the Superior Craton (Abitibi subprovince), the Nain Province and the Grenville Front was overly optimistic. In our defence, the hypothesis was not unreasonable, given the recent discoveries in the North Sea which are now being exploited profitably, as well as other major gas fields found along similar margins elsewhere in the world. It was entirely plausible that the geologic formations of the Shield would prove fruitful. However, as the Minister is only too well aware, prospecting for gas deposit is, at present, an inexact science, barely more advanced than dowsing (albeit considerably more expensive), not to mention the challenges of operating far from major transportation and supply hubs, under the pressures of the current Energy Crisis. I am afraid you will have to inform Mr. Lalonde that they will have to bite the bullet and cut a deal with Alberta as soon as possible.

If the RCMP needs me to explain certain matters further, my apologies, but I cannot tell them anything more that I have said already. Please disregard the more outlandish claims in some of the telegrams I sent you. Conditions were unexpectedly harsh, and the aforementioned challenges of weather and supplies created a great deal of stress and consequent ill health which may have affected my judgment. I would not be surprised if the testimony of the other surviving members is similarly affected.

Accordingly, I hereby resign from any and all roles and duties assumed with the Ministry and I will not respond to any further offers of employment.

Sincerely,

G. Herzog-Belzer, PhD, KNAW, FRS”

A hastily scrawled post-script to the above letter read: “Gord, as a professional and as a friend, I advise [‘advise’ was crossed out] implore you not to send out any more exploratory missions to the region marked on map. If anyone in the Ministry tries to suggest it at the review, shoot them down. There is nothing there.”

That letter to Gord MacDonald in the spring of ’81 was the product of my fevered brain, troubled by the experiences cryptically referred to therein as well as by the painful task of trying to persuade Gord, who had passionately defended my cause at the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources, as they used to call it back then. Gord fought tooth and nail to secure the funding for the expedition which the late Dr. Fraser and myself were to lead into the zone lying between Fermont and Nitchequon. God knows he paid for it. Cabinet made sure of that. Jeopardizing the relations with Alberta, which were already tense because of the National Energy Program? It looked bad. It was bad. And you better believe the folks out in Whitehorse would have liked to see the prospecting grants sent their way instead.

Well, the Albertans could laugh and say their ‘we told you so’s’. I did my best, hanging around the bars by Parliament Hills for a couple weeks after, dropping rumours and fuelling gossip to make sure that they had plenty of reasons to feel smug. Not that I cut a very authoritative figure. I doubt any of those oilmen or the federal bean-counters watched many TVO documentaries; my face wasn’t well known in those circles and it was the ‘Fraser Expedition,’ not the Belzer Expedition. Not to mention, I could tell the bartenders were thinking about their liability before they passed me my first drink. If they’d seen what I’d seen, or felt what I felt, out there…why, they’d have offered it on the house. Of course, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone just to get free drinks.

Our original report is stamped and filed; our expedition branded an abysmal failure – and now there’s probably nobody in the whole Civil Service who remembers the harebrained scheme. Good riddance! It disturbs me, though, that there’s people nowadays who are talking that because they’re taking gas out of the seabed off Labrador that it would be a swell idea to go mining the stuff beneath the glacial flats in the interior. Easier than building platforms, right? The idiots. If you’re gonna mine, you’ll need camps, and they’ll probably be year-round, too…it’s cold but it’s not the high Arctic. And then you got these people on the internet, going into these abandoned mines, ghost towns and the like, hunting the next creepy picture or tape of ‘found footage.’ I saw one blog the other day, some guy and his buddy took their snowmobiles out to one of those collections of silvering shacks among the ice-gorged valleys. They use it as their hunting camp; leave the snowmobiles, gas and stuff in the sheds. I don’t know if they stay overnight. If they did and…well, we wouldn’t know, now, would we?

Take my account for what it’s worth. You’ll see why the official report I submitted, the signed and sealed file mouldering in some battered steel file cabinet that was last opened by a guy who retired ten years ago, is as thin as it is. You’ll ask questions about our mental health, ask if we had to eat spoiled food or bear livers, or if cabin fever might have been affecting our reason. I want to say our judgement was unaffected, but we were eight fit, healthy public servants, and you don’t get cabin fever, even in the depths of winter, if you’re working, outside, for just a few weeks, with congenial human company, at 53 degrees, 17 minutes north latitude. It’s because we were eight – were eight fit, sober, fairly well-educated individuals that the things I saw, heard or thought I heard and saw…experiences is probably a more accurate verb, one that I can use without a risk of lying by accident…it’s because of these factors that I gave the Ministry that perfunctory version of events and kept the meat of our notes in a banker’s box in my study. All now I can’t tell you what to make of it. But I can tell you, since I don’t have anything particular against you, that if you intend on voyaging on a hunting trip for moose or bear, or if some egghead bureaucrat asks you to go prospecting for oil and gas in a location around about 53 degrees north, 68-70 degrees west, don’t. And if you do, keep within the forest, hold to the southern slopes, and, no matter how bad the wind, bear with it and don’t ever pitch your tent in the lee of one of the drumlins…

Consulting the expedition journal – the one I kept personally, not the one I made up afterwards to give to the Minister, I can’t make any more sense of it now than I could then. I can say for certain that the whole wretched idea was launched by a chance conservation I had in the Duke of York pub, at Prince Edward Avenue and Bedford Road, in Toronto, in January of 1981. It was and is a convenient place for U of T staff and students to tie one on, since it’s practically right next to Robarts Library. I was drinking a Sazerac, mostly for an excuse to stick myself among a bunch of living human beings for a moment. The endless winter nights were starting to wear on me and I’d been spending the slivers of daylight in my campus office doing a rush edit for a prick of a publisher. Half the faculty was still on vacation, which didn’t help.

Well, this fellow sits down to me, carrying a Sazerac in each hand, one of which he slides my way. “I can pay my own tab,” I told him. Like I said, I wasn’t in a cheerful mood. This fellow, though – he sure was. French Canadian by his accent, dressed in a herringbone three-piece underneath his overcoat, which he hadn’t taken off. I said to myself, the energy program isn’t working out so smooth as they’re saying on the news. The generous stranger wasn’t put off in the least by the cold reception. Right off the bat, he introduces himself in a funny way:

“I work with the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources,” he says, shakes my hand and talks about his job, telling me what a pleasure it is to meet the renowned Dr. Gershon Herzog-Belzer. Takes him a full two minutes before he remembers his name. “Paul Leduc, by the way!” I warmed up when he said he’d read the paper I co-authored with Sacher and Catudal and he was so impressed by it he showed it to his boss at the Ministry, Gord MacDonald. Now, my contribution to the paper he was talking about consisted of reading the rough draft, chatting with those two, and agreeing to lend my name to it, but there was no need to tell Mr. Laduc that, seeing how it was so popular at the Ministry. I had a hunch he was there to do more than praise my paper. Nobody goes and buys drinks for you because you wrote an academic journal article.

The conversation got going and pretty soon there’s three Sazeracs on the table and four Old Fashioneds, because most people have never heard of a Sazerac and fewer like them. Cabinet’s desperate, he admits. A real mess. Trudeau was tying himself in knots trying to get Québec and Alberta to sign on to the Charter and get the Constitution repatriated. It’s hard enough to beg somebody for one favour, but when you’ve got to ask them for another at the same time? This was after the Revolution in Iran, remember, and the second wave of the energy crisis was in full swing. Carter had just lost an election because he dared to tell Americans to put on a sweater, you know, because of the critical rise in the price of oil. Trudeau didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. It’s because he couldn’t take the pot off the fire is why Joe Clark had such a short run. The Revolution settled down, but P.E.T. was barely back in office when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and war broke out between Iran and Iraq, tankers in the Persian Gulf getting hit by missiles…it was clear the headache was going to last a long time, and Paul’s ministry was left holding the hottest of several hot potatoes.

“It’s not all bad,” I consoled poor Monsieur Leduc, who by this time was getting pretty hammered. “That Referendum last year tuned into a much ado about nothing; you don’t have a civil war to worry about anymore.” I was joking, but the Parti Quebecois had at least gone through with attempting to secede from Canada, which had really shaken up the national consciousness. I don’t know if things have fully settled all now.

“Yes, yes, we pulled it off, didn’t we?” My companion’s voice was shaky and he kept mopping his brow. I don’t think he got that I was joking. “That’s, err, what I came to talk to you about. The two things are connected. Oh, I haven’t been stalking you or anything like that. Your colleagues who you wrote the paper with, the French one, he told me you come here sometimes.”

“Yep. Robarts is a block away.”

“Yes…”

“Hold on, two things? What two things? You should slow down a bit with the, uhm…” I pointed to his glass.

He grunted and waved his palm at me. “I mean…the Energy Crisis, which is my daily torture, and the Separatists. Two birds with one stone…with one shotgun blast. Hah!” He pounded the table, drawing unwelcome eyes for a second.

“Easy! So you’re saying you want to, erh, there’s a way to…undermine, I guess? Undermine the Separatist movement, by something to do with your Ministry; something energy-related. What did Catudal say?”

“Your buddy? He looks like he never leaves his office. He’s not the kind of man we need. But…you – you’ve been to…to all over the world! I’ve seen you in National Geographic and on TV. You want to help your country, don’t you?”

I’m not the most patriotic man in the world, but, having travelled widely, I appreciate the boons granted to me by default of my citizenship in the Great White North. And, while I sympathized with the grievances of the Québec nationalists and have profound love for their culture as both an aesthete and an anthropologist – the only genuine peasant culture in all of North America, outside of Mexico – I was uncomfortable with the thought of the city where I grew up (Montreal) suddenly being in a foreign country. I generally approved of the direction Trudeau was taking the country in, whatever the ignorant rubes who pelted his train carriage with rotten fruit might think. If I could help with the situation somehow, I would.

Leduc leaned in till I was breathing in the hot whisky fumes. Speaking in a whisper, he proceeded to outline a plan that was considerably less of a crazy 007 scheme than I’d anticipated. The federal government was caught between a rock and a hard place. The economy was on the rock, in a recession that was lingering like a bad dream. Trying to make the analogy literal, the rock was Québec: Trudeau’s Liberals needed the votes of their traditional heartland in Central Canada, and Premier Levesque, not content to bury the hatchet after losing the Referendum, was doing his damndest to shove a wrench into Trudeau’s Constitutional dreams. As a Montrealer (still am, deep down), I understood why Trudeau moved with kid gloves; he hoped the political turmoil could be resolved without splitting the country into hostile tribes. Unfortunately, there were a lot of voters in English Canada who didn’t grasp this and felt they should just say ‘screw it, leave if you want’ to Québec.

Oil, as it always does, would solve our problems. So he told me and I’m not so much of a tree hugger that I would argue with him. Oil, or natural gas, for that matter, close to the main markets in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal- Québec City corridor; energy that had the dual advantages of not being controlled by the Albertans and providing top-paying jobs to Québecois to suck the wind out of the Separatists’ sails: a thoroughly Federal energy project. Spectacular idea. And, for what it’s worth, I’ll concede that, as far as I comprehend the subject, the seabed gas fields off Labrador do in fact extend inland. The arc of the Precambrian Shield practically declares it on the map; the mineral substructure being identical, once you ignore the couple hundred feet of water on top of the Labrador portion. I wouldn’t doubt that there’s substantial crude deposits underneath those bogs, as well, and, based on how the Alaskan production is competitive at current prices, I don’t suppose the permafrost is a challenge beyond the technology Petro Canada has at its disposal. At the very least, your average Canuck at the pump would be insulated from the shenanigans going on in the Persian Gulf.

But they should be happy I failed. And, anyhow, did they even think of the illogic of using a guy whose training is in anthropology, botany and the biology of tropical fish to headline what was, for all meaningful purposes, an engineering project? I hardly know more geology than we learned, or were supposed to learn, in high school. And, just because many of Mr. Trudeau’s voters have seen me on TVO, it doesn’t mean it has to be my name and face on every out-there project that can remotely be connected to the environment. I know why they did it. If it didn’t work, then I’m the spoiled intellectual who lectures the plebs to put on a cardigan and ride a bicycle whenever their diplomatic colleagues get us on the wrong side of politics in the Middle East (which they inevitably will).

[05/04/1981 Gordon – private – communicate to M. Lalonde – tact – NOTHING IN WRITING] … As you know, it starting with us heading up Route 389 in a gang of crew-cab trucks and cargo vans, on account of someone not being willing to pay for flights for the thirteen of us and our equipment. Our jumping-off point was Fermont, on the QB-Labrador border. If your boss doesn’t remember it, it’s because people have only been living there for nine – count ’em, nine! — years. To be more accurate, I should say it’s only been a permanent official settlement for nine years. The indigenous Naskapi-Montagnais have, of course, been in the area for considerably longer, but they never had any stable settlements in the spot where we were ultimately headed. The newness of the town made the strongest impression on me, the region being otherwise a perfectly unremarkable stretch of transboreal forest; the vast belt atop the middle-northern half of every province where the coniferous forest-sea gradually thins out amid glacial bogs until it merges with the barren tundra of the Arctic. But for the relative predominance of Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), you could have dropped me there and told me it was Northern Manitoba or Ontario above Lake Superior, and I’d have no evidence on which to doubt you. It was certainly strange, therefore, to see that the area had undergone none of the chapters in the historical cycle of fish, timber and mining exploitation to which nearly all parts of the country possessing similar ecology have been subjected to. After all, we were in the earliest-settled province in continental North America and we are used to the boreal zones being sites of a past already vanishing as everyone with sane and sensitive souls flees them for the cities where one can live a life with actual socialization – art, cafes and much less cabin fever. I don’t blame them, since unlike the rural villages of Europe and Asia, all the settlements of this vast region were inorganic constructions, thrown up by people already fully formed by the mentalities and habits of elsewhere, for the sole purpose of facilitating some robber baron or Crown Corporation to make a buck off an extractable resource, then abandoned, usually before two generations could be formed in their environment. Lots of folks romanticize such places but, dammit, they horrify me. You’re thinking of escape before you arrive. Really, it is strange; the worse that our textbook histories pretend it’s a normal condition of humanity. Fremont had bars where men drank, played pool and fought, strip clubs where women who, in Toronto, could only have been confronted after downing a bottle of Bright’s, gyrated listlessly for obscene sums that would be pitifully wasted, a couple shops for goods of the rudest practical nature, and nothing else.

Of course, the reason me and Professor Moffat – Barney – were going along for the trip had nothing to do with the labours of the roughnecks. The resources available at Robarts Library which I was able to peruse back home were few and out of date. Regardless, there was plenty to suggest to me that, barren as the territory was and as limited as we were in numbers (your boss might consider sending more than one assistant per scholar on future expeditions), there was a chance I might find something to full an article about. Robarts contained no books specifically about the zone where are endeavour would take place, but the Moisie River – the upper reaches of which pass by Fermont and which is known as the ‘Nahanni of the East’ – occasionally pops up in the accounts of the Jesuits and Protestant missionaries who competed for the souls of the Indigenous population, as well as those of the Hudson Bay Co. Officers and whisky traders who competed in extracting their wealth…I almost said “their money,” but even today, the dollar sometimes doesn’t get you as far as will a can of gasoline, a case of condensed milk, or an offer to haul some firewood. The river, treacherous as it can be (particularly during the spring melt and fall freeze-ups), nonetheless provided the best route from the ‘civilized’ towns along the St. Lawrence into the Labrador interior, a region whose gloomy desolation the fits and starts of successive resource booms have failed to alleviate. Most of the sources I poured through mention the place only as a geographic point passed through or beside, en route to places where more important things are done. However, there was a curious anecdote in a work called “Deux Ans parmi les Montagnais,” or a paraphrase of that, which was the memoirs of a Renard Le Pellerin, a priest and schoolteacher. Written in the style of a Victorian travel journal, it was published in Montreal at the surprisingly recent date of 1940. In it, the priest tells of the dangerous canoe trips, the bad or non-existent roads, and his trials and tribulations attempting to imbue his few and irregular pupils with a rudimentary knowledge of reading, writing, and Catholic theology.

Trained in Switzerland, Fr. Le Pellerin, practiced a habit of long rambles in the countryside, sometimes journeying by canoe into the empty country to the south of what is now Fermont, a habit which caused his parishioners much anxiety, despite the absence of risk of avalanches or other hazards in the monotonous terrain. He scoffed at the dangers of wolves and bears, for which the Winchester he carried was adequate medicine, but it was neither of these wild creatures which concerned his flock, since (so they told and so his observation appeared to confirm) there were no bears or wolves in the area. What caused him to open his ear and put pen to paper concerning the matter was the fact that his casual remark that his own people had always shortsightedly exterminated the most enchanting beasts in Creation was disputed by the native folk, who insisted that even in the times of their grandfathers’ grandfathers no member of the Ursine tribe had ever denned in those parts, and that whatever wolves on might glimpse were simply trekking through. The priest wondered why this should be the case since, as he had seen for himself, the natural environment was undisturbed – unlike the long-cultivated domain of his fellow Habitants. The forest, though not as impressive as those in more favourable climates, had never been despoiled by loggers or (at least back then) mining companies. Berry bushes and edible fungi abounded – in fact, he had filled his canoe with them after his plans to shoot a moose had not met with luck. His native friends had no qualms about devouring the fruit and mushrooms he offered them, which made their aversion to the place all the more strange: clearly, there wasn’t some curse or taboo about the soil itself or its products.

The diary of Sean McDermot, a factor employed by the HBC who travelled into the Coté du Nord hinterland during the waning days of the great fur trade a full century prior to Père Le Pellerin, echoes the Jesuit’s cryptic remarks. Concerning the district roughly west of the Moisie River and south of Fremont-Wabush, the trader writes of having cherished high hopes for his trip, such that, a third of the way from Lac St. Jean, he pulled rank on a south-passing canoe du maitre, persuading its illiterate captain with his deed to a house in Québec City, that the Company required the boat and its crew to return to the interior and delay their furlough. For more than two centuries, the country from the mouth of the St. Lawrence through to Lake of the Woods in western Ontario had been roved over by trapper and trade, voyageur and Indian, all in search of the precious furs on which the wealth of the still-primitive colony was founded. The colony was still mired in the same rude stage of economic development – the days of exporting wheat and wood were still decades in the future – but the furs were running out. The heaver had been hunted nearly to extinction throughout the Great Lakes watershed, and the ploughs and muskets of Habitant and Loyalist farmers had driven the other desirable fur-bearing beasts deeper into the receding forest-sea. When McDermot and his crew portaged amid the network of streams and swamps which on aerial photographs resemble stretch marks revolving around the Precambrian Shield, they reckoned, probably correctly, that they were the first white men to have tread upon that ground. Understandably, the trader anticipated that the area, with its umbrous stands of black spruce and damp slopes covered with rhododendrons ought to be teeming with game – especially the coveted beaver, for whom the mazy wetlands were a virtual paradise. They arrived late in the afternoon, to which McDermot’s journal, incomprehensibly, ascribes the absence of beaver that first day. To his surprise and bewilderment, on the second and third days, they also saw no beaver – nor did they note any rabbits, woodchucks, martins, bear or other fur species. The steams contained pike and char, so the men at least had fish for their camp table, but this did not help the morale of the voyageurs who had been anticipating fun and frivolity on leave in the city and who were unused to performing their wilderness labours without meat in their diet. On the fourth day, two deer were spotted and shot at. One was killed on the spot and carried back to camp for roasting. But the other, despite being struck, was able to sprint off under a burst of adrenaline. All through this period, the crews of all the canoes – perhaps two dozen men in total – were plagued with inexplicable discomforts. Two or three greenhorns aside, these were all hard men, cut from cloth no longer manufactured in our safe and hygienic modern era. The diarist recorded that many – but not all – the men slept poorly. The journey was undertaken in May, and, though the weather can be harsh compared to the same seasons in civilized parts, all would have been used to much worse. The persistent sleep issues became such a problem that it interfered seriously with the progress of the expedition, causing McDermot to remark – notably without any harsh words for his crew – on their failure to get to the subsequent portages at the expected rate. Despite dwelling on the matter through several entries in succession, McDermot never stated the precise nature of the voyageurs’ nocturnal disquietude. At the date he was writing, “hostile Indians” or scouting that presaged raids by rival fur companies were legitimate possibilities, but they were also not things which anyone in those times and in that place would have felt compelled to avoid mentioning. Cryptically, in the entry of May 24^th, 1832, McDermot lamented not heeding the advice of a Cree elder who had settled among the whites, running a provision store in Sept Iles downriver, when he’d started his journey. “I had dismissed the old man’s tale as mere superstition,” he moaned, “creditable only in the childish minds of peasant women and Savages, told to conjure monsters in the minds of fellow travellers gathered round the campfire, that they may be persuaded by their own trepidation to refrain from venturing into certain parts, invariably those most rich in game.”

On a sojourn to Wabush to stock up on supplies and hire a couple heady-duty Ski-Doos to haul ourselves, the ones provided by your recession-afflicted overseers being only light recreational models, I took the opportunity to gather info that might be relevant to my portion of our tasks. Unfortunately, small, rugged frontier communities often take much less interest in their history than do metropolitan intellectuals and novel-readers. At the dismal local library, I found myself alone perusing the stacks, which contained mostly yard sale fiction, encyclopedias and repair manuals for automobiles no longer manufactured. The archives of the town newspaper were the only materials relevant to the remote land itself, and these were written fora public that read mainly for practical advertisements and to have something to argue about at the local watering hole…which I headed off to before it could be decently called evening.

When trying to learn as much as possible about a new place with the minimum of time and sacrifice, my favourite tactic is to seek out a bar, pub, cafe or hotel restaurant, depending on the milieu I mean to swim in – maybe all of them. I further seek out one or more old men, with worn faces and calloused hands and a knowing glint in their eye. I sit myself down beside them – these characters are pretty much always at the bar itself, or at a good window seat. I never buy them a drink first: I let them figure out that I am curious but bored, and that I’m (not to brag) somebody who people pay attention to where I’m from; someone who might share their stories with a wider audience. I let them earn my attention; they won’t dig the tastiest tidbits out of their bag unless they have to do so to obtain the coveted hungry ear. Only then do I buy them a drink.

I bought a half dozen drinks (Crown Royal!), each, for Fred Bywater and George Volant. The former was an Anglo miner and machinist, the latter a Montagnais who somehow managed to survive the mid-20^th century on an industrial-era version of the trapper-fisherman-hunter lifestyle which had sustained his people for millennia. They sat at opposite ends of the bar, each man lost in his own beverage. Their appearance told me that either might be a good source of local lore, so I engaged the barkeep in conversation about dully practical matters – snow conditions, which waterways were navigable in the season, the best local shops for engine parts and provisions, etc. I casually knocked back the most expensive whisky-and-water on the menu (blended in the bottle, I suspect) and nodded, serious but dispassionate, reflecting on how we were on Ottawa’s tab and how I was sorry that sampling rock cores and twiddling with theodolites would not give the CBC the exciting documentary they were looking for. The barkeep agreed passively, as is the nature of barkeeps, although I thought I detected an uneasiness that should hardly have existed in the proprietor of a public house who was raking in a windfall thanks to his new customers from the Big City. Enough scotch and water (even if it’s a lot of water) will put suspicions into one’s head, but I could have sworn that the barkeep’s eyes kept darting into the left and right corners of their sockets, even though he kept his head down over his bottles and rag like it was welded to them…darting towards the two old timers I was consciously ignoring.

“Where, uh, where again exactly did you say you were heading?” the bartender gulped.

Unable to give the precise coordinates off the top of my head, I did better, wiping the bar with a napkin and unfolding a map. “Here, or, I should say, in this general area – we have to move around a bit, obviously, since we don’t know where – or if – we’ll find any of the oil, or, really, any sign that there could be oil down there at all. It’s a crap shoot. I figure, too, with all the gear we’re lugging around, we’ll have to adjust our route as we go, to match the terrain.”

Dammit, the man turned whiter than his bar rag. “Uhhh, gosh, in that case…maybe I can help you fellers out a bit. Been around these parts for a while myself, y’know? He tapped his temple, seeming unconvinced himself. “If it’s oil you’re looking for, you don’t need to go down the Quebec side so far. Or you can go around over the other side, by James Bay. I know they do a lot of mining ‘n power stuff there, last couple years. Or you guys can keep more to the west of where you’re showing, along the highway. Should be easier to move your kit, too. Dunno why you fellers want to make it hard on yourselves when you don’t have to.”

I assured him that we weren’t looking for trouble; we simply had to go where the data indicated the oil or gas would likely be.

“Oil, right, okay, I understand, but…there was some folks…you’re from Toronto, you said?”

“Yes, well, me personally, yes.”

“Well, they were from…Vancouver, and they were prospecting for oil, just like you. Came through here…”

“They were working for the government?”

The rag squeaked in the glass. “Nooo…nope, they were…were working on their own account, I guess.”

“Uhuh. And when was this?”

“Nineteen…forty-something? A year or two before the war, something like that. Anyways, they were looking for oil, like you, but they went more…” the bartender pointed out to a location well outside the basin where we intended to do our exploration – but close enough that Wabush remained the logical depot to purchase supplies.

“Alright.” I was skeptical from the first. “But did they find it?”

From the way he nodded, “sure,” I knew he was luying, which got me thinking, because, what did it benefit him whether we poked around in one patch of dirt or another? “Funny, the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources has never heard of these gentlemen you’re talking about, and I think they’d at least want to know if what they’re blowing their money on is going to be profitable or not.” I nonchalantly knocked back another drink. “Not my concern, mind you. I’m only riding along for publicity. My wallet only cares that I don’t break my contract, and maybe I find something interesting enough to get me a spot on the CBC.”

A slightly imbalanced laughter came from my right. There was nothing intimidating in the feeble, toothless chuckle, but it sent the shivers up and down beneath my lumberjack plaids nonetheless. I ignored it. “You’re headed out south a’ town, around Moisie Lake thereabouts, are ya?” It was the old man in plaid and khaki denim overalls, his rubicund visage shadowed beneath a stained International Harvester cap. “I don’t need ta see yer map. If it’s where those folks were drillin’ fer oil back during the war, then you’ll find what yer lookin’ for.” If he wasn’t just egging us on for fun, then the barkeep was telling the truth. “But,” he added, the corners of his lips creeping up his cheeks. “’Course you might find something yer not looking for. Or it’ll find youse.”

“Sorry, excuse me?”

“Don’t mind him; he’s just pulling your leg,” the bartender assured. “After the war, oil was cheap. That’s why nobody stuck around. That’s all. You didn’t believe me?” He could tell. “Still, you could try a little closer to the highway…don’t need to go out into the sticks…”

I hushed the bartender. As much as I treasure the creature comforts of life in a cozy house in the Beaches, or maybe because of it, I’m not above a primal thrill. There’s something about going mano-a-mano against a bear or wolf or shark or something. It’s hardwired into us. “Hold on, why exactly? Bears?”

“Bears?”

“Well, he said something might find us. No need to obfu… – to beat around the bush. So, what are you talking about? I thought grizzlies were extinct in this part of the country and I don’t imagine polar bears come this far south. Or wolves?”

The barkeep was momentarily flummoxed. “Oh, you mean what he’s talking about? Ah, don’t mind old Fred. He’s a shit-disturber. Old Injin’ fairy tales. Don’t let it spoil your drink. But, like I was saying, you’d find it easier to move all your equipment if…”

“We brought rifles,” I mentioned, lest the rustics within earshot take me for a mere city-slicker, full of naïve fantasies about friendly wolves and bears more scared of us than we are of them. “Plenty of ammunition, if we need it. I don’t mind hunting, either, when I get the chance…”

Fred spoke up again, and I noticed his expression had changed and he sounded like he was challenging me, as if, by not acting confused and afraid, I was insulting the dignity of his little town. “I believe you; you can take a wolf, with one of yer cannons, and a guide spotting fer you out in the open, but it’s not so easy like yer thinkin’. The ground plays tricks on yer eyes, eh. Fools ya into thinking it’s flat and open, but you walk a couple yards and then it hides the landmarks you were reckoning by, and yer up and down, and it doesn’t make no sense. The trees look little, eh, but they ain’t so little once you get in the middle of ’em. People get lost out there all the time.”

Ah, yes, ‘the place I live in is tougher than you, stranger.’ Countless times I’ve gotten that. I wasn’t going to play along. “It’s ok, we have maps, a satellite phone, compasses, all of us. And that’s a lot of men; a lot of hands and pairs of eyes.” I finished the watered residues lingering among the ice cubes and felt for cash in my pockets as if I was about to leave. It wasn’t an act. My face must have been irritatingly calm, because Fred stood up in his seat and practically shouted.

“Well, be sure the loopik doesn’t get’cha, then!”

“Come again?” I asked, plopping back down on my seat, as anyone would. “Loopik?”

“Ahhh, for Chris’sake, shut up Fred, will ya?” The bartender scowled with venom you don’t use when just playing around with friends. “He’s only joking. Trying to make an ass of you,” he smiled at me. “Because you’re an out-of-towner, that’s all. You can pay your tab when you leave out or next time you drop into town, doesn’t matter.”

I suspected the only reason he was ushering out otherwise lucrative customers was because the old drunk telling stories was about as immovable as an iceberg. “No, now I want to hear this. Actually, studying and collecting folklore from different places is part of my job, back in Toronto. Go on. What’s this loopik and why should I watch out for it, or him? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything by that name.”

“Nobody has! He’s just making shit up. Can it, Fred, or…” I could tell the bartender’s anger was sincere and therefore I was more intrigued. On the other hand, it is my experience that 75% of what old drunks tell you in remote watering holes is bullshit, on top of which, as you should know, the word for this creature or being, at least as Fred pronounced it, didn’t sound right. Despite the similarity of ‘Innu’ – which it’s now become the fashion to call the Montagnais – with ‘Inuit,’ there’s nothing at all related between the two peoples. They don’t have the same ethnic heritage, they inhabit different areas, and they speak utterly unrelated languages, the Innu being an Algonkian people, like the Indians of the Central Canada cottage country, and the Inuit are, well, Inuit. Eskimos, as we used to say. ‘Loopik’ doesn’t sound like an Alongkian word, made-up or otherwise, though it is plausibly Inuit. How a word presumably derived from an Arctic language came to refer to a concept in the folklore of an Algonkian region, given the lack of friendly relations, or much relations at all, between the two groups, it was a question my mind was spinning over.

“Don’t ask me,” Fred threw up his hands, and I was about to storm off in anger at having been duped, however momentarily, by an inebriated hick. “I never seen one myself, either, and it’s not something folks know how ta explain, supposing they did see it. ‘N that’s if it lets ’em talk at all. Ask George there. He can tell you a whole lot. He’s seen one, y’know, that’s how I know about it – not that I hadn’t heard about it before. But I didn’t believe in things like that, that’s what I mean. If you’d seen uncle Georgie, how he looked when he came into our cabin right as we were sittin’ down ta have our supper, hoho! Can’t turn out a man who asks you fer a meal – folks are hospitable around here. Hehe, but we were scared he was gonna eat the whole spread, and the table to boot! Looked like a starvin’ ghost, didn’t’cha, Georgie? But, honest truth, he hardly touched a thing. Just bread and soup, and he didn’t sleep till almost morning. ‘N neither did we, after the story he told us. Tell ’em, Charlie!”

The gentleman so indicated was an elderly, worn-out and inebriated as Fred. Largely by virtue of his taciturnity, he’d preserved a semblance of dignity that his friend lacked, though. Strange that what seemed to be two old friends should sit across from but not talk to each other, but one sees stranger things in the North Country, especially if one is not looking for them. ‘Uncle’ George’s body language was casual but his visage was grave, whether or not he could walk in a straight line unaided. He was sizing me up.

“Well? Is Fred here just screwing with me?” I asked.

The man’s narrow eyes were there and not there. “It’s a story,” George replied bashfully. “Someone told me when I was a kid. Don’t remember who, ‘cept it wasn’t none of my teachers.”

“But did you see it – this ‘loopik?’ What is it? Is it real?”

He chewed his phrases before spitting them out. “I don’t want to say that. People see a lot of things that aren’t real.” The way he said it was bitter and mocking.

“Okay, but, speaking specifically about this creature…it is a creature, right? Not a ghost or spirit or something?”

“I don’t know. I told what I saw to my father and he says that’s what it was called. He was a trapper, my pops. Good man.” George took another sip.

“Alright, but what is it then? A kind of wolf? Bear? Why are you so afraid of it? How big is it?”

“Dunno. Only ever saw its eyes ‘n its shadow. Never saw it standing up. Only saw it once. Most people only ever see it once. Anyway, if you hear it in the nighttime, get in your boats or your jeeps and go. Go away.”

“Well, if I’m supposed to listen for it, what does it sound like?”

“Like the wind, but an animal. You can hear it sometimes, at night, where you’re going. Between the long hills, in the ravines. It’s a whistling that all of a sudden everything feels no good inside you. Worst is when the sun’s falling, and everything’s all gold and black…”

I was admittedly intrigued, but forgot everything when George very matter-of-factly said, “Never mind. Horse hockey! Made it up after getting spooked by a cat or a seal out mushroom picking one time, and then our kids started to share it and pass it along, like how kids do with things they hear and don’t understand from grown-ups.”

I paid my tab and left. I’d been entertained by the story but it was tainted by the disgust I felt towards myself for having bought into it for a moment.

Winter lingered harsh and long this year, so we had no need to switch to portaging and riding the inflatable rafts we’d brought, and were instead able to race across the taiga on our Ski-Doos. We arrived, earlier than scheduled, in our first prospecting location south of Fermont, between the top end of Lac Jonquet and the unnamed glacial lake which lies barely an hour’s walk west of it. Everywhere the topography bore evidence of the tremendous processes which gouged and moulded rock like the hand of a furious kindergartener squeezing and pulling a ball of Play-Doh. Of course, the transformations at the end of the Pleistocene are responsible for our landscapes further south, but there the retreat of the glaciers has been demurely marked by cities, forests, and the plough. Here, in the North, the rude sculpting of the ice sheets was fresh. You felt like, if you blinked, a mammoth might lumber out from behind a clump of tamaracks. The Woodland Cree have tales, you know, about hunting great woolly bears – several-fold larger than any other bears – that had two great teeth and ‘arms’ growing out of their faces…about hunting them with muskets. Far-fetched, sure, but if you left your desk to go out to these places…you could believe a lot of things might happen, if only because there’s nobody out in those places, and, therefore, nobody to see what you get up to. There’s no need to bury bodies when no one will be walking by for a century or two.

The ground in the hemiboreal zone is nowhere so steep that you can’t pitch a tent, nor is it so flat that its hard to find shelter from the wind. Staking the camp and setting up the machinery was a simple matter, apparently, for those who had to do it. So easy, in fact, that, since we ate on the trail, Mac, the cook, at the request of Barney, delayed started supper as Jim Bouchard and some of the mechanics wanted to hunt a deer or at least some rabbits for Mac to stew up. The oblong glacial hills, or drumlins, covered with a low but rich layer of thick-leaved shrubbery no taller than an unkempt lawn, mixed with feathery grasses and cattails in wetter areas, poking out beneath the snow carpeting their windswept flanks, offered a delectable banquet for non-hibernating herbivores. On the other hand, I was unaccountably tired, as if I’d walked rather than Ski-Doo’d the last six hours, so I confined my activities to circling the perimeter of the campsite, on the lookout for any telltale signs of past Indigenous habitation. I didn’t really expect to find anything in the short window of daylight that remained, but the land surprised me: probably disgorged from the roots of Festuca-topped hummock when a rainstorm eroded the soil, was an arrowhead. It was unmistakeably pre-Contact, since, French or English, the colonists are never known to have used flint weaponry. Indirectly, my find was evidence of the unusual geological activity of the area, which boded well, since ‘usual’ land in Central Canada doesn’t have any oil under it. You see, heavy rains last summer or not, it’s not going to be enough to dislodge, out of fairly level ground, stone tools that would have been interred potentially millennia ago. My fatigue and cynicism evaporated when I brushed off the moist earth and scrutinized it in the rays of the declining sun. Now, I don’t know what you know of Indigenous arts and culture, but this arrowhead was unusual in the extreme. I was second-guessing myself. It had a shape more typical of a spearhead, though, even as arrowheads go, it wasn’t very big – roughly the size and shape of one of the leaflets of an ash tree. Knapped with exquisite care to create a row of fine teeth on each side, it was made of greenish, flint-like chert, the most abundant material suitable for the purpose between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Most remarkably, it was not notched to accept fitting into a shaft. Seeing as the natives lacked metal to make ferrules and no screws or bolts could have been driven through it, I had to wonder how someone could spend hours on the arduous task of shaping the stone and yet leave the end product in a form that couldn’t be held securely to an arrow-shaft, much less endure the rigour of thrusting into the body of a moose or mammoth. Then my finger passed, or rather, was detained, in the act of rubbing across its smooth surface. I examined it more closed and observed a slightly discoloured band, matte in texture, where some type of adhesive gum or resin had been applied. That would work, but it was a mystery how someone out in the taiga of eastern Quebec could come up with the idea, while all the other native peoples around him before and since have only used bindings to fasten points to shafts. Impressive, too, was the fact that, in the acidic soil, the binding gum had endured for four or five centuries at minimum. I pocketed my discovery and told noone, but felt much better about our expedition.

My mood was not dampened by supper. The cook was forced to improvise after Jim and his hunting partners failed to come back with any game. The undulating ridges with their extremely dense ground cover should have proved literal breeding grounds for all sorts of small mammals, grouse and the like, but they were not able to bag even a single rabbit. They were not bad shots – quite the opposite – they simply failed to locate game. The sole exception was a whitetail deer which they shot at but failed to kill. Jim had boasted about his marksmanship and tracking skills and put himself out as something of a protector of the rest of the party, embarrassedly explained that the deer had come out of nowhere (“nowhere” being a spruce bog below the slug-shaped hill whose spine they were stalking along). It bolted, he insisted, with the speed whitetails reserve for when they are being chased by a predator or if a hunter has shot and missed. But he didn’t miss. Jim pleaded that they’d followed the blood trail. Ed, a driller, who accompanied Jim on the hunt, sneered that it mustn’t have been a very good hit, since the blood trail was faint; nothing more than scattered drops which petered out among the rhododendrons halfway up the opposite slope. Jim and Ed were the only ones that really cared. When you’re hungry, sitting out under the stars on a cold night, anything hot tastes good, whether freshly killed or poured out of a can.

I shared a large tent with Jacques O’Hara, the geologist and his assistant, an environmental science graduate from McGill. Our quarters were as spartan as the roughnecks’ but it was nice to have a mind to bounce things off of. Despite both being born-and-bred Québecois, only a generation removed from habitant life, neither Professor O’Hara nor his student knew anything of the folklore of the peoples who inhabited or, at least made seasonal use of our work site. Québecois culture is steeped in native lore, intensely syncretic as Catholic colonial cultures invariably are, but the moraines of the Côte-Nord’s interior were isolated from the development of classic Québecois settlement by barriers more daunting than walls or borders, and so, whatever myths the Montagnais who fished and hunted the taiga might tell about it, they would not have entered into the common stock of French-Canadian folklore. I decided not to bring up what I’d been told in the Wabush bar.

Over the next two days, our partly made excellent progress collecting soil and rock cores, more than a few of which, when subjected to our crude field tests, indicated a promise for future oil and gas developments. Moreover, notwithstanding the innumerable tamarack bogs which dotted the landscape, these were nowhere great in extent and could be drained, since the water and granite only thinly covered the granite bedrock – a perfect substrate for a pipeline or freight railway.

Disquietingly, I found myself called upon on account of my qualifications as a biologist, there being no medical doctor or nurse on the team. Nobody was overtly sick, but three or four of the men had been experiencing sensations of fatigue and listlessness, unaccountable in light of their otherwise excellent health and the relatively moderate work and conditions, considering what and where oilmen’s work is. Whether by progressive action or because they simply became brave enough to admit it, soon a third of the men had reported similar problems. These complaints never extended beyond that population however, to indicate the nature or source of the affliction. I ruled out the food and water, since those were the sale for all of us, and anything infectious would have spread. Stymied, I prescribed more sleep and coffee on waking, trusting that we had enough time and government grant money that a small decline in our team’s efficiency wouldn’t matter.

On the third night, we heard the whistling. I say whistling, because it was a stormy, albeit dry night, and there was nothing to persuade any of us out of the assumption that it was the wind…which, incidentally, shot between the drumlins with enough velocity that, as I huddled with book and flashlight in my sleeping bag, I proposed to Professor Moffat that we might want to construct a shack, which we could do as we had some prefab supplies and there was plenty of wood around. If this was going to be the normal weather of the season, our tents would prove inadequate. I know, intellectually, that there’s not much danger in the wind collapsing a tent on you, but, regardless, I was uncomfortable with the prospect of having our temporary homes destroyed in the middle of a pitch-dark night.

On the fourth day, the McGill student pulled up a core from the bedrock that was such that we didn’t bother testing it before we decided that an urgent cable must be dispatched to Ottawa. The core sample cylinder was oily as a fried sausage. First, we attempted to transmit a message via radio. Despite there being relay stations at Wabush, if not southwards over the moraine, we could neither transmit nor receive any signal. Hiking to the top of the drumlin didn’t help and we decided amongst ourselves that some quirk of the local geology must be responsible. The satellite phone, expensive as it was, fared no better, although we reminded ourselves that none of us was very experienced in its operation. Reluctantly, we called it a night.

By the fifth day, no one troubled about the lethargy that gripped about a third – and never more than a third – of the team. After all, with the continued failure of our communications devices, there was a perfect excuse to get back down south for R & R. There being nothing relaxing about sitting in a tent in a frigid wilderness, I busied myself trying to create work for myself. After the excitement of that first arrowhead, I had failed to find a single Native American artifact of significance, though I was keen on it, since the flora and fauna offered absolutely nothing of interest…except, a nagging feeling argued, for their lack of anything exciting. It was a confounding Catch-22: an area so seldom visited by hunters ought to have been turning with the sorts of game long since slaughtered or pressured out of habitats nearer to civilization. Likewise, a place so far from civilization, and nestled conveniently ambiguously near the ill-policed borders of the backwater sections of two provinces was a natural draw for hunters, legal or otherwise. That solitary deer, a prowling fox, and scattered flocks of migratory geese aside, I could not recall seeing any vertebrates at all in the vicinity of camp. Did the petroleum deposits below the surface impart a toxic quality to the vegetation? Yet the oilsands at Athabaska possess rich ecologies…During my promenade on the reverse slope of the drumlin opposite the one on the flank of which we’d pitched our camp, I spotted a rabbit or woodchuck burrow (the two species might of course use dens made by the other). I waited, but no rabbit came out, nor did making noise at the mouth of the burrow cause its inhabitants to emerge at an alternate entrance. The forbes growing in front of the hole were compacted, indicating the passage of a body of some weight – more likely a woodchuck than a rabbit – probably no earlier than that morning. I took my entrenching tool from my backpack and carefully dug atop the tunnel, acting on the knowledge that burrowing mammals often collect small human-made objects and despot them in their homes. These four-legged hoarders often save us scholars precious time searching and digging, through they may cost us many times that in the office as we try to decipher the mishmashed eras and sources of the jumbled items. Unfortunately, the soggy, stony earth did not hold its shape well, and an entrenching tool and enthusiasm are no substitutes for real shovels and layered excavation grids. I soon lost track of the passages as the burrow collapsed in on itself, never having ascertained the identity of its occupants. I managed to scrounge up a couple of small objects, although they were so caked with dirt that they would have to await washing off at camp before identification could be attempted. On the way back, I noted the tracks of a moose, which, as a keystone species, was an important observation, but I was too tired and the sun was too low on the horizon for me to try to follow the tracks.

At supper, the mood was better than it had been the previous nights. We…intellectuals were confident that our energy-mad backers would reward us as they never would for our scholarship, and the roughnecks foresaw another resource boom which they could eat, drink and lech through, saving them from seeking employment as roofers and factory temps in Toronto or Vancouver. The McMaster student (for the life of me, I can’t remember their name) actually believed he’d accomplished something of service to the country. After an unaccustomedly large meal, I took an enamel basin and rinsed off the objects I’d pocketed on my walk earlier. Taking them inside, to examine them by the light of the Coleman lantern, every one proved to be an item fabricated by human hands. This was not in itself odd. Rodents, corvids and other animals routinely take an interest in objects alien to their environment and give them pride of place in adorning their nests. What fascinated me about them was the variety of the periods and origins they represented and the inexplicability of their all being found together. Let me enumerate some examples: gilded metal buttons, French, military, from the time of Louis XV. A copper pipe-bowl, likely a Native trade good, indeterminate date but probably French from the heyday of the fur trade. The cap of a Sheaffer fountain pen circa John F. Kennedy and a flattish carved bead, fashioned from a material whose identity I’d not speculate, but which was neither bone nor horn, nor the tooth of a cetacean, and whose plausible date would have made me dizzy if I dared to contemplate it. These things I recorded in my journal. I could explain neither how they came to be where found or where they were probably initially acquired. Oh, sure, small odds and ends of clothing and personal items, you might say; we lose these things all the time in modern society as well. Fair enough, but in five days of surveying the glacial till – digging it, poking it – we had found no remains of tents, or lean-tos, let alone shacks or cabins left by the sorts of men who could have worn or made the objects in question.

The kerosene flame bred many questions. It answered none. Anyhow, I was hungry.

You’d expect men doing manual labour to have hearty appetites for all kinds of gross delicacies that would turn the stomach of the man who works in a heated office and you’d be correct. Most of us fell like starving hogs upon the drop biscuits, stewed prunes, corned beef hash, and margarine-soaked half-burnt toast et cetera, but Jim and the McGill student were abstemious, which was all the more surprising since theodolites are cumbersome things to lug around and chipping rocks and boring soil cores isn’t exactly light work. The workmen were mostly too busy stuffing their bellies to care. The guys on either side of Jim proffered him choice morsels, as though pointing with their forks would cause him to eat that which he could easily reach with his own. Like me, they chalked it up to illness. His stomach wasn’t used to the kinds of quantities of food necessitated by the North Country. He did seem out of sorts, like one does who is suffering a mild fever. My attention was soon drawn more to the geologist, O’Hara, however. He didn’t say anything, besides a perfunctory wish for recovery and a humble boast about all the work they had done that afternoon. The man’s body language, on the other hand…he was sitting stiff as the table; from his facial expression, he might as well have been a husband in divorce court, forced by the judge to keep his mouth shut while his soon-to-be-ex-wife gives her teary-eyed spiel to the courtroom. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense. Of course, I mentioned the artifacts I’d found in the rabbit burrow, but the consensus, if anyone was listening, was that typical ‘pack rat’ behaviour, common to many small mammals and birds, was responsible. In light of the species of animals that could have made or occupied the burrow, this required a stretch of the imagination, which we all tried to make. I began to think of the objects I’d left behind in the burrow…

Before we turned in for the night, I asked O’Hara about the student’s odd behaviour; if maybe we should call in a bush plane to evacuate him, since we didn’t have the means to look after anybody who was really sick, especially if it was catching (Jim was robust enough nobody worried for him). O’Hara was non-committal. Either way, freezing rain that started around 9:00 pm put aside any chance of a plane coming.

The night was worse than any of the previous. If – IF – you’ve ever been camping in cold weather, you’d know how, in otherwise tolerable temperatures, rain and dampness can penetrate your tent and suffuse your sleeping bag and coat, and the fire, unless it’s a huge proper campfire, will seem pathetically small. Before you say, ‘oh, it’s the woods, such it up,’ ehhh…it’s one thing to curl up sick in your own bed, but if you come down with a flu or fever out out in the real wilderness, it’s no joke. You should be afraid. It was me, O’Hara and the student in the tent. None of us talked but none of us could sleep, either. O’Hara was passing the time reading, with his back turned to me in his sleeping bag. The student glumly watched the tent flap, which looked out obliquely down the slop and at the tail of the drumlin opposite. Occasionally, thunder, or echoes like thunder, rumbled over the taiga. Bored and irritable, I scooted over to sit beside the student, who was an old hand in the woods, though he was no older than my PhD candidates.

“Usually in Toronto – actually in most places I’ve been, thunderstorms are a summer phenomenon,” I said by way of conversation. “But, then, we don’t have the Northern Lights, either.”

There was a contemplative frown on the student’s face; what’s more, there was a trembling in his eyes that should have sent chills down the spine of anyone who knew how unnatural that emotion was in his type which, despite the bookish veneer, was born and raised in a rural town of clapboard houses and apple orchards before he went off to university on a scholarship. “It isn’t – doesn’t happen this time of year in places like this, neither. It’s not supposed to, not that I’ve ever seen. Should still be getting snow, instead.”

“Snow?”

“Sorry, I was thinking…there’s a ski resort in my hometown. The snow makes a funny sound when there’s about to be an avalanche. The locals can always tell. I dunno about you, but this doesn’t sound like a thunderstorm at all to me. It sounds like the snow and ice, rumbling away just before there’s gonna be an avalanche…but there’s not enough snow for that…is there?”

“You think maybe we should have pitched our tents higher up? The wind’s not so bad tonight, and it’s not like we’re obligated by law. Could always just…move it, eh?”

But none of us really wanted to pack up and reset the tent a few metres higher up the ridge, regardless of whether the ground might be a bit dryer. We had staked one tent on a mini plateau of soft earth, because it was easier to drive the stakes (yes, the tent I slept in), and I was mildly envious of the others who had taken the extra time and effort to secure their own tents on the exposed rock, which you obviously can’t just hammer those yellow plastic pegs into. “Right,” I couldn’t neglect to ask, “If it’s not thunder, and we don’t have enough snow for an avalanche, you don’t think, what is it?”

The student was startled. “It’s a thunderstorm. Different latitude; a-seasonal weather patterns. Yeah.” This was unusually technical, compared to his habitual diction. He wanted that I should take him seriously.

I half-heartedly speculated about the importance of our research, which was essentially complete, but it required too much effort for either of us to connect sealed tubes of dirt and alphanumerically labelled rock chips with commuters grumbling slightly less at the pumps. After a few minutes of what must have been deliberate stalling on his part, the student gazed, with the eyes of an unarmed hunter – though he had a shotgun propped just inside the doorway – across the drumlin, up the pale, smooth oval of granite, brighter than the rainy sky surrounding it; up to the ridge where meagre black feathers of larch and spruce tethered the hard, stingy soil with the purple sky. We both absentmindedly drew our jackets close about the collar. Then he hit me with a question: “Not that it’s my business,” he asked with unaccustomed deference, “But you’re writing a paper after this, right? About what we’re doing out here?”

“Yes, well, I intend to. Not sure about it, at this point, though.”

“Fair enough. But you know a lot about, you know, the wildlife, plants, and how places…natural places I mean…how they change over time?”

“You could say that.”

“You heard they say we are headed for another Ice Age, right? I saw a documentary a while ago, with that guy who played Spock from Star Trek. It wasn’t a show though, it was science; there’s a lot of evidence for it. Would that lead to changes in the kinds of animals you see in which places? Changes we could see already?”

“It would, if it were true, but just because Leonard Nimoy on TV says…”

“So that might cause, say, a seal to come down into…like, these areas?” Doubting himself in the same breath, “Still, that’s a long way, and it was an especially cold winter, but the nearest seals are hundreds of miles away…”

“Excuse me, seals?”

“Umm, yeah, seals. I can’t say what kind. Not a big one, though.”

“What?!?”

“Tell you, Doc, I’ve seen every kind of animal in the Bush; hunted most of ‘em, but I never ran into a seal before.”

“You sure? I mean, a seal…What – when was this?” I smelt the air attentively for traces of alcohol fumes.

“Huh, okay, maybe it wasn’t a seal. But that’s what it looked like.”

“When was this?”

“Two nights ago.”

“Two nights ago?!?”

“Yeah. Before you ask, I hadn’t been drinking.” I hadn’t asked, but the thought occurred to me. “I was tired, though; dead tired. And I thought maybe I was seeing things. It wasn’t even nighttime yet; maybe four, five in the afternoon. We were taking down the frame around one of the drills and I’d gone into some bushes to take a leak, right where the slope meets the bottom, eh, and, I dunno, I just looked around like how you do and I noticed it there. Well, I didn’t notice it at first. It’s just my eyes were looking that way, and it was a clump of shadows beside some boulders and a spruce tree, except it moved up, not side to side, like something swaying in the wind would. And it moved too much, and that’s what made me notice it. I wasn’t a hundred percept sure it was an animal, until it opened its eyes.”

“How far away was this thing from you?”

“About…” he gauged the slope. “Seventy, eighty feet? If it was closer, maybe it’s not as big, but…I was tired…and nervous, and its eyes were red.”

“Red?”
“Like when you shine a flashlight in the dark, on the edge of the forest outside your car on the highway sometimes. I didn’t have a flashlight on me, though. It was like they made the light themselves. Anyhow, it was probably because I was surprised; didn’t expect to see it.”

“The ‘seal,’ you mean?”

“I was…mistaken. Never mind,” he enunciated carefully, breathing so as not to compete with the sounds of the wild.

The rain had thinned to a fine-droplet drizzle, and I could be sure enough to sleep, knowing we weren’t about to get washed away in a landslide, so I forgot the desire to relocate to higher, dryer ground. But I would not sleep just then. ‘Pleasure’ is the wrong word for it, but there’s something about sitting cross-legged, preferably on a slightly elevated spot, just thinking, taking everything in, meditating. The Tibetans understand. The fakirs of the Indian subcontinent certainly get it. However, our industrial culture has, until recently, quite literally busied itself with ignorance.

I thought about the disparate objects I’d plucked from the ground and how the dense carpet of sedges and rhododendrons might easily hide a thousand times as many from view. Perhaps even post-holes or charred fire pots related to the hunters who fashioned that arrowhead of green chert that so closely resembled Aborigine spearpoints from half a world away, which no one would ever learn about because their culture happened to have existed in places far outside the zones of major European settlement – nothing more than names on a map until centuries after smallpox and typhoid had scoured the landscape of its inhabitants. The very emptiness of the land led me to muse about what I might discover were I to return with more funding. The ecology is the key…yet what ecology was there to speak of? There was clearly the odd large ungulate passing through, but in spite of the lack of hunters and the untrammelled abundance of forage, it was as if the ecosystem had been cut off at the lower and topmost trophic levels, with no hare, nor grouse, ptarmigan, voles or shrews, nor martins or weasels to prey on them. Nor, I reflected, had I seen a hawk in the sky. The words of the old Indian in the bar in Wabush came back to me and I debated with myself whether he had told his tale of bad places and ill-fated prospectors out of drunkenness or whether he drank to forget something peculiar about these frigid barrens.

I could see it in the student, too. Something gave him the creeps, as well, but neither of us said a thing because neither of us had any idea what it was…the exact same quality of the light and texture, like the landscapes painted by Andrew B. Phin, that draw you in with their quaintness as you study them in the hall after leaving the washroom, then suck you into a world of depressive gloom and well-concealed sin that weighs on you like cold lead as you rejoin your host and, hopefully, other guests in a house or cottage you will never visit again. I had an inkling that made me want to run – no, jump into a helicopter – a sickening thought that I was about to be confronted with the source of the soul-crushing gloom of the painting in the cottage hallway. But nothing happened. There was the rain, and the whistling wind; across the gulch I saw an owl, Strix varus, I reckon, for I saw only the silohuette, perched atop a boulder below a half-skeletonized spruce. The poor creature was probably hoping that the unexpected rain upon the thin, poorly-drained soil would drive a vole or shrew from its den. Shivering myself, I figured it, too, must have been hungry and cold, for it swayed and bobbed on its perch; it must have clambered down and hopped up on the other side of the tree trunk, because it emerged there and I never saw it take flight. But owls, unless one is talking about the long-legged burrowing owls of the prairies, don’t hop about or even walk for transit. There must have been two of them, suffering equally from the cold and starvation. There is no morality in a food chain, but I found myself wishing that something – preferably a pair of rodents – would scurry out so that the unfortunate hunters might have a feast. Since they didn’t make any moves, I supposed the wish went unfulfilled. And…this seems somehow like a bad omen, after later events – I never saw them take wind and leave, although there was nowhere to conceal them, the trees being short and sparse.

“It’s embarrassing. They understand loyalty better than we humans do. A good reason never to get married.” I remember joking to the student. He seemed confused as if he hadn’t seen what I’d seen at all. I told myself it was good the expedition was coming to an end. I couldn’t put my finger on it, because we hadn’t really done much arduous work, besides the guys drilling the cores and the cook, nor had the weather conditions been truly harsh, at least by the standards of northern Quebec. Regardless, something had worn down the mental fortitude of a good portion of the team and it was getting to me, too.

I didn’t sleep much. Ehh, if you only understood, God, that it is normal – you should expect it – that you can ‘read’ the history of a place, whether a fish pond or Amerindian village, in the environment. Like a forensic detective reconstructing a chain of events from evidence. I’m talking both human and animal aspects of things. The great empty spaces on our maps are, as a rule, the richest in species diversity; the most teeming with life – empty of Man, full of everything else. Yet, there, which is still an empty space on the map…Ugh! As sleep overtook me, my mind lost its logical bearings. As you know, I have spent time in some of the world’s most inhospitable regions, full of venomous and predatory wildlife, virulent diseases, and dangerous politics. One assesses the danger and prepares accordingly. It felt…and I know this doesn’t make sense…it felt as though the land itself had it out for us.

Not the taiga, or Quebec; this specific spot…and all the while I hadn’t glimpsed so much as a paw print of anything that could kill a man, and the weather conditions had been annoying, at worst. I was sure – don’t ask me how – that the very hills and berry bushes and scraggly spruces were conspiring towards our doom. You remember what I said, about the Cree having stories about hunting bears the size of longhouses, with ‘arms’ growing out of their faces, though they’d never seen an elephant? Think, too, how the Kwakiut’l out in BC were carving animal masks that looked almost human but for the prognathous jaw, pouting lips, absense of a nose and copious hair. Since that was in later times, ‘experts’ dismissed them as depictions of mythical beings – oh, just like their representations of ravens, bears, eagles and orcas, I guess! — because the non-literate shellfish-gatherers could have had no concept of ‘ape’ or ‘monkey.’ You will be incredulous as I tell you that there was an entire town in Alaska – Portlock? — that was abandoned due to harassment and attacks on residents by large, hairy bipeds. If you assumed it was an old fur trappers’ or prospectors’ tale, I should mention that Portlock was a cannery town, manufacturing food for the war effort. And before you say ‘bears,’ bears don’t throw rocks or bludgeon men to death with logging equipment. We can accept that the Bengalee cannot effectively farm the Sundarbans because of the presence of tigers, despite it being a century since modern repeating firearms were introduced into the country. I reflected on the fact that, whatever technology we possessed, the capacity of our small band of men to control a hostile force in that environment, beyond the northernmost fringe of agriculture, was minimal. We made hardly more formidable prey than…my thoughts turned to the artifacts I’d found…hardly more formidable prey than some 18^th century Frenchman with a musket and hunting knife, or a turn-of-the-century prospector with his black powder revolver. Our flesh was certainly no less succulent…

Think of it! The improbability of sheer coincidence having kept the efficient, destructive hand of Homo europaeus away for so long…The old man in the Wabush bar had been laughing, not because he was drunk, but because he knew something and we city-slickers, with all our degrees and diplomas were blundering into…for the life of us I couldn’t remember what it was we were warned to stay clear of. Sleep got me but not before I decided that we, or at least I, was leaving the next day and if I could not build much of a report on a pile of buttons and pipe-bowls, well, too bad.

From a scientific perspective, I attach little significance to dreams. Under normal conditions, we can dismiss them once the day’s activities have begun in earnest, as the projections of the previous day’s thoughts and experiences, fermented and distilled by the imagination. I don’t claim that my nocturnal reveries that night belonged to a different category, but, night in the cold, star-spangled darkness hundreds of miles from the nearest city, is a different thing from the same in a comfortable modern house surrounded by millions of (mostly) sane, peaceable fellow citizens. Our internal censorship bureau remains active, but its verdicts are much less convincing.

I dreamed – it’s almost shameful to sound like I put stock in this – I dreamed that I was in a small boat, either a canoe or a rowboat of some rough beige material. There were bundles of goods onboard, but, for whatever reason, I felt no desire to inspect them. My coat was also a dull greyish beige, with heavy blue cuffs, and I felt a warm hat upon my head, but I never looked into a mirror. I ‘knew’ – nothing or noone in the dreams said this, but I knew it as by intuition – that it was my job to paddle as far as we could go, taking three or four of the swarthy rough-looking fellows paddling alongside me with me into the lands beyond for a mile or two, leaving the others to make camp. I did not know what I would find, but if I found it, we would stay longer. If not, we would paddle back the way we came. From the context, it must have been beaver we were hunting, but, then, it wasn’t real. The terrain was identical to that which we were actually encamped in. Despite the historical aspect of everyone’s clothes and the canoe, the scrawny forest and rhododendron-covered slopes were no more ‘primeval’ in appearance, although because the sun set on our left, we must have been approaching from the south, not from Labrador. There was a storm, and my small party’s journey of half a league’s distance became a convoluted trek as we exhausted ourselves zig-zagging among similar looking ridges, dry stream beds and spruce and alder groves. Eventually, in the side of a teardrop-shaped hill we found a spot where, sheltered from wind, the trees had grown to more substantial height and breadth, and a cut in the hillside – not quite a cave – offered some shelter for us and a small fire. The storm raged all night. Though we managed to stay warm and dry and were beat to death with fatigue, none of us slept. No man could sleep, hearing those sounds: a strange, whooping whistle. It wasn’t loud but it asserted itself through the wind and rain as if on purpose, to remind us that we are not the masters here. Henri – somehow I knew that he was ‘Henri’ – was frantic, tugging at my collar as I fought for rest. He was yelling something about les yeux, the eyes; le chouan, and the stones, like a preacher on a downtown streetcorner. I slapped him with a gloved hand, as I was entitled to do. When he did not stop, I moved to draw my sword, such was my fury, but…then I saw them myself. First on the hillside, then on the ridge, appearing and disappearing. Red eyes, which glowed – they couldn’t have been reflecting light because we had none. Then, amid what I’d taken to be the outline of a hummock or boulders, they appeared much closer, among the sedges and rocks of the dry streambed in front of us. All the while there was no sign of anything walking or flying towards us. They simply appeared. I tried to make out what manner of creature they belonged to, but it was hopeless. Sometimes they appeared disembodied in the utter blackness, but in one or two instances, there was a silhouette around them, not unlike that of an earless owl or a Scottish fold cat when perched and alert. How big they were – I couldn’t say, depending on if the outline was of one of the creature’s heads or its whole body, but, not very big. I naturally associated them with the whooping and whistling that had scared us…I took a blunderbuss and fired a shot wildly and the eyes and whistling disappeared, but none of us could be at peace, knowing that the beings – whatever they were – lurked around us. At the crack of dawn, we ran and stumbled back to camp to warn the others and flee south immediately. I don’t remember what we found.

After a dream like that, understandably, I woke up in a bit of a bad humour. I was astonished by my watch, which showed it past 8:30 in the morning. Amazingly, O’Hara and the McGill student were still asleep in their bags, as if none of our alarm clocks had gone off. Not being a jerk, I let them sleep and went to go get coffee for myself. The earth was a sponge beneath my boots. The rain had continued all night. I saw that a clump of people had gathered at the tents lower down, on the rocks. Pushing my way through, I asked but got no answer. A second later, I saw they could hardly have provided one. The expedition leader (at least, he saw himself as that), Barney Moffat, was still in his sleeping bag. He was not alive. No inquest was done, but I’ll speak for everyone when I say it’s better to search for your oil elsewhere and leave that God-forsaken snow-desert to itself. I don’t think the expedition’s report included photographs. We didn’t take any. But I can give you a fair description…

Do you garden? If so, do you grow tomatoes? If so, then, I assume you are familiar with the appearance of a nice, ripe beefsteak tomato which has been subject to depredation by M. quinquemaculata – the tomato hornworm? Well, imagine that, but the beefsteak tomato is the torso of a man. What’s more, when all was said and done, it appeared there was a hole in the tent floor as well and – mere coincidence – the tent had been set up atop a natural fissure of about six or seven inches in diameter, pierced through the granite bedrock. This, anyhow, was what we agreed upon in our report. We did not plumb the fissure to ascertain its depth, and, if you have sense, neither will you. Tell your boss that Alberta’s premier is a lucky man, and please forward my cheque to my account at the Bank of Montreal.

Regards,

Dr. G. H. Belzer”

終

ULMUS

Part One of the Three Ages of Toronto

by M.G. Warenycia

I stood here before the first white sail came

As a footnote to Monsieur Champlain’s fame,

When the Huron and the Iroquois warred,

Longhouses and maize-fields dotting the sward,

Already tall and in aspect genteel

When first my kindred kenned the bite of steel.

With axe and musket each tribe sought its place,

Till plague and hunger laid waste to their race.

For many a year, none but ghosts did dwell

Mid wild ravine and goldenrod-fringed dell.

Then was a turmoil in the land to the South;

They came for land to feed the hungry mouth,

Those hardy wanderers, Loyal and stern,

By the sweat of their brows their bread to earn.

Forests primeval were wrenched from the earth,

My kinsmen’s corpses stacked by the hearth;

They planted apples and other things new:

Wheat, and cabbage, potato roots too.

Toil and thrift were these settlers’ home-brought creed:

The Land of Winter brooked no softer breed.

Alone I stood, upon the orchard knoll,

Spared since I shared their sombre, brooding soul.

I saw fires upon stately gambrel roofs,

My trunk echoing soldiers’ horses’ hoofs:

In blue legions, covetous, marched the Yanks,

Coming to conquer while expecting thanks.

Bold Brock fell and many a farmhouse burned;

With guns and guts th’invader’s gift was spurned.

Fruitful the orchards—and the people too,

Though alone in the wilderness they grew

As the wild-grape vines, in odd directions;

Each household its law with no corrections;

The clapboard cottages their secrets hold

Of sowings and reapings best left untold;

No Light there was save the Boreal sun;

Islands in forest-sea, nowhere to run.

Then came the age of Confederation;

The folk, grudging, joined a two-tongued nation.

Uneasily, I held my ancient court

As southward a City sprang from a Fort.

Pleased I was when the prospering townsmen

Lines their streets with thousands of my children.

“Toronto” ‘twas named, from Native fables;

They built shops, mills, charming Bay & Gables—

Homes graced with gardens that were studded thick

With lilies, Orange as their politics.

Above the crowd’s hubbub, the streetcar’s chime;

Sports on a Sunday was a grievous crime:

However much it expanded and thrived,

The City with my nature perfect jibed.

Then rose a madness over the ocean,

Threatening the Crown to whom devotion

Beat yet strong in the inhabitants’ hearts.

The City’s sons did eager depart,

But seldom returned except cruelly changed,

And art and music, expressing, grew strange.

The decade that followed was harsh and dry;

Some did run rum for the Yankees to buy;

Others o’er the sea did curious peer,

Some with admiration and some with fear.

Thus again to subdue the Teuton’s wrath

The City’s sons marched upon a one-way path.

As many as my leaves in autumn shed,

So many mourned the folk—their honoured dead.

Fire-scoured forests with doubled brightness bloom,

So land and people in richness did boom:

Stoic and stalwart like a mighty Elm

Or a storm-bred captain seizing the helm;

I saw the folk full of hope’s raw vigour

Stride broadly forward, trusting the Future.

Alas! About the time when first unfurled

Their banner, self-woven, before the world,

Into my vast roots a rot was creeping;

The centuries sap was fast depleting,

And so with all of the established stock:

Our limbs withered, our bark was dry as chalk.

When the arborists came and hewed our tops

And ripped us all up by the grove and copse,

The sun shone fresh upon a grand parade

And the City emerged from our eldritch shade.

The Norway Maple (Toronto)

Acer platanoides, chief of the urban arbour:

Like Sweno, the Norwayan king,

A stalwart bushy conqueror

Whose tale the poets sing.

He crossed the sea, invited,

In the reign of P.E.T.

To settle in the City blighted

By the scourging Elm disease.

Standing sentry over lawns and yards,

Limescent in the Springmer sun,

He shaded all the boulevards

As once the umbrous Elms had done.

Hearty he grew, and proud,

For did not the nation’s flag bear his noble face?

And yet he could not please the crowd

Who said this land was not his place.

A healthy wood, the ecologists said,

Forms a living web whose bonds are torn

When invades the foreign-bred;

Native Nature felled, they mourn.

The hipsters pined for the ancient Oak;

And denizens of the southern Beaches—

Academics and artsy, cultured folk—

Liked their garden dinners ‘neath the Ashes.

As the Viking of the land of his birth

Knew monk and peasant feared his call,

So the mighty Maple bloomed with mirth

As the City’s soil came under his thrall.

“The cold freezes not my vital juices;

My roots with relish drink the salt of the road;

How eager they bought into my ruses

As the cane-farmers welcomed the Queensland toad.”

And so Toronto upon the Lake

Was left without a choice to make;

If green the City desired to be,

Submit it must to the Norway Maple tree.

Painting on a Summer Evening, Grange Avenue, Toronto

by M.G. Warenycia

A caterpillar is marching circuits

Around the window fame.

The chestnuts and linden lush

And perfumed with Jasmine tea

Smother the humdrum Sturm und Drang

As the hot and irritable City seeps outward

Like water squeezed from a sponge.

“The world has been getting smaller,”

She says the truth.

First school, then university seemed to fade;

“They still exist,” she secretly suspects,

Recalling walking past daydream backgrounds of

Faces and voices—but that was long ago.

A year? Two?

Club nights and parties became occasional effort

And then a crime.

All the places become Google images

Alone; all the people become pics and posts.

“The world is getting smaller”—

She paints to chase away the thought

And to lure ghosts

Of Yesterday, Tomorrow and Elsewhere

To make her feel familiar.

And there’s YouTube and Netflix,

Poirot and Studio Ghibli in HD DVD.

It helps and then it doesn’t

When, in the evening through the still-dark morn,

With the cold-sweat panic

To be Somewhere and Someone one isn’t.

Brew some coffee, put on a podcast, paint:

Emergency measures

Wielded with flagrant frequency

That would make dictators blush.

On the canvas, a moth

Has seen a light,

Flaps to fly

And hits the wall of a jar.

The jar is getting smaller…

The breeze at the window is so fresh

It feels wasted

On sleeping nostrils,

The light beyond so beautiful and bright

It aches; she wants to scream

But no one can hear her through the jar.

《土生土長陌生人》

背井離鄉謀生意，

山棲谷隱找機會。

晚風淒涼海廣闊，

靜夜多思訪舊友。

虛業無味竟喪心，

欲回加國見鄉親。

然而市民患病狂，

繁榮城市已空荒；

人似樂意當囚犯，

最憎自由男子漢。

昔日街巷已萬變，

土生土長陌生人。

隧道盡頭還有燈？

哪有知己共美夢？

Streetcar Chimes

She boarded the streetcar, a degree or two ago,

Like a salmon, unconscious, going with the flow;

Sealed below the Bloor-Yonge Line,

Wielding as if her birthright

The scholar’s pen and painter’s brush,

The Lake-side ash-grove her Druidic shrine.

Markets bursting with as many a kind

And taste of fruit as people,

Each a brushstroke,

The City painted by them combined.

We are seeking Truth with intrigue and fun

—This she, far too young, did know:

As a lash on flesh the knowing drove her,

Lest the Prize be gone before it was won.

The streetcar passes less often now,

From changes sudden come

Like Jaeger bombs on a starving brain

That left her pondering “how?”

The chimes echo not quite the same

Off glass and steel and plywood shacks from which

Pungent prophets curse the masked-up sheep

That full the waste she once did claim.

A stranger in her newfound home

Who alone in Dreams can roam

In the stillness of the suffocated City’s night,

Hurtling blindly in mental flight.