His first experience of this — mirage or revelation? — had happened after seeing his father in his coffin. He’d died suddenly of a heart attack, aged sixty. The shock and horror of the waxy, empty face had caused Richard to move into this walking-dead world for days afterward. When his mother died of cancer a few years later, he made a point of not seeing her body.
His father had made his mother miserable for most of their marriage, with his emotional distance and his constant criticisms. Not a great role model, Richard realized after Grace left. He hadn’t been as bad as his father, but before that he’d believed with the hubris of youth that he could be entirely different.
He was glad he hadn’t seen Jenny dead. After the first weeks, his dreams of Jenny changed. She was still as alive as ever, taking his hand and leading him to the baptismal waters of the sea. But now in the dream, he was pale and waxy, struggling to find enough strength to wade in the water.
Sometimes, awake, he thought he caught a glimpse of her walking ahead of him, turning a corner. Once he ran a block to catch up, before he realized the madness of it. Sometimes he felt her presence: once in a crowded café and once in a dark theatre, the one time he’d tried to sit through a film. He’d walked out in half an hour, unable to bear looking for her in each row any longer, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see her.
Walking was a form of relief but that, too, failed him when he entered one of the dead zones. The only thing he could read was The Tempest, because of his commitment to Jenny. And teaching kept him going for the same reason. What would he find to save himself — if he still wanted to be saved — when that was over? He knew what he should do: find a way to make a difference in the world, as functioning altruists would have it. He had brochures from various organizations, like the Red Cross and the Stephen Lewis Foundation. He didn’t necessarily need to go abroad (or he could prove Carol wrong, be more courageous), but whether he could find a spark in himself with enough heat to enable him to be of use, he didn’t know.
February 2012
Richard,
How I poured my heart out to you all those years ago. How I wanted you back. I feel sorry for my past self — not a healthy emotion. As for people walking around hollowed out, I was one of them for a while, and so were you. It seems to me now that as painful as that state is (and it comes more than once in most lives), it’s a mistake to rush headlong into something new to fill the void, as we each did in our own way, your way, of course, causing more dire consequences. What wiser people say about boredom can apply to the more serious state of hollowness: sit with it, breathe it in, wait for the right action to come slowly.
Carol
Dear Carol,
You are one of the wisest people I know.
Richard
EIGHTEEN
“SORRY I’M LATE,” Beth said, out of breath from hurrying her heaviness up the stairs to Jacintha’s apartment above a bakery on Commercial Drive, as the intoxicating aromas of butter, yeast, caramelized sugar, and cinnamon seeped into the room. Beth’s breasts, white as bread, swelled out of her pink tank top, and her surprisingly small feet and puffy calves protruded below a bright-green peasant skirt.
“Be on time, next time,” Jacintha said. It was the first meeting of her newly invented women-only Gaia Circle, a branch of the Gaia Warriors. There were three members, Tanya being the third.
Beth had told Jacintha, the day after the city hall protest, how alarmed she’d been when Jacintha lit the fire.
“You have to push the limits when you’re fighting the establishment,” Jacintha had told her.
Beth had escaped, as had the other members of their group, but several protesters, the most vocal and belligerent ones, had been taken into custody for a few hours, then released for lack of evidence of who had started the fire. The TV coverage was minimal and Jacintha suspected International Olympic Committee censorship — or at least that they had some sort of “understanding” with the media.
“It’s unseemly to come late to a Circle,” Tanya said to Beth.
“This isn’t a Wiccan Circle,” Jacintha said.
“It could be. Maybe it should be,” Tanya said. “Let’s at least read Charge of the Goddess, so we can ask for her help. I brought a copy with me.”
“Without a proper casting of the Circle? Are you all right with that?” Jacintha asked.
“Yes, I think we’ll be forgiven,” Tanya said. “This once, anyway.”
Tanya read, and when she got to “Naked in our rites,” Jacintha saw Beth’s startled look and smiled coolly at her, making Beth squirm.
The Charge was over and Tanya was looking at Jacintha expectantly. Tanya was also a “mature” student at UBC. She’d completed her BA in English and had taken a couple of years off. She was now in the Theatre Program to get her MFA. The two girls had been in high school together, not close friends, but they’d been in the same Wiccan Circle. Neither was in a Circle now, and Jacintha had abandoned the practice, not sure how much of it she believed in. She’d originally turned to Wicca out of a need to set herself above other girls. She’d wanted no repetition of the ignominy she’d suffered in elementary school.
In grade one, lonely, she’d told her classmates her mother’s claim that she was a Russian princess, and that her grandmother, also called Catherine, was related to and named after a queen called Catherine the Great, Empress of All the Russias. “We have one of her crowns in a safe place,” she said. “But I can’t tell you where because it’s a secret.” After that she had friends to play with at recess, and girls to eat lunch with.
But her second-hand clothing, scuffed shoes, and sometimes-tangled hair were too much of a contradiction to her claimed status, and one of the older girls started calling her a liar and made up hurtful chants to plague her in the playground: Jass the Ass, Jacintha the Stinka, Princess Poo, Stinky Pants. The torment went on for weeks, until an actual Stinky Pants, a boy who shat himself in class one day, took the gleeful attention away from her.
During the worst of it, Jacintha begged her mother to let her stay home from school, and Catherine, seeing her distress, acquiesced. During the second week, a social worker came to the door. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily considering what happened later, Catherine was dressed modestly in sweater and skirt and had that morning washed the encrusted dishes and swept the floor. If she’d been out, as she was most days, leaving Jacintha alone, Jacintha might have been removed from her mother’s care then. Before the terrible thing happened.
In high school, living with her adoptive family, Jacintha was tall and beautiful and wore fashionable clothes, but nevertheless she still felt the need for something to set her apart, something to give her power. She began by reading tarot, and then, with the help of library books, started casting spells for her friends. Her first successful spell was for a girl who wanted a particular boy as her boyfriend. The spell involved a pink altar cloth, a magnet, a pair of pink candles, and rose petals. “I am the magnet, he’s the pin” was the incantation.
She cemented her success, and thus her reputation as a witch, by taking the boy in question aside and asking him if he was interested in the girl. When he said no, she told him that if he pretended, took the girl out a few times, then she, Jacintha, would give him ten dollars plus whatever he spent on dates. She had a generous allowance from her parents. He agreed happily.
“If you tell,” she said, “I’ll make your life hell.” The look in her eyes was all he needed to be convinced.
“Can we do a spell now?” Tanya asked.
“Just a short one,” Jacintha said.
“Okay. Let’s do one to call our heart’s desire to us.”
Jacintha found paper and pens.
“I’ll need a metal bowl, too, or a saucepan if you don’t have a bowl. And matches.” Equipment assembled, Tanya said, “Write down one thing you desire in your life now, then fold the paper and place it in the pan.”
Tanya finished quickly. Beth took longer, writing earnestly, frowning. Wishing for
a lover, Jacintha thought. It’s probably ages since she’s been laid, if ever.
She herself had been celibate for several weeks, believing sex would distract her from her plan. There was a tradition — she didn’t know which one, maybe several — that said sex squandered energy, depleted personal power. It didn’t seem to be in the Wiccan tradition, with its rite of god and goddess having sex, usually symbolically but sometimes in actuality. A holy copulation. When she’d told Skitch about it, he’d said — how could he resist? — “Holy fuck!” She smiled, remembering.
Jacintha had written one word only: Richard. She placed the paper in the metal bowl, set it on fire, and watched it burn.
“All right, down to business,” Jacintha said. “Let’s come up with an idea for a new action.”
“Greg says we should find out where that developer lives, the one who’s planning to cut down a bunch of trees on the North Shore to build houses for fat cats, and throw paint and garbage at his house and maybe graffiti it, although it could be tricky if he’s got fences and alarms, and maybe we should do his offices instead.”
“Tanya, Tanya,” Jacintha said. “I’m asking for women-originated actions.”
“Can’t I even consult Greg?”
“‘Can’t I consult Greg?’” Jacintha mimicked in a little-girl voice. “You need to stop consulting Greg about everything, asking him for permission.”
“We’ve always talked about everything. No secrets, even.”
“What? In the great tested maturity of your one-year relationship?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t make for a great group dynamic, you know,” Tanya said.
“I thought of something,” Beth said, and waited for permission to go on.
“Let’s have it.”
“Well, I was reading the story of Spider Woman, and how she spun the world out of herself, and that inspired me. You know how some housing developments don’t allow clotheslines because they say they’re unsightly? I think it reminds them of poor people. Anyway, not using dryers saves energy. So I thought we could tie lots and lots of clothes together into huge webs and string them down a whole city block between trees and telephone poles, and put up signs saying things like Clean Up Your World Without Wasting Energy, and Clothes Dryers Suck.”
Everyone was silent for a long moment. Then Jacintha smiled one of her rare, wide-open smiles, and said, “Great, Beth. And signs saying The IOC Sucks, and Hang the Politicians Out to Dry. But the largest signs will say The Olympics — Greatest Energy Suck of All. Everything we do now needs to be about the Olympics.”
“How do we do it without anyone stopping us?” Tanya asked.
“That’s Beth’s problem,” Jacintha said. “You’ll be the commander, Beth. You can enlist the services of Skitch and Greg and Brian. One of the real benefits of this idea is that you’ll get a lesson in having men do your bidding. Don’t you love that phrase?”
“I’ll help Beth organize it,” Tanya said. “What will you do?”
“I’ll alert the press, when the time comes.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Beth said. “Be in charge, I mean.”
“Think of Spider Woman and have courage.”
Skitch arrived minutes after the meeting was over, carrying a bottle of red wine and some cinnamon buns. “I saw Tanya and Beth leaving,” he said. “What were you doing?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.” He set the buns on the table, opened the bottle, gripped its neck, drank long from it, and gave a loud sigh of satisfaction. He offered the bottle to Jacintha and when she shook her head, he put it down, held out his arms, and gave her a hooded-eye look. “Come here.”
“Come here? Do you think you’re in a romantic movie? That supposedly sexy face is just silly.”
“Harsh! Listen, Jacintha, we have to fuck — we just have to. I don’t care what you said about me handling you. It’s just a simple fuck.” He grabbed her, held her tight, pressed his erection against her.
“You can be such an asshole.”
“Lie down with me, Jass. Please. Give me something.”
“No. You need to learn patience. I’m going out now, but you’d better stay here for a while. You’ve got a big wet spot on your fly.”
“Jass, please.”
But she was out the door and gone.
NINETEEN
CAROL STOOD GAPING at the street where Richard lived. It was barricaded by police cars, and pieces of cloth of every colour were tied together, the ends fastened to tree trunks down the length of the street, blocking traffic — of which there was little, the street being a quiet, residential one. When she looked more closely, she saw that the cloth was clothing: jeans, shirts, printed dresses and skirts, bedsheets and towels. At intervals were what looked like very large dream catchers — clothes woven across huge hoops hanging in the middle of the street. More sheets and garments had been flung over tree branches and dripped nightmarishly as far as the eye could see. It was like a bad Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation — their most recent had been the hangings of beautiful orange banners all through Central Park in New York. This installation on West Sixteenth was chaotic, except for the carefully made webs, as though every person on the block had gone mad on washday.
It took Carol a moment to notice the sign in black pen on cardboard tied to a telephone pole: Up with Clotheslines, Down with Sucking Dryers, and further down the street, The Sucking Olympics. Police cars were parked at various angles to prevent vehicle access, although who would try to drive into the mess of sheets that would drag across their windshield, or into the hoops that would snare them, she couldn’t imagine. Leaning against one of the cars was a striking young woman, talking to two policemen. They had notepads out and seemed to be taking a particular interest in her.
Carol started down the sidewalk, but was stopped by another policeman, outside the yellow tape.
“No access, ma’am.”
“I just want to visit someone.”
“Who might that be?”
“It might be my husband.”
“What’s his name and address?” His pen was poised over a clipboard. He was good-looking, about thirty-five, tall and lean. Attractive.
Carol had one of her sexual surges and became thoroughly disoriented.
“Ma’am?” the officer said. “His name and address?”
And she realized she’d been staring at him stupidly, probably for several seconds.
“Oh!” She told him Richard’s name and address. She could feel her face flushing.
“And you don’t live with your husband?”
“No.” She gave her name and address, as requested.
“Did your husband have anything to do with this?” He gestured to the carnival of cloth behind him.
“No, of course not.”
The beautiful blond woman shouted, “It’s all my doing, officer. Leave her alone.”
A car drove up and a man with a video camera and a woman with a microphone got out. A local news team.
“Over here,” the woman claiming responsibility called. “I’ll make a statement.”
“No, you won’t,” an officer near her said, and stood in front of her. “You can take pictures of the street,” he said to the reporters, “but that’s all.”
“I represent the Gaia Circle, the women’s branch of the Gaia Warriors,” the woman said, shoving past the officer.
The officer opened the police car door and said, “Get in.” He held her arm and she jerked it free, but she obeyed and got in.
She rolled down the window and shouted, “We’re tired of most people’s passivity. We want thousands to join us.”
The cameraman swung her way and tried to photograph her just as the officer blocked the window.
“It’s quite funny, isn’t it?” the woman reporter said, pushing her microphone toward the officer.
“No comment.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“We’re w
aiting for a city crew to come and take this mess down. I can’t tell you more, pending an investigation.”
“Get a shot of that sign, Doug,” the reporter said. “Our MLAs Have Lint Traps for Brains. That’s funny, Officer, you have to admit.”
The officer was admitting nothing.
Carol tried again. “Please, my husband’s place is just a few houses down.”
“Sorry,” he said. “You’ll have to come back later.”
She had a class and then a faculty meeting to get to. “Later” would probably be tomorrow.
But she said, “Later, then,” and smiled the slightest bit suggestively. Oh, please let this stop.
TWENTY
IT WAS SUNDAY afternoon, the day after the Spider Web protest. The knock on Richard’s door startled him. He wasn’t expecting anyone — only Carol knew he lived here, and she hadn’t emailed him to say she was coming. When he opened the door, he saw Jacintha standing before him.
“Jacintha! What are you doing here? How did you know where I live?”
“Beth told me you’d moved nearby and told me which house she thought it was. I was in the area yesterday and saw it, so I thought I’d try my luck. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, it’s all right,” he said, setting aside his embarrassment at having been caught in such a dishevelled state. “Please come in.” He asked, “Were you involved in that demonstration here yesterday? I remember you said you were with a protest group. Presumably Beth is in the group, which is why it was on this street.”
“Yes, Beth was in charge. I was actually arrested, but they let me go with a warning. We got insultingly little attention from the media. They didn’t mention the Gaia Circle or Warriors, the names I gave them. They went from thirty seconds of footage of our signs to some Olympics official saying how wonderfully safe the Games were going to be. Typical bias.”
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