Panegyric

by Logan Macnair

  As M sits down I try to read the label on the bottle. It’s ‘Mac’ something or other. Mac means Scottish right? Scottish means whisky? Or is it rye? Is there a difference? In my limited experience it always results in the same disgusting shudder as it slides down my throat. Occasionally Maxime and I would have wine on the nights we had dinner together. Even then I have to work hard to feign polite gesticulations as I force the rotten grapes into my body. What can I say? I’m a simple man when it comes to these things. My drink of choice is beer that I see in commercials. I don’t own a tie.

  Regardless, Max and I have never indulged in anything like this, but I suppose it is in my best interest to humour him. No brakes on this gravy train. No screaming women tied to the railroad tracks. Still wordless, he goes about filling both of our glasses with the mystery elixir. I feel a little tight in the chest, like the nervous anticipation you get before the drugs kick in—or so I’m told. When he’s done pouring, he lifts his glass in the air, holding it toward me. I mirror his gesture like a properly socialized person would—or so I’m told.

  “All at once now. Santé.”

  The First Drink

  AHG! POISON! Goddamn is that ever vile! It’s burning my throat. Why hasn’t it stopped yet? Christ, am I going to die? This is how I go out? Hunched over a table a million miles from home, choking on Mac-what’s-his-name’s Scottish venom? Oh, wait, the pain is going away. Okay, I can breathe again. I feel it boiling in my belly, but despite my near-death experience, I manage to maintain composure on the outside. I think. Monty didn’t seem to notice either way as he now starts to lighten the load that has so clearly been encumbering his mind since he walked in.

  “Thank you for joining me, Lawrence. While indeed there is no shortage of political colleagues with which I may have shared this drink, one in my position must be cautious, as each drink with them is never just a simple drink. Each drink with them is a statement. An affirmation of alliance or allegiance, an opportunity to forge the links that bind us. It becomes tiresome when all you truly desire is company and companionship.”

  He pauses a moment.

  “It can be very dangerous to make friends in this business.”

  Call it motherly intuition, but I sense that little Maxy may have had a rough day. He has generally been adamant about not sharing any details of his day-to-day affairs with me, encouraging me instead to concern myself with his past, but I wonder if right now he’s willing to make an exception. He doesn’t seem to be angry with me, but there’s something that he wants to talk about. Why else are we doing this? I’ll press him a bit.

  “How do you, how do you mmmm-muh-mmmm-mean?”

  “Nothing in need of decryption, my friend. I speak plain truth as two sharing a drink should. It can be very dangerous to make friends in my business. Friendship clouds your better judgement. It gives way to attachments and sentimentalities that can hide the obvious decisions that need to be made. We had to make, I had to make a choice today that betrayed the trust of someone who I sincerely enjoy. He is what you or I or anyone else would consider to be a good man. Honest, loyal, altruistic even if you believe in such a thing. Today an immovable wall was placed in front of his career, a wall constructed on my order. By all accounts it was the right decision. While I respected his integrity and honour, such traits can be liabilities in this world. From here on he will occupy only a trivial role in my campaign, and while I have long since accepted the distinction between what is right and what is required, I find myself uneasy with this decision. His face when I told him was akin to a dog that had been abused by its master. There can be no friends at the poker table if you expect to come out on top.”

  As he finishes his thought, the moonlighting bartender proceeded to fill our glasses once again. I should have known that I wasn’t going to get out of here that easily. From this point our conversations become spotted and fecund, they trail off and bleed into one another, our words winding like streams as my tongue slowly comes to terms with the Scottish solution that every quarter hour was reintroduced. Bear with me as I tune this radio.

  The Second Drink

  “How is it that you are able to be here, Lawrence? You hastily accepted my offer of employment knowing full well it would take several months. Have you no attachments back home? Is there no one eagerly awaiting your return?”

  And I don’t remember how it happened, but I soon found myself going through the details of my last romantic relationship with M, something I hadn’t ever done with anyone else. Maybe I felt secure discussing this with someone who was so far removed, or maybe it was just the hooch unscrewing my inhibitions, but I told him everything. I told him that when I asked her what she was passionate about in life she responded by saying that she was passionate about me. I told him how disgusted that made me feel, how I didn’t want to take on that responsibility. I told him how her devotion threatened my way of life. I told him how I wasn’t able to end it with any shred of integrity, opting instead to let things linger and disintegrate until I could convince her that I was nothing more than a burden. He listened to me. He listened to me intently, and for the first time in recent memory I felt like my jagged words were being processed, and not just ­tolerated.

  “I empathize, and truly I do. I would not embarrass us both by attempting to speak about matters of love in any certainties, but I do know that you retain opportunities that I do not and I would urge you not to squander them. Be civil with your desires, but do not follow my lead on this. What is dead for me may yet find life within you.”

  The Third Drink

  It’s worth mentioning that alcohol is one of the precious few things that seems to help with my stuttering. After a few drinks most words tend to come a lot easier to me. I’ve read that it has something to do with the alcohol ‘relaxing’ the brain and curbing some of the anxieties that might cause the stutter. And now you’re thinking, ‘so why don’t you just drink more then?’ Gee, great question. Maybe I should start each morning with three ­fingers of my preferred brand. I don’t see any harm in that whatsoever.

  “Do you know what it is that we’re drinking?”

  “Can’t say I d-d-do.”

  “It’s a Scotch. Macmillan. About three thousand a bottle as I recall.”

  And suddenly I hear police sirens coming for me as if I’ve stolen from the school treasury or the church collection plate. I’ll crunch the numbers later but I’m pretty sure we’ve just drank what would be roughly the equivalence of one month’s rent back home in less than an hour.

  “Three g-grand? Muh-Max you shouldn’t have.”

  “Please, have you any idea how many ‘three grands’ I have? And who else would I drink this with? How do you find it?”

  “The truth?”

  “The truth.”

  “It’s wuh-wasted on me. It all tastes the, tastes the same.”

  “Do you recall Aesop’s Fable about the Miser and his gold?”

  “No, I grew up with TV.”

  “Clever boy. As it goes, there was once an old Miser who spent his life collecting gold and burying it at the foot of a tree beside his house. Every so often he would dig up his gold collection, admire his prizes, and rebury them. One day a Robber noticed this behaviour, and when the Miser was asleep, the Robber dug up the gold and stole it for himself. The next day the Miser discovered that all of his gold has gone missing and he fell to his knees, screaming in agony. When his neighbours came to comfort him, they suggested that he place some rocks in the hole where the gold used to be. After all, he only ever looked upon the gold, surely he could do the same thing with the rocks. Now drink up.”

  The Fourth Drink

  “What will you do after this?”

  “Go to b-b-bed probably.”

  “Once the book is finished, Larry. What will you do once the book is finished? You’ll have money. Money opens doors. What do you intend to pursue?”


  “Try to ruh-write maybe.”

  “That pleases me to hear, though I prophesy a myriad of troubles for you. If I may offer one piece of advice—do not write with them in mind. Linger on the nature of art if you will. Is appearance always the point? Is it true to create something without the audience in mind? I’d not wish these burdens on you. I’d rather your efforts be buried under the sands of history than diluted by your expectations of expectations.

  The Fifth Drink

  “No, no, it’s santé, not ‘san-tay.’ Santé. Hear the difference? This is important. Try again.

  “C-caah-can’t you just t-teach me, teach me some swear words instead?”

  “We’ll get there. But first I promise that we will refine you if it takes us all night.”

  The Sixth Drink

  “Then you should know better than to wear the themes of your ordeals like a self-adhesive name tag. I cannot speak with more clarity than I offer you now. Ours is a story of two men similar in many ways, one powerful, the other forgotten. This brings me no joy, but the juxtaposition is not one I can ignore—and surely you have thought of it as well. We both came from nothing. We both see the world in a similar way. Both our paths have lead us here and we are now both sitting as the same table, drinking from the same bottle. So where did our trajectories so radically diverge as to lead me to the bowels of Ottawa while you fester away in under-achieving obsoletion? I know where you place your blames, but do you truly believe that were you born a foot taller and with no blades in your throat that you would soar to the heights you see behind your eyes? There are no bigger barriers in life than the ones that we ourselves erect.”

  And while M’s words should have offended me, or stirred me, or inspired me, what they really did was exonerate me. I may be a hack and an underachiever, but I’ve never been caught misquoting Ronald Reagan.

  The Seventh Drink

  And here things get muddled. I can’t remember the drinks that followed or the intricacies of the conversations surrounding them. The last thing I can remember with any clarity or certainty were the words that Montblanc spoke shortly after imbibing our seventh. It was something along the lines of:

  “You are not my friend, Lawrence. I do not have any right to make that claim. It seems the higher I rise the fewer friends I am allowed to retain. And soon our time together will end. The job will be done and we will likely never see each other again. You will go about your life and make of it what you will while I do the same. That is not friendship. Still, I would be doing us both a dishonour if I did not acknowledge my appreciation of you at this very moment. For whatever it is worth to you, I am truly grateful for the present company. Je te remercie. Oh, and one last thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I still have several bottles of this Scotch remaining in my stores. Disobey my rules again and I promise you that we will drink every last one of them.”

  52

  PISCATOLOGY

  THERE ARE OCCASIONAL days when one must accept that nothing productive is going to get done. The earlier one can acknowledge this the more hours may be spared from contrition. Here we are on such a day, floating serenely atop the warm waters of acceptance. No hauling of scattered history, no polishing of past relics, just a nothing day to be stricken from the official records. Motivation is limited and inspiration cannot be forced, even when the carrot on the end of the stick is worth about five years. A true nothing day indeed. I’ll assure you now that you’ll find nothing here to advance the plot. I tell you this as a courtesy—that you might skip ahead freely and without guilt should you desire more immediate narrative placation.

  Okay then.

  I awoke late in the morning with a suffocated brain and a mouth still soured from the, uh, ‘merriment’ of the prior evening. Somehow Montblanc had already managed to get up and leave the house for whatever great adventure he was meant to have, but as for me, well, after embracing the fruitlessness and futility of the day I decided to spend what remained of it from the comfort of Montblanc’s picturesque backyard. Direct sunlight, I call upon you to replenish my vitamin D supply and to char my chalky casing. A serendipitous combination of fortunes adding to the resplendence of the scenery. First, the unblocked sun, next, the isolation. M shouldn’t be home until the evening, while the groundskeeper is apparently not on duty today.

  A brief note on the groundskeeper—I myself have never spoken to him, and have seen only flashes of his form through the window of the guestroom. I was alerted the first time this ­happened and it took more than a moment to realize who the stranger in Maxime’s yard was and what he was doing there, the concept of paid grounds work alien to me. The groundskeeper, M refers to him as ‘Mack’, though one could safely assume this was not his given name, is a tanned Asian man of seemingly ­infinite stamina. Some mornings I can hear snippets of his conversations with Monty, who he refers to with his strong accent exclusively and at the end of every sentence as ‘boss.’ He starts work early, long before I’m out of bed, and he has unknowingly taken on the role of my unofficial alarm clock, waking me up with his puttering and mowing and green-thumbing by the window. I feel guilty every time this happens. Mack is up and labouring away while I’m unhurried under expensive sheets. This is why I’m glad that he’s not here today. The tranquility of my current situation would surely be compromised if Mack was pruning and deadheading around my indolent body. Montblanc’s backyard is gorgeous in a way that is beyond my ability to describe, and this is due largely to Mack’s regularly applied expertise. But when it comes time to enjoy the fruits of his labour, I can’t have him anywhere near the scene. That right there is why I could never be rich enough to have my own personal staff. I recoil at the thought of anyone working for me. My shoes could never be shined by any hands but mine. Yes, I belong on my hands and knees toiling beside Mack and exchanging harmless subversions, not lying on the grass he has so perfectly maintained as I am now. In any case, I felt it necessary to commit a paragraph toward appropriately lauding Mack, my comrade of Montblanc’s employ, a man who works hard and never complains. Here’s to you brother. And now back to me.

  The grass where I’m lying, a nutritious bed of deep green, has a subtle hint of moisture and each individual blade feels like a velvet tendril on my bare back. My eyes closed, my hands behind my head, I feel small insects using my stomach as a landing strip, a brief layover in their indeterminate journeys. A stream runs through the backyard into nearby Lake Ontario offering a persistent auditory relaxant. I’ll purposefully avoid attempting to further describe the scene in significant detail. I think that’s better left to you. Regardless, in this exact moment it’s hard to feel anything beyond peace.

  But what peace ever endures?

  My own was compromised when I started to hear the noises. A low rumble, a murmuring sound, barely discernable at first but slowly escalating in volume and urgency. I kept still for a moment, focusing on the strange noise and attempting to identify its origin point. Interjected with the murmuring were ­sporadic high-pitched pangs and wails, and though audible, these sounds were muffled as if they were coming from underground. The hands of anxiety fumble around with my innards. These were not the pacifying sounds of nature that had moments ago lulled me into equanimity—these were the sounds of agony emitted by a host that was clearly suffering. I sit up and feel my back dampen with sweat. The sunlight had transitioned from welcome caretaker to a liability as I felt the direct heat further disorient my senses. The high-pitch wails, resembling a cross between a bird’s chirp and the whine of an abused dog, were starting to increase in frequency. Scanning the environs, my head darting back and forth like a startled rooster, I notice nothing unordinary.

  And then, a splash from the stream.

  I stand up and uneasily make my way to the water. As I look down my heart expands and threatens to tear a hole through my chest. In the stream, itself only about three feet wide, I see, stuck amid the rocks
and shallow water, the struggling body of Acipenser transmontanus—the white sturgeon. The largest species of freshwater fish that can be found in all of North America. But I knew right away that this wasn’t a regular white sturgeon. This was Praegrandis and he was near-death.

  A brief note on Praegrandis—but first, a rudimentary understanding of white sturgeon is required. Only then will you be able to properly emphasize with the terror currently coursing through me.

  WHITE STURGEON A REPORT BY LARRY MANN

  White sturgeon, like all species of sturgeon, are among some of the oldest underwater creatures ever discovered, believed to have first appeared over 200 million years ago. They have evolved remarkably little since and are considered to be living fossils. White sturgeon are big (generally around six to eight feet in length), and they live a long time (some even see their centennial). They are found exclusively in the river systems of Western North America, most prominently in British Columbia, Washington, and California. They are bottom feeders who use their suction-like mouths to scoop food from riverbeds. They do not pose a threat to humans, and are sometimes fished for sport, though usually released as their meat can potentially be toxic.

  As for Praegrandis, I remember first hearing whispers of him when I was about eight years old on a camping trip with my family just outside of Lillooet (that’s on the Fraser River, where Praegrandis allegedly dwells). 150 years old they say, and twenty feet long—a true monster. I remember my dad, red ball cap on and with a can of beer in his hand saying with no hint of jest, ‘don’t go in the river or he’ll swallow you whole.’ His playfully disguised warning against swimming in the swift and potentially dangerous waters of the river planted a seed in my psyche that later blossomed into a fully realized phobia that is still hung within me. Today, I fully enjoy the sight, sounds, and smells of ­running water, as I had been this afternoon, yet I must admit that I am still afraid to submerge any part of my body within those moving waters. Praegrandis would always be waiting, ready to pull me under and devour me whole. An irrational fear, yes, but accepting that doesn’t alleviate it any.