by Peter Unwin
Arthur Gratton was also the vain owner of a hard body buffed on treadmills that churned beneath screens scrolling 24-hour news. It didn’t hurt his cause that he had a deep and noticeable dimple and a streak of white hair that showed quartz-like on a head of trimmed locks. I am a simple woman, Linda told herself. I desire simple things. Even simple men. She enjoyed the simplicity of their bodies. He was tall like her husband, but wider at the shoulders than at the middle. He was muscular and responsive. He did fine in some passionate and empty way, and she understood that while Paul sat disconsolate on the bed beside her, she had no desire at all to make a marital confession of her own.
POSTSCRIPT 4: INTO THE MOUNTAINS
IN THE EARLY MORNING WITHOUT ceremony or ablution she took her place behind the wheel and resumed her path north up the highway over the Goulais River and into the rock and the mountains. The great cavern of the north opened white as ice, and she drove up, up, as the old Westfalia dragged and droned. Black Dog Road, a sign read.
The van drove by feel now, independent of her, stroking the grey asphalt, entering into the tops of the trees, climbing into the vapour of the clouds, coming out the other side into a lagoon of blue sky where an eagle flew perfectly straight and without effort. She was among the eskers and skinks and the black dinosaurian skin of the mountains. There she looked down and took in cold Superior, strangely purple in the moment, and immense, flexing to the road where old billboards lay, long toppled in the blueberry mantle like soldiers fallen in combat. At one time each of those signs had shilled a restaurant or stopping place that now no longer existed. The paint was curled and bubbled now. She drove past husks of Stop Here places with American Plan and TV and Vacancy, bare boxes of sagging boards standing on grey concrete slabs. Stubbles of stone foundations. Overgrown parking lots breaking up as the thistles threw back the tarmac like pastry. One after another the motels, some not even boarded up, had given way to the club moss, some abandoned in a single fateful afternoon, the car packed, the owner gone south for good. The great and foolish promise of the north come undone. For Sale signs nailed in place thirty years ago curled on the walls from which the paint had long decamped. Linda bit her lip. At one time a groaning confusion of love had filled those places; the songs of smoky-voiced crooners on solid state radios, the newlyweds, the tacky negligees made of chiffon, the price tag still attached; adventurers, the travellers, the runaways, the sigh of trucks on the highway. So many of them. Of us, she thought. So many of us. Now rain pelted through the holes in the roofs and the porcupines gnawed the cladding, as if they had all the time in the world.
In a moment it was all behind her, yanked backward by the passing of her country.
14
DRESSING QUICKLY
The Seventh Prophet that came to the people long ago was said to be different from the other prophets. He was young and had a strange light in his eyes. He said, “In the time of the Seventh Fire, New People will emerge.”
THE PROPHECY OF THE SEVEN FIRES
LINDA LAY ON A HOMEOPATHIC Swedish-made mattress that belonged to the ex-wife of the man she was having an extra-marital affair with. That the ex-wife was attending a crystal healing conference in Seattle, and that Arthur was here in her absence to feed an anti-social Himalayan cat and to sprinkle dried shrimp-bits to a Madagascar cichlid that stared at them from behind the glass of an aquarium, said something to her about the state of the man she was involved with. His back faced her from a desk where he sat sunning himself in the rays of a computer screen.
“Arty,” she tried. It amused her to level silly and even idiotic lover’s nicknames on the personage of Arthur Gratton. He did not approve. “Arty-poo.”
“Fuck off,” he answered, without looking up from the screen.
She pulled some sort of painfully authentic quilt over top of her and whispered hoarsely. “Arthur, who was it who turned your cock to stone? Did you ever consider that.”
He looked at her, almost angrily. “What is it that you’re trying to say?”
“How is it that without the benefit of cocaine you have the ability to achieve rock status and stay that way?”
“Because I am the king.” After a moment, he added, “And you’re the queen.” He was entirely intent on the screen, as if some final answer was to be found there. What he was looking for. There was something terrifying in the way that men looked at screens, she thought. As though life existed there.
“No, not me,” she said. “It’s because of you. You’ve had your cock turned into stone by a wizard. Face it.”
“How would you know that?”
“How do we know anything? I read it. It’s written on the rocks near Spences Bridge, British Columbia. We were having a fight one summer, so Paul took me there. Why not? All these stones covered with writings. Some horny beast was having his way with all the girls until one day a pissed-off father who happened to be a sorcerer turned his cock to stone.” He had also, if she remembered correctly, turned his wife’s vulva to stone as well. She thought it best if she skipped that part.
Arthur squinted at the limpid surface of the screen. “Where was this?”
“Spences Bridge, population twenty-five. Franz Boaz was there a hundred years ago. He made cylinder recordings of the Nlaka’pamux people speaking.”
Arthur tapped a key and made a flourish in the manner of a pianist. “Who would come up with that? For what reason would any thinking person come up with some story like that? Why would anyone waste their time writing it down?”
“It’s a folk tale. It comes out of the primeval mud of your unconscious.”
Arthur leaned back with his hands crossed behind his head and put his feet up on an abstract piece of furniture that resembled a circumcised mushroom. Evidently it had no practical use whatsoever for his feet slipped off of it at once. “What if you have risen from the mud, what if you are mud-free? What if your use for mud is to hurl it into the face of the hocus-pocus industry? What do you think this mud is?”
“Icky mud,” Linda answered at once. “You’re not in touch with your icky mud. It haunts you, Arthur. You’ve become a screen person. You’re all screened off. It makes you sterile. If you need to know, it’s a legend, it comes from an understanding that can’t be reached by thought.”
“Ha,” he grunted. “The great feely fraud of the century.” He frowned at her. “You’re implicated. Your husband is a practitioner. Your mind has gone soft. Nonetheless I find you extraordinarily attractive.”
She was suddenly tired of the way they went down this path. It had been funny, she thought, at first. There had been wit in it. A teasing competitiveness that frequently led to sex. Now it was only annoying. “There still is a peace that surpasseth understanding, whether you like it or not,” Linda said. She wondered if she was trying to convince herself. Arthur consented to squint at her.
“There is just one piece that surpasseth understanding.” Arthur spun in the chair and braked in front of her, clutching himself. “This piece. I thought that you of all people would know that.”
The way he sounded in the moment reminded her weirdly of certain fishing nets she had read about. Fifty miles long some of them, dragging the bottom of the ocean where they scooped up every living thing that had gone there to hide. She hauled herself from the ocean floor and began to dress. He watched her. He did not approve of women dressing. “You really should not put on your clothes,” he said. “It’s a misstep. It is civilization itself going in the wrong direction. Trust me.”
She was dressed, preparing to go, flummoxed with him, eager to be somewhere else. How much of her life had been spent moving from one room to another where different men lived? What would Paul say? He would say, “‘We murder to dissect.’”
“Pardon me?”
“We murder to dissect.’”
“That’s a bad thing?” Arthur knew he should let this go, but was unable. “If Banting had not m
urdered those cuddly puppies and dissected them? He did it down the street in that lovely grey brick building with ivy growing on it, by the way. The puppies screaming in the basement. If not for that you could be having a seizure right now instead of being here with me. ‘We murder to dissect?’ I like that. Did you make it up?”
“William Wordsworth, the poet. Remember? The people who once legislated the world. ‘Tintern Abbey.’ Read it. It will help you.”
“I’ll read it,” he said. He made it sound as if he’d already done so.
“You won’t read it,” she corrected him. “You’ll keep invading people’s privacy in the hope of finding dirty underwear or a porn stash. You’ll find it too; welfare mom doing outcalls, a councillor with the crack-addicted daughter. You’ll keep putting your nose into people’s messes until finally they jump in front of a subway train, and then you’ll get an award for doing it. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“This may surprise you, my dear, but I am ashamed of myself and furthermore I know all about Willy Wordsworth. Didn’t he screw his sister or something? Weren’t those Romantic guys always doing that? I trust they were ashamed of themselves.”
“He did not screw his sister.”
“No?” Arthur sounded crestfallen. Then he brightened, “I’ll just say that he did,” and laughed.
SHE SHUT THE DOOR BEHIND her the way she put down a newspaper or snapped off the television, dirtied by a hunger that coursed through her body and seemed to have no interest in ever being satisfied. There were no stories. No children. It was an adult building. Filled with adults. Only adults, acting the way adults acted. There were ornate light fixtures and sex performed the ultra luxe way with no risk of infection or fertility. There was the gassy sound of electronic equipment murmuring through the carpeted corridor from behind firmly shut doors. Muffled music made without the touch of flesh on gut or lyre. Muffin music, she thought. We are being muffined to death with such music. She was mad. There was no doubt. Mad as a muffin. The entire world had become a pathological and diseased muffin. She stood alone in the elevator reading a hand-written piece of paper taped to the console; WARNING, it read. The raccoons were rabid and another earwig infestation had entered the parking levels in the basement.
15
APARTMENT
There is a most evil custom among the Savages. Those who seek a girl or woman go to her to make love at night.
THE JESUIT RELATIONS, 1639
PAUL SAW HIMSELF IN REVERSE in Loretta Ramsay’s mirror and didn’t like what he saw, the stooped and dim outline of a thief in a room that was not a woman’s room, only a chamber filled with a young person’s confusion and ephemera. The sensation of being spied upon touched him and he searched for the source of it. He found it finally in the form of a stuffed teddy bear on the floor in the corner, dressed it in a child’s T-shirt, Homeland Security Fighting Terrorism Since 1492, shown on the front of it.
For a moment he listened to the city outside meting out its confusion of cars and the hysterias of young people. He heard students who were either singing or screaming or committing violence against one another. Arguing about Hegel and young women. He heard the swish of vehicles and the distant punctuation of car alarms that sounded mournful as trumpets. He heard the great Babylon of the city at night.
On the walls of her apartment hung posters of musicians he’d never heard of and was glad not to have heard of, tall, skinny men with violent names and dark sunglasses. Indoor people. A poster of Malcolm X wearing black shades and machine gun, he recognized. It seemed like something from a movie. In her window hung a massive dream catcher of feathers and deer hide. He wondered what nightmares had been caught in it. He didn’t want to know anymore. It was not his business. There comes a point in a man’s life when a young woman is no longer his business. He thought he knew that.
She lay on a mattress supported from the floor by four plastic milk crates. That tradition strangely had not changed from his own student days from so long ago. The smell of oil paint pressed every inch of the room and her canvasses and boards leaned against the walls randomly. Paul stared somewhat wildly at the stark depictions. He saw again the figures knifed in their sleep, the tortured expressions of mouths, eyes flashing open in colour, others in black and white. Children suffered violent death in her work, one after another. It was the children, always the children where the murders went to nest. The boards pressed against every available space in her apartment, stacked three and four deep. Suddenly he resented the bravado of them. The bravado of other people’s pain. What did she know? Of murder. Of anything, even children. What the hell did people think that they knew anymore?
Paul looked at her, but could barely comprehend how far away she was from him. All of the miles he’d tried to compact into his own life, all the bridges and portages he’d crossed, the solitudes he’d tried to tread, the trails, the car rides. They all flapped away from him like bandages come undone. He stood in a bathroom that felt hostile to him, his urine splashed on the porcelain, a dreary rain of failures. He did not want to turn to where the mirror was. He didn’t want to see his own face. His despicable face. It had begun to look like a shoe. A man had an obligation to be handsome, he thought. He had failed.
He flushed the toilet and went back to her room where she was up and unmindful of him, squatting undressed on the floor. Her hair, her impossible hair, fell down in a tangle against her shoulders and her vertebra flexed like a ridgeline of rock, shining and silver. He would not look at her.
In a white ceramic bowl, the red paint pooled, her fingers sunk knuckle-deep, withdrawn to stroke the board, finessing rivulets of red from the eyes and the mouths of her figures. He continued to watch her. It had always looked like this he thought, in the dark caves at Chauvet it looked like this but darker, the vapour of glaciers hung in the air, at Altamira, at Lascaux, at Creswell Crags, at Agawa, at Peterborough, Ontario, someone crouched, someone infested with insects, someone holding a torch or a stone bowl filled with animal grease while the partner picked vermin from their lover’s hair. Without a paintbrush or a pencil, without paper or practice, a man or woman, forty thousand years ago brought a charred stick to the surface of a cave wall, or his finger, more likely it was his finger, or her finger, and rendered the first painting on the planet — an animal, a horse in profile, or an aurochs in perfect detail, roaming the forests of what would become Poland, showing the very tremor of animal life that throbs beneath the hide.
Paul looked at Loretta Ramsay doing this as she squatted on the floor. The two impressions at the small of her back. He heard the low hum that came from deep inside her throat as she worked. A pop ditty that was as unfathomable to him as cave songs. He understood that a rushing herd of animals thundered past him, like traffic in the city. He turned away. It was not too late. Not midnight yet. He watched her, wanting her to turn and remain in the shine of the streetlight. He thought if he looked at her again, he would turn into stone.
The phone rang, and she allowed her concentration to break. She turned his way and Paul saw she’d painted red and horrendous lips around her own. The effect was as shocking to him as the gash of a wound on her face.
“Look at you,” she laughed. “You have been mad and drunk all winter.”
“What’s the matter with you?” His words knocked against the walls. What’s the matter with you? He didn’t know who he meant exactly. She was already gone into the kitchen.
“Megwetch,” he heard her speak eagerly to someone. Her laughter foamed back. The brilliant bottled sound of her voice had been opened. It flowed for someone else now, someone tattooed and wearing a gold ring in his left ear, though Paul was skeptical the man had ever sailed the China Seas or crossed the equator. For Paul there existed a special place in hell reserved for men who wore a gold earring without having shipped the Asiatic seas, sailed a submarine, or survived the sinking of their ship. Nobody knew their traditions anymore. They just
swallowed everything like plankton.
From the other room, he heard her speaking in a voice of extreme intimacy. He’d had that voice directed at him. Only him. Only her. She could take it away in a moment. Her voice lowered and he understood that she was pointedly excluding him from the passions in her life. She had once aimed that brightness at him. Now it was aimed elsewhere and he despised himself.
“I’m not doing anything.” He saw her wipe the red paint away from her mouth, damping at it with a cloth. “I’m just hanging around. What are you doing?”
I should cough, he thought. Or burp loudly. Instead Paul moved across the room, stopping at her desk which was a wooden door set across two sawhorses. He’d helped her carry it up from the trash out front of a hardware store at the beginning in the sun when they couldn’t stop talking to each other, when every word was rich and blossomed with discovery.
The desk was now heaped with books and the elaborate constructions of her confusion. A white forgotten bra, flattened, a scattering of hair clips, strips of moose hide, a great boxy computer that didn’t work, earrings, pencils, a velvet-lined flute case but no flute, fishing wire, a gram of hashish in tinfoil, a shoe, a scattering of articles clipped from the paper, all concerning the one she was on the phone with. She talked of him increasingly, he was a thin man of considerable height who had achieved notoriety for smuggling six dozen jelly doughnuts through the lines of the Canadian army at Akwesasne and giving them to a garrison of Mohawks. He was the one who had shut down a gravel pit, closed a road. Barricaded a rail line. Paul shuffled the clippings. The photo showed a tall man with long hair and a melodramatic nose — Joseph Maracle, of Tyendinaga, in all his power, Aboriginal Protester Surrenders to Police. Mohawk activist found guilty. Leader of Highway shutdown faces twelve-year sentence. She would do anything for that man on the phone.