by SK Dyment
“Nonsense. Of course I was in a trance. And I was just going to suggest that you and I go to the nearest service station....”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. And I no longer think, my bug-eyed friend, that you should be getting back on your bike.”
“Well, I don’t think you should be fantasizing about your dance instructor. Forget his pretty white blouse, his teal tights and his nappy nylon nightstick. He’s wearing a pheromone cologne, and his interest is purely....”
“Back off!” screams Natalia. “Stop reading my mind! You’re sick! It’s not a blouse!”
“I’d hate to be stranded by the road.”
“Thank you for the gasoline. I hope that you fare well.”
“Well yeah, now that half the motor fuel’s gone….” Mimi begins. The two women glare at each other. It is a dangerous looking eye-lock. Mimi clears her throat. “Um, I’m going up to the Adirondacks. Whereabouts you headed?”
“I’m going crazy,” says Natalia. The engine turns over perfectly, a friendly sounding growl.
“Fine,” says Mimi. “Go crazy, but don’t drag all my friends into your romance with a madman.”Mimi mounts her bike and starts her engine. Her movements are fluid, and for a moment, dancer Natalia widens her eyes.
Mimi pulls into the traffic, causing a car to swerve. It blows its horn and Mimi waves her leather fist.
40.
JACKIE IS NOT HAVING the greatest time with the Chevy pickup. It is moving with a misaligned drive shaft that coasts slightly into oncoming traffic, and her steering has to be corrected every few moments. It wasn’t something it was doing before Mimi got out, but she dismisses the idea that Mimi has powers to fudge with mechanical things. Otherwise she is moving swiftly along New York State Route 28, to an area called North Creek.
It is because she knows Vespa is headed there, not because she gives a damn about Rudy. Jackie senses Vespa is approaching danger, and approaching it with a forgiving, kind-hearted attitude that is about to blow her to bits. Jackie curses the pickup, then apologizes to it. She believes in an unwavering, agnostic way that machines can feel her vibes.
“I’m sorry,” says Jackie aloud.
The pickup truck corrects and suddenly Jackie is driving in a straight line again, without having to adjust the misalignment. A shudder of truck-woman kinship moves up and down her spine. In the back of the truck, the Squirrel glider is held down by bungees and a tarp. In the rear-view, she can see the furred rudder moving happily back and forth with the wind.
Arriving outside of North Creek, she parks the Chevy at a lookout point to assemble the motorless aircraft. A strong wind is tugging at her. She grits her teeth and pops together the component parts. Roping it to a tree, she runs over their craftwork with the tips of her fingers until she is satisfied that every part is joined tightly and in place. The cliff she chooses is four hundred feet above the mixed-tree forest. Throwing a pack on her back, she launches the glider, the wind speed-reading at thirty knots an hour. To any observer, it would appear that Jackie was committing suicide. To Jackie, it is merely a challenging fly.
In Manhattan, Olesya’s bail officer laughs and settles back in his chair. A sense of hilarity has swept in through the windows and into his bones, and he has started to giggle. The judge has rendered the evidence against Olesya as inadmissible on the grounds that the videotape is black and white and the jacket is tangerine. Eyewitnesses aside, even the city workers tearing up the block in front of West 109th Street are wearing tangerine. Even the PR men and some of the cops brought in to control the Internet site picket chaos were wearing tangerine. The judge himself has a tangerine Speedo. The papers are flaring in tangerine ink: “Olesya case acquitted, Judge rules lack of evidence.”
Several miles of hardtop behind Mimi is Ben and Gus’s lover Swan on the back of his Trident 750V. They are following a map taken from Natalia’s apartment. Ahead of them is Ben’s sister. Vespa has been thinking about him on idle, not crazy about him, just a regular guy now, when the idea suddenly strikes her that Ben has been a real worm.
First, he broke into that woman’s apartment, then abandoned Wanda for doing nothing more than conning a few filthy thousand out of dirty Rudy. Rudy—the man who had Vespa thrown from his building. The man who had laboured in the corporate boardroom of a company that had killed, defrauded, and caused death and injury to hundreds, possibly thousands of people. And he had mistrusted Jackie, when all Jackie had ever done was to saw open a few bank machines, breaking into a few places that would not miss the cash. It was something Ben had done himself.
The price tag in damage and death behind corporate crime was apparently in the millions, and B.F. Turner had not paid a cent. At least Rudy seems informed. Now, he is somewhere up in the trees. And she is supposed to love him and forgive him? She is supposed to convince him it had not been Ben who sent the threats? Why? So that Wanda could be targeted? So that Ben could have Swan to himself?
Vespa allows her bike to slow and then dodges and trails behind Ben. As ever, even with the sides of his face smushed like a Shar-Pei inside his helmet, his smile is magnetizing. When Ben and Swan have rumbled ahead of her a decent distance, she turns onto a sideroad, and then another, and another. Ben finally slows to have a poutine and a fried fish burger with Swan, and realizes his sister is not behind him. “Oh no! She doesn’t understand!”
For a moment, he is flooded with fear that she has been swiped off the road and killed. He feels as if he has been torn apart, as if a tornado has ripped off the roof of their home and dropped a raging river between himself and Vespa that is too wild for him to cross. He argues with Swan that they should turn back and look for her, but Swan is insistent that they should push on. Ben is not used to not getting his way. He steels himself. He cannot let concern for Wanda surface. After all, Wanda is shagging Swan’s beau. He has an absurd feeling of rootlessness, something like what Olesya must have felt when she first came home from the prison psychiatric infirmary to find her home was packed with the busy lives of many other people.
Swan laughs and shovels a French fry into Ben’s mouth, and Ben accepts it, like a baby bird, like a cygnet. If it had been Wanda, he would have pushed her hand away. He might have said something angry. He is beginning to think about how he treats Wanda. Perhaps he has not been playful enough. With Swan he accepts, even peeps like a baby bird. Swan laughs and feeds him another. The sun beats hot, and they are enjoying each other’s inner child. Swan tells him not to worry about his sister, she is probably having fun. For a moment, Ben thinks he meant Wanda, having fun in the arms of Gus. He drops his eyes before they can discuss it. Instead, they look at the map they have gleaned from information in Natalia’s house. It is confusing; it is chicken scratch, Ben has become separated from Vespa, and they are lost.
41.
ARNICA HEARS THE RUMBLE of Gus and Wanda’s Moto Guzzi coming towards her at their picnic spot by the Hudson River. Celeste has only been in New York a few days, and is overcome by Alaska’s caring attention to her child. As well, Alaska seems to appreciate Celeste for what she is, a hot artiste. They sit closely together, the door of the minivan left open, a radio warbling from within. Arnica however is tired of staring at her mother’s friend’s French easel, being bounced on Alaska’s knee and listening to them discuss forgiving and nonforgiving watercolour paper. She misses Gus and Swan.
Celeste looks furtively around her. The sound of the motorcycle engine has disrupted her meditative state. She looks up guiltily, as if caught en flagrant délit stoned on absinthe avec la bébé on the banks of the Seine. But Gus is far from a judgemental mood. For one thing, thanks to him, Arnica’s father is with Ben and he is with Wanda, having the time of his life.
“Hello, my dear friends,” says Gus, and he hits the kill switch on the Guzzi. Wanda hops off and saunters over to the group. As ever, Wanda is intimidating, something she has never noticed, preferring to hide behind men
who frighten her more. She is only now beginning to realize and think about the effect this may have on other people.
“Hello,” says Wanda. Only the baby looks impressed.
The grown-ups look like they are about to burst into tears. “It’s okay,” Wanda tells them.
“What do you mean?” asks Celeste.
Wanda drops a newspaper on Alaska’s lap and saunters over to look at the painting of Trees By The Hudson that Celeste has painted.
“This is stunning! You’re really good. It’s captured every flash of light in the tree! Everything is in that painting! Gus, come look!!”
“Holy Smokin’ Foot-longs!” says Alaska, reading the bright tangerine print. Ignoring her, Gus steps lightly over to look at the painting.
Alaska falls back in her Cape Cod recliner, and Gus takes Arnica in his arms.
“Mary, Joseph, Java, and Tee Tee. Holy Dog Nuts and Hashish Hannah!” Alaska holds up the newspaper.
“I know, it’s good,” says Gus, unsure if he should be referring to the newspaper report of Olesya’s acquittal or to Celeste’s work. “You didn’t know?” he adds politely.
“It’s first-rate!” says Wanda. She moves closer in her leather and traces the motion of the brushwork in the air with her prosthetic.
“I always wanted talent like this,” she murmurs gently.
“Gorgeous!” says Gus. His hair is sweaty and sticking every which way. Arnica laughs and presses her fist into his mouth.
“We really, really love your work,” says Wanda.
“You do?” asks Celeste insecurely, and she stares at Wanda, the expression of a brilliant and tormented artist that will become her everyday resting face is just beginning to accent her features. She falls into Wanda’s embrace, and fits Wanda’s body in a way that makes Wanda feel good and warm and gentle.
Gus sits the baby on the newspaper. The river light Celeste had caught in her painting plays in Gus’s dark hair.
“We really do,” says Alaska. “We love you.”
“Yes,” says Gus, “and we love sweet baby Arnica too.”
42.
ALONE, MIMI DOES NOT find it difficult to visit Rudy in his trees. She has parked her Scott Flying Squirrel in the bush, and then followed the open book that has been left as a marker into the woods. She finds a deer trail, and begins to follow it, turning as her instincts tell her to do. Finally, she feels a sense of arrival. She is not entirely wrong, as she is standing in the centre of his mines.
“Hello!” she calls out, not sure why she is here alone, only that this is the place where she has been led.
“Dear God! Look out woman!” calls a voice from above her, and then, “It’s all my fault!”
She begins to take a step toward the voice, then steps back.
She realizes that many small animals around her are watching her, and that the place has become a sort of temple to the forest, with pines as spires. Rudy, in the trees above, is its silent worshipper, who, only just now, has become terribly troubled.
She begins to walk to him and stops a second time. Something is telling her not to approach him, but a powerful compassion pulls her forward.
“What’s the matter with you?” she shouts at him. “What the hell is your problem?”
“The whole place, this whole place, is surrounded by mines. Do you hear what I am saying? I would come down and help you to safety, but I am crazy with sorrow. I don’t even remember where I placed them. Each one is more damning of me than the one I buried previously. And they are all around, surrounding me where I hide. I cannot come down to help you, and you cannot come here to help me down.”
Mimi looks around for a moment. She realizes that any perceptions that may have brought her here cannot help her at this juncture in her life. She also realizes that she has arrived here alone because she has always been interested by excesses of evil. She had always thought it was something she could touch without being harmed. She thought that her ability to go into a trance and see things as they really are would protect her, but she cannot see the land mines buried in the ground. They are rooted in paranoia and misunderstanding, and she cannot see where they are placed. “I can’t see them and I don’t know why.”
“Because curiosity has brought you here,” says Rudy, “and curiosity is pure.” It is a riddle he should not have constructed. To be in the same place as Rudy because of her purity, and now find that she has been rendered powerless by fear and evil, is an answer she does not accept. Mimi resolves that even if kills her, she will take all risks to remove the danger—and not so as to rescue another person or to learn what turned him into who he is, but to clarify who she is to herself.
“How many?” she asks him.
“Twenty-four.”
Mimi looks at the various ways the treetop could be approached. She looks at the sky, then she looks around for a rock, a stick, an object with some weight.
“I know you are not here to assassinate me,” Rudy tells her.
“Not for that,” Mimi answers him.
She takes off her boot and turns her back away from the direction in which she is walking. She is glad she is wearing leathers. She puts on her helmet and braces herself. Then she throws the boot into the air onto the path where she was about to step. When the boot falls, there is an explosion. The explosion sends gravel and dirt high into the air. The fireworks and gunpowder make a spectacular flash in the sky, catching the attention of Jackie, jumping with mastery in her lightweight craft from tree to tree to tree.
The force of it knocks Mimi onto her stomach.
It leaves a crater in the ground. She gets up slowly and looks about her. Her boot has landed next to her, as if it was frightened and had returned to the protection of its mate.
“Twenty-three!” says Mimi.
She steps into the crater with her boot in her hand. It is a well-made boot and is barely damaged by the force of the blast. She slips it back on. Then she tosses a dislodged rock onto the path, creating a second explosion. Mimi tosses more rocks, triggers a third. The force of the third explosion strikes her in the solar plexus, causing her to fall.
Another boot fall strikes its mark, and Mimi is showered with rocks and debris. A sting strikes her foot, and she sees that she is cut. Anger starts to rage inside her.
“What the fuck were you trying to prove? Are you completely out of your mind? What the fuck kind of hotshot dipshit do you think you are? Rudy, I am going to kill you when I get my hands on you, you candy-arse prick.”
“I have a gun,” he tells her. “And you are creating me a path to freedom. You will not kill me. You are serving me. I will shoot you first. It is the law of the forest.”
“Okay, okay, I won’t kill you,” says Mimi. She smiles and sees his face peering out at her from between the branches. She stares back and locks onto him with her eyes. She is determined not to die at the hands of this twerp. His anger softens, while hers grows hard. “I’m just coming to help you down because something told me you were in some kind of trouble.”
She picks up a largish rock fallen at her feet after the last explosion. “What are we at, honey?”
“Twenty,” he says. He is the saddest-sounding man she has ever heard. A shadow passes over him. It is Jackie, flapping her glider wings in the trees and landing on the trees next to him with her glider. Both Mimi and the man in the tree can only see the silhouette.
“Sweet mercy!” cries Rudy. “What am I seeing?”
He fires his rifle up at the glider, and a bullet tears through the wing.
There is a crashing sound as Jackie drops down onto the trees.
He fires a second shot and misses his target. Landing on his platform, Jackie grabs him by the collar and sinks her fist into his stomach. She takes the gun from him and throws it from the tree. A kick leaves him begging for mercy.
43.
“YOU�
�RE RIGHT. Alaska was right. Celeste really is talented!” Wanda is gushing. They have enjoyed a pleasant visit with the painter, the woman-who-knows-a-whole-ton-about-art and the baby. They have left them with their minivan and they are nearing the end of their long road trip with the Moto Guzzi near a shady place called North Creek.
“Listen Gus! Explosions!”
“Yes,” says Gus in an informed-sounding voice, “they may be doing some type of mineral extraction in these hills. The Adirondacks are old.”
“I thought it was parkland,” shouts Wanda underneath the helmet on his head.
“Oh, yes, this part may be, but I’m not sure,” says Gus. It does not cross his mind to feel afraid. He is unsure how to act. The quiver in his gut is something he feels more closely to be a cousin of social danger. He is right. He is worrying about seeing Swan and Ben on the Triumph when he should be worrying about losing his life. Because he is with Wanda, the woman whose life he has saved, whose girlhood was swept away from the grip of snowy death in his arms, he is unable to see through his own blizzard of confusion over his own mortality or the fact that they are doing this for Ben. They have arrived at the end of the utility road on the map.
Wanda is feeling the letdown feeling that something between herself and Alaska has been lost. Gus turns off the engine. The two of them sit there, smoke a joint, and ponder how to proceed. They stare at the beautiful mountains and smile blithely as a red Corvette pulls up next to them. It is Natalia and Camelia, Camelia at the wheel, looking like FBI agents in matching Raybans. Natalia, who panicked and abandoned her Panhead, contacted Camelia by phone for a ride. Since Camelia was already driving out from the New York offices, and already tracking Rudy, it didn’t take long for the red Corvette to find Rudy’s mistress on the highway. Camelia jumps out, and her boardroom power voice makes itself known as she takes command of the little group. “Whatshisname has really gone over the deep end, kids. This is no small matter. I have a cellphone and I’m going to use it.”