Nov 262012
 

This year’s edition of Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press), edited by John Metcalf, just arrived on the doorstep with the afternoon mail. DG’s story “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child,” originally published by Philip Graham in Ninth Letter, is included in a stellar list which also contains an amazing number of Numéro Cinq writers: Lynn Coady, Caroline Adderson & Steven Heighton. That means four out of the ten stories included in Best Canadian Stories this year were written by authors we’ve published on these pages. This tells you something about the quality of the work we’re publishing.

Here’s the opening of the story. You can order the book online from Chapters/Indigo.

dg

———-

The Sun Lord and the Royal Child

By Douglas Glover

.

I went to see my friend Nedlinger after his wife killed herself in that awful and unseemly way, making a public spectacle of herself and their life together, which, no doubt, Nedlinger hated because of his compulsive need for privacy and concealment, a need which seemed to grow more compelling as his fame spread, as success followed success, as the money poured in, so that in later years when he could no longer control or put a stop to his public notoriety, when it seemed, yes, as if his celebrity would eclipse his private life entirely, he himself turned reclusive and misanthropic, sought to erase himself, as it were, and return to the simple life of a nonentity.

You will recall that Nedlinger began his career as a so-called forensic archaeologist specializing in the analysis of prehistoric Iroquoian ossuaries in southwestern Ontario and it was then, just after finishing his doctorate, before lightning struck, as it were, that he met Melusina, at that time a mousy undergraduate studying library science, given to tucking her unruly hair behind her ears and wearing hip-length cardigan sweaters with pockets into which she stuffed used and unused tissues, note cards, pens, odd gloves, sticks of lip balm, hand lotion and her own veiny fists, her chin depressed over her tiny, androgynous breasts–in those days she wore thick flesh coloured stockings and orthopedic shoes to correct a birth defect, syndactyly, I believe it is called. Only Nedlinger, with his forensic mind, could pierce the unpromising surface, the advertising, as it were, to the intelligent, passionate, sensual, fully alive being that hid in the shadows.

— Buy the book, read the rest.

Feb 012012
 

“Blue Clouds” deals up predatory males, mothers and daughters, betrayed and doubly betrayed women (an ancient story told with freshness and aplomb with just a hint of perverse eroticism), against an ironic backdrop of political engagement — even more ironic because it’s all told through the eyes of the cleaning help. Cynthia Flood writes like a telegram — terse, elliptical — but creates fictional worlds dense with character, drama and a sudden crimping of emotion. Cynthia Flood’s stories found their way into Best Canadian Stories twice (1997 & 2001) in the decade I edited the book; it’s wonderful to have her on the pages of NC. (The author photos are by Dean Sinnett.)

dg

 

The pattern often isn’t noticed till a man’s in his thirties, even forties. By then he’s had several — serious relationships, the comrades say. Serial monogamy, they say that too. If his teens were examined there’d be no surprise finding he’d favoured girlfriends with dear little sisters, but here at the hall people mostly arrive in their twenties. Their time before the movement is hidden, except what they pick to tell, and telling is cleaning.

Back up. Such a man, when he falls for a woman she has a daughter. Maybe two. Could be sons also, but he’s not aiming for importance in the life of a small man. It’s the small woman he wants. Oh, not to rape, though maybe a hug she’ll remember on a birthday, or when she’s back from summer camp. No, he wants to implant his image, so if she thinks Man it’s him. He puts his arm round her mother, tongue-kisses, turns to smile. This is how it’s done. Your mum likes it. Seen it, seen it, the offer to babysit. The young mum goes off smiling to her CR group. This guy really wants her to be liberated! He plays with the girl, helps with homework, is fun with her friends, and if she’s in her teens lets her know sideways that boys haven’t much to offer. He and she chat about how immature they are, how the girl deserves better. Then the break-up: he’s charmed by a fresh girl/woman combo. Stale mother, alone again. A child missing him can be comforted but a teen turns sour, specially to revolutionary mum.

Exceptions, yes. Roy’s a carpenter, in his late forties. On him, those years look good. He and Marion and her daughter came to Vancouver from the Calgary branch ten years ago. At the Friday suppers R and M are side by side at the big table. They dance, they picket and poster and go to conventions. Marion’s a lifer at the post office, friendly, considerate. Not much for theory. Jennifer just finished high school. Hasn’t joined the Youth. Comes with the grownups to the Oct Rev and May Day banquets, that’s all. Sullen.

Her father?

“None of your beeswax,” says the old one.

The true sign of no nastiness with Roy is that he and Marion and Jennifer don’t live together. To be under the same roof — the girl-hunters engineer and plot to get there, but this mum and her daughter keep their own place.

Enough chit-chat. The bathrooms at the movement hall are Monday.  After every weekend, vomit’s here and there because the Youth can’t manage booze yet. Not only them, either. The divided bucket: dip mop in cleaning solution on one side, then in water so hot it hurts. Use the side-press wringer. Repeat, repeat. Disinfect the wheezing toilets. Smear abrasive cream on porcelain. Sprinkle deodorizing powder on the floor, sweep it up. The bathrooms won’t ever look like ads, but they’re better than the Cavalier’s. That’s down the street, Monday’s next job. Pub washrooms take twice as long to clean. Shovel, more like. Stinking loops of paper that never reached the bowl, condoms, underpants, butts, coke, bloody pads draped over the pedal-cans, smashed glass, the red crushed wax of lipstick.

§

The problem of the strong women is different.

The old one’s in her sixties. Pushy as hell to survive and support her girl (near forty now) and do the political. Husband? AWOL decades back, couldn’t manage her. Such a life, rebelling through Depression War Cold War, struggling for abortion and birth control, still at it, startled and happy to meet today’s young libbers. Hardworking beyond hardworking. Known to every lefty in the city, admired.

“No point any man sniffing around thank you very much. I like my independence.”

Used to be, her typewriter rattled on for hours. Arthritis now. Hates help.

Her daughter’s the opposite. When she comes round, not often, always for money, the old one’s sad after. Hides in a bathroom to re-braid her hair, the tiara brown still with grey woven in. Out again. Slam. “Jake, you call this sink clean?” Marion sometimes sits with her, talking quietly. A hug round the shoulders.

Back up! Women like the old one don’t mean harm. They’re just big. Breathing normally, they suck out all the oxygen. Beloveds can suffocate.

Enough. Cleaner, that’s the job here at the hall. And handyman.

Why can’t the TU comrades — revolutionary electricians carpenters fishermen longshoremen — shim the filing cabinet, rewire the ceiling light, put a new ribbon in the Remington when the old one’s fingers won’t? Because they’re not here weekdays. They work. Or, in this period of intensifying struggle, they’re on strike. Locked out. A demo, a flying picket, a union meeting.

The men on staff here were mostly students, before. They can’t put a handle on a pencil-sharpener, let alone finesse the old Gestetner. The present Organizer once took twenty minutes by the clock deciding whether to phone Toronto Centre long-distance. (No.) Swivels his chair about, reads, wouldn’t notice a mass uprising at the front door. Recently the old one reamed him out when a still-meaty chicken carcass vanished from the fridge. “There’s petty cash in this hall, too,” shouting. “Typewriters, easy to pawn. Open your eyes, asshole!”

Back up back up back up. Girl-hunters, strong women — these are types. Learning to identify, over two decades of cleaning here. Others too. The too-enthusiastic contact who toils at the hall night and day for months, then gone without a word. “Here on a visit,“ the cdes state.

The misfits, so-called, those with a serious lack, a family it may be, looks, social ease, fluency in English, even a job. They want compensation.

So do those mourning a religion or a love. Mourning a baby, once, but after two years dying of grief she revived and left.

As for the nut-cases, no one here or elsewhere knows what to do. Some cdes, forcibly removed in ambulances, come back to rant and throw furniture.

Back up!

Roy too lives in the old three-storey building near English Bay. The Sandringham. Good construction, not like now. Solid wood doors, brass carpet-rods on the stairs (tricky to clean), small delivery cupboards outside each apartment door. For milk, long ago, by horse-drawn cart no doubt. Roy’s on the top floor. Says Hello. Chats at the mail boxes, or by the laundry next to the small basement suite. In exchange for interior maintenance, reduced rent. A deal. Ideal.

Once Roy wisecracked about the old mole Revolution, underground. Nothing to say occurred. The place in fact is bright.

Most tenants are elderly, female, alone. Some dodder. Not Mrs Wolfe. That Saturday she came over because she’d been away a day or two, on Bowen, lovely weather, and was now afraid for Miss Nugent above her, who did not answer door or phone.

“But I heard a tap on my ceiling.”

To the second floor. In Mrs W’s bare spare kitchen, listening upwards to silence.

Then to the manager’s apartment, but Russell’s almost always sozzled since his wife died. Couldn’t locate a key. What a jeezly mess. Mrs W’s eyebrows up to the hairline.

The stairs with her again, third floor, seeking Roy’s skill and strength. Also he might know locks. Rap, rap.

Mrs W wondered, “That milk cupboard. Could someone get through?”

Broad male shoulders the problem, not only Roy’s.

He said, “I’ll phone Marion. Jennifer might.”

Not long till the two arrived. The girl slender as celery.

Roy broke through Miss N’s milk-door.

Mrs Wolfe’s trill. “Emily! Emily?”

Nothing.

The girl’s arms, head, shoulders into the aperture, Marion lifting legs to help. Jennifer’s bum, compressed, wiggling through. Roy’s gaze. Savouring. A tumble, a scramble. The latch clicking open.

What was expected. Not dead, out cold, one hip at a wrong angle. Ugly breathing. The kitchen floor puddled.  Been there two days anyway, the ambulance guessed.

Miss N gone then, feet first as the saying goes, unlikely to return. Siren fading. Mrs W weepy, Roy and Jennifer slipping out, useless Russell barging in.

Marion. “A cup of tea, Mrs Wolfe? Your place? Best to take your friend’s keys.” Poking through the shabby purse, more tears.

Alone to clean up, also as expected. Floor soon done, but Roy to be all rethought. Marion too. The girl didn’t arrive alone. Not allowed? Separate apartments. What went on in Calgary?

§

Each Monday, the quality of the previous evening’s branch meeting is palpable.

Attacking the bathrooms, even a humble contact — a man who’s never joined, never paid dues, invented a party-name, raised a hand, spoken his word, taken to the streets, held a banner, waved a leaflet, a man who only cleans for statutory hours as he cleans all the rental spaces in this building, offices, storage rooms, cubbies for solo notaries accountants psychics — even that man can smell the night’s doings. Fear sometimes. Anger, agitation.  The tang of power.

To sense.

Long long ago, a so-called friend of the mum whispered she hadn’t wanted this baby. Tried to have it out, failed. Illegal then and still. This whisper heard at thirteen, approx. Why tell? Mean. A child’s word, correct. Rancid with meanness. Much thought given to that whisper.

Life alone with her, scanty hard rough, tempers lost voices raised but never an unwanted feel, not even with the school troubles, abc and xyz and all between. She wasn’t a big person, either, plenty of air. Though large when gone.

Years later, realizing that teller’s envy. Of the mum. With her failure by her side. Warmth ran all the way back through the shared time.

§

Back up back up.

The hall, one morning — like sniffing leftovers from the fridge, Nose declaring On the turn. Irrevocable. Trouble.

At big tables, cdes fold, staple, lick stamps, smoke. From the back room, no printing sounds because the monster’s on the fritz. This week’s forum leaflet is just a ditto. Nobody’s pleased. Waste-paper all over the O’s office, the basket full. His plaid shirt stiff with sweat. What a reek. The worker daily handling dirt grime scum cum dust rot grit mould ooze shit pee grease slime puke scuzz grunge — that one, his body’s clean. Fresh overalls. On such a day, routine sustains. Ammonia. Baking soda. Snaky wet-mop whispers, swirling over lino. The power of bleach. New rubber gloves. Where not pitted, the chrome shines.

Tired.

The old one isn’t talking. Sternly brings coffee. Not enough sugar. After twenty years she should know.

At last, check the stuck Gestetner. Ink can’t be forced through. Roller, drums, something inside, invisible. No time now to take it apart.

Tired. A nap on the fold-out cot? Better to exit this bad air. The Cavalier’s dirt a relief.

§

Late afternoon, going home.

Mrs Wolfe outside the Chinese grocery. Holding a turnip. “Jake, that Jennifer is in the building.”

Clarification. Mrs W has gone up to air out Miss N’s place, launder the lonely tea-towel and undies in the hamper.  Has seen the girl.

“I’ve never liked that man’s looks. Trouble coming.”

In she goes, to pay for her vegetable. So she too has a list of types. If she and the old one met? Scorn, to start. Prim proper, tough coarse sharp. They’d find links though. Care for others, disapproval. Mrs W was once a crack typist.

Looking up at Roy’s windows. That girl in his bed, bum and all. The mother alone.

Telling should have happened then. A word to the old one. To the women’s fraction leader, not that Ms Loose Tits ever notices a cleaner’s work. To the O, even.  Should, should, telling is cleaning, but. But she was under the Sandringham’s roof, night after night. Close by. Wake, sense. Once, up the carpeted stairs. Silence. Stained glass backlit by the moon. The corridor still, by Roy’s. No vibrations.

Some days later, he’s in the laundry room. Cross. Shoving sheets into the dryer.

“Nothing but meddling old women here.”

They find somewhere else. At night, the building’s different.

§

On Wednesday the off-smell at the hall is overlaid by tension, like before a demo, or a bitter forum where all know the TU cdes will haul some yelling sectarian out. What? There’s been no announcement.

Kitchen.

After the big Friday suppers it’s late when cdes clean up, all are tired, the fluorescents cast distorting shadows. Mondays, bathrooms take precedence. Thus, today’s task is to degrease. On counters, sinks, oven racks, shelving, baking pans, soup-kettles, sharp liquids force soft fats to huddle into little orbs while hard ones slide off like scabs. The new spray-can foams penetrate where a soapy rag can’t. Skin itches. Eyes hurt. The old one reads aloud the cans’ contents, but she’s no chemist. Familiar cleansers are harsh anyway. Over time, steel wool blurs fingerprints.

Now all squeaks clean, but the sink won’t drain. A wire hook fishes up carbonized macaroni thick with tapioca cement. Still water won’t rush down. The cut-off valve. A bucket. Hands and knees, to the j-pipe. Wrench. Open. Scrape, but the foul blockage lacks any spoon, bottle-opener, pencil. No obvious blame. Back painful, twisted. The Gestetner can wait.

§

Work socks, cheapest at Army & Navy.  Parcel in hand, out to sunshine, and on the corner a group of women. Not young, not libbers. The light’s hard on used skin, bare arms. A chocolate bar, shared. Laughter in the sun. Downlines by the lips curl way up. The old one’s daughter waves her cigarette in the air, a big circle, more giggles, affection all round. Watching them, a fellow on crutches. Once a logger? Skid row’s full of broken men. Coal dust ground into every old miner’s cheeks, forehead, ears, into the eyelids’ red linings.

§

“Jennifer is eighteen.” The old one speaks through tight teeth. “A woman grown.” Purple eye-bags. “Won’t listen, naturally. Little fool. As for him. . . .”  She goes on scalping potatoes for supper.

The big machine releases the coils of its hose.

To run the vacuum is to be doubly invisible. From room to room the roaring goes without a glance from cdes rolling out paper tablecloth, slinging cutlery, setting up chairs and lectern and the lit table. Fridays aren’t as important as Sundays, but they do matter. Suppers and forums draw contacts.

The cord’s too short to do the whole place in one go, so pull from one outlet, plug into another. The beast snorts up dirt. In the noise-gaps comrades go on talking loudly as they pin up the regular decorations, posters of screaming naked child, screaming kneeling woman, man shot dead in the ear, a president’s snarl, women holding sky.

Someone surprised those two in Stanley Park. Movement behind bushes. Not just someone. Marion. She made a scene at the branch exec.

Jennifer and Roy moved the girl’s stuff to his place, meanwhile. Every single thing.

Jennifer wouldn’t listen to the old one. Laughed at Marion. No, the mother slapped the daughter. True, both.

Roy’s quitting the movement. No, he refused to quit. Cited women’s liberation, the girl’s right to control her own body, choose lovers freely.

At this the mother shouted, “Bullshit! God damn you to hell.” Lots of atheists still curse by God. The women’s fraction mostly on side with the mother. Two leading women against.

The O’s torn. Roy might be expelled. Mightn’t.

As the vacuum noses towards its cave, the old one wades into the hissing gossip. “Shut up, the lot of you! Can’t you see it’s a tragedy?” Throws down her apron, blunders weeping to the door and out into summer rain.

About this work. After the vacuuming, no one says, “Wow, look at the floors!” Cover given by the noise is unnecessary. Stocky, not tall, not authoritative, not admired by any girl. Who’ll observe a toilet’s blanching? An unspotted mirror, shelves unfurred? Young cdes assume  things clean themselves. Telling is cleaning. Without, the inexorable slide from malfunction to breakdown, mess to filth.

Rare, to eat supper at the hall. This evening the tables packed, loud. Who peeled the spuds after the old one left? No matter. Plain food, plentiful. All await, none saying so, the arrival of — Roy? He’d have the nerve. Jennifer? Raging Marion?

None.

Staying to hear the speaker is beyond rare, but to leave feels incomplete. Plus disloyal to the old one, still AWOL.

The draft-dodger at the lectern is black Irish, his family raw from Dublin to New York somewhere in the 19th c. Witty yet dead serious. A vocabulary to stun. Vietnam his theme. His topic, divisions in the anti-war movement over slogans. With vigour he parses Victory to the Vietcong, Bring The Troops Home, Stop Canadian Complicity, U S Out Now, arrives at the right conclusion — and leaps off again, soaring to a prosecutor’s summing up of capitalism’s bellicose crimes. Then a paean to the brave Vietnamese. To the sacrifice and glory of the workers’ movements around the world. Their history. Their future.

When with a startled look the speaker ceases, applause. Spontaneously all rise to sing the Internationale. He blushes. Then the old one’s up the aisle, tiara and clothes damp with rain. She claps him on the back, the first of many.

Not including the old one’s daughter. Snuck in. Nearby. The bleak face hateful, scornful of hall, speaker, song, applause. Oh why tonight, her mother happy? How to get rid? The forum over, everyone in motion. Hand to pocket but too slow. Those two pairs of eyes find each other.

A kind of finish. The day not yet over, though.

To the Cavalier, as a customer. Alone, to consider that young man’s exultation. The old one’s sorrow. Days of blame before she’ll be anything like herself. If hand quicker to pocket, all changed? No. For sure that daughter wants to wound.

Back up. No, no, this isn’t like not telling about the girl. That wasn’t for sure. Might have changed things. Coward. Worse.

A second beer. The daughter’s contempt aims at her mother, but it’s common these days on the call-in radio shows, TV, the talk on buses. Loathing. Fear. But what if no young rebelled? Just grew old? Before departure, a visit to the men’s room. Disgusting, though scrubbed savagely this morning. There’s the answer to What if.

Then the dark hike down to English Bay. Will Roy’s bedroom light be on? No, dirty coward. They’re elsewhere.

§

Sunset.

Here on the beach at English Bay, a sharp curve in the seawall makes good shelter to watch the sky split into gold and orange feathers. People come round that point squinting westward, don’t see someone almost at their feet on the grey sand.

Can that be Roy, hungry, hang-dog?

Be certain!

Up from beach to path, scurry ahead of the pair. Dip down by shrubs.

She’s in view first. Cat got the cream, look at me! Not a glance at that desperate figure by her, starved. Watching a handsome man thus, pure pleasure. Hot tasty spite. Meanness. Typical.

The colours in the sky go on for hours, as they do in summer.

§

Weekly, the Bissell beats as it sweeps as it cleans the carpet-runners on the first floor of The Sandringham, the second, third.

Dust banisters. Dust the sills of the stained-glass windows, nearly colourless by day.

Behind Miss N’s door, silence.

Behind Roy’s too.

Neither he nor Marion appears at the hall, their absence a sore licked by sixty tongues a day. Other cdes take on their assignments. The O studies his documents. For no reason the old one’s arthritis lets up, and at 110 wpm the Remington’s carriage-bell rings madly. Newspaper copy, minutes, letters, drafts of leaflets and pamphlets.

§

The Cavalier’s lino is so scarred and broken that cleaning the floor is ritual only, but the front windows still do respond.

What? The old one’s limping down the street toward the pub. Well-known of course, Red Annie, local character.

Out of the boozy dim, vinegar rag in hand.

“Jake, it’s Jennifer. Get Marion.”

In the struggle towards reading, some words are fireworks. War, for example, even if it comes up as raw, once learned isn’t forgotten. Same with hearing. That name’s a floodlight.

Run.

“Good comrade!” cries the old one.

Seven blocks downtown, hot bright streets, breathless.

At the post office, the mother’s on a break, where? Run upstairs, the cafeteria, panting, not there, down, corridors, where? Doors, counters, asking. At last Marion’s surprise, terror.

“Quick,” she gasps, exiting the PO.

Vinegar rag waves for a taxi.

Arrival. Marion headlong into the hall.

The  cab waits.

From the Gestetner room, the O’s swivel chair emerges. Slumped in it, Jennifer, eyes half-closed. The old one pushes the chair forward, kicks at Roy, elbows him off.

“Mummy?”

“Right here, darling.” An embrace. Marion grabs the chair, heads for the door. Roy trails.

With the old one, a shared stare at the print-room. The Gestetner to be eviscerated. The ditto machine. Folded-out cot. Silkscreen. Splats on the lino.

“Later!” she cries, pulling an arm. “They’ve been in there for weeks. He’d got a hall key somehow.” Passing the O’s office. “Damn fool never noticed.”

Out to the sidewalk.

“Bastard, how could you?” The mother spits.

Roy’s chin drips. “It wasn’t a quack I took her to! I’d never do that, Marion, you know me! I love her.”

“In we get, darling.”

Taxi’s off to Emergency. The not-father-to-be runs after. “Marion, come back!” Slows. Slinks off.

Double-quick, to the Cavalier for a mickey. The swig’s sharp, hot.

Back. Into the kitchen, at the big table by the old one.

She swallows.

Again.

Calmer now.

In a bit she’ll go over to the Remington, won’t notice the bucket’s clank. Cleaning solution this side, pink water that.

“If the cops don’t come down on us for aiding and abetting, we’ll be lucky. Procuring, even. Bloody irresponsible.”  She doesn’t know the half of that. “And you heard, he quote loves her. Typical.” Sighing, she sets the flask aside, smoothes her hair.

§

At the PO, Marion puts in for a transfer and returns to Calgary.

Strong Jennifer moves to Toronto. Bum never seen again.

At the next branch, Roy shoves in to argue his case. TU cdes strong-arm him out. In this the old one doesn’t exactly take pleasure, but she doesn’t not either.

Russell manages to locate the Apt For Rent sign, pens 2 clumsily before Apt.

A day later, a summons from Mrs W.

“Look what that man did before he left.”

The Sandringham’s garbage cans, tossed. Newsprint all over the alley, cat-litter, tins, jars, peels and grounds, bacon-fat, tea-bags. Slimy leavings coat the cans’ insides. After tomorrow’s pickup, scrub. Russell won’t do it. Somebody has to.

“He even threw these out.“ Wet white papers stick to asphalt, drift under parked cars. She holds out a handful. “From when Jennifer was a little girl.”

Artworks, back through elementary. One picture has a strip of green along the bottom, red flower-dots above, a white sky thick with paint. Along the top are plump blue clouds with scalloped edges.

“Poor girl. She got that all wrong too.”

This doesn’t cover the whole situation, yet nothing to say occurs. Mrs W stoops to gather up more refuse.

                                                                                    —————————————————

Cynthia Flood’s latest collection of short fiction is The English Stories (Biblioasis 2009). Her stories have appeared in many Canadian magazines and anthologies and in Best Canadian Stories, and have won the Journey Prize and a National Magazine Gold among other awards. She’s at work on a fourth collection of stories and has published recently at FoundPress.com and Joyland.ca  After decades in a house on Vancouver’s East Side, she now lives in a 7th-floor apartment overlooking Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Heaven!

Sep 142011
 

Read this as a lament, a keen. It was written, to start with, for Numéro Cinq’s series of “Childhood” essays. But this is no island idyll. It’s not even poignant; that’s too mild a word.  It is sad beyond sad. It is a trip to the heart of darkness. It is also beautiful and rich and generous to that which deserves generosity. In places it makes for nearly unbearable reading. And yet it demands to be read. Years ago, I took a chance on an unknown writer and included one of Kim’s stories in the annual anthology Best Canadian Stories which I edited at the time. In the intervening years she has proved out my intuition, growing deeper, more complex, more heartbreakingly open.

Kim lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (she chronicled her move there from Toronto for NC with two lovely “What it’s like living here” pieces).  She is a writer and artist who grew up in Bermuda and earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her watercolours have been exhibited in galleries, and her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The New Quarterly, Room, Event, upstreet and other journals. She recently completed a memoir, The Girl in the Blue Leotard. She is a Founding Member and Editor of Red Claw Press and leads an annual retreat to Bermuda for writers and artists. 

dg

.

I was born and grew up in Bermuda where my father was born and grew up, and a few generations of Aubreys before him. Photos show me as a baby, sitting in a laundry basket full of oranges, fruit as bright, round and juicy as the world must have seemed back then.

Next to the plump oranges, I looked pale and thin. My parents worried I wasn’t gaining enough weight. My father bought me goat’s milk and fussed over me, helping me to sleep by bouncing me in his arms every evening when he returned home from selling jewellery in his shop on Queen Street.

Kim in the orange grove

As a toddler, I was so slight that my mother had to cross the straps of my overalls twice—first on my back, then across my chest. When a big wind rushed in from the Atlantic, she held onto me so I wouldn’t blow away. I loved how the wind pushed against my face, pressing my mouth open, promising to take me someplace new. But I loved the island too—the oranges dangling from their leafy ceiling, the crabgrass tickling my feet, the warm Bermuda earth, red-orange with iron.

When I was six or seven, my parents rented “Rocky Ridge,” a blue bungalow on a cliff overlooking Harrington Sound, where my mother taught me and my brothers, E.R. and Mark, how to swim. We’d run across our backyard to the grey limestone steps, which led down to the sea through a hollowed-out cave, its sandy walls the colour of cream. We’d rub our fingers against the crumbling limestone, stare at the small holes that seemed drilled into it, looking for the creatures that had burrowed there. Sunlight filtered through the cave, cast arcing shadows over its bright surface, enticing us to follow it out into a world of light and water.

Aubrey house with the orange trees

The cave opened onto a long narrow dock stretching out over the blue-green sound. If you stared down from the end of the dock, you might see bright fish or dark sea rays. If you looked out across the sound, you’d notice that it was encircled by land, sheltered, enclosed. But we seldom looked out; we ran for the steps leading down into the clear water where purple sea urchins raised their spikes from the sandy bottom, and shiny sea cucumbers lay waiting for us to squeeze the water out of them.

My mother taught my father to swim too, even though he’d spent his whole life on an island surrounded by water and she’d grown up in a small town in Maine at least an hour from the coast. She’d learned to swim in the cool waters of Great Pond where her aunt and uncle had built a log cabin, while my father had avoided the beach, afraid of the bullying surf that could send you sprawling under, push water up your nose and salt into your eyes.

South Shore Bermuda

The sound could be calm and glassy, or gentle waves could hold you floating. Only in a storm did the water leap up and fly against the limestone cliff, swamping the dock and filling the cave, washing away more sand from its soft walls. Sometimes, the waves would blast up over our house, and once we found a trumpet fish stranded on the driveway out front. My mother flung it over the cliff, back into the water before it could begin to stink.

Trumpet fish are long and thin. They camouflage themselves by standing on their noses amongst strands of like-coloured coral, or swimming with schools of like-coloured smaller fish on which they prey.

Sometimes, my brothers and I fished off the dock. Once I caught a squirrelfish—orange-red with a big dark eye. Squirrelfish usually hide in the reef, emerging at night, protecting themselves by raising the spines on their backs and croaking when threatened. I don’t remember if my squirrelfish made any noise. I kept it in a pail of water for a while, then dumped it back into the sea.

On Good Friday, we flew kites. My father taught us to make them out of tissue paper and oleander or fennel sticks, starting with the traditional diamond shape formed from a cross of two sticks, its flight meant to reflect Christ’s rise to heaven. We nicked slots in the ends of the sticks with a penknife, and threaded twine through the nicks, pulling it tight and knotting it, then covered this skeleton of stick and twine with different shades of tissue paper. One year, my mother could find only white paper, so to brighten my kite, I pasted on oleander petals and cherry leaves. They fell off when the wind stole the kite into the sky.

The whole island flew kites. Good Friday afternoon, the sky filled with their bright shapes and colours. Every March, a radio and TV ad campaign reminded kite flyers about the dangers of power lines, and every Easter on our way to church, my brothers and I would lean out the car windows and laugh to see all the kites stuck in the lines, or on the branches of trees.

In our backyard with its fence marking the edge of the cliff, my father would hold up the kite while I clutched its ball of twine, waiting for the wind from the sound to rustle the taut tissue paper bound within its frame of sticks and string. “Now,” he’d call, and I’d rush forward across the lawn, my kite rising into the air behind me as I hurried to let out more string, the ball of twine flipping in my hand, the kite straining against its narrow lead. Its tail, made from torn-off bits of rag my mother had knotted together, gave it ballast, weighting the kite so the wind wouldn’t toss it around and crush it. I stopped running as the wind lifted the kite higher. Its tail streamed out behind, anchoring it to the clouds.

On Guy Fawkes’ night in November, my father and his younger brothers, Dennis and Peter, set off fireworks on our back lawn near the cliff’s edge. Rockets and fountains burst and shrieked into the night sky. My brothers and I ran around in circles laughing and shouting. When our uncles lit the Catherine’s Wheel, we stopped and clung to our mother, watching the great circle of fire spin and hiss, flinging sparks into the cool damp air.

In the distance, other people’s fireworks cast brief bright shapes against the dark as we waited for Dennis to bring out the Guy. It was made from an old jacket and pants stuffed with newspaper, its head a brown paper bag, also stuffed, topped with a straw hat. I stared at its face, drawn with black marker. Its slit eyes and wide grin leered back at me like a malicious Frankenstein’s monster. I half hoped half feared the fire might spark it into life.

My father, Dennis and Peter built a small bonfire from dry sticks and crumpled paper, lit with several matches. Once the fire caught, spreading through the kindling, they mounted the Guy on top, and we watched the flames burst out from inside his dark pants and shiny jacket, consume his mean face and feed on his crackling hat. Soon the guy was one enormous flame eating away at the dark, launching flakes of ash into the sky.

One night in September, I’d learned that my mind could float free of my body, flying up like a kite or a piece of ash. My parents had gone out to dinner to celebrate my mother’s birthday, leaving my brothers and me with our teen-aged uncle, Peter. Outside, the wind tapped tree branches against the living-room window. Inside, I practiced the pliés I’d learned in ballet class that afternoon, holding my back straight, bending my knees, then rising onto my toes. The reflection of my head bobbed up and down in the darkening window. I was not yet eight and had only begun learning ballet a couple of weeks ago. E.R. was six, and Mark, who had just started nursery school, was four.

For the past year, Peter had been molesting us in the basement of his house where our parents sent us to play on Sunday afternoons, while they sat and drank tea with our grandparents. In that shadowy basement, Peter terrified and shamed us into secrecy, keeping our parents ignorant of what was happening.

If they’d told us he would be baby-sitting, I’d probably have spent the day chewing my fingernails and getting a stomachache, even though I hadn’t believed that he would hurt us in our own house. The familiar ordinariness of the wood-encased TV set, the living-room carpet we sat on to watch cartoons, the purple couch where my parents usually relaxed in the evening seemed to offer a protective spell. Besides, a summer spent visiting our New England grandparents, swimming in cool dark lakes, and picking blueberries in the woods of Maine had already begun to wash out my memories of that basement, making them less vivid, as if those things had happened to three other children.

When Peter yelled, “Stop that jumping!” and lunged after me, I froze at first, then dashed towards the hallway where the bathroom door had a lock. The TV shouted ads from its corner, the wind rattled the windows, and the walls seemed to blur as if suddenly plunged under water. Peter grabbed my arm, clamped my legs between his, pushed my face against his belly. The fibers of his shirt scratched my eyelids. I tried to scream, tried to bite him through his shirt. He gripped my mouth with one hand, forcing me to breathe through my nose, while his other hand crept up my bare leg and into the bottom of my leotard. At first, his fingers tickled, making me feel warm and shivery, then they jabbed into my flesh, sending a sharp pain up through my whole body and into my head. I tried to scream again, tried to bite his hand, but it was pressed too tightly against my mouth. My head felt light and spinny, throat dry and empty.

I learned how to run while standing still, to run until I lifted from the ground and the wind carried me up, a ballast of fear anchoring me to the ceiling. I learned how to pretend something shameful wasn’t happening, and how to clean up the evidence afterwards. Sitting in the bathtub behind a locked door, I washed streaks of blood from my thighs, learned to let the water run until all the pink had swirled away.

The next day, my brothers told my mother that Peter had shown us his penis. I told her I didn’t want him to babysit ever again. I had no words for what had happened. When we visited our grandparents, my mother and father no longer sent us to the basement to play with Peter. My brothers and I forgot what he had done to us. Memory swirled away like a pink stain in water.

Every Good Friday, we flew kites, making them as bright and beautiful as we could, multi-hued hexagons or octagons, borrowing their colours from the hibiscus, the oranges, the cherry leaves, and the clear waters of the sound. We flew kites, cheered when we managed to launch them and they didn’t get caught on a shrub, or drag our spirits to the ground. We flew kites, watching them rise unblemished into the blue, their spokes like outstretched arms, watching them shrink into distant sparks of light, longing to follow, to lift off from the red earth and climb the sky.

—Kim Aubrey

Jul 272011
 

Photo by Emmanuel Albert

.

In this amazing story, Mark Anthony Jarman tells the tale of Custer’s Last Stand in a way it’s never been told before–surreal, phantasmagoric, funny and horrid all at once. I put this story in Best Canadian Stories when I was editor of that estimable annual collection. And you can also find it in his collection My White Planet. Jarman is a short story writer without peer, heir to a skein of pyrotechnic rhetoric that comes from Joyce and Faulkner and fuels the writing, today, of people like Cormac McCarthy and the late Barry Hannah. He edits fiction for a venerable Canadian magazine called The Fiddlehead which, in the 1970s, published some of my first short stories (and another story is coming out in the summer, 2011, issue). Mark has written a book of poetry, Killing the Swan, a hockey novel, Salvage King Ya!, four story collections, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, New Orleans is Sinking, 19 Knives, and My White Planet, and nonfiction book about Ireland called Ireland’s Eye. He teaches at the University of New Brunswick and lives in a very large house fronting the Saint John River. His story “The December Astronauts (or Moonbase Horse Code)” appears in Numéro Cinq’s Best of Vol. 1. See also his interview with NC Contributor Mary Stein here.

dg
.

Winter Coat, Winter Count (Assiniboia Death Trip)

By Mark Anthony Jarman

.

Each man is fain to pluck his means, as it were, out of his neighbour’s throat.

—Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth

.

She buttons up her tiny sweater, not knowing I study her.  She is vanishing like a bridge in fog.  Crow Jane is not a ghost, but I know now she will haunt me.  I want to see her unbutton the same garment for me.  Nothing stays the same in fashions.

.

The bridge vanishes in fog and I discover we are fretful devices wrapped in such thin skin.  Or we are ghosts on river ice.  What’s the difference?  Inside the erect palisades of Fort Robinson Crazy Horse sings his death song; Crazy Horse lies on his red blanket on the floor.  Have you met?

.

My good friend Private Gentles runs Crazy Horse through with a bayonet and now ostrich feathers are in vogue on our ladies hats.

To our hats we also add veilings, side combs, pompadour pins.

.

Her kind sad face by the icy shore, her long wrists.  Does she have any feelings for me?  I think she does, but I cannot be sure.

Did you see me in the bakery? she asks me.

I thought our paths would cross, she says.

.

Louis David Riel swings over the shop’s mannequins.  See the fine glass display cases, our high ceilings of slotted tongue and groove, see the snipers on the high ground, tied into trees like hanged men, and our poor young shop-girl run off her feet.

Hat boxes, invoices. O Miss! O Miss!

The bullet passes my head.  You missed!

Continue reading »

Dec 052010
 

.

Diane Schoemperlen is a good friend, a novelist, short story writer, editor, and winner of the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction (1998) and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Marian Engel Award for an author in mid-career (2007). In 1995 dg and Diane edited the annual Coming Attractions story collection for Oberon Press in Ottawa. Technically inventive and exuberant, Diane structured her first novel, In the Language of Love, on the hundred words of the Standard Word Association Test.  She writes poignant, emotionally articulate fictions which yet have a foot in the camp of experiment and formal play. The story published here appeared in Best Canadian Stories (edited by John Metcalf, Oberon Press, 2008) without the collages under the title “Fifteen Restless Nights.” This is the first time the text and visual elements have appeared together the way they were intended. They make a welcome addition to NC’s growing collection of off the page and hybrid works. And it’s a huge pleasure to introduce Diane to the NC community.

—dg

 

On Making Collages

My interest in collage as an art form began twenty years ago when I was working on my first novel, In the Language of Love (1994). I chose to make my main character in that book a collage artist and, in doing research on the art of collage, I became more and more interested in creating some myself. I began with relatively simple pieces, hung them on my own walls, and gave them away to friends. I actually sold a few too. It was not a big leap then for a writer to think of putting collages in her next book. I had become very interested in the interaction between visual art and the written word, the different parts of the creative brain involved in creating the two art forms, and the similarities between collage and my written work. So my next book, Forms of Devotion (1998), was a collection of short stories illustrated with black and white pictures that were actually images from earlier centuries that had since gone into the public domain. This book went on to win the Governor General’s Award for English Fiction that year. In the following years, I published several other books, none with illustrations, but for all that time I was collecting all kinds of things that might someday be used in more complex collages. To be honest, what held me back from actually making the collages was my anxiety over what my agent and my editor were bound to say about the impossibility of actually publishing them. Finally I put aside my anxiety on that front and decided to do them anyway, without worrying about whether or not they would ever be published.

As with the stories in Forms of Devotion, sometimes the story came first and other times the pictures. In this particular case, I had the story first and created the collages later. The entire process of putting them together is done by the old-fashioned cut-and-paste method, one little bit at a time. This is very labour-intensive and more than a little time-consuming, but it is immensely satisfying. I don’t use PhotoShop or anything like that. The computer is important in the process though, as I use my scanner to copy anything that I want to preserve in its original state, and also to resize anything that doesn’t fit in the spot where I want to put it. The computer also allows me to reproduce anything on a transparency when I want to use that for a special effect. Some of the paper bits and pieces in the collages were purchased expressly for this purpose, while others were found by accident or searched out on purpose. I have also incorporated some three-dimensional objects, such as eyelets, sequins, stars, fancy paper clips, an actual watch face, and a piece of old jewellery. I also use felt pens, coloured pencils, and rubber stamps. I am especially fond of maps, both new and old, and have used these as the backgrounds for each piece.

—Diane Schoemperlen

.

I Am a Motel

 

ONE

 

All day driving west. The highway liquefies in waves of heat, dissolving over and over at the horizon.

VACANCY.

Pull in.

ALL ROOMS INCLUDE.

Check in.

AIR CONDITIONING.

Unlock the door.

Half the window is blocked by an air conditioner that generates more noise than relief.

KING BEDS.

Royal blue bedspread shiny and slippery.

Blood-red carpet matted and stiff. Leave your shoes on. Sleep in your socks so your bare feet never have to touch it.

A pattern of cigarette burns on the carpet between the two blue beds. Try to discern shapes in them the way (in another lifetime) you used to make shapes in the clouds.

Running away from home.

In fact, there was no running at all: no thudding of feet on concrete, no ducking behind hedges and parked cars, no leaping over white picket fences, no sweat dripping down forehead or torso, no grasping, no grunting, no vicious dogs drooling and panting in hot pursuit.

There was only the smooth steady purr of the car engine.

There was only the cryptic message stamped across the bottom of the mirror: Objects Are Closer Than They Appear.

There was only driving and caffeine and smoking and singing along with the car radio.

There was only ending up here.

DIRECT DIAL PHONES.

Nobody knows where you are.

Stare intently at the phone anyway, willing it to ring.

Here you are nowhere.

Here you are no one.

You thought you would like this more than you do.

.

TWO

 

She has never been fond of secrets. But now she has a big one.

He will be here in half an hour.

She waits in the bed. Naked.

He calls to say he’s on his way.

She waits in the bed some more.

He calls to say he’s not coming. He is whispering. His wife has come home early. He cannot get away after all.

She cries loudly for a long time although she’s sure the occupants of the rooms on either side can hear her. She doesn’t care.

She gets up and gets dressed.  She sits in the chair by the window. There are six dead flies on the sill.

On the highway the lights stream festively red and white in both directions. It begins to rain.

The phone rings again but she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t care.

She swears she will never do this again.

She says it out loud a hundred times. She makes it a song.

She hopes the people on either side can hear this too.

Outside, it is still raining and the traffic is slower now. But still relentless.

 

THREE

 

An ancient rotary phone, the receiver as a big as a shoe, as heavy as a brick. Beside the phone is a collection of take-out menus.

He orders sweet and sour chicken balls, beef chow mein, four egg rolls, wonton soup. He is hungry.

He calls home. No answer save his own voice on the machine:

We cannot take your call right now….

Where is she?

He has been living in this room for two weeks.

All day he works on the highway in the heat. All night he eats fast food and calls home.

Please leave your name and number after the beep….

Where is she?

The phone is black. The bedspread is white chenille.

The drapes are gun-metal grey. He pulls them back and stares into the grill of his pickup truck as if it were a TV set.

The food comes. He gives the delivery boy a big tip. He eats.

He calls home.

We’ll call you back as soon as we can….

Where is she?


FOUR

 

All the doors are blue. All the numbers are black.

Outside each door is a coloured plastic tub chair: pink blue green red orange purple.

All the doors are closed. All the chairs are empty.

Enter when no one is looking.

ALL ROOMS HAVE BEEN RECENTLY REDECORATED AND FURNISHED.

The curtains are gold.

The carpet is blue.

The bedspread is red.

There are too many colours in this place.

COMPLETE WITH NEW BEDS AND LINEN.

All the sheets are white and scratchy.

This bed is too hard.

This bed is too soft.

This bed is just right.

All the pills are white too.

All my friends will miss me. They will be sorry. They will be sad.

All the people who were mean to me will feel guilty. They will wish they had been nice.

Everyone will be shocked.

Except me.

Everyone will be crying.

Except me.

 

FIVE

 

I begin the night in the bed by the window.

The sheets are limp with many washings. A three-cornered tear on the top sheet has been carefully mended by hand. They are tucked in so tightly they make my feet hurt.

I rip the bed apart.

I have a nightmare about rats chewing on my toes.

I move to the other bed.

The spread is patterned with bears, ducks, pine trees, a brown moose with green antlers, a red wolf howling at a blue moon.

I roll it into a haphazard ball and throw it on the floor.

I have a nightmare about being eaten by a grizzly bear.

I move back to the bed by the window.


SIX

 

He paid cash for a room at the back and parked the car behind.

He unlocked the door and went in.

He put the chain on the door and set his bag on the bed by the window.

He pulled a bottle from the bag, got a glass from the bathroom, half-filled it with rum.

He took a can of Coke from the minibar and topped up the glass.

He took the gun from his bag, wiped it with the pillowcase, slid it between the mattress and the boxspring of the other bed.

He turned on the television and watched the news.

They showed the outside of the bank, the inside, the teller in her hospital bed. They said she would recover.

He watched a game show and counted the money twice.

He fixed himself another drink and went into the bathroom.

He had a shower and a shave.

He put on clean clothes and lay down on the bed by the door.

He could not feel the gun beneath him.

 

SEVEN

 

The bathroom light switch automatically also turns on the fan which roars like a jet engine. The fluorescent bulb flickers and hums.

The floor, the walls, and the ceiling are all tiled in pink.

The water glasses are wrapped in paper, also the soap, a miniature waxy rectangle that smells like citronella.

The towels, which might once have been white and fluffy, are now grey and threadbare.

The rubber mat, also grey, hangs over the side of the tub.

The bottom of the shower curtain is best not examined too closely.

I will not have a shower anyway.

I have seen Psycho too many times.

 

EIGHT

 

The red light on the phone is flashing. It is a message for Dave.

In fact, there are four messages for Dave, each one increasingly frantic.

Dave, it would seem, is long gone, but someone named Julie is still looking for him.

There are other signs of Dave.

The television set is tuned to the sports channel, a basketball game now in progress.

The alarm clock is set to 5:00 a.m.

There is a single black sock in a ball in one corner.

The whole room smells of fried eggs and burnt toast.

In the bathroom there are half a dozen long brown hairs in the tub. This is probably something Julie should know about.

Also the silver earring glinting on the floor behind the toilet.


NINE

 

A desperate pounding on the door in the middle of the night. A man’s voice calling for Shirley.

Let me in, let me in, God damn you, woman, let me in.

He moves on down the row one door at a time, pounding, calling, cursing.

I know you’re in there, Shirley, let me in or I’ll kill you.

Hold your breath.

Put the pillow over your head.

Pretend your name is not Shirley.

The toilet next door flushes many times. Then the occupant decides to have a shower at 3:26 a.m.

Followed by more toilet flushing.

Put the pillow over your head.

The television set in the room on the other side blares all night on the music channel.

Put the pillow over your head.

A dog barks.

PETS WELCOME.

A baby cries.

CHILDREN STAY FREE.

Put the pillow over your head.

The pillow is hot and sour.

Now the sun is rising. It too is hot and sour.

 

TEN

 

Concrete-block wall painted a muddy mint green. So ugly but so cool when she pressed her cheek against it.

And later, cooler still, when he pressed her back against it and covered her body with his.

He told her he loved her.

She laughed in his face.

He didn’t seem to mind.

Now he is sound asleep beside her.

The tattoo on his left arm says DORIS.

Any minute now he will be snoring.

The numbers on the bedside clock roll over silently like the numbers on the odometer in the car.

How far away is home?

How far away is morning?

Even with her eyes closed, she thinks she can see the aura of the red numbers glowing the way the sun shows through your eyelids on an August afternoon at the beach.

It is not August.

It is not afternoon.

This is not the beach.

This is not her life.

This time she cannot even remember his name.

 

ELEVEN

 

Snowstorm.

Ice pellets.

Freezing rain.

All flights grounded.

FREE SATELLITE CHANNELS.

The television set squats on a metal swiveling stand. I can’t figure out how to work it.

Or the thermostat either.

FREE LOCAL CALLS.

I look through the phone book. The columns of names are hypnotic, like found poems. I know no one here.

I thumb through the bedside Bible which does not appear to have ever been opened before.

It tells me nothing.

At the moments I do not believe in God.

HEATED OUTDOOR SWIMMING POOL!

I sit on the edge of the bed in my bathing suit and my bare feet.

I am shivering.

I should be in Hawaii by now.

 

TWELVE

 

He put his shaving kit on the counter beside the sink.

She organized her toiletries beside it.

They put their toothbrushes together in a glass.

Hers was a brand-new battery-powered fancy one with a purple handle.

His was an ordinary green one with a dentist’s name stamped in gold on the handle, the bristles worn down and splayed.

He had forgotten to bring toothpaste but she has some.

In front of the mirror, she brushed her teeth and combed her hair while he stood behind her in the doorway watching.


THIRTEEN

 

Do the right thing.

Dial the number and.

ALL CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED.

Dial the number and.

No.

Dial the number and.

No.

Hang up.

VERY REASONABLE RATES.

Smoke another cigarette.

Try not to think about the blood.

Dial the number and hang up.

DAILY WEEKLY MONTHLY.

Smoke another cigarette.

Try not to think about the sound.

Dial the number and hang up.

FRIDGES.

FREE ICE.

COMFORTABLE BEDS.

Do the right thing.

Dial the number

It is ringing.

Do the right thing.

Speak of anger.

Speak of sorrow.

Speak of regret.

Do the right thing.

Turn yourself in.

 

FOURTEEN

 

I am tired of making sense.

I am tired of telling stories: mine, yours, ours, theirs.

I am tired of knowing that everyone has a story: the world is too crowded with stories.

I am tired of talking.

I am tired of not talking.

I am tired of the colour of the kitchen walls.

I am tired of the look of the folds in the living room drapes.

I am tired of letting the cats in at bedtime.

I am tired of walking the dog at dusk.

I am tired of understanding.

I am tired of being understood.

I am tired of you being you.

I am tired of me being me.

Here I am no one.

Here I am nowhere.

Here I can finally stop thinking and sleep.


—Diane Schoemperlen

.

Jun 152010
 

Mark Jarman Story- St. John River


Mark Anthony Jarman is an old friend dating back to our days at the Iowa Writers’  Workshop. He’s from Alberta, lives next to the Saint John River in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he teaches at the university. He plays hockey, wrote a hockey novel, has three sons, and was a regular pick when I edited Best Canadian Stories. He is the subject of my essay “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story” which originally appeared in The New Quarterly and can be found in my essay collection Attack of the Copula Spiders. He writes the wildest, most pyrotechnic stories of anyone I know.

This story originally appeared in Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, edited by Zsuzsi Gartner (Douglas & MacIntyre, 2010).

dg

/

The distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me.
I am as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.

James Welch, Winter in the Blood

I was lost in the stars, but not lost, my tiny craft one of many on a loop proscribed by others, two astronauts far out in a silk road universe of burning gas and red streaks, and one of us dead.

Then the land comes up at us, the speed of the land rushing up like film and our Flight Centre men at serious blinking screens.  Our valves open or don’t open, the hull holds, the centre holds, little I can do.  The dead man is not worried.  I will not worry anymore, I renounce worry (yeah, that will last about three seconds).  The angle of re-entry looks weird to my eye.  I had to haul his corpse back inside for re-entry so he wouldn’t burn up.

In the city below me traffic is backing up into the arterial avenues.  They want to see us return, to fly down like a hawk with the talons out.

“Units require assistance.  All units.”

We are three orbits late because of the clouds and high wind.  They want to be there if there is a memorable crash, our pretty shell splitting on the tarmac into several chemical flash-fires engraved on their home movies.

We were so far up there above the moon’s roads, my capsule’s burnt skin held in rivers and jetstreams that route our long-awaited re-entry.  Up there we drive green channels riven in the clouds, ride stormscud and kerosene colours in the sky, then we ease our wavering selves down, down to this outer borough, down to rumpled family rooms and black yawning garages, down to the spanking new suburb unboxed in the onion fields.

I’m a traveler, an addict.  I descend from the clouds to look for work, I was up there with the long distance snowstorms.  It’s hard to believe I’m here again, hard to believe Ava became so uncaring while I was gone from the colony.


Ava’s messages are still there.  “This message will be deleted in 2 days.”  I press 9 to save it yet again.  I save her messages every ten days, my private archives, my time capsule, a minute of her lovely voice.

“Loved your last transmission,” Ava said in September. “It made me laugh!  And I loved the pictures you sent!  I can’t wait to see you.”

But then the change in October, the October revolution.  We are changelings locked in a kingdom of aftershave ads and good shepherds, lambs and lions and the Longhorn Steakpit’s idea of a salad bar.

Her messages were so very affectionate, and we’d lasted so long, so long, but in the end our messages were not enough.  Our words were not enough.  A week of silence and then a new message.  I knew it.

“Some bad news,” as Ava termed it.  She’d met someone else, she’d had a lot to drink, one thing led to another.  And I was so close.  Only a few days more.  But she couldn’t wait for me.  So long.

In the Coconut Grove bar in the afternoon I’m feeling all right.  I’m good at clarity and appreciation, but I’m slightly out of time.  Time slows and I lurk in it, I can alter it.  Do you know that feeling?  I drink and carefully move my head to study my world.  Venetian blinds layering tiny tendrils of soft light on us, the purple tennis court on TV, an AC running low, the lack of real sky.  It all seems okay, it all seems significant, it all seems deliberate and poised for some event.  But only to me, only I know this mood, this valiant expectation, this expedition into the early realms of alcohol.

Perhaps I am not quite right, but I savour the strange interlude.  I’m a lonely satellite in space, a craft drifting alone, drinking alone.  In this room the music is fine, the hops have bite – the perfect bar moment.

Then the bartender cranks up the volume on Sports TV and snaps to his phone, “The girl who cut my hair butchered it.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her, you suck.”

And that’s the end of my spell, the end of that little mission to Mars.  And I was so enjoying it.

“Hey dog, you flew with that dead guy, didn’t you?  And then your girl dumped you.  She’s hot.  Bummer, man.”  I wait until the bartender goes to the washroom to work on his hair and I exit without paying.


Maybe not the smartest idea, but I call Ava in Spain.  She left me, but she’s the only one who will know what I mean.

“What do you want from me?  Why are you talking like this?”  Her slight laugh.

Apparently I have some anger to work out.


Turquoise mountains at the end of the street remind me of Tucson or Utah.  The mountains of the moon.  I kill time walking.  Funny to be on foot once more.  The sun and earth – what are they to me?  I still orbit Ava, but she’s not there, no there there, so to what furious solar system do I now pledge my allegiance?  I still orbit her blue-eyed summer kitchen memories and the cordwood and pulpwood childhood in the north.

Need to change that orbit, need orbit decay.

In the building where she used to live they now deal ounces and eight-balls.  I was gone, Ava’s gone, the moon has changed.

Not sure I like the messages I’m picking up re the new frontier.  No one foresaw this, crystal and crank smuggled in to the colony, dealers and Albanian stick up crews and crummy walk ups, the adamantine miners working the face under Dwarf Fortress, all the single males earning big bucks in the catacombs and mineral mines, but with nowhere to go, the shortage of places to live, the exorbitant cost of milk, the new gang unit brought in, dead bodies on the corner with splayed hands and wrists smeared red with their own blood, and bouncers at the door working hard at that Russian look.  With the economy in the toilet the Minister of Finance is studying the feasibility of holding Christmas four times a year instead of two.


At the reception for me and some other space cowboys the party crackers lie like ashes on my tongue.  The fruit salad fallen from soldered tins; taste the fruits of duty.  My long periods of radio silence and now the noise of crowds and halls of ice cubes.

My brother-in-law Horse the detective is at the reception with a woman he says has just moved to the moon from Babylon to escape the war.  Delia looks nervous, as if still in a war zone.  Her family made her leave her home, smuggled her over the border, they feared for her life if she stayed.

Forget this place, they said of the only home she’s known, it doesn’t exist anymore.

“How do you like it here so far?”

Delia says, “People are very kind to me, but it’s not what I thought.”  She shrugs.  “All my life I wanted to see the moon, stared up at it.  But I miss my home, my family, my car, my brothers, the path to the river.”

“Can they visit?”

“No, it’s impossible now.”  The family had money, but now it is all gone, they are bankrupted by the war, the stolen gold, the extortion, the journey to other lands.  Her English is very good.

“How is the new job?”

“Horse can tell you better than I.”

“Brutal,” says Horse, “A ton of movement with the gangs, a lot of old grudges, eye for an eye.  We just had a 27 before we came here.”

“27?”

“It means he was already dead before we got there,” Delia tells me.  “Another young guy,” she says.  “They get younger and younger.  Children.”

Five phones ringing on the silent body, once so talkative, now so grave.  How may I direct your call?  How come it’s so easy to become a body?  He is past saving, his messages will be deleted in ten days unless someone who loves him presses save.


The woman from Babylon asks about my last trip in the light years, where I slept in far stars like fields sown with salt.

“Is it boring out there?  Is it better than here?”

“It was wild, hard to describe, almost religious.”

“What about when Curtis died?”

“I don’t know, he was just dead.”

Was it an accident or did he do it to himself?  This question is not in the press.  One time, after he was dead, I swore I heard a fly buzzing inside the windshield, that manic little taptaptap.  I turned my head slowly; there was no fly.  I had wires to my skin, an extended excellent dream.

I hear Delia speaking Arabic on her phone.  Her uncle is a consul in Vietnam with an Irish wife.  We, all of us, have come so far from home.


Very few of the December class returned alive.  There is a chance they are still out there, or else something is killing them, making them martyrs.  Or perhaps some Decembrists stumbled onto a beautiful world, and chose to not steer back to this one.  Why am I the only one who found a course home?  And to what?

It’s just survivor’s guilt, the detectives insist.  Take up golf.  Some good 18 hole courses on the moon, especially the Sea of Mares, Sea of Tranquility, condos with fake pools stocked with trout fingerlings.

“You can rent an AK at the range,” says Horse.  “Or sled down Piston Alley.”

Piston Alley is named for all the sled engines that have blown pistons on the long straight stretch.  The engine runs the best ever just before the piston shoots out like a tiny rocket.  I don’t really want an AK47.

In the NASA gymnasium the trainee astronauts play tag.  Astronauts get lots of tang; that was the old joke.  Poontang.  When I was out there I craved smoked salmon and dark beer.  The dead man went on for hours about steak and ice cream.  I have a few too many bank loans.  Curtis was outside when it happened, his air.


The woman from Babylon stares at me with her very dark eyes, says, “I wonder if perhaps you would help us in the interview room.”

Did Horse put her up to this?

He says, “The Decembrists are famous with the school-kids.”

“But with these jokers you pick up?”

Horse says, “You’ve always been better than me at reading faces.  You can let us know when it’s a crock.  We’ll have signals.”

Horse makes it seem like a job selling vacuum cleaners.

“Think about it.  Something to do.”

Something to do — he has a point.  Maybe a distraction from Ava in my head.  I have escaped gravity and achieved a kind of gravitas.  Yet I feel a broken shoe.  I can’t sleep (night and day), my mind locked on her with someone else (day and night I think of you), and the lymph nodes each side of my groin are swollen tight as stones inside a cherry; no idea what that’s about, what’s next, what’s approaching me.


They are ploughing a new road by the graveyard, by the old settlers and the new settlers in the cemetery under Meth Mountain.  The lumpy graves look to be making their slow way across the whitemoon’s dusty field, the dead in their progress to us, their magnetic message under clay walls and organic reefs and the moon’s Asiatic peaks just past the plywood windows of the closed mall.

Ava quit her job and got away, but when I filled out a Planet Change Request Form it was turned down by upstairs.  I know it’s not a planet, but that’s the form they use.  At the drive-through window on Von Braun Boulevard I order a combo and a willowy uniformed teen hands me a paper bag.

“Enjoy your meal.”

I drive to the carved-up picnic tables by Lost Lake.  Opening the bag, I find $6000.  They have handed me the day’s receipts.  Or gave something to the wrong car.  Someone will be pissed off.  And where are my fries?  I’m not driving all the way back down the mountain.

Now, how to use $6000?  Pay down the loans or just buy a giant TV?  I’ve always wanted a jukebox or to buy a bar in Nebraska.  Maybe I will.  I can learn things.  Ava said, Whosoever wants to be first must first be slave to all.  That night I sleep among the fences under stars where I rode so long.  Perfect carpentry is a thing of amazing beauty.


Downtown I see Delia walking by the Oppenheimer Fountain.  She seems shy.  I feel her lovely eyes hide something, some secret limit inside her.  Is she resigned to it?  I like the idea of a secret, like her face.


“So I can just ride along in the car?”

“Hell yeah you can ride,” says Horse.  “That’s it exactly.  A goddam team!”

I can ride, privy to the children selling ghost pills stepped on a few times, dividing the corners, eyes like radiogenic freeway lights.  It’s the Zombies versus the 68th Street runners, yellow flashes on a dark wall and the Indian Head Test Pattern, and from this world of instant grudges we pluck the sad eyed murderers and take them into Interview Room #2, where we strive to arrive at some form of truth acceptable to most of us.

Everyone loves truth.  Ava told me the truth, did she not?  She loves me, she loves me not.  It’s a gamble, shooting dice while clouds boil around the sun, goading the dominos.

Who controls the corner, the zoo?  We travel to the far corners of the universe, but we can’t control the local corner, can’t control the inside of our head.


In the interview rooms prisoners must be checked every 15 minutes.  Someone slumped there in a chair killed a son, a cousin, killed in the triple last time.  Horse walks in with his coffee.  It goes on, it goes on.

They seen you riding with Moonman and Mississippi and Ghost.

Seen me?

You been slinging dope?

I don’t know no Mississippi.

Tight bags of meth hidden in the torn baby-seat.

Where were you rolling?

Nowhere.  You know, just rolling nowhere.


By the fountain her gasmask matches her dress.  Males never quite exist for me — only women.  I don’t carry a mask; the air inside is fine, but she is very cautious and keeps it with her briefcase.

Five p.m. and the moon goes violet.  Free Fanta for all teens at the moon-base chapel.  She doesn’t drink and I am a spastic snake.

At dinner she doesn’t know she saves my life just by being there in front of me.  I’d rather she not know my sad history, my recent heartbreak.  It’s so pleasant to meet someone so soon after Ava, but still, the joy is tempered a tad by the prospect of it happening again, of another quick crowbar to the head.  But I resolve to be fun.  After the attack on the Fortran Embassy I resolve to be more fun.


Delia says she swam a lot in Babylon before the war, and she has that swimmer’s body, the wide shoulders.  She says, “I am used to pools for women only, not mixed.  I don’t want to swim in the moon-base pool.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll laugh.”

She doesn’t want to swim with strange men, but also fears catching some disease.

“I was hesitant to tell you about the pool.  I feared you’d laugh at me.”

“No, I understand perfectly.”

But now I want to see her in a pool, her wide shoulders parting the water, her in white foam, our white forms in manic buzzing bubbles, her shoulders and the curve of her back where I am allowed to massage her at night when her head aches.

Strange, Ava also had migraines, but I was rarely witness to them; she stayed alone with them in the whimpering dark and I would see her afterward.  Beside me in her room, Delia makes a sound, almost vomits over the edge of her bed, almost vomits several times from the pain, her hand to her lips, her hands to her face.


Delia is very religious, very old-fashioned, jumps away in utter panic if I say one word that is vaguely sexual, yet she delights in fashion mags and revealing bras and cleavage in silk and she allows my hands to massage her everywhere when she aches, allows my hands to roam.

“How do you know where the pain is,” she asks me, her face in pillows.

I don’t know.  I just know how to find pain.

At Delia’s kitchen table we study maps in a huge atlas, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Assur, where she says her ancestors were royalty in a small northern kingdom.  I love the small kingdom we create with each other in our intimate rooms or just walking, charged moments that feel so valuable, yet are impossible to explain to someone else.  I saw her in the store, saw her several times in the middle aisles, knew I had to say something.

“I noticed you immediately, thought you were some dark beauty from Calcutta or Bhutan.”

“You saw me several times?  I didn’t notice you.”

“But you smiled at me each time.”

“Everyone smiles at me,” she says brightly.  “And you whites all look the same,” she adds, and I realize she is not joking.


Her white apartment looks the same as the other white apartments, windows set into one wall only, a door on another wall.  I realize both women have apartments built halfway into the ground, a basement on a hill.  Yet they are so different.  Ava’s slim Nordic face pale as a pearl and her eyes large and light, sad and hopeful — and Delia’s dark flashing eyes and flying henna hair and pessimism and anger and haughtiness.  Ava was taller than me, tall as a model.  Delia is shorter; I find this comforting.


I close my eyes expecting to see Ava’s white face, but instead I’m flying again, see the silver freighter’s riveted wall, the first crash, then sideswiped by a Red Planet gypsy hack, a kind of seasickness as the Russian team ran out of racetrack, Russians still alive, but drifting far from the circular station lit up like a chandelier, their saucerful of secrets, drifting away from their cigarettes and bottles, from a woman’s glowing face.  So long!  Poka!  Do svidaniia!


The young woman in Interview Room #2 speaks flatly.

They killed my brother, they will kill me if they want.

We can help you.

She laughs at Horse.  You can’t help me.

Who to believe?  I want to believe her.  She got into a bad crowd, cooking with rubber gloves, the game.  Our worries about cholesterol seem distant and quaint.  She’s not telling us everything, but we can’t hold her.


“I’ve come into some money if you need a loan.  It’s not much.”

Delia raises her dark eyebrows in the Interview Room, as if I am trying to buy her with my paper bag of cash.  Maybe I am trying to buy her.

“And how am I supposed to pay you back?  I have no prospects.”

On her TV the handsome actor standing in for the President tells us we must increase the divorce rate to stimulate the economy.  We need more households, more chickens in the pots.  I am sorry, he says, I have only one wife to give for my country.  We switch to watch Lost in Space re-runs.


At night I ask my newest woman, my proud Cleopatra, “Is there a finite amount of love in the universe?  Or does it expand?”

“What?”

“Well, I didn’t know you and no love existed, but now I love you, so there is that much more.”

“Say that again,” she asks, looking me in the eye.

I repeat my idea.

“I think you are crazy,” she says.  “Not crazy crazy, but crazy.”

I am full of love, I think, an overflowing well.  Perhaps I supply the universe with my well, perhaps I am important.  Her full hips, the universe expanding, doomed and lovely, my mouth moving everywhere on her form.   The bed is sky-blue and wheat gold.

“How many hands do you have,” she asks with a laugh in the morning, trying to escape the bed, escape my hands: “You’re like a lion!”

She is trying to get up for work.  My first time staying over.  I am out of my head, kiss me darling in bed.  Once more I can live for the moment.  But that will change in a moment.


My ex on earth watches our red moon sink past her city.  The huge glass mall and my ex on an escalator crawl in silver teeth, at times the gears of the earth visible.  We are all connected and yet are unaware.  Does Ava ever think of me when she sees us set sail?  We hang on the red moon, but Ava can’t see us riding past.


“How many girlfriends do you have?” Delia asks, tickling me.  “Many?”

“Just you.  Only you.”

“I don’t believe you.  I know you flyboys.”  She laughs a little at me.

“How about you?” I ask.  A mistake.

She turns serious, conjures a ghost I can never hope to compete with.  “My fiance was killed,” she says quietly.  “He was kidnapped at a protest and they found him in the desert.  His hands were tied with plastic.  My fiance was saving to buy me a house.  My parents told him that I wished to go to school before we married and he didn’t mind.  My parents sold their property for the ransom, but the men killed him regardless.”

I remember my parents’ treed backyard; I tilted the sodden bags of autumn leaves on end and a dark rich tea came pouring out onto the brick patio.  Do the dead watch us?  There were bobcat tracks: it hid under the porch.


Horse says, You know why we’re here?

I watch the boy’s face; he is wondering how much to admit.

Got an idea, he says.

The rash of robberies and bodies dumped in craters and the conduit to the Interview Room and my irradiated bones that have flown through space and now confined in this tiny Interview Room.

You never sell rock?

Like I told you, never.

He’s got a history.

Somebody’s took the wallet before they killed him.

Holy God.  Holy God.  Dead?

The man is dead.  We need the triggerman.

This the t’ing.  I have no friends.  I learned that.

The young man wants to pass on his impressive lesson to the interrogators, but he has misjudged, his tone is all wrong.  He thinks he is good, world-weary, but he hasn’t seen himself on camera, has no distance.  The face and the mind, O the countless cells we represent and shed, the horseshit we try to sling.

Man, they had the guns!  I was concerned with this dude shooting me in the backseat.

Down the road, what will haunt the victorious young tribes?  They’ve heard of it all, but still, nothing prepares you.


You have your ways, Delia says, you can control me.

I wish.  I can manipulate her, get some of her clothes off, but I need her more than she needs me.

She says, I don’t think I can control you.

I can’t tell if she thinks this is good or not.  We spend time together, but I have trouble reading her, can’t tell if she likes me.

Delia is not adjusting well to being here.  She hates the lunar landscape, the pale dust and dark craters past the moon’s strange-ended avenues.  She is weary of the crime, the black sky.

“The weather,” she says, “never a breeze, never normal, either one extreme or another.  Killer heat, fourteen days!  Boil to death!  Or else so cold.  Fourteen days, freeze to death!  Cold then hot, hotthen cold.  And there are no seasons.  At home summer is summer and winter is winter.  Food here has no taste, has no smell.  I hate everything and then I hate myself.  All my life I wanted to meet the man in the moon and now I’m here.”

“You met me.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

I wish she spoke with a bit more enthusiasm on that topic.

She is losing weight since moving to the moon.

This is not acceptable, she says to the waiter. You would not serve me food like this on earth.

But we’re not on earth.  Forget earth.

I’ll make you some of my own, she says to me later.  Which she does, a creamy and delicious mélange at her tiny table in the apartment.

Sunday I bring my bag of illicit cash and we shop for fresh spices.  We hold hands, touching and laughing in the store, fondling eggplants that gleam like dark ceramic lamps.  We are the happy couple you hate, tethered to each other like astronauts.  I am content in a store with her, this is all it takes, this is all we want now, red ruby grapefruit and her hard bricks of Arabic coffee wrapped in gold.


Romance and memories and heartbreak: One war blots out an earlier war, one woman blots out the previous woman’s lost sad image, one hotel room destroys the other, one new ardent airport destroys the one where I used to fly to visit her.  The only way I can get over her.  We are prisoners, me, her, bound to each other like a city to a sea, like a kidnapper to a hostage.

Why did Ava leave me when we got along so well?  It was so good.  I think I lost something human in the blue glow of that last long flight.  Will it keep happening to me?  Now I am afraid. The Russians from Baikonur Cosmodrome never returned, the sky closed over them like a silver curtain, like the wall of a freighter.

They went away and I was inside my damaged capsule, inside my head too much, teeth grinding in ecstasy, quite mad.  They had me on a loop, my destiny not up to me.  We are abandoned and rescued, over and over.  But who are our stewards?


We went backwards to the stars.  For months rumours have suggested NASA is near bankruptcy, bean counters are reorganizing; my pension is in doubt, as is the hardship pay I earned by being out there.  Now we are back to this surface, back to the long runway and smell of burnt brake pads by the marshes and Bikini Atoll.

Me alone in the photograph, the other travelers erased.  Or are they out there still, knowing not to come back?  You can’t go back to the farm once you’ve seen the bright lights, seen inside yourself.


One day I delete Ava’s sad lovely messages.  Why keep such mementos?  You burn this life like an oil lamp.  You make new mementos, wish they could compare.

I remember parking the car by the dam with Ava.  The car was so small we had to keep the doors open as I lay on top of her, but the dome light had no switch.  To keep us in darkness I tried to hold one finger on the button in the door and my other hand on Ava.  That ridiculous night still makes me laugh, but I need to forget it all, to delete every message and moment.


You are unlucky in love, Delia says.  The God is fair and distributes his gifts and clearly you have many talents, but not luck in love.

Is she right?  I had thought the opposite, that I had inexplicably good luck that way, but now I wonder; she does seem to know me better than I do myself.  I was lucky to know Ava, but now my thoughts are distilled: Ava was too tall, too pretty, too kind.

What I thought was good fortune was bad fortune.  Was I bad luck for the Russians?  Did I kill Curtis?  Strangely, I feel lucky to have met her, to have crossed paths in the long florescent aisles of the store.  With my cash from the drive-thru I buy her shoes, an ornate belt, French dresses.  She is very choosy, but I like to buy her things.


In her room when I squeeze her hard she calls me a lion.  Says I will devour her.  I want to devour her, her ample flesh.  My tiger, I call her.  My tiger from the Tigris will turn.  Friday night and we don’t talk, no plans do we make.  I thought that was kind of mandatory.  Are we a couple or not (Is you is or is you ain’t my baby)?  It is odd to not know.

Desire has caused me so much trouble in my life, but I miss it when it is not around.  Living without desire – what is the point of life without desire?

Perhaps that is a question an addict would ask.

Perhaps I am not unlike that French youth – you must have read of his sad sad plight – rejected by a circus girl with whom he was in love.  A circus girl!  I love it.  The poor French youth committed suicide by locking himself in the lions’ cage.


I was locked in a cage, tied in a chair, in a capsule’s burning skin, hairline cracks like my mother’s teacup.  A rocket standing in a pink cloud and I am sent, her pink clitoris and I am sent, 3,2,1, we have ignition, my missions hastily assembled, mixed up, my mixed feelings as I move, my performance in the radiation and redshift.  The officials and women are telling their truth about me.  I was thrown like an axe through their stars.  I was tied in a chair, a desert, waiting.  When the engines power up – what a climb, what a feeling!  And who is that third who hovers always beside you, someone near us?  When I count there are only you and I together – but who is that on the other side?  1,2,3.  3,2,1.


Why can’t Delia say something passionate to erase my nervousness?  I have to live through someone else.  Why can’t I be aloof, not care.  I used to be very good at not caring.  But when Delia hates the moon I feel she hates me, when she says she has no money and that the moon is dirty!, too hot!, too cold!, then I feel I’ve failed her with my moon.

Why does she not say, Come to me my lion, my lost astronaut, I love you more than life itself, my love for you is vaster than the reaches of the infinitely expanding universe, oh I love you so much, so very much.  But no one says this.  Her expanding clitoris under my thumb.  She is calm, she is not passionate.  But she is there, I’m happy when she is near.  After my trip I crave contact.


I am being straight with you, swear to God.  I had a couple of ounces.  He was on me – it was self defence.

Did he have a weapon, Delia asks.  How can it be self defence if he didn’t have a weapon?

Friends we question say the dead man was always joking, always had a smile.

We were sitting there, the kid says.  The gun went off, the kid says, and he fell out.

It went off.  Delia tells me they always word it in this passive way, as if no one is involved and, in a kind of magic, the gun acts on its own.


Government people contact Delia.  Don’t be afraid, the government people say to Delia, which makes her afraid.  They visit her at her apartment, claim they are concerned that a faction in the war at home may try to harm her here.

Has anyone approached her?

No, she says.  No one from home.

Has she heard from her uncle in Vietnam? they wonder.  Is he coming here?

They were very nice, she tells me, they bought me lunch.

I look at the white business card they gave her; it has a phone number and nothing else.  My hunch is that they are Intelligence rather than Immigration.  She asks questions for a living and now she is questioned by people who ask questions for a living.  Now I worry we are watched, wired, wonder if they hear me massage Delia’s shoulders and her back and below her track pants and underwear, if they hear us joke of lions and tigers.


In the interview room: He owed me money so I hit him with a hammer.  He was breathing like this, uh uh uh.


A day here is so long.  At Ava’s former apartment building I pick up my old teapot, books, and an end table from the landlord’s storage room.  The aged landlord’s stalled fashions, his fused backbone.

“Young man, can you help me with the Christmas tree?”

Of course.  I like to help.  He was one of the first here.

“The moon used to be all right,” he says.  “Now it’s all gone to hell.”

He gives me a huge apple pie from the church bake sale.  They attend church religiously, they’ll be in the heavens soon.

And poor Mister Weenie the tenant evicted from his apartment down a red hall.

What was his life like, I wonder, with a name like Weenie?

Horse laughs when I tell them, but Delia doesn’t get the humour.

Now it’s on the books as The Crown versus Weenie. How he yelled in a red hall.

“I belong in there!” he hollered, pounding at the door closed to him.  “I belong in there!”


Mister Weenie pounds at doors that once opened for him, and I wonder where we belong and who do we belong with.  In times of great stress, says science, the right brain takes over like a god and the left brain sees a god, sees a helpful companion along for the ride, an extra in the party.  Does Mister Weenie see a helpful companion?

My ex quit her job to move to Spain.  Ava has always loved the sun, the heat in Spain, the food, the language, the light.  On a weather map I see that Spain has a cold snap and I am happy, as I know Ava hates the cold.  I want her to be cold and miserable without me.  I am not proud of this part of me.


Delia reads from a childhood textbook that she found in Ava’s belongings: “Our rocket explorers will be very glad to set their feet on earth again where they don’t boil in the day and freeze at night.  Our explorers will say they found the sky inky black even in the daytime and they will tell us about the weird, oppressive stillness.”

“It’s not so bad,” I say.  “The stillness.”

“It isn’t at all beautiful like our earth,” she reads.  “It is deadly dull, hardly anything happens on the moon, nothing changes, it is as dead as any world can be.  The moon is burned out, done for.”

Delia endured a dirty war so I admire her greatly. She gets depressed, refuses to leave her room.  Where can she turn?  Her Babylon is gone, the happy place of her childhood no longer exists, friends dead or in exile or bankrupt or insane.

My dark-eyed Babylonian love, my sometimes-passionate Persian – where will she move to when she leaves me?

Out the window are astral cars and shooting stars.  Where do they race to?  I know.  I’ve been out there, nearer my god to thee, past the empty condo units, the Woodlands Nonprofit Centre for New Yearning, the Rotary Home for Blind Chicken-Licken Drivers (hey, good name for a band), the Rosenblum Retirement Home (Low Prices and Low Gravity for Your Aching Joints).

My happiest moments with my mouth just below her ample belly, I forget about outer space, her legs muffling my ears, a gourmand of her big thighs, her round hips, surrounded, grounded by her flesh; I have never liked flesh so much as with her.  The world only her in those charged moments, my brainstem and cortex and molecules’ murky motives driven by her and into her.  The devil owns me.  No devil owns me.

The valves on my heart are wide open.  I have no defences, sometimes I am overflowing with affection – and I have found this is a distinct disadvantage when dealing with others.  I never want this to end; so what do you suppose will happen?


The crowd pays good money to file into the old NASA Redstone Arena, into the band’s aural, post-industrial acres of feedback and reverb.  The band used to be someone, now they play the outposts.  We are happy to see them here.

The woman singer moans, Don’t you dog your woman, spotlights pin-wheeling in the guitarist’s reflector sunglasses.  She sings, I pity the poor immigrant.

We will remember, we will buy t shirts, souvenirs, get drunk, hold hands on the moon.  We will remember.

Later the ambulance enters the moonbase arena, amazed in pain and confusion.

The white ambulance takes away one body from us so that we can see and not see.  Carbons linger like a love song for all the coroners in the universe.  One casualty is not too bad.  Usually there are more.  An OD, too much of some new opiate, some cousin of morphine, too much of nothing.  You pay your money and you take your chances.

Who calls us?  The ambulance tolls for someone else.  Who owns the night, owns the night music of quiet tape hiss and music of quiet riches and debts in messages and missives from the crooners and coroners and distant stars?  I have learned in my travels that the circus girls own the night, and the Warriors and Ghosts and Scorpions run the corner.  They have the right messages.


And come Monday or Tuesday the interview room still waits for us, will open again its black hole, its modest grouping of table and walls and the one door.  But Delia books off work: the war, the government people, the questions.

Say that one more time?

Who do you think did this?

Dronyk.

Dronyk says you did it.

Who’s bringing it in?

Who.  That’s a good one.  Who isn’t!  Man, who’s bringing it in.  Can I have a smoke?

The room – it’s like a spaceship for penitents; we climb in and explore a new universe, their universe.  Fingers to keyboard: does he show up on the screen?  A hit, a veritable hit, he’s in the system, the solar system.


I don’t want her to worry, but I want to know that she knows.

“Those government people asking you questions; they may not be who they say.”

“I know that,” she says.  “I wonder if they are watching us now?”


We watch Delia’s TV.  In the upscale hotel room the actor states to the reporter, Friend, for this role I had to go to some very dark places.  He was gone for a while, celluloid career gone south, the actor is hoping for an award for this project, a comeback in the movies.

Gone?  I’ll tell him about being gone.  I went up past the elms and wires, past the air, past the planets.  Where did he go?  A piano bar, a shooting gallery in the Valley, a dive motel in the wilds of Hollywood?  The actor went nowhere.


When you return to a place that is not your home, is it then your home?  I insist she go out with me and then I fall into a fight on Buckbee Street in the fake Irish bar (yes, fake Irish pubs are everywhere).

“Hey, look who crashed the party.  It’s that rug-rider cunt who sent me to jail.”  The slurring voice in the corner, a young man from the interview room.

The brief noise of his nose as I hit him and he folds.  Granted, it was a bit of sucker punch.  Why oh why didn’t I sprint out of the fake Irish pub at that point?  I stuck around to find myself charged with assault.  Aren’t you allowed one complimentary punch at Happy Hour?


Now it’s my turn to be asked the questions in Interview room #2.  I’ve been here before, know the drill, I know to stonewall, to lawyer up.

What the hell were you doing?

Wish I could help you, Horse.  Really do.  Beer later?  Chops on the grill?

Mine may be the shortest interview on record.


Delia says to me, Stand against that wall.  Face forward.

The camera flashes in my eyes.

Now please face that wall.  The camera flashes.


After the fight in the fake Irish bar Delia gets depressed and doesn’t want to see me for a week, lunar weeks, it drags on, which gets me depressed that she is depressed in her subterranean room andwon’t let me even try to cheer her up, have a laugh.

“No, I’m in a hopeless situation,” she says on the phone.  “I don’t want a temporary solution.”

“Everything is temporary.”

“That is true,” she admits.  “Everything is temporary.”

But, I wonder, what of Curtis?  Gone, permanent.  Ava?  Gone.  Is that permanent too?  I feel myself falling from the heavens.

“Are you hungry?  Let’s go out,” I beg.

“There’s nowhere to go here.  I’ve told you, I don’t want temporary solutions.”

“Can I come over?”

“I’m tired of questions.  No more questions.”


The other astronaut, Curtis – I wonder if I’ll ever know for sure whether it was a malfunction or suicide.  Curtis might have tinkered with his air and made it look like an accident, a design flaw, or his air went and it was horrible.  I often wonder where I’d like to be buried; perhaps he wanted to die out there.  Flight Centre instructed me to tether him outside to the solar array until just before we got back; didn’t want him stuck out there burning up when we made our grand entrance.  Maybe Curtis wanted to burn up, the first outer space cremation.  It’s almost poetic, but the Flight Centre would not see it as good PR.


You know who strangled the old man?  You know who did it?  A fuckin stupid crackhead!

He is pointing at himself and in tears.  It’s Ava’s landlord who is dead.

I fouled up good, says the aged addict.  Using that stuff wore me slap out.

His craggy face.  He is sincere, his hard lesson.  But he is somehow alive.  His prints don’t match his face, but I can read his mind.  By the power invested in me.  He is thinking like a cheerleader, he is thinking, I must look into the future.

Yes, I tell myself, I too must remember there is a larger world out there, a future.  I too must think like a cheerleader.


“This has worked a few times,” my lawyer says before we file into the courtroom.  “You guys are the same build. Both of you put on these glasses and sit side by side.”

The judge asks the victim, “Do you see him in the courtroom?”

“He bumped my table, he spilled my drink and then it all went dark.  I had a bad cut over my eye.  I couldn’t see nothing.  Dude was on top of me wailing all over me, and it went dark.”

Wailing?  I hit him once and he dropped.

“So you can’t point out the assailant?”

“Hell if I know.”

His girlfriend takes the stand, says, “It might be one of them over there.  I thought he was going to kill him, beating him and beating him.  I remember the third guy, that tall white-haired feller.”

They cannot ID me.  The judge throws out the case, my lawyer makes his money, the truth sets you free.


After my lawyer takes his cut I still have $3000 of the $6000 cash in the paper bag.  She’s so sad.  Delia saved me, but can she save herself?  Delia believes that her God takes care of her.  I guess I don’t need to buy a bar in Nebraska.  With my cash I buy her a ticket back home to the Hanging Gardens, a visit, but I suspect she’ll stay there or land a more lucrative job in Dubai and never return from the sky.

You are nice, she says.

Because I like you.  I like you a lot.

Thank you, she says.

She never says, I like you.  Just, Thank you.


The Interview Room is never lonely for long.  Who did it?  Why?  Someone always wants to know.  We come and go like meteors, Horse at his desk staring.

That’s the one was running.

Did you see the shooter?  Did you see?

I ran off, I didn’t see anything.

No one sees anything.

Why did she leave when I was almost there?  Who shot him?  Who was the third guy?  Don’t know a name.  I ran.  Give me your money, I heard him say, then Pop pop pop!  Man I was gone.  No need for it to go that way.  I don’t want to do nothing with nothing like that.  Maybe Eliot did it.


This is good, this is rich: a collection agency calls my voicemail using a blocked number.  The young hireling tries to be intimidating.  It may be the loansharks or skip tracers or maybe the poor Burger King clerk at the drive-thru wants his paper bag back.

“Reply to this call is mandatory,” the dork voice speaks gravely on my voicemail.  “Govern yourself accordingly,” he says, obviously proud of this final line.

Govern myself?  I love that, I enjoy that line immensely, much the way the roused lions enjoyed the French youth’s heartbreak as he walked in their cage, as he locked himself in their interviewroom.  You sense someone else with you, you’ll never walk alone, and the empty sky is never empty, it’s full of teeth.


Maybe I’ll re-up, sign on for another December flight, collect some more hazard pay, get away from everyone, from their white apartments and blue eyes and dark eyes.  Be aloof, a change of scene; maybe that will alter my luck.  I’ll cruise the moons of Jupiter or Titan’s lakes of methane, see if I can see what’s killing the others.  Once more I renounce worry!  And once more that notion will last about three seconds.


One Sunday Delia phoned at midnight, barely able to speak.

What?  I can’t hear.  Who is this?

A delay and then her accented Arabic whisper: I have headache.

I rushed over with medicine for her migraines and some groceries, sped past the walled plains and trashed plasma reactors in the Petavius crater.  I was happy to rush to her at midnight, happy that she needed me to close the distance.

In her room I saw that she had taped black garbage bags to the windows to keep light from her eyes, her tortured head.  I unpacked figs and bananas and spinach as she hurriedly cracked open painkillers.

“Thank you for this,” Delia murmured quietly with her head down, eyes hidden from me.  “I know I bother you, but this is hard pain.  Every day I will pray for you.  Every day I pray the God will give you the heaven.”

—Mark Anthony Jarman

/
/
/

Jun 122010
 

IMG_0431

.

Here is a story by my friend Michael Bryson from his 2010 collection How Many Girlfriends. For several years Michael published a terrific online magazine in Toronto called The Danforth Review, which is sadly defunct although the pages now reside in the Library and Archives Canada and can still be accessed there. This was before online magazines had much legitimacy; Michael was ahead of his time, and his magazine was a useful lens on what was new and coming in the Canadian literary world while it lasted. He also writes. I put one of his stories in Best Canadian Stories (2005). And he publishes a blog called Underground Book Club.

dg

When I was sixteen, a man spoke to my parents. A week later, he bought me a new set of clothes and I flew with him to California. His name (and I’m not making this up) was Sly. Maybe my story starts with the arrival of Sly. My parents will tell you straight out he’s an evil bastard, which is true enough, but Sly’s character was nothing if not Byzantine. He looked a bit like Santa Claus, an fact he exploited with the young and the old. It took me a long time to see the bits of him that I can claim to know, because for a long time I couldn’t see over his wake. I would look at him and see just the crest of his wave. He was my substitute father, my mentor, my guide in the world of glitter he had brought me to, and I was his servant. I was his paycheque, too, but it took me a long time to figure that out. I’m trying hard not to cloud my judgement about Sly here. I’m trying to tell you things that are simple and real. I would like to say things about Sly that even Sly would agree with, if he were here to agree with them, which he isn’t, since he’s dead.

Maybe that’s where we should start.IMG_0220

It was a dark and stormy night in New Hampshire (I’m not making this up). I was in L.A. with Lily (more on her later). Sly was in New Hampshire. I was trying desperately to get him on the phone. In recent days, we had argued. I had been in a professional slump. At the time, I blamed Sly. “Patience,” he counseled. In my condo on the outskirts of the city, Lily laid out the last of our drugs. It was approaching nightfall. Lily was still wearing her bathrobe. Beneath her robe she wore only her bikini bra. She was seventeen. I was twenty-one.

“Sly, you fucker!” I screamed into the phone. I kept getting his answering machine. He had gone to New Hampshire to meet a new client. A potential new client, anyway. I was afraid that I would lose his attention. Before he had left for the East Coast, he had been reassuring.

“I have a script on my desk right now. It’s perfect for you. The producers want you. It’s a role that could really make you.”

“Well, shit! Send it over!”

“When I get back,” he promised.

The circus was his favorite metaphor. “Life’s the Big Top, kid,” he would say. “Don’t ever forget that.”

After he died, I kept hearing his voice over and over. “Life’s the Big Top, kid. The Big Top, kid. Don’t ever forget that.”

Let me tell you one thing clear and true: I haven’t forgotten that. Life is a carnival. The carnival is the centre and source of all life. Sly taught me that, and now I’m telling it to you.

Continue reading »

May 152010
 

Herewith it’s a huge pleasure to introduce my friend  Bill Gaston, a writer of poignant and sometimes Rabelaisian family stories, plays, novels, and a fine sports memoir Midnight Hockey. He teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island (way to the left if you’re looking at a map of Canada). “The Night Window” can be found in print in Bill’s story collection Gargoyles. It’s a story I know well because I included it in Best Canadian Stories the last time I edited the annual anthology (during my ten years as editor, I picked Bill three times).

dg

The Night Window

By Bill Gaston

 

Tyler’s librarian mother has brought two home for him. He hefts them, drops them onto his bed. One is on fly fishing. The second is Crime and Punishment. Tyler suspects Dostoevsky is a writer he will read only if made to, for instance if it’s the only book he brings on this camping trip.

Tyler knows that what he is actually weighing here is his degree of insubordination. Yesterday his mother’s boyfriend–Kim–went through all their gear, inspecting wool sweaters and cans of food. Peering into Tyler’s hardware store plastic bag he shook his head and pointed in at the new reading-light with its giant dry cell battery.

“It’s a natural-light camping trip,” he said, unpointing his finger to waggle it, naughty-naughty, in Tyler’s face. Tyler saw how he could fall to an easy hate of his mother’s boyfriend, except that Kim was just always trying to be funny. His mother had explained this early on.

“Umm…no lights?” his mother began, half-coming to Tyler’s defense. “If I have to pee in the middle of the night? Kim, you want some on you?”

It was this kind of statement (which had Kim laughing over-loud) that made Tyler turn away blank faced, that made him not want to go camping, and let his mother go wherever she wanted without him. It must be exactly this sort of statement that offends her co-workers at the library; it’s the reason she fits nowhere, and dates someone like Kim Lynch.

Continue reading »

Mar 152010
 

THE FIRST EVER NUMÉRO CINQ APHORISM CONTEST

Submissions March 15-31, 2010

Submit by commenting on this post

Submissions must be no more than 150 words in length

Do not enter a submission unless you have figured out what an aphorism is first

Wit and arrogance appreciated

Contest open to everyone including employees of Numéro Cinq, their significant others, children, and small pets

First Prize — Instant Worldwide (e)Publication w/ commentary

Plus honours & laurels