Idea in Stone

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Idea in Stone Page 7

by Hamish Macdonald


  “I’m going to leave the show,” Stefan confided. “I’m going to leave Canada.”

  Helen’s eyebrows rose on her pointed, elfin face. “Delonia never mentioned this.”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  Her eyebrows rose higher.

  “She’s everywhere, Helen. There’s no place I can go here where I’m not ‘Delonia Mackechnie’s son’. If she’s not getting in my way, her reputation is.”

  Stefan expected her to counter this, but instead she said, “So where are you going?”

  “I’m going to Edinburgh. In Scotland.” This was the first he’d said it out loud. The commitment of it made his stomach flutter.

  “Oh,” said Helen, “are you putting on a show at the Fringe?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The Fringe Festival. Are you putting on a play there?”

  Stefan’s heart stalled.

  “Yes, I am.”

  Five

  Helen on Wheels

  “There’s a lot here,” said Helen, “but it’s a mess.” She riffled through the manuscript, her eyes flicking back and forth across the pages, magnified so many times by her lenses that each blink surprised Stefan. She looked up at him. “But it’s very good. I haven’t seen anything like this in a long time.”

  His spirits lifted. “So what should I do? What’s next?”

  Helen lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes, her fingertips beneath the lenses like pink eggplants. “You’ll need a cast, obviously, and a director. A stage manager, a production manager—those could be the same person. And this script wants a dramaturge, someone to get it into shape. Then you’ll need producers, backing. Getting a show together and paying everyone, particularly if you want to ship it overseas, is more expensive than you might realise, even if you do it on the cheap. That is, unless you get people to do it for free, maybe on some kind of point-sharing system. But then you’re probably looking at student actors. And some of these parts, particularly the older man—you don’t want to do that to this script.”

  Stefan slumped back in his chair. He had his own debts to think about, now this. He felt dread coming over him, the feeling that often made him pull the covers over his head instead of facing the day. This is too hard, he thought.

  Helen sat up in her custom-built, ergonomic executive high-chair. She flicked her long hair from her face and leaned on one of her small arms. “So?” she asked.

  “So?” replied Stefan, unsure.

  “So when are you going to ask me to help you? Or were you?” she croaked at him, point-blank.

  “I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I can’t ask you to take this on. You know I can’t afford you.”

  “Stefan, at this point in my life, I don’t need any more money. I’m not rolling in it, but I’m not exactly hard-up, either. This work I do here, I enjoy it, and I enjoy the people I work with, but it’s pretty familiar. Most of it is just entertainment. This play you’ve brought me, it means something, and not just because it has a sentimental attachment for you. I would love to do something I thought had as much meaning in it as this. I also haven’t been involved in theatre in years. It could be fun to try that again.”

  “Helen, that’s amazing! I can’t thank you enough. But what about the money?”

  “Stefan, look at me. I’m a handicapped First Nations woman who can speak French. I’m a government grant on wheels. I also happen to be a very good producer. I can raise us some money. But you’ll also have to hustle, too. I can’t do everything.”

  “Oh, for sure,” he said, with no idea how he’d raise his portion.

  “So,” she said, “is it a deal?”

  “Definitely. Deal.”

  “Alright, shake,” she said, offering him one of her little clover-like hands, “but not too hard.”

  “You amaze me,” said Stefan.

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling, then going deadpan. “If you patronise me again, this whole thing is off.”

  ~

  Stefan walked through the large concrete park next to the broadcasting centre where he’d just left Helen in her office. Dried leaves scraped across the ground in the chill wind. Skyscrapers towered all around him, monoliths of glass in turquoise, copper, and black. Across the park, lights blinked around the marquees of theatres that hosted touring mega-musicals. Stefan tried to imagine what the budget for those shows might be, but didn’t know where to begin. Equally unfathomable was the amount they pulled in each night with their enormous ticket prices.

  He faced into the wind, digging his hands into his pockets, making a mental note to find his gloves when he got home. He tried thinking about his own show, tried breaking the task down, but his mind had a habit of not sticking with difficult tasks, chasing every stray thought like a little dog after feigned throws of a non-existent ball. Before he knew it, his mind fixated on the need for a coffee—that drink his mother referred to as “office drugs”. Stefan turned back toward the broadcasting building, a giant concrete block outlined with red metal piping. On the ground floor was a coffee shop (“An institutionalised dealer,” Delonia said in his mind).

  The shop was a cafeteria decorated like a bistro. Stefan poured himself a medium cup of coffee from an urn, then followed the roller coaster tray rails to the till, where he paid, then took a seat at one of the small tables. He preferred his coffee with sugar, but he also preferred not to hear Delonia’s reminder that the brown sugar they offered was just white sugar with molasses added, and white sugar was “powdered cancer”. The chemical alternatives to sugar weren’t an option for him either, having heard his mother unconsciously mutter “excitotoxins” every time she saw someone dump the contents of one of the little paper sachets into a cup. Nothing in her world was simple. On their search for her birthday cake, Stefan had commented to Allen that it would be easier to find the Arc of the Covenant than to find a ‘cake’ that matched her nutritional demands. Allen suggested that the Arc might make a nice gift, but Stefan insisted that it was a bit Christian for her tastes. Allen suggested that she could still use it for storing linen, as long as she vacuumed it out with her eyes closed first. Would that then, Stefan asked, make their vacuum cleaner the Electrolux of the Covenant?

  Stefan realised he would miss his friends when he left. Still, he thought, it’s always easier to be the leave-er than the leave-ee.

  “You’re Delonia Mackechnie’s son, aren’t you?” said a voice, bringing Stefan back to the cafeteria.

  “Yeah, it’s Stefan, hi.” In this building the tone of such exchanges was different, easier for him to take: less take-home autograph requests, more expressions of professional admiration for his mother.

  “My name’s Roger. I’m the floor manager for Super Fantastic Window. Do you know the show?”

  Stefan stifled a laugh. “Uh, yeah. Every time I see that couch on your show I get a happy feeling.”

  “‘The Mirror’ died on Thursday,” said Roger.

  “What? Not—what was his name? Theo, wasn’t it? Oh, I’m really sorry.”

  “Yeah. Bad circumstances, too. Luckily we’re managing to keep it out of the papers. If he lived it would’ve been a scandal, but since he’s dead it wouldn’t play for very long, so we managed to convince everyone to skip it.”

  “Wow, that’s too bad. I met his wife a few times. She’s really nice.”

  “She was there, too. And some other couples, along with some strippers, hustlers, animal handlers, you name it. Big private party in a hotel pool, disco lights hanging overhead—you can do the math.”

  “Oh God,” said Stefan.

  “Yeah. Big investigation, everyone from the vice squad to the SPCA. We’ve put off shooting for a few days, but if we can’t start again right away, the show might fold.”

  Something in Roger’s voice was less than matter-of-fact, Stefan realised. “You’re telling me all this for a reason, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I’ve heard about you from the people on your show. They say you’re really talented.”
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  “And you want me to voice-over ‘The Mirror’?”

  “Well,” said Roger, “you’d also have to do the arms, too. You know, how they wiggle on either side of the mirror-frame with those big gloves on? Theo loved that part.”

  “Does it pay scale?”

  “God no,” said Roger, “the guy did the show for fifteen years. It’s three times that.”

  Stefan grinned. “For three times scale, Roger, I’ll wiggle anything you want.”

  ~

  “The stimeless story of a woman’s passion,” said Stefan in an earnest basso profundo.

  “Perfect,” piped a voice electronically into the tiny sound booth. Behind the word Stefan heard the echo of another voice.

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Stefan, “I said ‘stimeless’.”

  “Oh,” replied the electronic voice with the echo. “All right then, let’s do it again.”

  Stefan enjoyed this, doing movie trailer dubs. The film distributor couldn’t afford the ‘real’ voice that everyone knew from the cinema, but Stefan could provide them with a version just different enough to have that familiar feel, yet not invite any potential legal problems. The day’s recording would pay well, but he’d also receive residuals every time the trailer ran. He also liked getting an early peek at the movies being produced locally, though sometimes he found it difficult to speak about them with the seriousness the films’ producers requested.

  “Alright,” said Stefan, then took a deep breath. “The timeless story of a woman’s passion...”

  ~

  Stefan looked over the pages of the grant application. “Wow,” he said, “this is pretty thorough.”

  “You have to be,” said Helen. “This is decision by committee we’re talking about. Lots of applications are eliminated off the bat because they goof up on the basic requirements. It saves the committee looking at everything in depth. I know that some of what I’ve written there doesn’t sound much like your play—”

  “My dad’s play,” interjected Stefan.

  “It’s your play now,” countered Helen. “You have to take ownership of it. We won’t ever get it on its feet if we’re being precious with it.” She adjusted in her chair with a little hop. “So that’s what I’m submitting. We’ve missed this year’s deadline, of course.”

  Stefan’s face fell.

  “Oh, don’t look so gloomy. Let me make a call.” She put on a headset with a microphone and a little dial-pad attached, flipped through a wheel of cards on her desk, then dialled a number with a deft series of finger-pokes. “Hi, yes, this is Helen, could you put me through? Thanks.” She smiled at Stefan and gave him a little thumbs-up. “Hi there. I was just wondering how you were getting along with my application. What do you mean? Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t get it! Dammit! Okay, I tell you what, I’m going to courier it over to you right now. Yeah, perfect. Thanks. Yep. Great. Okay, so I’ll hear from you soon? Perfect!” She poked her dial-pad and took off the headset, grinning. “That’s how it’s done, baby.”

  “So what do you think our chances are?” asked Stefan.

  “Very good. And not because of that little manoeuvre there, and not just because of that application. I wouldn’t push it through like that if I didn’t believe in that play.”

  “I really appreciate this, Helen.”

  “I appreciate the opportunity, Stefan. Art can change the world, you know. Well, so can business. But art can save it.”

  Stefan had never considered this. It hadn’t come up. “So how long until we find out?” he asked, after deciding that he had nothing to add to her declaration.

  “At least a couple of months.” She cocked her head. “You’re making that face again, Stefan. This is the process. It takes that long. We need this time. We have a lot of work to do.”

  ~

  Stefan wondered why he shouldn’t just buy a ticket and leave. Money was coming in, and his debts were shrinking quickly. With a set purpose before him, he found it easy to avoid spending and to accumulate money quickly. This play, though, it would take everything he had and then some, and from what Helen told him, he knew he shouldn’t expect to make a cent from the production.

  He walked along Yonge Street, past discount stores, sex boutiques, and electronics shops, all lit with flashing neon words and flickering bulbs. Every window offered objects he could have, but he was pleased to find he didn’t want. People bustled in and out of the shops and squeezed past him on the sidewalk. Pixelboards overhead flashed down with giant news-anchor heads, shiny cars, and television celebrities.

  The next shop he passed was a travel bureau. Inside the window was a white plastic board listing destinations, with prices magic-markered in next to them. Edinburgh wasn’t listed. Glasgow was the closest destination mentioned. He could get there just by putting the ticket on his credit card.

  Stefan took out his wallet and opened it. His father’s face looked from his driver’s licence at him with one eyebrow raised. Stefan slammed the wallet shut.

  Right, he thought, I should stick with the plan.

  ~

  Stefan watched as the bodies flapped together like pink sea creatures thrown from a net. He turned his head, studying them, listening closely, trying to filter out their voices from that extra voice he always heard. He really wanted to listen to the other voice, but that was not what he was here to do.

  “What are they saying to each other?” Stefan asked. “Do you have a transcript, something translated that I can work from?”

  “Look,” said the man who’d been assigned to this task, who Stefan suspected was not a real recording engineer, “it’s an adult movie. What sounds do you make when you bang a girl?”

  “Oh, I uh, I don’t—” stammered Stefan, then finally concluded with a shrug.

  “Right, okay, I’ve dealt with your kind before, those ‘What’s my motivation?’ types. You know what your motivation is? Getting paid. You want to know the dialogue?” he asked, scribbling on a piece of paper. “Here. Here you go. Now we’re going to take this in one.” He returned to his controls. “Go!”

  Stefan followed the movements of the man onscreen as best he could, moaning. When the man started speaking, Stefan read from the paper with all the conviction he could muster. “Yeah. You like that, don’t you bitch?”

  Ah feel like a fish supper, said the extra voice he heard underneath the recorded sounds, uncharacteristically clear. Stefan bit his hand to keep from laughing, moaning instead. The voice and he were in on a joke, and something about that felt sexy. Stefan found himself forgetting the sound man and getting wrapped up in the work.

  ~

  Helen crossed out a line of the script and Stefan winced. She picked up her cup of tea and sat back on the low couch in her living room. The space was filled with carvings and paintings of dramatic aboriginal Canadian design. They were surrounded by vivid spirits with exaggerated expressions and grand stories behind them. Stefan looked at one of the sculptures, marvelling that this whole section of the Canadian world that had only existed for him before in a shadow way had now come alive for him. The culture’s back had been broken long ago, and some people like his grandfather insisted that assumptions of a spirituality were antiquated and condescending, but Stefan felt there was something to it. Just the idea, the romance of it, made it real. Still, though, it was too thin in his blood for him to claim it as his own. He knew it wasn’t. His spirit was elsewhere, and he’d had that feeling long before his father came back into his life to tell him.

  “Stefan?” said Helen. “Focus.”

  “Right, where were we?”

  “This line. It doesn’t work. What do you feel your father was trying to say?”

  “Well, here she’s talking about her father’s company.”

  “Oh,” said Helen, “oh, I hadn’t seen that. Good. So how should we put that?”

  Stefan picked up a pencil and leaned in next to Helen, scribbling words beside her notation on the photocopied script. He wondered about being so
close to her, but knew she would make no mistake about him; surely Delonia found some opportunity during their work together to divulge her son’s exotic sexual otherness (though the revelation got much more of a reaction when he was in grade school; in recent years the effect had diminished greatly).

  Helen was so comfortable to be around. When they were out in public together, he saw how people reacted to her, just as he had when he first saw her, and felt lucky to be past the bubble of her strangeness, in close to the centre of who she really was. But being with her—her endless challenges to any half-reasoned, sloppy arguments from him and her complete commitment to the things she stood for—honed his thinking to a point where he could see through even this new-found comfort to a sort of smugness, a self-righteous pride in their friendship: at its core was still her difference; he felt special for getting beyond it, for being the chosen company of such an oddity. Question everything, she told him. He wondered if her circumstances made her this clever, or if she would have been like this anyway. Maybe she and her circumstances were indistinguishable. It occurred to Stefan that her condition wasn’t something put upon her, something that should be fixed. It was as quintessentially her as the laugh—like an emptying balloon—that he loved to coax from her.

  “What about this line?” Helen asked him. “This section is all a bit foggy. What does it mean?”

  “I have no idea,” answered Stefan.

  “Good,” said Helen. “It’s good to say that. Let me know if you get any indication.” Helen often made oblique references to his recent experiences of his father, speaking of them in a matter-of-fact way that made him feel better. “We’ll skip it for now and come back to it.”

  Stefan nodded. Then looked at the marked-up script: the ‘finished’ pile consisted of a few sheets of paper. The ‘yet-to-do’ pile was very big.

 

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