The documentary spun the Earth backwards into eras before the first dinosaur. Giant arthropods, the scorpions and spiders of yesterday, battled with amphibious toads and reptilian crocodiles and bizarre lizards. Things seemed to simplify as the years spun away. Suddenly the earth was no longer a jungle, a steamy and stormy mess, but a barren, red-dusted crater. Only enormous insects prowled the rocks and soil and Martian-like stalagmites. Even vegetation seemed like too much to ask for. Beneath the surface of the blue sea, the impossibly blue, boundless ocean, Ryan watched a computer-generated recreation of the first stumpy leg of an amphibious creature retract and shorten, becoming a pure fin, over millions upon millions of years. Millions of years moving fluidly like water. Gone. A stump becoming a fin. A fin becoming nothing, becoming a smooth curve or bump on a scaly, CGI slug, as it undulated over a ridge of coral. And before the years slowed completely, there were only bacteria, dancing and dividing into complex things.
It was supposed to be a violent, exciting montage, but Ryan, remembering it so clearly in the warehouse, with his finger pushing into an asshole and his eyes half-shut in the near-suffocating heat of the mask, recalled feeling the opposite – felt it unfold as soothing, lapping waves, though they were tinged with that haunting minor chord of sadness. The comforting British accent, the authority of television, the pills and drinks in his bloodstream slowly rocking him to sleep. The Discovery Channel credits rolling over a black screen, the urgent voices of commercials, then oblivion. There was no worry, no dread. He’d let the empty glass fall from his hand, his head back against the soft fabric of his pillow, his mouth open, for there were dreams that sent his eyeballs rolling and darting beneath his lids, dreams that welcomed him in his passage to sleep. Swaying in the costume, his gloved hand gripping BJ’s hip, Ryan allowed himself to remember. And there! There! It was then, watching the documentary, on the verge of passing out, that he had had The Last Dream.
Ryan couldn’t believe he was remembering the dream on-set, as two lube-slick women churned beneath his prosthesis and the lights blurred around him. He’d been trying to remember for so long, trying to find that last dream before the end, the final stop and all the ensuing worry. But he could see it now, clear and cuttingly sharp.
The Last Dream simply prolonged his last waking thoughts, his last glimpse and impression of his room, as if he hadn’t fallen asleep at all. As if he’d closed his eyes for just a second. Then he was being shaken awake. He opened his eyes and turned to look at a woman lying beside him, close and relaxed, as if she’d been there the entire time. It was someone he recognized, but he couldn’t put his finger on who she was. She was shaking him awake, was kidding him gently about his slack mouth and the thin line of drool that trickled down his chin.
‘Should we get under the covers, turn off the tube?’ the woman asked, drowsily, her voice and breath so familiar that he hurt with the effort to remember.
Ryan put his arms around her, and she lay with him over the covers of his bed, his fingers wrapped in hers, his nose buried in the scent of her hair. It was raining, cool, noisy, like a tropical storm, water hammering on a roof of fronds and leaves. And the dream continued for only a few minutes, maybe, before everything else faded into forgetfulness, the dinosaurs long gone – he remembered the flickering white and blue of the television, and then the abrupt drop to black as the woman in his arms raised the remote and turned off the set. He remembered the silver light of his dark apartment, his pale reflection in the television screen, his breath rising and falling opposite hers, the rising tide of sleep. The moment, held by light and the hushing sound of rain, seemed to affirm only comfort and erasure. What did anything matter? So much of what he cared about seemed, in the deep shadows and rhythmic water, so laughably insignificant. He thought for a moment of talking about his dad, of telling the woman in his arms his hopes for his dad’s second life, beyond the reach of flesh and fear. The moment passed. What did he care about, anyway? He was drifting, falling asleep. He cared about nothing. It was gorgeous.
The Last Dream, Ryan sighed fondly, sweat stinging his eyes. So calm, so relieving and so vivid. As if it wasn’t a dream at all. He coasted there in that memory, losing focus.
And that’s when he slipped on the little pool of spilled lube and quickly regained his footing. He could see again, and the moment, the fine silver light of the dream, was gone, fading out into the backdrop of brainwaves, the cemetery of all sleep. He glanced nervously at BJ, afraid he’d botched the scene. She moaned as before, as if nothing had happened.
And that was that. The rest of the shoot, the triumphant, purple-toned money shot, the buzz through the footage, the drive home. The screen saver, bubbling.
Ryan sits up in his bedroom, blinking. He glances at his television. He can still see his reflection, his slumped shoulders, the near-empty glass of rum in his fist. No shadows, no smudges, no ghosts in the mirror. There is nothing to scare him or make him think that something is haunting his room. No one is beside him. No one is watching him. He is alone. I am entirely alone, he thinks. All the dinosaurs are gone. Every life went the same way; everything passed through the same turning mechanism, the same coursing water. He feels hardened to this, and lonely, and sad, and deeply wise, and somewhat philosophical even, sitting in the growing shadows of dusk, staring at the television, empty of haunt or threat.
Some minutes pass. His screen saver breaks the silence. The passing animated sperm whale – one of Ryan’s closer friends, enriched now by his expansive feelings of kinship and sadness – issues a long, haunting moo, like a lone foghorn, a hail and farewell, and bubbles, rising with the release of his magical breath, burst.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the publications that risked bankruptcy and scorn by publishing earlier drafts of some of these stories. Thank you (specifically) to the editors of Departures (above/ground, 2008), Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House/teru, 2010), experiment-o (AngelHousePress, 2008), For Crying Out Loud: An Anthology of Poetry & Fiction (Ferno House, 2009), Gulch: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose (Tightrope Books, 2009), The Frequent and Vigorous Quarterly, Joyland: a hub of short fiction (and Joyland Retro Vol. 1 No. 2: Selections from Joyland Magazine) and zaum.
Thanks as well to the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for generous support of this project in its hatchling stages.
Special thanks to Alana Wilcox for her belief in this book and for her keen edits. Thanks to the entire Coach House crew – Evan Munday, Leigh Nash and Simon Lewsen – for the tremendous support, camaraderie, enthusiasm and gross fact checking.
Many thanks to my teachers: Trevor Cole for the help in shaping many of these stories into readable format; Jeff Parker for constant brotherly support and wisdom; Rosemary Sullivan for the much-needed encouragement in the fourth quarter; Robert McGill for the excellent advice; Anthony Bright for first and lasting lessons; and Nathaniel G. Moore for putting me over in the main event. Thanks as well to all the patient writers who have read and commented on these pieces and to Arnaud Brassard for the cover design.
Thanks to all my wonderful friends, from Burlington, Ottawa and Toronto. There are far too many exceptional people in my life to list in this small space, and for that I am truly blessed. Thank you for your support during the dark ages.
And lastly, a million thanks to Stephanie Ward, my partner, who traded a country and a home for the sake of us, and thanks to my mother Susan, father Kenneth and sister Emma. All my love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Spencer Gordon holds an MA from the University of Toronto. He is coeditor of the online literary journal The Puritan and the Toronto-based micropress Ferno House. His stories, articles and poems have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He blogs at dangerousliterature.blogspot.com and teaches writing at OCAD University and Humber College.
This ePUB edition produced at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane.
Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, o
n Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design by Arnaud Brassard
Author photo by Arnaud Brassard
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