The best lies are an adulteration of truth. I could stretch that point and argue that truth is a relative construct—the way you fashion your facts to suit the end you have in mind. These relativities are only exposed as lies when they are viewed from somebody else's perspective, or when their purposes have been served. Now there's a doctoral thesis that would make the philosophy profs at UBC sit up straight in their creaking chairs. Not that their hair-splitting matters. It certainly doesn't to the Marketing & Communications Group at PenUtlimate Oil, which has been churning out its versions of truth since before I was born. "That's not truth!" you shout indignantly. Well, Kevin and his wunderkind don't have any doubts about where the truth lies, and they've got the market data to make their point.
Do you think me a cad? Well, perhaps I am. But that doesn't alter the truth or lessen the effectiveness of those who manufacture it, no matter how superior slagging me makes you feel. Kevin and his crew are only too happy to stick me in the ground as a lightning rod for your outrage. That's how they think. It's how they've thought from the beginning. PenUltimate hired me, and Kevin groomed me as a sacrificial mole, an innocuous species that could infiltrate the enviro movement in whacky BC. My job was to burrow, and dig up minute details that would make their version of events ring truest. They know the very best lies are so well conceived and rehearsed, so seamless in detail and argument, that we end up believing them ourselves. Call me a liar, and I'll invite you to join me in the dock. We're all liars when you get to the bottom of us, which is to say, we all end up espousing stuff we believe, but can't certify as truth… the non-existential, heart-of-the-atom truth. How else could we sell our washing machines, used cars, politics, newspapers and such, eh?
I introduced myself to Alesha as a freelance reporter and gave her one of my cards to prove it—one of the cards that had been deliberately designed to look amateurish and home-made. Paul Welland, she said. I've read some of your stuff. I blushed and told her I wanted to do an item on the Menagerie project, and on her belief in humanimal spirit. She kept on painting Raoul. Let me think about it, she answered, meaning: I'll call you.
Alesha is one of those women who make you transparent simply by looking at you. You can never fathom what she might be seeing through those shockingly clear, minutely detailed brown eyes of hers. You might be a crystal ball in her vision, or an empty wine glass, or a clear, calm patch of ocean over a kelp and eelgrass bay. No matter how you think it, though, you can never figure out what she's really seeing when she looks straight at you. There's a tendency in Western culture to misconstrue her kind of clairvoyance as innocence, and I suppose the two species breathe the same air. But when we met in the Cornerstone Café, it took only a few minutes for me to realize she was getting to know me in dimensions I couldn't begin to guess at—that my aura, if you believe in such, was something she could sense beyond sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell just as surely as she watched me and listened to my words.
I've described all this as though I'd encountered the likes of Alesha before, as if I'd known others who had revealed to me what Leonard Cohen meant with his song about Suzanne's tea and oranges. I hadn't. Or at least I can't say for sure I had. What I can say without prejudice is Alesha was the first to see through me and convince me of my own self-misperception. I haven't described all this as well as I should. When I say she saw through me I'm not suggesting I'd become invisible, quite the opposite. To her, people are a sort of lens, each offering a unique perspective on a larger world. In fact, in her vision every creature becomes a node within the common matrix. Or, to put things another way, as individuals we are all 'wonderful and necessary illusions'. There may have been others who had looked at me that way before, when I wasn't ready. I can't remember. So by default Alesha becomes the first.
That's what makes the betrayal nascent in our moment of meeting so painful—Alesha could see who I was, she could bring out the true soul of me; she couldn't see my perversions though, my fractures and faults.
Why? she said. Why what? Why do you want to write about me? Because the idea of humanimalism… She laughed. What's so funny? You make it sound like some kind of philosophy. We stopped there for a moment, and I could tell she was letting her words sink like coins into diminishing strata of light. Isn't it? I asked. She shook her head. As soon as you make what you live a philosophy people want to argue with you about it, she said.
My mobile went off, an angry wasp inside my pocket, its furious vibrations insistent, frantic. I answered to shut the thing up. So how's it going? Kevin wanted to know. Oh fine, I said, pretending I might be talking to my favorite uncle, or a mentor, or a friend—anyone but Kevin Norquist. Alesha watched, her eyes intense, like a bird of prey's. I'm doing an interview actually. I'll call you back later, okay? You're talking with her! Right now! Kevin let out a conspiratorial whoop, his voice shrill like an excited teen's. I'm in a café in Fernwood. Got to go. Bye. I punched the red 'end call' square on my mobile's screen.
I wonder, Alesha said, a hint of playful mocking in her voice. You wonder what? What kind of humanimal you might be? I'm just plain old human, I said. She smirked. You're not plain and you're not old. I'm glad you stopped there, I joked. She smiled, almost laughing, and I was buoyed by the upturning of her lips and the luster in her eyes, hints of her knowing things about me I didn't yet know myself. And you are humanimal, she insisted. We all are. I thought you said what you live isn't a philosophy. It's not. What is it then, when you insist something you believe has to apply to everyone else? An invitation, Alesha smiled. I tilted my head. Perhaps you're a cocker spaniel, she hazarded. We laughed and for an instant, for just a tick in time, but suggestive of a seam in the veil of illusion and a light behind… for an instant the joy of us harmonized on the air and I forgot what I was about. We'll have to find out, Alesha said. What? We have to find out what kind of humanimal you are. It's the best way to do your story. And how do we do that—discover the humanimal me, I mean. I'll paint you, Alesha said. Then you can write me. Okay?
* * *
My joints ached, the cold penetrated, I shivered. The sun slid toward the west, a golden seal pasted onto the azure by a PR edition of God—light without heat, without even residual warmth. I yearned to shout out something like 'Fuck it!', but words were out of place—any formulation of thought into language verboten. I couldn't actually see the sun anymore because my eyes were shut. "You have to see it with your inner senses," Alesha coached. So there I was, trying to piece together a humanimal experience through the pink opacity of my eyelids: pretending not to hear as a physical sensation, so much as the spirit of wind and waves sighing and whispering without language, without even the physics of sound—internalizing the tickle and tousle of streaming air as something inside me, as if I was a ghost cloaked in a perfectly permeable membrane instead of rubberized skin.
I could not remember how long it had been since Alesha had spoken. Her injunction against my speaking held firm. I could not break it, couldn't have disappointed her that way for the world. I wanted, so wanted her to be right, even if my wanting was wrong—wrong, she had prescribed, because it would only reveal what I thought she wanted me to be, not what I truly was. You might be a starfish, or jellyfish, or any kind of fish at all, and that will be fine with me, Alesha said. Be what you are! We'd walked the log-littered beach to Holland Point just before sunset because I told her that was my favorite place, and sunset my favorite time. Follow your instincts, she said en route, and the spirit will come to you. Is this some sort of incarnation experience you're leading me into? She laughed. What's so funny? Everything, Alesha said—and I don't know how, but I understood exactly what she meant. It's better to receive a question as divinely funny than reject it as stupid.
Before I paint you, we must know who you are. Did Alesha actually say this out loud, or had she patched directly into my thoughts? I'll never know. She seemed a blend of sibilant wind and waves, probing the porous contours that bound me with her cool, persistent pressure—seeking a
way. And this communing of wind and waves and Alesha and me dissolved doubt and—let go, she whispered. Let yourself go. Where? That is not for you to know or me to say. Let go.
There's a point beyond relaxing that cannot be described because what you are trying to formulate into words, into thoughts, is non-existence—total dissolution of the muscles and ligaments of being. This is not death; it's the opposite of death. Words imprison as surely as bricks, mortar, bars. Scientific theories seek boundaries and insist on belief, on proof… Let go, Alesha sighed, as if her breath were mine. Let go. Perfect translucence is not something you can define or point to. Alesha's way of seeing is something you can only know after you have allowed yourself to be seen by her, or somebody like her—as if you were a crystal ball, or an empty wine glass, or a clear calm patch of ocean… or an unblemished expanse of sky… Let go…
Caw! Caw! Caw!
I became nothing. Inseminating spirit rushed into the world.
Caw! Caw! Caw!
Then it swelled, urgent to be born, to unfurl its hollow bones, pulsing veins, feathers and wings—first inside the shell then breaking out, breaking free.
Caw! Caw! Caw!
The call came out of me, out of all of me. It became me, a convulsion of being that had to be shouted at sky above and world around. A joyful ejaculation that said: All this is! All this is me! And I am all this inside of me! Yearning, rage, terror, greed, hunger, flight—all these are me. And there was no place I could not go, no place beyond the bounds of my imagining.
Caw!
I opened my eyes, and there on the bleached log opposite sat a perfect crow, sleek and black and glistening in the westering sun. He cocked his head, fixed me with his obsidian eye, and clacked approvingly.
* * *
The tip of her brush traced contours of muscle, hair, bone. She kneeled behind me, but her aura engulfed me, surrounded me with a swaddling of confidence I could only interpret as love. Her version of it anyway: fierce, transformative, insistent.
I don't usually do this here, she said. My eyelids flipped open and I scavenged the room for bits of information that might tell me what she meant. The swatches of colour, scent and sound wouldn't come together into an assemblage I could call 'her apartment', though. My mind refused to draw the evidence of its senses into something I could encapsulate in a single word.
I'm a performance artist, after all, she was saying. I usually do my transformations in the street, like I did with Raoul the day I met you. Alesha wasn't really talking to me so much as to herself through me. She used that tone pet owners do, communing with uncomprehending dogs, cats or budgies—a sort of singsong meant to convey intelligent feelings as much as anything that can be said in the abstract code of language. And that's all I needed from her voice—the consoling modulations of compassion threading sound waves like beads on a string. It's the experience of a moment that matters, that's where art happens—on the cusp of vision, execution and observation. It's as ephemeral as lightening.
A slanting surface splashed with reds, greens, and blues that could have been sacrificial droplets, a tuft of lawn, a swatch of fallen sky; a skeletal contraption fashioned of wood, which looked a likely place to perch; a bouquet of sticks, topped with hair, protruding from a clay pot. I recognized these snippets as Alesha's converted living-room studio, but couldn't muster the intellectual gravity to resolve my impressions into a definition that subsumed the shards of data. Rather, her space—and I knew beyond doubt my creator was its sole occupant—would never in that moment be anything but a curious assortment of artifacts that should have had meaning, and purpose. If I allowed it, though, that purpose would have destroyed me before I was truly born. I closed my eyes, not wanting the jumble of imagery to coalesce. That's it, she coached.
The wings Alesha had invented were appendages of wire and black satin fastened to my human frame with Velcro straps. Fish line ligatures tautened when I stretched these pinions, splaying the feathers as if I were in flight. Alesha whooped, laughed, then cried at the effect. 'Holy fuck!' were the last purely human words I heard from her before I became confused.
Her brush tickled the small of my back, just where the tail feathers attached. Where are you? she asked. The question annoyed. How could she not know? How be so stupid? I was at the precise point where the tip of her brush touched my skin, and could only ever be where the arc of her imagination might take me. And yet… and yet it seemed her tracery defined a point inside me too, that there was a geometry to her art which converged with Euclidean precision at the very centre of me, the exact point where the musculature of angels' wings are joined. In an instant I knew that if I could figure out her spiritual theorem I would be able to fly, and an instant after that I realized that I did know.
* * *
The air over the foothills rises up in shimmering columns from the parched earth, hot, arid. I soar north, following the uplift where it deflects off the tilted landscape, gaining strength from a desultory breeze out of the east. Nothing lives down there—or dies. At least, nothing I can peck at. I wheel eastward. I know the possible consequence of this decision, but the risk must be taken.
Away from the baked rock and scorched foothills the air will be still and, if anything, more oppressive. I will have to expend energy to stay aloft, flap my wings against the dead molecules or fall to ground. On the worst days I have seen other birds drop dead out of the sky or flutter down as if wounded by an arrow or pellet. Their corpses litter the plain, for no bird—not even a carrion bird—will intentionally land in the dead zone. Remains lay there, wrinkling like drying fruit or aging human flesh, not rotting the way things should, but simply withering and wasting away.
Midway through the flight, panic takes hold, the certainty that this time you're not going to make it. Instinct urges you to flap harder, faster, but that would be certain death, for there's no time in this transit you're not on the very edge of heat exhaustion or starvation. The slightest increment of exertion will push your metabolism beyond a supportable limit. The thing to do is relax, glide as much as you can, and by prolonging torture, outlive it. In the end that's who survives—the ones who can tolerate heat, hunger, fear, pain, and shivering nights for generations, without panicking. The ones who habituate themselves to hell's suburbs without going stark raving mad.
I follow the dry riverbed east toward The Pinnacles. I can see them now, in the distance, through the heat haze, gleaming towers thrust up from the plain like gigantic crystals or blades. They are still many wing beats away, so I calm myself, focus on them as you would a mountain peak on the layline of an arduous journey. No sense getting worked up unless there's something to eat within your field of vision; or something to escape; or another of your kind to mate, flock with, or fight. Excitement kills. It dissipates energy, draining you. It can only be permitted when it serves a basic need.
My destination is The Urbs, where the exiles congregate in ragged, shifting, savage bands, intermingling with the damned. It is there a scavenger stands the best chance of finding something to placate the growling god of hunger. Humans die there. They starve to death, leaving enough meat behind to fatten a carrion bird. Or they murder one another in fights over patches of ground, trinkets, differences of opinion, mates. Or they hunt each other as predator does prey, leaving flesh to be picked from the scattered bones of their feasts. All this takes place within sight of The Pinnacles (where I can freely fly, but the exiled and damned don't dare approach on pain of death).
It is said that no exiles would be allowed to live—that they would all be executed within The Pinnacles' perimeter wall—except they serve a purpose, that even in banishment they meet The Masters' ends. For once released into The Urbs they get to know the ways of the damned, and that knowledge can be purchased or prised from them with suitable implements (which The Masters are never loath to employ). As well, the exiles provide useful cover for The Masters' picked murderers and spies, who would otherwise not be able to infiltrate the tribes of the damned in the g
uise of disgraced citizens.
Such speculation doesn't interest me. All I need to know is the result of The Masters' polity—a zone where the damned and the exiles and The Pinnacles' agents converge, form alliances, barter, and kill. There's always a remainder from their interactions, a quantity of meat to make a meal for creatures such as me.
So the risk is worth it, or will be until the day I am brought down by a stone, pellet, or arrow. That day must come because the damned, stupid as they seem, are cunning in their own ways and perpetually hungry. And they hate the likes of me, who have eaten the flesh of their mates, children, relatives, and friends…
* * *
Where were you? Alesha sat cross-legged before me, the soft light from a candle accentuating her angular features like the contours of a pink-hued planet.
I wasn't ready to speak her tongue, wanted to go back to the harsh vision that had created me. I hadn't reached my destination, The Urbs, before I had been precipitated out of the dry air above the plain surrounding The Pinnacles. I croaked angrily and shook my wings.
She looked surprised, then bemused. I never called you back, she laughed. I've been waiting, but I never called.
How long? Alesha shrugged. Does it matter? I supposed it didn't, now that I was back in her apartment, the clutter of her studio coming into focus, her portraits of other humanimals looking in from every wall. I didn't reach my destination. Again, she shrugged. We never do, she said. Or at least, not the destinations we intended. There could be no mistaking her meaning, no possible interpretation except for what she did mean. I reached out to touch her, but ended up brushing her cheek with my black satin wing. Does this make me crazy as you? I wondered.
Alesha laughed, and it occurred to me I'd never asked what kind of humanimal she might be. Carnivore, I suspected, but didn't need to know. Not then. Not there. For my knowing would be a lie and a betrayal, and I could feel self-loathing growing like a canker inside me.
Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Page 8