I could dig that. Shit, I think I just disqualified myself.
Still, in that alternate reality a time will come for me to write my own memoirs, and you can bet your last shiny quarter that my cover won’t suck ass like all those others. And you know what else? That fucker will be as thick as a thigh and heavy enough to remedy the largest of ganglion cysts. And it won’t have any polished fluff either. The whole thing will be an encyclopedic account of every fault, flaw, failing, foible, and fuck-up that I can account.
Like the time I went to a house party when I was fifteen and, after trying to impress the older kids outside by smoking three cigarettes in a row, puked in the bathtub and blamed it on Chris Evans who had conveniently passed out on the couch and was unable to defend his honour. Or that time in ninth grade when I stealthily scoped out Kim Ribald as she typed in her email password, only to check her inbox later that day to find that she had told Aimee Woods that she thought I was gross and had bad hair. Or the fact that I, to this very day, can’t sleep with my bedroom door closed because I get scared of what might be trapped in the room with me. Or the fact that I believed in Santa Claus far longer than any of my peers did because my dad once told me that I should believe whatever I wanted to believe. Or the fact that I constantly lie about having seen certain movies like Schindler’s List. Or the fact that I call myself a writer but I still have no idea how to maintain a proper and cohesive narrative structure so I rely instead on postmodern experimentation in the hope that my subjects never realize that their emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.
Fuck you, keep going.
I can’t get out of bed most mornings. When I can, I stare at the hourglass behind the blank screen and wonder what will happen when the last grain of sand is finally funneled through. The increased ubiquity of online ordering is one of the best things that’s ever happened in my lifetime. Some nights I can hear Montblanc tickling the keys of his piano with a feathery touch from the floor above me. I tried belonging to some online stuttering communities. They would share articles and treatments and stories of struggles and success. I found myself quickly despising them all. The querulousness of this queer modern year yearns to define us. Acceptance and defiance paint us with the same crusty brush.
You don’t need a voice if you don’t have anything worth saying.
40
POLLICITATION
THERE’S NO KNOCK on my bedroom door before the unexpected M opens it and unhurriedly enters. There’s always an unavoidable second or two of confusion whenever you’re awoken in the middle of the night, particularly when you’re in a foreign bed, and particularly when you’re being awoken by a person you’ve never once before seen under this hour’s light. Wait, what hour? I steal a glance toward the trusty electric clock, unchanged in design for decades, and its ever-stalwart LED lights of order. 3:17 am. Wow, what a time to be alive.
Max is anomalously underdressed, wearing only a purple robe. It looks to be quite nice—elegant even. Made of silk? Velour? Cotton? Not like I would even know. Forget it, the robe is purple, we can leave it at that. Let me gather my thoughts for a second here so I can process this. Damn, why is he here? Does he have some somnambulant habits he never told me about? Or maybe he’s finally come to hold the pillow over my mouth and do me in proper? I know too much about him. He probably has a perfect hiding place for my body. Well the joke is on you, Monty, your book isn’t even halfway finished yet. Good luck finding another ghostwriter who’ll be willing to put up with these unscheduled late-night visits. Showing a touch of courtesy by leaving the light off, he turns his head toward me with unusual sheepishness and initiates our unrehearsed conversation.
“Apologies for waking you, Larry, but if I may confess, I find myself this morning in a curious state of arousal. Not sexually, as can so easily be remedied, but rather toward an untouchable and lost curiosity. Thinking in fantasies for a kiss, not mechanical and banal as when I used to greet my wife, but empathetic and tinged with the underused palette of excitement. Forgive my wandering mind, but in these occasionally listless early mornings it can be hard to parse out the influence of the dreamscapes recently left behind. If you are willing to indulge me for a moment I would like to continue on this path.”
I must be getting better at interpreting the meaning of Montblanc’s convoluted requests, as here I get the unfortunate sense that he wants to tell me about a dream that he just had. Is there anything more unfruitful for the receiving party then when a dream is relayed? Like some hack of an author he will describe to me a picture that I will likely interpret in a way incongruent with what he intended and I will be left to ‘um and ah’ with how to make sense of his symbols of uncontaminated subjectivity. ‘Well, Max, I’ve heard that your teeth falling out in a dream can mean a great number of things. How was your relationship with your mother by the way?’ Give me a break, does he really want to do this? I never figured him for one to prostitute his dreams for inspiration or conversation. A dishonest tactic utilized by the unskilled. No, wait. That’s not fair. Lest I be crowned the grand King of Hypocrites I ought to remind myself that I’ve done the very same thing in this book. A dishonest tactic utilized by me. Dali gets a pass. Regardless, these are thoughts I keep to myself during my almost entirely disingenuous response.
“Yes, puh-puh-puh-please carry on.”
“Thank you, Lawrence. My darling comrade. As I alluded, I have tonight been enveloped by the reverberant echoes of yesterday’s footsteps. With eyes assuredly closed I saw her once again. Her, from an era of antiquity—before my name bared weight, before my thoughts given form. Her deep blue eyes to be sailed on, her onyx black hair to be individually counted in eagerness. A visage that nearly four decades ago could be found adjacent to mine. But more potently, her voice, delivering to me a vital message of palliation. I am today locked in position and increasing in speed, the burden of a man’s ambition and choice. But then, a child physically, an uninitiated mentally, a thief amorously, and what made all the difference was the time with her.
“Tonight I saw her again.
“Her, who had slipped from common vision into the dusty recesses of memory. No time was wasted in renewing acquaintance as if we were both tacitly aware of the limited seconds afforded to us. We met in the same place where we used to all those years ago, under the conifers that comprised the area in-between civilized existences. Huddled with the trees in seclusion and burgeoning twilight, we reunited as the unseen keepers of a love half-understood. It was in this exact spot that thirty-nine years ago we made a promise to each other, and it was in the same spot that we met not one hour ago.
“She hadn’t aged.
“Years of absence and now my mind is incapable of filling in the blanks. But her voice was heard with undiminished clarity, and her words delivered with familiar fervency. Though brief our exchange, to have seen that place again—those trees with the moonlight sifting through, the pinecones strewn across the ground where we sat, and her blue eyes focused on mine.
“Tonight I found her and attempted to make good on my word.
“She accepted my apologies with reassurance and warmth, and I felt a long-held burden break through my chest. In my new weightlessness I thanked her, and as the words came from my mouth I was pulled from our sanctuary back to the waking world like a newborn being pulled from the womb. I felt at once both empty and inspired, both longing and content, but was unable to close my eyes again. I needed to respect and pay due consideration to what had just happened, to this beautiful gift from the past.”
Montblanc’s voice began to waver and flutter as he finished his story. As I silently looked at him, my eyes now somewhat adjusted to the dark, I noticed something just barely visible under the finite light, something that I thought was impossible. A tear was falling from his eye.
This was the first and only time I have ever seen him cry and I was immediately discomforted by the sight. Partially because of the subversion of my e
stablished expectations, but more so because of the impact I knew this was going to have on the dynamic between us. How was I supposed to cope with this new information? As the Master stood before me in brazen vulnerability I felt in myself an uneasy power, as if I had just picked up a handgun that I still had no idea how to fire.
I chose to stay quiet. After taking a moment to wipe away the renegade tear from his face, Maxime continued his verbal ruminations, though his current emotional state caused a small lapse in the rhythmic cadence and excessive eloquence that he normally displayed, prompting the virtuoso rhetorician to speak quite plainly.
“About seven years ago I found myself in the interior of British Columbia for an event with the Party. Very close once again to those teal-tinged trees where two sprouting souls were once laid bare. On the final night I decided to forgo the haughtiness of the fundraising dinner, this at a time when my absence could have gone largely unnoticed, endeavoring instead to act on the opportunity to revisit the shrine of my burgeoning fecundity. That place, unfindable except by those who would already know where to find it. That place where she and I, shielded under dense branches, drew out and dwelt upon the strange viscus we both seemed to share. How different would those trees appear through the eyes of a man now as weathered as I?
“But that question was to remain unanswered.
“The trees were gone. Cut down and carried away. And in their place? A parking lot. A parking lot I could never envision being full. A dread crawled its way up through my body as I realized that my memories were now the only reference point I had left. The wheel of modernization always turns, this I know and embrace, for it has made me my fortune, but for first time I felt as if the wheel had dragged itself across my chest in a petty effort of karmic realignment. There was no doubt a pain to be felt, though I also recognized the futility of lingering on it. Change and decay are inevitabilities—this I was able to acknowledge without further consideration. Until tonight. Until the harbingers of the past decided to collect on my sins. And make no mistake, Lawrence, my guilt is unquestionable and I deserve everything that’s sure to come my way. But that that is my burden alone. Those trees didn’t do anything wrong, did they? Collateral damage caught in the wake of my rise, but they didn’t do anything wrong. And neither did she . . .”
It sounds again like Montblanc is about to start weeping. He sits himself on the end of my bed and holds his face in his hands. I don’t know what to say to him and I’m still not entirely sure what he’s just said to me. I see now that he has removed his left hand from his face and it seems to be repeatedly squeezing something that isn’t there, a lost gesture, a secret handshake. Acting on sympathetic intuition I get out of the bed and take a seat next to him. A short beat passes and I gauchely put one arm around him. To my surprise he leans his body toward mine, accepting my unpolished attempt at embrace. Instinctually I put my other arm around him and he buries his face in my chest. And now I am holding this lumbering beast of a man in both my arms like a parent holding their child. As I hold the man—the probable future Prime Minister—and comfort him from a bad dream that he just had, I realize the absurdity of my current position and almost let out a small chuckle. I catch myself, and instead look again toward the electronic clock and its still-stalwart LED lights of order. 3:27 am. What a time to be alive. And just like that, in a span of no more than ten minutes, I learned something about my host. Something incredibly important.
The robe was made of fleece.
41
PROPINQUITY
QUESTIONS ABOUND REGARDING the mental stability of my host. Why do I get the feeling that I am being shouted at through a movie screen by nervous viewers begging me to get out of the house before it’s too late? Until now I’ve been rolling with the spontaneity of this whole experience in a very uncharacteristic way, first and foremost as a means of eventually securing a cheque with a truly alleviating number of zeros written just to the right of my name, and second, as a meager but honest attempt to break out of what the deluded disciples of Dionysus would refer to as ‘my shell.’ I’ve never been one to jump into unfamiliar bodies of water without first measuring the exact distance to the bottom and taking role call of all the beasties and fanged fish lurking in the murky depths. But here I am. In the service and space of a man whose emotional state is unpredictable and whose mental wellness is questionable. My efforts to track some sort of pattern in his behaviour and moods have so far been folly, and as such, I’m willing to open the floor to bets.
Come on, who wants to put their money down on what we will see tonight? Will he come in guns blazing, berating me with a torrent of well-worded insults right out of the gate? Will he be strictly business and keep our discussion brief and related purely to the book? Maybe he’ll remember another tree from his youth that got cut down and start crying again? Christ, I sure as hell hope not. Well? Any takers? Side bets on whether or not he will belittle me for having a speech impediment. Maybe tonight is the night he finally makes the proposition that we go to bed together? Or maybe he will attack me physically and I’ll be forced to defend myself against a man six inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than me? Your guess is as good as mine. Empathetic readers, and bless your hearts, might be wondering why I endure the unscripted chaos that I do. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for that, though I do see it as a stamina test of sorts. If I can put in my time, finish the book, and manage to walk out of here after a job well done, I will have made per$onal growth and reached a new level of exi$tential $atisfaction. And isn’t that really what life is all about?
Now, concerning Montblanc . . .
At an improper sideways glance, you might think that the two of us were compatible figures, both desperately clinging on to the last remaining seed as if its sprouting and our validation were untenably entwined. Clinging on, yes. Squeezing out the life, especially yes. Let that then be our grand irony, with our swollen iron glands and our tandem gridiron dance of ire, fire and sand. In your mind I’ll ask that you let that misconceived miscarriage end as all ought to, for I’m finding with each passing day the outlooks of myself and Mr. Emmy, our perpetually polite parliamentarian, to be oceans apart. Still, I find myself in an unexpected state of reverence, bordering on awe, as I am made witness to the circumstances that meticulously mixed the martini of a man I have been endeavored to elucidate in way that is palatable for the mouth-breathing public. Hey, careful now. Don’t insult the audience like that. That’s no way to win friends and influence people. Montblanc speaks in a way that I wish I could. That alone comprises the list of his traits that I would want to share. Still, I feel blessed in my opportunity to transmute his life onto paper, partially because I also get to learn about the nuances of his life that won’t make it to print.
But an uneasiness looms within me. This man, composed equally of marvelousness and madness, has a high likelihood of becoming the elected leader of this country. That is a fence I don’t know which side to stand on. Maybe all great leaders have had the subtle hands of lunacy laid upon them at some point? After all, I’ve heard world leaders give speeches, I’ve read their words, I’ve seen the images they project, but I’ve never personally known any of them. Maybe behind closed doors they’re all a little different. Maybe they’re all a little Monty…
I choose to believe this for now. I have to. Lest the fear of this force unleashed partially by my hand embrace me in its paralyzing arms.
42
PYROCLASTICS
THE ERUPTION HAPPENED as the morning sun was attempting the horizon, the day’s first light denied as a concoction of smoke and rock burst from the caldera obscuring the entirety of the sky’s canvas. A thick ash blanketed the jungle suffocating flora and fauna alike as a lifeless silence fell around the base of the burning mountain. From the cataclysmic sludge the Boy struggled to emerge and draw first breath.
Following his first steps the Boy’s feet turned tough as boiled leather but a mighty hunger remained.
He walked naked across the scorched jungle floor on some impulse of nourishment. He found nothing worth eating until he had nearly exited the area of immediate destruction. On the ground lay an okapi half-burnt but still alive and immobilized under the nearly hardened magma. The creature wheezed as its lame body remain trapped and broken. The Boy descended upon this gift, biting through the thick skin of its neck and sucking its blood through his teeth. The okapi’s eyes remained open and wide as the Boy eventually chewed through the trachea. The creature died soon after and the Boy ate until he could no longer, his face dotted with hardened and hardening blood. The Boy stood over the corpse and wiped the blood from his hands onto his lean and muscular abdomen. He noticed the red lines on his stomach left by his fingers and proceeded to cover the entirety of his chest with the seemingly endless supply of searing crimson at his feet. With his thumbs he scooped out the creature’s eyes and taking one in either hand collided them hard and fast against his chest.
The Boy ran. He ran naked and fast, his legs never stiffening, his lungs never failing him. Sweat fell from his brow mixing with the dried blood on his face, landing salty atop his tongue hung loose out his mouth. He ran deep into the thick of the jungle still lush and untouched by the morning’s eruption. His feet landed indiscriminately on insects and animal scat. He bound over branches and fallen trees. He was dexterous enough to snatch mosquitos out of the air midstride and shove them into his mouth, their spindly legs occasionally catching between his sharp teeth. And he ran on like thunder crashing until he came across a small clearing.
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