A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  Their better selves came out of the mirrors. All it took was a glance.

  In Lagos, a motorcycle weaved through traffic and a street merchant saw his face warped in the chrome; when he got home late that afternoon, he found an improved version of himself counting money on an ebony desk that covered the floorspace of his entire shack. The new him looked up and said: “Leave now or die. You are bad for business.”

  In Paris, a businessman from Hong Kong stood in front of the bathroom mirror brushing his teeth, neck still tingling from a hooker’s lips; the following morning, when he logged in to his daily teleconference, he heard his own voice tendering his resignation, and with such confidence, too. When he checked out of his hotel, he found his credit card had been charged to the limit. He followed the paper trail to a yacht dealer in Barcelona.

  Such incidents swept the globe. At first, complaints were easy to ignore. These people were quacks. They were the world’s thrashing unfulfilled. Later, the authorities receiving the complaints had also been replaced by their better selves, who pitched battles for supremacy, sometimes clever and sometimes violent, but always, by some measure, very successful.

  “Not just our doppelgängers,” read one newspaper headline, possibly written by an improved editor, “but our dreams come true.”

  The global population doubled, tripled, quadrupled. People lost work to their better selves, lost lovers and friends. Food insecurity became rife for the world’s first people, who called themselves the Originals. They met in shadowy networks. They plotted to reclaim their lives and their failed aspirations. Global militias were recruited and deployed. Except for a few pockets of stubborn resistance, the better selves were too caught up in their success to take note. They were easily sabotaged, and the last of them went into hiding.

  But there was nothing left afterwards, and the militias refused to disband. Brimming with inspiration, they laid siege to the towns and cities they’d fought to liberate, and then they fought each other. Everything was ruined, because too many people dreamed that it should be.

  RON

  Crouched up here in the shadowy fir of the Smoke Bluffs, Ron can easily see a naked body tethered to the roof of the home he built twenty years ago. It looks like Reggie, the balding life insurance salesman with saggy breasts, a perennial bachelor who used to invite the neighbourhood over for barbeques and tuck neatly folded policy outlines beneath everyone’s drink coasters and salad bowls. From this distance, it’s hard to tell if he’s dead or alive, but either way he’s essentially roasting up there, plump and disturbingly hairless, his flesh glistening like exotic pork on the very shingles Ron coil-nailed himself.

  Despite everything, Ron still feels a flush of pride when he sees his house. As the lead builder, he snapped the chalk lines and stood the walls, set the trusses and sheeted the roof. He even stuffed the insulation. He worked with his shirt off and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He threw beer cans in the gravel driveway until there were hundreds. Then he brought them to the depot for a return.

  Things were different back then. The neighbourhood was different. The forest was thicker and wider and nearer to the houses, of which, aside from his, there were very few. After he moved in with his wife, he told her to watch for bears and mountain lions. He told her to stay out of the backyard at night and relished the fear that flashed in her eyes. It was man against the world, and he was on the front lines.

  But now things have changed. After manifesting from his reflection in a saw blade, Ron’s better self wouldn’t let him stay, not even for a night. “No one is sleeping with my wife but me,” said Better Ron, a shotgun resting on his shoulder. And then militias attacked the neighbourhood, bullets whizzing through the picture windows, punching holes in the garage doors. People came into the streets to welcome them, and they were killed in jubilation. The dead were ploughed into the centre of the cul-de-sac. They burned for days, and everyone remembers the smell.

  Down at the base of the Bluffs, Ron watches Greg crawl through the thinning brush leading to his backyard. Even in this situation, there’s something faintly homosexual and repugnant about him, about his tall and lanky frame, his wildly corkscrewing hair and arty beard. He’s one of those British Columbians who owned kayaks. He took his wife and kids on four-day hiking trips, the West Coast Trail, some place with no quads or dirt bikes, just — and Ron truly hated this little phrase — just knee grease. Greg’s wife had a greenhouse and sashayed around the front yard twirling a painter’s palette. At Reggie’s barbeques, they held microbrew-assisted lectures on topics like the knowledge economy and green-collar sectors, all of which affronted Ron in a primordial way he could neither describe nor conceal. People say that Greg has no better self. People say he’s always been exactly who he wants to be. But Ron doesn’t buy that for a second, not even now.

  Because Ron is one of those British Columbians whose lineage used to saw down trees and build houses on the roaring shores of the Pacific Ocean. If a landslide wiped their homes away, so what? They just sawed down more trees and built anew. When a storm swept his grandfather out to sea, the survivors moved inland, ranched some horses, prospected for minerals, and built their houses yet again. Ron’s father passed away at his home in 100 Mile House about ten years ago, half a life of panic and rage finally collapsing, sweet and sweaty relief all over his leathery face.

  As for Ron, he ran a crew up and down the Sea to Sky Highway. He used to operate dangerous saws, whistle at women pushing baby carriages, and make illegible notes on site plans. It was his company, his show, his signature on the paycheques, and he sometimes chose to issue those late because, hey, shit happens. After shift, he would crush beer cans under the steel toe of his work boot. He would hook his thumbs in his tool belt and belch, and then maybe he’d reconfigure a mesh-back ball cap on his grown-in crewcut and drive his half-ton home with the air-con cranked and windows open to let the cigarette smoke billow out. And if Greg had a problem with that? Well then fuck Greg. Maybe he’d like to buy a life insurance policy off Reggie before Ron slapped his face across the front lawn.

  Now, Ron’s keenly aware of how lucky he is things never went that far. He fiddles with his tool belt and surveys the street as Greg breaks out of a crawl and sprints into his old yard, pinning his back to the wall of the house and squeezing behind a stack of kayaks punctured with bullet holes and smeared with graffiti.

  As always, there are soldiers around, the sun flashing off the chrome of their automatic weapons as they patrol the sidewalks and alleyways. They wear riot gear raided from police stations in Vancouver, and they stamp their boots into the crumbling asphalt. They shoot civilians and set fire to pets. They discipline each other, occasionally executing one or another of their ranks in the streets, stripping him of his gear and nailing him to the side of a home visible from the Smoke Bluffs.

  But it’s no relief to see the corpse of the enemy. Even in death, they appear fit and strong, blood congealing in the contours of their muscled thighs, chiseled jaws hanging inches above their broad, still chests, and flies growing fat on the cusps of their cracked lips.

  There are rumours that they plan to set fire to the fir stands atop the Smoke Bluffs and burn everybody out. Imagine the horror of people hurling themselves off the cliffs in a desperate bid to escape immolation, rape, slavery, torture, murder.

  At the moment, the soldiers are at the top of the street smoking cigarettes and shooting at burnt-out cars. It’s an ideal time to gather supplies for the smattering of refugee camps in the Bluffs. Unless Ron bangs his hammer against his nail-pull, producing a sharp, resonating ping, Greg will continue his search for balls of string and chili pepper sauce, so some of the families in the forest can protect their gardens against elk and rabbits.

  Of course, Ron finds this ridiculous. He can’t understand why anyone would risk his life for such petty supplies. Not when Ron’s got his tool belt, not when he’s got his bullet level and speed square
, his pencil nub and claw hammer, his cat-paw nail-pull and forty-foot measuring tape. But Greg says those tools are just so much ham-handed industrialism, part of an old cookie-cutter cash-out, whatever that means, and obviously a lot of people agree, because Greg is moving down there with a team, coordinating, delegating, administrating, and he only reluctantly let Ron have Bluff sentry. “I know you want to do your bit, bubba. I know what that’s like. But just stay sharp, okay? Lives are in the lurch, and there aren’t many left.” Ron can’t stand it when Greg calls him bubba, something he only started doing after the militias evicted them, because this is a new day, and gone is the instinctual fear men like Greg once had for men like Ron.

  Later, after they’ve distributed the supplies, Greg approaches him with his hands in his pockets and the wind tousling his curls. “Want to come help me check my traplines? I know what you’re thinking, I know. Trapping is so ethically bankrupt it might as well be criminal. You’ve come a long way, bubba, haven’t you? Ordinarily, you’d be right, but how else can we get enough protein these days, you know?”

  “I miss the supermarket,” Ron admits. Earlier this week, he punched a new hole in the strap of his tool belt, the third since the eviction last spring.

  “I know you do, bubba, I know.” With a handful of gunny sacks, Greg walks a few paces ahead of Ron, his footing quiet and confident as he whistles bars of Jefferson Airplane under his breath. “How’re Justine and the kids? I worry about them, you know. I mean, we were practically family, weren’t we? All of us?”

  Sweat trickles down Ron’s gaunt and grizzled cheek. All around him are mossy tree trunks, fat with age and listing somewhere above the canopy, beyond the limits of his imagination. Shafts of yellow sunlight reach down from the sky and penetrate the leaves from directions he can never quite figure. The whole scene is tense with that ominous, forested muffle advantageous to woodland predators.

  There’s a language in here. For Ron, it’s an impenetrable tongue, completely foreign with sounds unpronounceable, concepts ancient and bewildering. His grandfather would’ve been familiar with it, but no matter how many hours Ron spends with his ear to the ground, or pushed against a tree, or cocked toward a stream, he doesn’t understand a word.

  But of course Greg speaks it fluently, maybe better than anyone in the Smoke Bluffs bush. And, for whatever reason, he’s not above showing up at Ron’s camp unannounced with berries and cured meat for the wife and kids. Even a bit extra for Ron.

  “Did you hear what happened to Reggie?” Greg is the only one debriefed by the Bluff sentries. If there’s a rumour to spread or a story to tell, Greg will be the first to know. “Soldiers shot him while he was weeding his old garden, the poor fool. I mean he was right there in his old front yard. I think he just had enough, you know? Bled out over some lovely romaine. I sympathize in a way. Betty and I often worry about our little breadbasket. About how they’re treating it. And let’s face it, no one’s had a good salad in a long time, right? But weeding the garden? That’s just suicide.”

  Greg’s trapline runs off-trail through the firs that crowd the cliffs in a semicircle around the old neighbourhood. He set them up a week or so after the eviction, using what he called ethical, quick-kill traps and making sure anyone who had a surviving dog knew where they were. At first, Greg’s original hand-carved Haida Gwaii–themed food storage box was the talk of the camps, and so was the thick-bearded trapper himself, emerging from a copse or thicket to proffer a tasty piece of weasel, badger, or marten. But today, none of the traps have been triggered.

  Greg moves from one to the next, shaking his head. “This is getting worse all the time.”

  “But look here,” says Ron, nudging the carcass of a raccoon with his steel-toed boot. He lifts his hat and wipes sweat from his brow. “Looks like you got something, right?”

  Greg walks over and swats a horsefly on Ron’s bicep. “This animal wasn’t killed by my traps, bubba. You can tell because he isn’t actually caught in one.”

  Hiding his face from Greg, Ron bends down to inspect the raccoon more closely. He removes his nail-pull and lifts the stiffened body a few inches off the forest floor. “Well, yeah, I know that, Greg. But maybe he just sort of stumbled away and died, right?”

  Greg hands Ron a gunny sack. Using his claw hammer to lift the creature off the ground, Ron cranes it inside, twists the top into a bunch, and hands it back over to Greg.

  “No, bubba,” Greg says, a sad smile on his face as he pushes the sack away. “Consider it a parting gift, okay?”

  In his chest, like the time his father pushed him off a dock when he was a boy, Ron feels a plunging feeling, as if he’s falling right off the entire world. “Parting?”

  “We’re moving on, okay? I mean, look at that raccoon. The soldiers shot it. You know what I think? They’re not going to burn us out. They’d rather starve us instead. They’d rather have us turn on each other to compete for food. I mean think about it, bubba. Isn’t that what happened in Vancouver? I mean, isn’t that what people are saying?”

  “Well, but, okay, sure, but what do you think we should do?”

  Ron flinches as Greg reaches out to grasp his denim-clad shoulder. “I can’t help you guys anymore, Ron. Listen, I haven’t told this to anyone else, but we’re going to Saanich. Betty knows someone with a farm over there. As much as I hate to say it, they’ve got guns. It’s a dangerous trip, but if we pull it off, that’s where we’re going to make our last stand. What I need you to do, and this is super important, what I need you to do is to tell Justine and your kids that I’m really, really sorry and I’ll miss them very, very much. Okay? Especially Nick and Justine, okay? I’m really, very sorry. But things are different now. That’s all I can say.”

  On the way back to camp, Ron looks for the orange flagging tape Greg set up to demarcate the route. Without it, he’d get lost in the trees. Whenever he finds a piece, he removes his bullet level from the centre pouch of his tool belt and adjusts the tape so the edges are perfectly parallel to the ground. This little chore is a pleasant distraction from the horrible fact of Greg’s imminent departure.

  Because who will feed his family now?

  Justine is poking at a mess of smoldering coals when he arrives. Her blond hair is tied off her high forehead with a shoestring, so Ron can see the crease in her brow, the frown on her face. She looks like a person trying to remember something, trying to imagine the details. A stick cracks under his boots and she jerks her head in his direction, a strange hue of expectation in her eyes. But recognition tolls on her face and she sighs, wiping her hands on her jeans, which are torn at the knees and hang off her hips where once they were a snug fit.

  Ron nods, swinging the gunny sack at his ankles. “Where’s Christina?”

  “Nick’s bathing her down by the river.”

  “You sound like you don’t even care where she is.”

  “I care, Ron. It’s just that no one loves her as much as you, now do they? What’s in the bag?”

  He smiles. “Meat.” Feeling almost giddy, Ron unfurls the sack and pours the raccoon out onto the ground by the fire. “I trapped it myself.”

  Nick

  Often, when he’s alone with his sister, Nick entertains ideas he knows Greg would disapprove of. Sometimes, he thinks about misogynist pornography or his inexplicable disgust in fat people. Other times, he thinks about pissing in his dad’s boots while he sleeps. But mainly, he thinks about how much he hates his younger sister. How much he curdles at the sight of her sitting in the river shallows with her hunched and naked back turned toward him, a rash of pimples spreading down from her shoulders in an ugly spiral. He thinks about how much he despises the way she should be washing herself but fiddles instead with the plastic hammer his dad gave her before the war, giggling as she taps it against the mossy rocks. “Look, Nick.” She swishes her legs in the water, even though she was born with nothing more than thighs and knots o
f flesh where her knees should be. “I’m helping Daddy.”

  The thing he hates most is that he’d have to rescue her if soldiers suddenly rose out of the bushes with their guns drawn; he’d have to sprint into the frigid river while she shrieks in his ear and thumps her stumps against his back. And what would be the point in that? She’s probably going to die soon anyway.

  Greg would not approve of thoughts like those. Greg would take Christina into his arms and hold her tight, even as she dribbled snot on the chest of his shirt. Greg would invite her to play with his very own able-bodied kids, and they’d all pull her up the side of some enormous mountain so she could see what their town looked like from the clouds.

  The problem is Christina makes Nick think of their dad, and she always has, because their dad showers her in constant attention and patient compromise, even as he furiously rams Nick into some tiny box of preordained self-actualization. Nick understands that Greg has probably intuited all this, that Greg knows his dad wanted him to be a carpenter — still wants him to be, once the new world is settled. But it doesn’t matter. Greg wouldn’t punish Christina for loving her dad. He’d only love her all the more.

  But not Nick. Christina is Daddy’s little girl, and Daddy is the bane of Nick’s life. Once, when Nick was thirteen, his dad called him to the workshop, where he’d been sawing and hammering and drilling all morning long. He was building a shelf for his power tools, and he wanted Nick to come and toe-nail into place a flourished wooden hook, from which he planned to hang his perfectly coiled extension cords.

  Nick had spent the afternoon in his room with the curtains drawn, alternating between surreptitious visits to his preferred porn sites and fussy detail-work in his full-size cross-sectioned drawing of a better family in a different home. He’d sketched the father sitting on the edge of a queen-size bed in the modest master bedroom. The body turned out perfect, the posture natural and the proportions bang on. It was the best body he’d ever drawn. Totally lifelike. Except for the face. The face just wouldn’t come together. He kept trying to draw his dad, or at least a facsimile of the man, a suggestion, but instead he wound up with something that looked more like Greg.