by Peter Unwin
Unlike the Arcadia broccoli, she felt herself intolerant to Black Rot and Downey Mildew. She felt Black Rot and Downey Mildew had infested the airwaves and the lint in the carpet, that she herself was a breeding ground for both of them. She was alone in a house with a growing residue of mildew, black rot, and a streetwise cat that didn’t belong to her. There was no audience. No children. There had been a cone biopsy, a second one performed in a white room in a hospital downtown. It came back to her very suddenly. Mostly she was unconscious. Squamous Dysplasia. The drugs came on and she’d thought that squamous dysplasia was located in British Columbia, and that she had gone there to hide from a bad relationship. The anesthetist possessed a bloodshot eye. The doctor had spoken to her. Please. This is very important, I need to tell you this. Are you clear? She was clear. Everything was clear.
To her husband her complications had been a much-longed-for get out of jail free card. During their journey home, after her release from hospital, he found it difficult not to skip through the streets beneath the white chestnut blossoms. To not look relieved was an effort. He largely viewed children as shrunken adults with little experience on the trail, deadly on a portage, and ignorant of carbon dating or geothermal physics. This did not stop children from adoring him, following him, and stalking him. To his alarm children and small animals routinely mistook him for a combination of Francis of Assisi and the ice cream man.
She closed her eyes and at that moment the doorbell gonged and she went to it automatically, like a sleepwalker. No one was there. A box sat on the porch. She did not have to sign for anything. She brought the box into the kitchen table and opened it. Fifty copies of a paperback issue of The Apocalypse Already; Rock Writing and the End of the World, by Paul Prescot. The book had been an irritant, a secretive little project that, for the first time, he did not desire her assistance on. It was barely more than a revised version of the “Legs That Walk by Themselves” chapter from Pictographs, Petroglyphs and Paradigms of the Apocalypse; a closer look at the rock painting site on Coldwell Peninsula.
She slid a copy from the surface and opened it:
The apocalypse enters water as e-coli, and enters the intestines of domesticated fowl in the form of type A avian influenza that will demand their slaughter in the growing millions. Prepare for a new virality. Prepare for the age of the virus.
They enter our ears in the songs that do not belong to us, but are penned by men of the indoor variety who refer to what they do as “music.” This is not music, but the death of music, songs are not chanted from the origins of our dreams but rather excreted from the rust of our machinery …
She closed the book and held it between her fingers. The volume consisted of 126 pages; her husband had paid several thousand dollars to have it printed in an edition of five hundred. A hundred of those copies had wended their way to academic journals, to curators of sombre museums. The rest would be in a box like this. She held the book in her hand, unable to stop herself from reading. She had never been able to stop herself from reading. The cover showed the Legs That Walk By Themselves, a pair of legs painted in red ochre, and a prophecy woven in wampum, later spoken to an assembly of elders by an eighty-nine-year-old man, grandfather William Commanda; that at the waning of this fire there would come someone holding the promise of great joy and salvation, but that promise would prove to be a false promise.
Her husband’s linking between a telling of the Seven Fires prophecy and the aboriginal rock art of the Canadian shield was a stretch that had caused him some professional embarrassment. He’d identified that promise as science, (“a system for killing people remorselessly”) and linked it to a host of diseases that he saw predicted in the hybrid of human and non-human symbols defining Canadian rock art. The microbe in the pig or the bat that went into the human. The false prophet was any book he happened to disapprove of, which was most of them except the 1887 edition of The Iroquois Book of Rites translated by Horatio Hale, and anything by Pauline Johnson. Paul had demonstrated to his own satisfaction, if no one else’s, that the armies of sickness and greed would amass and one day be defeated, or not be defeated, in a battle taking place in a dream. That dream would unfold on a holy landscape, the rock of the Coldwell Peninsula somewhere between Dead Horse Creek and Black Dog Road, ten miles down from the truck stop diner at Neys. The promise would be a false one. Death would come on the air and in the water and the blood of the bird and in the heart of the pig and the brains of cows. A great pestilence would appear out of the open pits of the old Congo. The machines getting smaller and smaller. The animals killed. The children with small machines in their hands.
Linda realized she was wearing her husband’s bathrobe. This disturbed her. Why wasn’t she dressed in her own clothing, building her own story, dream by dream? I am, she insisted to herself. I am the teller of my own story. She loomed over top of the page proofs of Vesuvius’s 26th Anniversary Seed Catalogue. A popular improved coreless variety with excellent quality and good flavour. Vegetables, she wondered? Or men? The improved coreless variety. There was no shortage of the coreless ones. She heard them on the radio and television, eagerly holding forth. A popular improved coreless variety with excellent quality and good flavour. Sow early and follow with a second planting …
Yes, sow early and follow with a second planting. Perhaps a third planting. Then throw the whole bunch of them into a ditch and see what happens. Maybe they would flower.
From outside the window, the squirrels screamed at her. Who are you, they chattered, You don’t know who you are. You are not Native, not Aboriginal, not the first of people.
She had no idea who she was. She had grown accustomed to being defined by what she wasn’t. Non-Native, nonchalant. Increasingly nonsensical, often to herself. She was not of the people. All those Indigenous language words for people did not apply, did not take in her tribe of drunks and civil engineers and audio technicians who watched television, did crossword puzzles, and increasingly sat in front of computer screens scratching themselves. She was chimookoman. She knew the term from Paul’s writing, or thought she did. It meant, to her knowledge, “non-Native,” which to her mind described just about everything she knew, but it didn’t place her. She was non-everything. It struck her with some force that without Paul she was alone in the world and that without her, so was he.
Linda forced herself to sit again at the desk and took comfort in the knowledge she belonged in the chair. The chair was made in China or assembled there. She belonged in it. This was something. It was better than nothing. She belonged with those who ate spanakopita on Danforth Avenue and sold spice from roti shops on Queen. She was an itinerant member of the pale tribe cast out from the coal pits of Manchester and the enclosures of Caledonia, a literary caretaker of the Heirloom carrot: Sow early and follow with a second planting.
She fingered Paul’s book. The war, she read, the outcome, would take place in dreams. Of course it would. She had read it all before. When it was over, a boy would appear. Paul had learned of this boy from his ethnographic readings. A boy with shining eyes. She read on: Who are we and what are the chants that move us from one dream to another? What are the stories that made us possible before speech? Who sings us into existence now that the song has been reduced to a ditty sung by a teenager executing doubtful martial arts kicks?
It made her smile, his ranting. It was tiresome, but it was real. It had a stink to it. Whatever he was trying to sell, it had her Heirloom carrot copy beat to hell, even if the Heirloom did have flexibility in the field and long term storage capabilities.
She turned the book over and confronted his face in black and white. The face was as common to her as an old rug, one that was constantly on the verge of getting tossed out but had faithfully managed to keep her feet warm through many winters. She expected such a face to be fringed by a grey beard in a counter-attack against his receding hair. While she was thinking, the telephone rang.
20
&
nbsp; YOUR EX-HUSBAND
Picture writing is the lowest stage of writing in use amongst men. It is crude and cumbersome. Many tribes of Indians still use this method of conveying their ideas, though many others, to their credit, have learned the language of their conquerors.”
JOHN MCLEAN M.A. PH.D. 1888
THE DEVICE BLARED ACROSS THE spaces of the house, incessant, filled with needs. It brooked no possibility of going away or dying unanswered. She rushed headlong toward the machine, despising herself for doing it. Answer me. The world is collapsing, female snails off the coast of B.C. are developing male genitalia. The ice caps are turning into circumpolar toxic slushies, and your marriage has split on the rocks like an overstuffed oil freighter. Answer me. Respond to my needs.
She rushed headlong to answer the ringing machine, not because she wanted to, but in response to the desperate neediness of the technology itself. The world was so full of desperate and lonely telephones, desperately lonely machines, all of them on the verge of suicide, ringing furiously into empty rooms, hungry for contact, calling out for phone sex, for pizza, for anything, wanting to be cradled, longing for something, for a connection, or any sort of hand to hold them. A human hand.
Answer me.
She hustled on at the urging of it, her feet encased in a pair of Paul’s enormous wool socks. The rest of her remained wrapped in his white bathrobe. Linda got to the machine and put the plastic to her lips. An idiotic voice sounded, her voice, hello, it said, the way idiots answered the phone. She was mortified. What sort of idiotic person answered the telephone by saying hello? “Yes,” she tried, and this was worse. Yes was no improvement. Yes was cursed by its hissing snake sound at the end and its geisha-like subservience. Yes was crazy. She realized with horror women had been answering telephones since the last ice age and all they had to show for it was someone else’s stained bathrobe and a pair of horribly itchy wool socks that didn’t fit. No, she thought. No was the only appropriate response to the telephone. Everyone on the planet should pick up the phone and politely, firmly say, “No.”
A blackness, filled with pricks of white, hissed in her ear before it gave way to a man’s heavy voice.
“‘Five years have passed. Five summers with the length of five long winters.’” There was a pause at this moment for heavy breathing then the voice resumed. “‘And again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur. Once again do I behold the steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of a more deep seclusion …’” The beefy voice ended. “Pretty good huh? Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth who did not sleep with his sister. Unlike like Byron who did. As for William Wordsworth and his problematic penis, he went off wandering lonely as a cloud and impregnated some French hottie, correct me if I’m wrong, Annette Vallon of Calais who had his baby. Meanwhile Windbag Willy runs off to spend six weeks with said sister at Windy Brow Farmhouse where he wrote scads of poetry and took long and meaningful walks. With his sister. Settled down by the fire. With his sister. But no hanky panky right?”
“It was beauteous evening,” Linda answered, “calm and free. He was trying to burst his mortal coil.”
“Oh, I’ll bet he was.” Arthur cleared his throat and went on. “‘That time is passed and all its aching joys are no more, and all its dizzy raptures. All its dizzy raptures.’” He interrupted himself with a groan. “Did I mention that I have an overwhelming desire to have thee?”
“Who?”
“Thou. You. Thee thou and you. And your sister. Do you have one? Sweetheart,” he breathed again. “It is only thee thou and you that I desire so sweetly —”
“You’ll have sex with mud,” Linda said abruptly.
“I will not.”
“You will.”
“You’re naked?” he said.
“I’m wearing my husband’s wool socks and his housecoat.”
“Your ex-husband.”
He made the point of reminding her of this. To her it did not ring true. Paul was not her ex-husband. He was like carpet, the air in the house. It would be there even if she wasn’t.
“Sweetheart.” This time the word was made clinical. “I have your ex-husband’s book. His latest. It came to the office in the mail. A remarkable piece of nonsense by the way. Would you object if I ruined the man? Ruined him completely I mean? Nothing personal.”
Linda had a vision of the cold room she’d live in when she was ruined too. All the pornographic places of her mind exposed on the front pages of newspapers. It was all her fault. Her filthy mind. “What are you talking about, Arthur? I would have thought you’d had enough of that. After that man. The one you wrote about.”
“That guy had too many problems,” he said, carefully.
The man was a school teacher, or had been, who got himself stuck in a back room of the world wide web where he called himself Peter Pan and detailed vivid fantasies about boys. Arthur had uncovered him, disrobed him and left him beneath a headline that stated Sex Teacher, or Teacher Sex, she couldn’t remember. She remembered that the man’s school had fired him and that he had swallowed a massive amount of oxycontin and had gone into a coma.
“He was a perv.”
“You’re a perv,” she said.
“Yes, but I’m a perv for women and that makes me normal. Like pie. And you’re just saying that because it heats you up. You’re naked, you’re on the phone, and if you don’t have sex you’ll become one of those burden-to-society women who write novels and go on about their creative process and appear on talk shows.”
His voice drained at once of its moaning and became cool and inquisitorial. “Did you know there is someone who insists your husband is a fraud? Other than me.”
“The entire British Columbia Rock Art Foundation insists my husband’s a fraud. Even my husband insists he’s a fraud. A real genuine fraud. Not a fake fraud, a real one.”
“It’s a woman. She outs him as a fraud. Some artist-type. Her name is, get this, Wan … Wana …
“Waunathoake?”
“Yes,” he said. “You know her?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“She said she did them. The paintings on the rocks. She said it was her who painted them.”
“So?”
“She says all those ancient rock paintings that your husband wrote about? Guess what? It was her. She did them, the big one anyway.”
“The big one?”
“On Lake Superior?”
“You don’t mean the Agawa Rock? Someone wrote a description of the Agawa Rock in the eighteen-thirties, I spent a month in a canoe staring at it. If she painted that thing Arthur you really have a story.”
“It’s in his book, in fact it’s in both his books, Pictographs, Petroglyphs and the Paradigms of the Apocalypse. It’s all over his new book too; Apocalypse Already, I’ve got a copy. Self published, how quaint is that?”
She heard the distant thunk of a book hitting the floor. Apparently he’d dropped it.
“Chapter Five, the legs that walk by themselves. Are you ready for this? ‘The legs that walk by themselves, an essay on the end of the world.’ Really, I’m not making this up. Have you read this?”
“Are you interviewing me Arthur? Because I could interview you. I could get you to talk about your handcuff collection.”
“Legitimate research. I was given those at a police conference. This woman. Her name is Loretta Ramsay, I mean it’s also Wanny-wooky-wawa or something, but it’s also Loretta Ramsay. She says there are pictographs on some Lake Superior outcrop. Port Coldwell? The ones your ex-husband wrote about. His theory is based on those paintings. Am I right?
“On the advice of my attorney I have no comment to make at this time.”
“Well, guess what? She painted them. It’s what she does. It’s what she says she does, listen to this, ‘a Time Keeper at the Eas
tern Door.’ That’s what she calls herself. What exactly is a Time Keeper at the Eastern Door?”
“Don’t ask me, Arthur. You should talk to my husband about it.”
“If she wants to call herself a time keeper why not get herself a watch? ‘A Timekeeper at the Eastern Door, her work seeks to avenge the violence and injustice that call to us and haunt our dreams and history.’ She says she painted the rocks at Port Coldwell years ago when she was still a teenager. Your husband dates them to the sixteenth century, or earlier. That would make him look foolish. Even more than foolish.”
The telephone clung to her ear like a fungal conk on the side of a tree. An empty hiss spewed from it. The machine had never evolved she realized. It formed in the primordial slime a billion years ago, and it remained there, an organism for spreading lies and loneliness around the Earth.
“It never evolved,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Neither do you. Neither does she. Have you ever seen a rock painting, Arthur? You can’t fake them.”
“You can fake anything,” he said cheerfully. “You can even fake the fakes. Trust me. She signed the damn things. L. R. She signed her name.”
“Those letters came later. Centuries later, Paul thinks some trapper put them there in the early eighteen-hundreds. A French-Canadian named Robitaille. Leroi Robitaille. L. R.”
“That’s what he says. That’s not what she says. She says she painted those letters with crushed ochre and a special fluid from the swimming bladder of a sturgeon, and that she painted them from the blood of the suffering. Your husband says that those images are ancient and predict the end of the world. Have I got that right?”
“Ask him.”
“I would if I could find him. Every time I phone his house, I get you. His loving wife. You are such an easy person to have an affair with really. Your husband is always out trying to start an Academy of Rain Dancing or something and there you are at home. I’ve made some inquiries about getting it tested, the paint, I mean. There’s a chemist from the college, a former park superintendent up there in Terrace Bay, works at a community college as a chem professor. He knows the site. He’s going to go out there and take a few scrapings so we can date them.”