Written in Stone

by Peter Unwin

  Paul yanked another handful of moss from above the pit and pressed it to the kerchief. This is an odd way for a man to die, he thought and yet, it was precisely the way he does, foolish, frightened, without understanding. He was astonished by that, as if it was something he should have known a long time ago. It was dark now, finally, either from night or the swift enclosure of extreme weather. He could not remember it being so dark. No animal had appeared to him; the crow only, cowled black and rasping in trees. He needed to get up. He heard the shushing of the spirit ocean. It was whispering to him. He stood in the halls of his high school, a child with bad skin, a reader of too many books, alone, listening to the silver whisper of girls, sounding to him like surf against the shore of a lake.

  Paul tried to get up, but his bones would not allow it. He thought he might just roll over and try to find some way to break through and embrace his wife, to make love to her, to crawl to her on her knees, like a proper husband, but he encountered an old discomfort and feared neither of them would reach their passion. They had held that for others and got nowhere for it. He felt the tightness of her belly, clenched and waiting for release. Linda Richardson. He realized with some alarm that he was crying.

  He needed to get up. He needed to crawl back down the path out of the forest and onto the cobbles for Joe to meet him. The idea pleased him; Joe coming down that trail whistling a tune and smoking American Spirit tobacco. Soon, tomorrow. The next day. Joe Animal. He wondered if the man existed. His leg had become grimed with blood. Paul tried to stand and failed. Sweat rolled on his face. A fox barked. He wanted to tell his wife about the love he had for her, enough for both of them and for the entire bloody world. Even his own. He knew that. It had written them and rolled them in the same bedsheets, nights of shooting stars and sheets of lightning when they rode the Ontario Northland, brilliant on wine, in a train clattering on shadowed rocks under the moon. He had to tell her that. It was the only thing he could tell her. The dereliction of this duty bothered him unbearably.

  Dark came and the aching of his mouth merged with his mutilation. He felt his thigh and told himself he was not bleeding very much. He felt foolish and chastened. From somewhere nearby he heard panting, his own he realized, and water, he thought. A hissing from the surf, the metallic sound of Superior grinding on the sand and rock. Life had started out there, not his life perhaps, but life; it began in the foam that washed off Lake Superior. It was raining again, falling water dripped through the canopy of foliage, pattering, the most beautiful sound on the earth, but what he heard was not the rain. It was different.

  PAUL BECAME AWARE OF THE source of it standing motionless between the trees quite close to him all this time, a tall thing. Standing there watching him. The flesh on it was without any form of skin that he recognized, red and black, and crisscrossed with veins or tattoos and red lines. Two curved, slender antlers spiralling toward the top, rose from the head. He saw the white foam of Lake Superior clinging to the shoulders and thighs and then it began to move. It advanced smoothly into the trees, luminescent even, loping, with one hand outstretched toward him. The long penis swung like an eel that was hardly attached to its loins. Suddenly the thing stopped and turned its head from east to west before staring directly at Paul, registering only then the sort of creature that he was. Slick-skinned like a salamander, the form came at him through the woods, almost curiously, beckoning to him with long fingers and uttering a low moan that Paul understood at the end was the sound of his own voice sobbing in the trees.

  37

  AT HOME

  SHE STAYED ON IN THE rented house by herself. She woke and slept. There was nothing else she needed to do. Nothing was in front of her. She paddled through a place she thought of as Catatonia, a wilderness tourist resort without tourists, only birds with enormous wings, like pelicans. There she flat-lined into a dreamless landscape indistinguishable from the horizon or from the interior of her shut eyes. The highway, she thought, the vast Canadian road that had kept her young and in constant motion, that endless river of macadam. She attempted to sleep at all times, to remain there in a state of absolute sleep.

  When she couldn’t convince her body to sleep, she lay on the sofa and watched television. She stared at the agitated ghost-dance of burning pixels taking place in front of her. On the little screen she witnessed something she’d seen before, more than once, the disappearance of a lover. Arthur Gratton. There had been a day when she enjoyed the taste of that name on her tongue. “Arthur Gratton.” His name was voiced repeatedly, his picture shown, not a flattering likeness. It surprised Linda to learn there existed an unflattering picture of the man. By the end of the week he did not exist. Arthur Gratton had been caught out and exposed. Quotes attributed to various people turned out to be completely fabricated. People who’d led to the ruin of other people turned out to be not people at all. Crucial statements had been lifted from websites desperately constructed by Arthur himself, staying up desperately all night to piece them together. “Frequent acts of journalistic fraud,” is how it was put. “Extremely frequent.” In all, 137 verified acts of journalistic fraud. They were read out like a death count and for three nights the numbers climbed. An award-winning, two-part feature on a methamphetamine addict who sold herself for drugs and food for her equally-addicted daughter is what caused Arthur to evaporate. Jenny is a seven-year-old third generation methamphetamine addict, a precocious little girl with sandy hair. The sentence had been held up as the gold standard of investigative journalism and had earned Arthur a Michener-Deacon Fellowship.

  Only there was no addiction, no mother, not even any sandy hair. Fabricated from start to finish like a dream everyone thought they should have had. Arthur was let go. Resigned, they said, citing personal reasons. A puffy-faced and contrite senior editor put himself in front of the camera; “If we can’t trust the accuracy of our stories, we are finished as a society.” “Whose stories?” she thought angrily. “Whose stories, mister? Whose society? Who we, white man?” She watched from the sofa. A pixelated face made sympathetic remarks about the effect of a competitive work environment on men under stress. A decaying apple had been uncovered. That’s all. The barrel was sound. On consecutive nights she watched this story and when it was over Arthur Gratton had been put to bed, plucked from the barrel and tossed away. Dead of exposure. Gone.

  Linda thought that very soon she would get up from the sofa and phone him, not because she wanted to speak to him. She didn’t want to do that, she didn’t understand why people wanted to speak anymore, but to listen to his phone ringing without answer, each sound growing fainter until it went nowhere.

  She was not asleep when her own phone sounded and she let it ring repeatedly to prove its faithfulness to her. It was Paul, she knew it. He was calling her from heaven, from the Milky Way, he wanted to know if the coffee was on. He was there, among the souls of everyone who had died, and he missed her. I miss you, he said. I miss you unbearably. Linda lifted the device and heard the desperate strained silence of a man who couldn’t speak anymore, or cry, or sing. She knew, from the silence itself, she knew.

  “Arthur?”

  Nothing came back to her. The loneliness burned with a hiss. “Arthur, it’s all right.” She wanted to tell him that what he’d done was all right. You made a story out of a living man, you led men to take their own lives, you took our stories and fed them into your machines. They paid you to do that. There are no more stories, we’ve sold them all. Turned them into a spectacle for the telling. You made a way of life out of it. We can’t get them out of the machine anymore. She understood that if she spoke she would sound exactly like her husband. Our songs have been taken from us. They’ve turned our stories into silicon. “Sing for me,” she whispered. “Can you sing? Can you sing the song that your mother taught you? Who mothered you and what is the name of your mother’s mother’s mother? What are her dreams?”

  The silence burned on the line, it came out of the sky and fill
ed the room. She heard the sound of a man shuffling in a lonely apartment. She waited for the word “darling” to break out and to bridge it. Darling followed by an obscenity. Darling. Darling. Let me count the ways in which I must have thee immediately.

  “Paul,” She tried crazily, “Paul?” She didn’t know what she was saying. She wanted to speak to him, only to him, about mornings when the sun broke in on them, and they lay there wrapped together on the bed, this bed.

  But no one was there. The line had broken and was dead. She put back the telephone and pressed her face into the pillow.

  38

  IN TEARS LET US SMOKE TOGETHER

  Now, now this day, now I come to your door where you are mourning in great darkness, prostrate with grief. For this reason we have come here to mourn with you. I will enter your door and come before the ashes and mourn with you there. Yea, therefore, in tears, let us smoke together.

  THE IROQUOIS BOOK OF RITES, CIRA 1400 TRANSLATED BY HORATIO HALE

  SHE SLEPT FOR ELEVEN HOURS and in the morning went downstairs to the kitchen where she drank three cups of coffee and ate four eggs. When she was finished, she entered the living room and removed a half-full Scotch bottle from a gold-painted tin canister. She considered drinking from it, venomously, with the same bottomless thirst that had destroyed her mother.

  Linda placed the bottle on the table without drinking from it. Instead, she took down the shining steel canister containing Paul’s ashes from above the fridge, unfastened the two clasps that were shaped like playing-card spades and poured the grit into the empty tin. Because she felt no urge for a drink in the slightest, she poured one and threw it down. Cheers, she said aloud and felt stupid for saying it. Stupid for drinking it.

  The moment she put the glass down a bird smacked the window pane. She heard the dull thwock of bird on glass and saw the foggy smudge left on the window. She went to the window and looked down and found the bird on the bush tops, a small starling with its neck angled aggressively to the side. The situation demanded something from her, but she didn’t know what, and willed herself against doing anything.

  As she made this decision, the doorbell sounded twice and she saw herself cross the room with the same arched disapproval that Rover used when he exited the house the night before. The bell rang once more, insistently.

  She opened the door and confronted a fat and grinning set of lips on a brown face scored with two vertical grooves. A bolt of salt-and-pepper hair, tied at the back, was jammed beneath a stained green tractor cap with the words Red Man Chewing Tobacco on the front.

  “Joe,” said the lips, opening to reveal a set of large teeth in some need of repair.

  “I’ve been expecting you.” She didn’t know why she said this. In some dream he’d stood there. She was not expecting anything. Not him.

  “Joe Animal. I was upriver fishing, that’s why we couldn’t come down to the funeral you know?”

  “Yes. There was no funeral. He didn’t want one.”

  The man nodded. “I found him. Paul, I found him in the pit, there.”

  “Yes.” Linda looked at him skeptically. “I was under the impression Paul died in the arms of a younger woman.”

  “Yeah sure.” The man grinned somewhat warily and at that point a boy came up to him from beside the bushes. Nine years old, she thought, at the most. What did she know about children, or their ages? He looked brazenly at her as if to determine what manner of life she was. Both his eyes were glazed by a scattering of milkish cataracts similar to those she’d seen in the eyes of several Husky dogs. His eyelashes were jet black and thick.

  “This is Joe.”

  “Joe,” said the boy. “Joe too. Like him.”

  “Nope,” said the man quickly, “Joe One. Not like me.”

  “Joe one and two,” said the boy.

  “Come in,” she said.

  They came into the house and she saw the man wore a jacket of blue denim ornately, even traditionally embroidered with fantastic colours that took the figure of a nude woman displaying herself on a chair. He took the jacket off and beneath it a T-shirt read, No One Knows I’m Elvis.

  Joe, the little Joe, left his jacket on. She stared at him, the velvet skin, the eyelashes that appeared to be an inch long. She thought he had the beauty of every child. Linda felt she’d seen him before, years ago, leaping into the brown green water of the Grand River.

  “You’re that guy’s old lady, aren’t you?” the boy said.

  She nodded. “His old lady, yes. He’s dead,” she added purposefully.

  “Yeah, dead as a door knob right?”

  Linda snorted a type of laughter.

  “Enough.” Joe Animal scanned nervously around the room and seemed relieved to spot the black box of a television in the corner. “Maybe you should watch some television for a few minutes.”

  “You got cable?” said the boy. “Or satellite? At Tyendinaga we got satellite.”

  The man raised his palm to the child as if to smack him. “Will you shut up about Tyendinaga. At Pays Platt we got an old lady with no teeth. Give her a dollar and she’ll turn into a bear and play harmonica for you.”

  “Satellite’s better than that.”

  “For a blind kid he sure likes his tv, eh?”

  “I’m not blind,” protested the boy, hotly. “You’re blind.”

  “No, it’s just I can’t see so good.” Both of them spoke this at the same time and both broke into a gasping laughter. It was something they had clearly done before. Indigenous vaudeville, Linda thought. Wonderful. The boy became suddenly and stonily serious.

  “That’s where they dream, you know, on the television.”

  “Who,” she said, “who dreams?”

  “The ones that aren’t born yet. I don’t know. The ones that have trouble being born. Mostly them. If you can’t sing, that’s what you do. You go inside television and dream.” He stood examining a spot off her left shoulder, two black rings shone from the whiteness of his eyes. She was aware that Joe Animal was looking intently at her.

  “Maybe you should watch TV,” said the man. You got one of those clickers?”

  “Remotes. They’re called remotes,” said the boy scornfully.

  “We do it the old way here,” Linda stood up distractedly. “The way the cave men did it.” She was about to do it for him but the boy crossed the room carefully and went to the TV and slid his hands along the surface of it, exploring the glass with his fingers. “Is this how you turn it on?”

  The screen flowered into colour, followed by images and sound.

  “Kid’s a pain in the ass.” The man spoke loud enough to make sure the boy heard. Quickly the dull noise of the machine rose into the room and Joe Animal undertook a series of gestures that saw him at last remove a green pack of cigarettes from one of many pockets.

  “I found him.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “I found him in one of those pits. You know what they are?”

  “I know what they’re called. No one knows what they are.”

  “He was like —” He was about to make an imitation of Paul Prescot in death but thought better of it.

  “In an attitude of sleep?”

  Joe shook his head. “No, he wasn’t sleeping.”

  “It was something he liked to say.”

  “I told him not to. Those dream pits, you don’t want to go anywhere near those damn things. Who knows what the hell they are? We used to picnic on Michipicoten and they were all over the place. You don’t go near them. I never did. No one did.”

  “He did.”

  The man nodded at her and silence came into the room, drifting, touching everything.

  “He was a dreamer,” she said.

  “Yeah, well. Somebody was.” A cigarette lighter appeared in his palm and he made a swift pass at his face and somehow the ci
garette ignited. “You don’t mind if I smoke do you? I had this cousin, eh, he could make women fall in love with him just by blowing smoke in their faces. Light up a rollie, blow a little smoke, and bingo. They’re all over him. It had to be the right stuff, you had to pick it, you had to know when to pick it.” He looked in her direction and sent a tight shaft of cigarette smoke at her.

  “You need an ashtray,” she said, sounding, she thought, like someone’s mother. She went into the kitchen and came back with a pickle jar lid and placed it on the low table in front of him. It occurred to her that she didn’t like pickles, that Paul bought the jar a very long time ago and that he didn’t like pickles either.

  The television spewed inane choruses and the boy sat entranced, giggling, rocking forward on his knees.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Yes,” the man answered immediately, even, it seemed to her, before she’d finished asking the question.

  She went to the mantle and took down Paul’s Scotch, pouring two drinks straight up.

  “Cheers.”

  “It don’t make you any wiser.” Joe Animal raised his glass and responded with a satisfied post-swallow grunt. “This come out of there? He pointed to the dented tin. “Paul’s scotch. The Aberlour?”

  “Yes, I put his ashes in there.”

  “Paul would’ve liked that. He does like it. He likes it right now.” The man laughed. “Don’t you Paul?”

  “Yes,” she said. The thought pleased her, but she had no way to believe.

  They sat for a moment waiting for where the drink would take them. “My husband was going to save the world.” She stared into the amber of her glass.

  The room thickened with the screams of television; someone was getting tortured or having an orgasm or had won a car.

  “Sure,” said the man. “Someone had to.” Then he spoke softly to her. “That lady, that painter lady. I heard about that. She didn’t paint those rocks I bet. She just copied all that stuff out of Paul’s books that’s all she did. That’s what I think.” Joe Animal stared with some alarm into the bottom of his glass, as if one of his eyeballs had fallen in. “And that reporter guy was a plain old liar. He didn’t know the truth. He thought he could make it up.”