by Peter Unwin
Through a blaze of Chinese neon symbols and feeling numb to the city, she walked back to the van. The key was in the door when she felt a touch light as paper brushing against her right shoulder. Paul, she realized. Her heart jumped in her chest. She didn’t say anything. She caught herself, startled by how much she wanted him back right now in this moment. It was Paul at her shoulder in all his ridiculousness, grinning, explaining to her the dream was over, she was awake now. He was not going anywhere, he had found what he was looking for. The world the two of them had come to know together would continue to drift with them inside of it. They had years of life yet, years to journey into the piney woods to camp and to lie together in the dark night beneath the shriek of the owl.
She turned and confronted a woman wrapped in a shower curtain. A faint beard clung to her chin and her teeth appeared to head in directions teeth were not meant to go. She smelled of bleach and something less familiar, the miasma of cat dander and moulding clothes. Her eyes were red-rimmed and circled in vermillion greasepaint. Across her shoulder she wore a tattered yellow sash that proclaimed her “Miss Universe.” The woman stood in a random moment the way leaves assemble when the wind tosses them into piles.
“Good day lady, good day. That’s right. It is you know. Truly it’s a good day.” She seemed to give Linda the opportunity to speak, but that was not her plan and she resumed in a rasp of pavement and cigarettes her tale of injustice. “I just been kicked out of three lousy churches lady, three of them. What? I ain’t good enough for the house that God lives in? Jesus Christ. I’m as good as you, right?”
“Better,” said Linda and began her escape into the van. But the woman restrained her by laying a large pasty arm on her shoulder. “You know what’s happening, don’t you? You get the picture. You know lady? That last little piggy? The one that went to market? That little piggy is going to blow. First he’s going to suck, then this whole freaking shithouse is coming down. It’s melting see? You know that. I know that. You see? The whole world is an ice cream sandwich that’s melting. There’s no stopping it.” She handed over a folded sheet of paper and stared at Linda with a look that witches exchange when they meet beneath the bleeding neon signage. The knowing look of sisters. Linda took the piece of paper and pulled herself into the van, watching the shower curtain lady turn and flounce away, rustling a thousand plastic skirts, some of them made of green garbage bags, all of them compressed beneath the shower curtain.
When she reached home, she found an unwanted newspaper stuffed in the railing of the porch. She circled it warily as if an improvised explosive device had been left there. From long experience, she knew she’d find it packed with a thousand exclamations, indignations, and fevered opinions and that any one of them could put her into a coma. “The news is the only thing in the world that never changes,” Paul had told her repeatedly and she’d come to agree with him.
She picked up the newspaper and took it into the kitchen where she dropped it on the table. There the note from Miss Universe fell out of her shirt and she stooped to snap it up from the floor, then unfolding and staring at the spread of text typed in a strange font that was intended to resemble handwriting. My children, it began,
Save yourselves my lambs and lovelies for the end is truly upon us. Shortly there shall come that day when cataclysms of the dogmatics and the dogmatism of the catatonics will bark and bay at your windows. An awful smelling liquid will rain down on the earth and contaminate your water and your brain. The icebergs shall melt away into nothing. Your buildings will fall, your banks shall choke with greed, your funds will be hedged, the hurricanes shall strike, your girls and women will be snatched from the highways and murdered, your young men shall die in the desert in their death orgies and your greed shall be transformed into virtue, the virus will live inside the virtue even as the songbirds drop from the sky and the waters rise. Prepare warm blankets and clothes. Pray pray pray that you are not killed in the white days of darkness …
She left the note on the table and walked through the house without aim or even what she considered sanity. She sensed that she was becoming one of those haunted figures from literature, Ophelia or Lady Macbeth, or the madwoman kept in the attic in that dreadful novel, or that other dreadful novel in which that other woman slashed herself or set herself on fire or threw herself beneath a train or waded into the Atlantic. The new woman always ended badly in the novels of the old boys. In novels it was always open season on women.
She went to the fridge and was stopped by a note taped to the fridge with duct tape. This seemed to her the most normal of things. Unable to find scotch tape or a fridge magnet, Paul had unsheathed his role of duct tape, and fixed his note to the fridge where it would remain stuck for all time.
Darling, the note started. But darling had been crossed out and improved on: My dear darling it is the time of the Fifth Fire and there have come among us those who promise great joy and salvation. It is a false promise. The great struggle is coming now. The greatest struggle. I love you. Even beyond my attempts to tell you. For God’s sake look after our people.
28
TURTLE ISLAND
HE LEFT THE CITY AS the Wawa 7 fire burned from the Pukaskwa coast to the provincial interior. North of Parry Sound, the flames had reached the Trans-Canada, examined it for several minutes, and then leapt across the tarmac and entered the new forest. By day seven, the vast thunderheads of smoke had reached an altitude of 30,000 feet and altered the flight paths of aircraft. The smoke had been observed in London, England.
He slept uncomfortably and woke uncomfortably. He found himself squeezed next to a young man with a ring in his nose, a bolt in his tongue and several more pieces of hardware protruding from his ears. The face appeared to have been assembled in a hardware store for reasons that weren’t clear; maybe a raised middle finger, he thought.
Paul closed his eyes. The miles rolled outside the bus; the rock, the miles, the moss and the rock, and more miles, and the rock, and then more rock and more miles. He was daydreaming. He fell asleep and when he woke he saw that he was in a rock-filled world with his facially armoured seatmate smiling at him.
“You were snoring,” the youngster said cheerfully.
“Sorry.”
“No problem. Look.” He held up a book. “It’s a book,” and with some daring, added, for emphasis, “A novel, it’s a novel. By Stephen King. He’s really famous.”
“Oh.”
“Really famous.”
“Is he Native?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. He writes super scary shit. Not that I get it.” The youngster dropped his voice into a deeply intimate whisper. “I don’t know how to read. I’m illiterate, right? I can’t read.” He looked at Paul with wild eyes in which the stain of amphetamines was visible. “You keep a book out it makes people think you can read, right?”
“I guess,” said Paul. Who were these kids, he wondered? Long-gone offspring of Kerouac and Kesey, little Benzedrine daddies fleeing across the Shield, armed with books they couldn’t read. The boy could not read and for some reason this provoked a longing in him for his wife, with her books, and her devotion to them. Even his books.
He returned to himself and felt the engine vibrating the steel walls around him. The country flew sideways outside the window.
“What’s in the box?” he said.
“The box?” responded the boy suspiciously.
Between his legs he squeezed a cardboard box tightly, protectively, fidgeting every few seconds with a stained dishtowel tossed over the top.
“The box. What’s in it?”
“Oh.” The youngster glanced uneasily behind them, through the crack between the two seats in front. “I’m not supposed to do this. It’s against the regs. Look at this.” He drew back the dishtowel and to Paul’s amazement an ancient spherical shape rose slowly from the interior, the hairless head of a buried zombie, potted with cracks and mark
ings. It resembled the bald earth itself, and he saw inscribed on its back the thirteen square patterns that mapped the full moons of the year.
“Splendid,” said Paul, “My God.”
Out came the phallic and reptilian head with the yellow stripes and the grey eyes. The creature gave off the mouldy odour of socks and moss, and craned its neck to ascertain that everything falling within range of its prehistoric eyes was as uninteresting as it had been when it last took a peek.
“It’s a turtle.”
“Yes, an eastern red ear. Its blood freezes solid in winter.”
“No shit?”
“None whatsoever.”
“It’s sick.” The boy held back the dishtowel so that Paul could see the creature. He looked closer; the great bearer of the earth was sick. A scum of white fuzz built up in the cracks of its back, like some turtle mange that had come to destroy the world.
“I’m taking him to British Columbia. He’ll get better there.” The boy stroked the shell with a deep and tender affection. “Won’t you buddy? Sure you will.” He looked at Paul again. “He’s going to be all right.”
“Sure he is,” said Paul.
A sick turtle in the company of an illiterate boy with pierced eyebrows, crossing North America by bus. It’d be all right. Just fine. A better time was coming. Paul forced himself to sleep, or at least to close his eyes.
AT BLIND RIVER, HE GOT off the bus and hauled his gear into a Motor Inn where he suffered the inspection of a severe woman who took his money but otherwise remained unconvinced by him. He flopped on the bed and for the first time understood how hot it was, a broiling heat filled the small and painfully neat room, but he felt no inclination to fiddle with a thermostat or even look for one. He took a mickey of Bell’s out of a rucksack and sucked on it. Frequently he heard the helicopters rattling overhead, back and forth, as they took their loads of retardant to drop on the Wawa 7. He wondered if this close sticky heat was caused by the fire, the eruption of fire on earth, a hell that had broken forth while his attention was elsewhere.
He lay on the mattress, scrolling his aimless way through a large television screen positioned at the foot of the bed; commercials for beer, no end of commercials; pickerel fishing on Lake Erie; the familiar footage from Paisley Head, Ontario, a severe reporter in a grey suit counting up the E.coli victims, eleven of them. Death was coming out of the water taps, she explained. He sucked on his mickey, and savoured the life-giving force of the scotch. At the same time, he prepared himself for an attack of dread, a raw sensation of waste and wrong choices, of remorse and infant-like loneliness that he knew was preparing to grab him. Paul smelled it in the room with him.
He had a sudden memory of Linda pulling the bed sheets up to her chin and laughing. For a terrible moment he thought they had stayed together in this very room, with this same grinning television in front of them, watching the drunken world stagger into its own detox, but it had to be somewhere else. He wasn’t sure why it had to be somewhere else, except that he couldn’t bear it if this was the place. It was another town, another bead on the blacktop that stretched outside the door. Spanish, maybe, or Massey, where they walked high up on the banks of the Aux Sables, by the cemetery.
Paul lay and sweated and drank and flipped through the television: … increasingly fanned by winds from the west … the dreary, grey smoke on the screen flicked away, channel after channel of young people grinning and saying foolish things to each other, always grinning. He saw a graphic estimating the number of domestic stock in British Columbia infected with bovine spongiform encephalitis. The number did not mean anything to him. Feeding the minced brains of cows to other cows. Who was the genius that came up with that idea? He watched stricken cattle wobble across the screen.
He looked up idly to the ceiling fan, but the fan was not working. Paul understood that he was drunk. He had achieved a type of lift-off. The phone was in his hand, he was ready to phone her, to have the assurance of his wife’s voice and her calmness speaking to him through the ridiculous wires, but he was ashamed for himself, and he put the machine down.
The rat appeared in the doorway and stopped. It was no ordinary rat, obviously. Paul saw that a dream catcher had been tattooed in red on the animal’s side.
“You are not Rattus norvegicus,” said Paul accusingly.
“No, I’m not, and neither are you. Why don’t you phone your wife,” said the rat. “You have ended up alone in an overpriced motel room watching television and failing to summon up the courage required to phone your wife. You inherited the moral arrogance of your race. You have attempted to chuck the dead world and build a new one. You’ve been mad and drunk all summer and now you’re talking to a rat.”
Paul groaned. It was true. He’d ridden a great road and now he was lying on an unknown bed with a mickey of Bell’s scotch and a talking rat.
“For God’s sake,” he said, convinced momentarily that he had the right to say such words. With a feeling of intense gratitude, he passed out.
29
HAS THE FIRE PASSED?
“In the time of the Sixth Fire, it will be evident that promise of the Fifth Fire came in a false way. Those deceived by this promise will take their children away from the teachings of the Elders. Grandsons and granddaughters will turn against the Elders. In this way, the Elders will lose their reason for living….”
FROM THE PROPHECY OF THE SEVEN FIRES
THE ELDERLY WOMAN LAY ON starched sheets in the Lake of the Woods District Hospital beneath the branches of trees she couldn’t see. Her hand was being held. Her hand was wrapped in a man’s hand, but it was not her husband’s. It did not belong to the man who’d sat in that room where the vellum books covered the walls, and the amber of the lamps was reflected in bottles of liquor. She called out to him through the tall pines that waved above the church at Pickle River, “Joshua, I have no feeling I can find beyond those miles we travelled.” There had been a great passion. But not for him. Sometimes she saw it floating behind her eyes. A boy. Theodore, he did not like to be called Ted. He preferred Theodore. He wasn’t a boy, of course, he was a young man with wide shoulders. He lost a leg at Monte Cassino, then he died. There were letters she kept in a tin, funny letters and letters of love. The boy had loved her.
A voice was speaking to her, repetitive, droning, like the voices that blared on the intercom; Doctor Kohut to emergency please Doctor Kohut emerg … “Priscilla,” the voice said, “Mother.” It would be Paul then, the boy, her only child, her son standing there in the dark where she could not see him, where so many things existed now. He had grown into a man with troubled teeth and hands the texture of bark. She felt something pressing to her. She wondered if Paul was an old man now too, her son. Had that happened to everyone? Even him? It wasn’t fair. Everyone, it had happened to everyone. That the life written by her body grew old, disappeared and became invisible — she had made a peace with that; the paper shrivelled, and became dust. That it should happen to her children, too, she thought. That was the atrocity.
She remembered there was a boy out there, her boy, who searched among the rocks and roots of the ironwood tree and wielded his fishing rod through the spring pickerel runs. He was always searching. Always wanting to know. The boy had made himself an honorary son of Ronnie Whiteloon. He was dead too then, Ronnie Whiteloon, that smiling man who arranged his children in order of size, largest to shortest, as they walked through town. Her boy Paul had played in houses tacked with newspaper, snuck into bathrooms where there were no toilets, only bathtubs filled with coal. The otters clattered over the woodpile. “Mother,” he said, I want to change my name to Weaselhead. Why would you want to do that? Because I love that name. Why do you love that name? Because it makes sense. My name does not make sense. Prescot is a foreign name. It makes no sense to me. His father had slapped his face for it. Weaselhead.
Joshua, she said, stop it, and she understood this was the
last word she would speak. Joshua, she whispered, has the fire passed? Is it roaring? Do the animals still run in fear from the forest? Does your very son fear you? Does the land fear you? Is it time that we must leave our homes and rivers and go from here, Joshua? Paul? The heat was unbearable, on her eyes and forehead. The sun would not forgive them.
“Stop it,” she cried.
Paul felt the thin bones of his mother’s hand, a bare flicker of blood within it. In that moment he became aware of the giggling of Muzak that fell from the speakers, had been falling since the beginning. It came to him like a symphony rising louder until it filled his ears and eclipsed her breathing. She spoke, uttered frail words, then tried again.
“Stop it,” she said. He was sure that’s what she said.
“Priscilla?” His lips were against her ear, close enough to feel her hair, its dryness. “Mother.”
Beneath the fluorescent lights he heard the laughter of two nurses. One of them had a date. “He has his pilot’s licence,” she said. The other one responded to this with some awe. “Oh, a fly boy.” But her colleague would have nothing to do with it. “It’s never worked before. Why should it with this guy? So what he has a pilot’s licence?” This was followed by an outbreak of laughter from both of them.
Paul closed his eyes.
30
EMBARKING
THE FOLLOWING DAY HE WENT to visit again, but she was not conscious. Paul left the hospital and walked the harbour on his way back into town, past the grand old Kenricia and into the Whistling Monkey for two quick therapeutic Johnny Walkers. Televisions hung from the walls above the bar and he watched stupidly the exploded streets and bleeding people in Bali, Madrid, London, the unreal cities in which shards of glass mingled with flesh and teeth. Between the laughter of stars and starlets, the bombs were located in the shoes, in bicycles and in baby carriages; missiles directed by satellites lurked in the Milky Way, the most sophisticated weaponry, exploding in villages that had no running water. Terrorists, they said. Like microbes, Paul thought. Everyone had suddenly become a terrorist. Even the gods.