“Where’s Chaz? I need him to make a run. No major fires to put out later?”
“It’s pretty much business as usual, but remember that Dr. Spëk will be here for lunch at one.”
“Doctor who?”
“You remember, ‘Professor Gasbag’ from ‘that sunset industry.’” Lora’s fondness for finger quotation had not abated in the years she’d worked at Jake’s side. “Chaz will be back in five, I expect.”
“Oh right. Jesus, that’s today?” He foresaw the specimen: rigid and as void of humour as a budget department bigwig. Jake knew the type.
“That’s why those clever gods in Cupertino invented the organizer calendar on your phone, Jakob, all pretty and highlighted in purple by yours truly.”
“Jeez, Lora, I should kick my own ass. I’ll be ready.”
“Coffee?”
“Yeah, I’ll get Chaz to pick it up. Same for you?”
“You know it!”
Inside his office, Jake typed the laptop’s password. He scanned email, relieved to see a trickle instead of the usual Monday deluge. Pleasure before pain, he figured, and clicked on a new blast from Exconfessio.
Ex A.W. (Toronto, ON)—
1. I often smoke pot or have a couple of shots of whiskey (rarer) before I go to work in the morning. I’m a middle manager in a corporate environment—suits, ties and everything—and I get off on being bombed at 8:30 a.m. while everybody is slaving around me.
2. I have recorded with my camera phone the hot secretary in my office who insists on wearing tight skirts walking down the hall. I can’t beat off when she’s in front of me, but I can when I’m at home later.
3. I’ve never cheated on any girlfriend . . . but I’ve never been offered the opportunity.
4. I once fucked a woman twice my age who I met over a chat line. I wasn’t attracted to her in the least, and I almost couldn’t go though with it, but I did. I came on her face.
5. I minored in Women’s Studies in university.
6. Sometimes I eat my snot, but I’m cutting down on that activity lately.
7. Sometimes I smile at gay guys on the street, just for the attention.
“What a douche,” Jake said, smiling at the global village of human piggishness the website exposed, and thankful again for his gut’s aversion to suit-and-tie strangulation and office tower managerial drudgery. Exconfessio’s honesty was as exhilarating as the sheer inventive profanity. As one of those villagers, he thought he should participate too and had even compiled two lists of seven. He’d send them eventually. Maybe: the thought of having them become part of the visible world, even anonymously, made him feel exposed.
Time to check in with L.A, he thought.
CONTACT
1.
Winking at Marta, Lora picked up the receiver. “Your one o’clock appointment, Dr. Spëk, has arrived, Mr. Nugent.” She hung up and drew an arrow in the air toward Marta’s destination. “Your meal will be along in a heartbeat,” she said. “Question: You still like Thai, I hope?”
With thoughts settling on caged factory farm chickens and habitat destruction caused by Malaysian prawn suppliers, Marta answered with a smile. “Oh yes, thank you.”
Furnished by a budget office equipment leasing firm, Jake’s office—a painted metal desk with an imitation wood grain top, grey filing cabinets, spun-nylon chairs—matched Lora’s exactly. The sparseness, so at odds with Marta’s imaginings, served to assure her that above all filmmaking was a bottom-line business with deadlines, returns on investment, lists of hourly goals, and a high risk of failure.
“It’s good to finally meet you, Professor Spëk.” Jake stepped from behind the desk to offer a firm hand. “Please make yourself comfortable.” That smile opens doors for him, Marta thought, cowed by the well-tended edifice of impervious masculinity. Well-proportioned and aware of the fact, she surmised, here’s the strutting cock of the henhouse. At least he possessed the manners to not chew gum.
“Marta, please. ‘Professor’ makes me feel one hundred.” Sitting, Marta fussed; the cuffs of the new blouse hung just a titch long. Jake’s carnivore watchfulness unnerved her, recalling the momentary eye-squint—instantaneous assessment and dismissal—of SRLFI’s industry cronies. Stiff-backed in the wheeled chair, she watched the man’s flitting eyes and imagined a low-charisma figure reflected in them, strangely invisible despite festive colouration.
“Sounds good. Marta, I’m Jake. Jakob was my granddad’s name, and it makes me feel about the same age.” He sat and pushed into the chair’s adjustable back. “I suppose you’d like a clearer picture of why we’ve invited you here.”
Lora knocked, stacked Styrofoam-encased lunches in hand. “Lady and gentleman, luncheon is served.”
Jake laid out the basics of the production with veteran efficiency. He dabbed a spring roll in shared plum sauce, bit off a third, and said, “If I’m going too fast, just say the word.” Pencilling bullet points on a pad of yellow paper, he sketched the contractual particulars of the consultancy, and broke between each to lift pad thai noodles steaming in the container. “This stuff tastes like crap after it cools.”
Marta, surprised to be charmed by the unusual intimacy of a meal with a virtual stranger, wrote in a notebook and asked questions, relieved that the anticipation of a hard-nosed exchange of terms had been completely unfounded. She’d sat through seminars with fiercer antagonism.
Jake’s answer to Marta’s unasked question, “Why me?” deflated her excitement considerably. “You know,” he said “there’s no one in the entire region—well, no one else alive anyway—that knows a thing about this Lady Hester Stanhope. She’s no Marie Antoinette.” Marta hadn’t been vetted, then. No, her presence represented a convenience, a local one, far cheaper than flying in a biographer from England.
Having never haggled, Marta judged the terms of employment to be exceptionally generous; she didn’t conceive of demanding greater compensation.
Jake felt likewise assured by their negotiation. Unaware that scholars often dedicated years to writing one volume and received a pittance in royalties, he warmed to the fact that Marta’s expertise had been leased at an attractively low price; the deal-making would keep the bean counters off his back.
“We’re looking forward to your input, Marta.”
“Yes, I’m keen to help out.”
Jake handed Marta a copy of the script—“Nothing’s nailed down, so think of it as a work-in-progress, okay?”—and recommended flipping through it.
2.
Stepping across the yellow safety line and into the deserted city-bound car, Marta stood before the vista. Past concrete, asphalt, and mottled rooftops, she caught a glimpse of the dwindling streaks of snow on the city’s backdrop peaks.
With the system’s precautionary gong sounding, she slid into a seat.
The Prophet of Djoun and the accompanying notes in pencil demanded little effort. She’d filed the script—slapdash, she concluded, as though spit out by a computer with rudimentary AI—in the valise well before transferring to the last bus connection.
II
PENTICTON TO OROVILLE
Help Yourself to Happiness™
—Golden Corral Corporation
KERPLUNK
1.
Jake spotted the Location Manager within a gathering crowd of elderly couples who’d donned khaki shorts and sleeveless fleece zippered to the neck. With a gadget-stuffed utility vest the man was unmissable. Jake waved him over.
“How do, Jake. Welcome to Penticton, Palm Springs north. ‘A Place to Stay Forever’ is plastered everywhere. Sounds like purgatory to me.” The man surveyed baggage claim’s points of interest grandly with the slow-motion sweeping Welcome Aboard! gesture of a caricature cruise ship entertainment director. “Or maybe death row. Please observe the exquisite architectural details, fresh from knock-off Miami-Dade 1985 shopp
ing mall hell. I’ve been stuck in some shit-hole Podunk airports in my time, but wow, man, this one takes the cake.”
American-born, storied, and as maligned as tripe, Nikolas ‘Baby Dick’ Babadek attracted notoriety for a collection of all things Star Trek and the feather-ruffling habit of making stacked-deck comparisons between local destinations and ones further south. Shopping, buildings, restaurants, bars, art, sports, beaches, women, you name it: Canada ranked as third rate, a knockoff repository, all originals found in New York, L.A. or San Francisco. And those pronouncements were hard to miss: if honest, Nicos could not list personal space recognition as a top five attribute.
“Take a gander at Omaha next time you’re in the Midwest, Nicos,” Jake said. “Now there’s a tragedy.”
“Uh huh. Been there, done that. This is worse. Bush-league, definitely. Let’s get outta here.” Nicos’s addiction to having the last word also made him no friends; raised in a Midwest household of armchair football tribalism, the man lived for pissing contests. Though he excelled at scouting locations, Nicos was no one’s first pick. Everyone mocked him with nicknames—Half-Black Napoleon and Baby Dick—whenever he moved out of earshot. Jake felt convinced the man loved the sound of his adenoidal voice; believing he kept his own self-satisfaction firmly in check, Jake rated visible narcissism in others as a glaring personality flaw.
With a hitchhiker’s thumb, Nicos indicated the empty luggage carousel. “How was the flight?”
“Mercifully short and smooth. No highballs or Ativan necessary.” Take off and turbulence jangled his nerves, and the (Just in Case)™ pamphlet peeking out from the seat pouch hadn’t helped. “And way better than driving through hours of non-stop treescape.”
The carousel lurched toward full speed. “Quick pit stop, hold on.”
“Sure thing, boss dude.”
Jake walked to the men’s toilet. He loathed flying, but airports made him randy. He roamed through their terminal wings restlessly, on the prowl for searing eye contact, agreeable idle gab at whose foundation stood the pulse of quickening sexual deal-closing, and the occasional—exceptionally, sadly so in an era of lurking terrorist underwear explosives and career-killing entrapment by security personnel—head jerk that promised furtive unzipped flies in an out-of-the-way stall.
The uniqueness of the airport environment was, he’d say, sorely undervalued. Airports, enormous livestock pens basically, housed an oily concentrate of emancipated drive—beast of burden vacationers gearing up for a week’s worth of unencumbered bar-hopping, solo business travelers leaving behind the sapping imprisonment of mortgage payments and minivans, and weary returnees keen to squeeze out one final drop of escapade before stepping back into the drudgery of 9–5 under fluorescent lighting, re-circulated air, and TGIF drinks at Shenanigan’s. Temporary freedom, and even the illusion of it, bounced between neurons as a heady aphrodisiac.
The devil will find work for idle hands to do, Jake figured, and that wasn’t a bad thing. He’d long considered the shoulder-perched whisperer a trustworthy acquaintance when it came to provocative offers. No diabolical scourge, the silver-tongued, black-eyed tempter made no promises that opened the door to an underworld of everlasting doom. Selling real estate, of a sort, matched his character: “Now consider the excellent amenities of this fine property, the seller is very motivated.” Jake could inspect the details and close on the purchase, or say, “It’s not for me, thanks. I’m going to keep looking.” The choice? His alone: Yes, No, I’ll mull it over, thank you. No gun barrel pressed against his temple.
With the exception of the whistling gnomic near-retiree mopping the floor, the facility revealed only emptiness. No bedevilment today. Jake stood at the urinal for a minute and cupped his warm sack as he pissed. After pushing the silver flush handle he washed diligently at a sink. He’d read that a full thirty seconds of soapy suds took care of germs. The last thing he’d want for this obligatory week in the trenches would be a cold. Now alone, he checked the mirror: tired, but not too shabby. Jake’s gaze swept the room. This regional airport didn’t merit a second glance. Adventuring can be such a coin toss, he sighed.
2.
Nicos stood, balanced cautiously, on the narrow edge of the battered metal luggage carousel. Jake had noticed that the man compensated for a jockey’s height as a matter of course, though apparently drew the line at the elevator shoes rumour placed on his feet. He pitched a bottle of water to Jake.
Jake asked, “What’s first on the agenda?”
“After luggage shows, I figure we can drop your stuff off at Kaleden and then I’ll show you our sites.”
“Kaleden? Never heard of it. What’s there?”
“Not much, pretty much as you’d expect. I can’t figure out why anyone actually calls it home. Anyways, Kaleden, aka Kaleden Junction. There’s the concrete shell of an old hotel at the base of a bone-dry embankment. That’s it, I think. Some orchards. It’s not like I requested a grand tour from city council. The guide refers to it as a historic town, which means that in days of yore a train stopped there or something. I wouldn’t call it a town, maybe a pit stop if you need to take a leak. The place you’re staying at is cool, though. Adobe-style. At the top of a sandy mound on a back road. Nice swimming pool. Air conditioned. And it’s just fifteen minutes or so from the production office.”
“Okay, let’s get to it.”
“Ready to rock and roll?”
Jake sighed. Why couldn’t people learn to edit before they spoke?
The men drove away from the flat, overgrown town and ascended a long-haul hill on the black ribbon of highway leading south. Jake nodded, pleased that the location matched the photo slideshow Nicos had emailed. “Dehydrated as a mummy,” he’d written. The description seemed apt and a surprise considering the valley’s pooling lake water: but from the shoulder of the asphalt all the way to the tops of the blunt-edged mountains, the austere terrain refused to entice with bright shocks of greenery. Instead, Jake discerned sun-blasted grass patches, low scrappy brown-leaf bush clusters, rusty scars of raw rock, and no shade anywhere. A bitch to work in, he could tell, but it would be a perfect stand-in for eastern Mediterranean desert.
“Are there snakes out there?” Jake imagined rattlers basking on flat rocks.
“Probably. Looks like it. I’ll check into it if you want.”
“I would. Snake bites, crap, those would be a headache.”
“I’ll say.” Nicos tugged at a cigarette package in a pocket of the plaid cowboy shirt bunched on the seat.
“That’s not going to happen while I’m in the vehicle,” Jake said, deciding that They’ll stunt your growth tipped the scale into plain cruelty dressed up as guy banter.
“Right, I forgot. Gotcha.”
Jake stared out the window. In this blistering heat, a swimming pool might be the best part of the day. “Let’s go directly to the office. I’d like to check in with Lora. I’ll give her a call now, tell her to update them on my check-in time.”
“No problem. We’ll be there in twenty. That was Kaleden by the way.”
“Huh?”
“That fruit stand we passed a couple of minutes back, that was Kaleden. Next stop, Bridal Falls. No, make that Okanagan Falls. I heard there’s tourist traps there, a Foamhenge and something called Mystery Manor, but saw a grand total of nada.”
Jake slid a finger across the surface of his phone.
IN THE ORCHARD
1.
Marta detached a brochure clipped to the shade of the room’s bedside lamp. An Economy Facility for Family Fun, the Star-Lite Motel evidently counted every penny: “Guest credit cards will be charged $10 per missing towel, no exceptions.” Looking around spare and clean #10—complete with a set of three water glasses protected by crinkled hygienic cellophane—brought to mind untroubled lakeside and mountain slope vacations tightly budgeted by their autocratic mother, Marta and Lester in one room
with Dianne and George adjacent, inset doors normally connecting them. Possibly, decades ago, she’d politely knocked on this very door next to the bulky television, her thrifty parents requesting privacy in their room and—never the doting kind—respecting that of their children.
Marta now checked to confirm the lock’s security. She inspected the closet and bathroom and found everything in order. Spotting no ashtray—times had changed—she slipped the car keys on a novelty holder shaped like a fishing lure for a world of giants. Though the rental coupe wasn’t strictly necessary, Marta desired the mobility. I can go out for a drive now, she thought, and enjoy a freedom unavailable in the city.
The entire winding valley of prodigious manufactured fecundity was familiar enough, but from the emerald parcels she glimpsed during the steep descent from the crest there’d been substantial refurbishing. The single-family orchards and modest roadside stands with arrow-shaped signs announcing “Peaches, Cukes 4 Sale,” so plentiful once, now slouched into history; magazine-ready viticulture and the affluent metropolitan tourist demographic it attracted—discerning eyes peeled for organic preserves, half Ironman marathons, grape cultivar trends, and gourmet lunches on chic verandas overlooking luxuriant vineyards—had become the new economic order. A rectangular plot cut from the surrounding orchard of dwarf peach trees, the Star-Lite represented a 1950s vestige with a passenger pigeon future.
Capillary dirt roads still crisscrossed the arid valley, Marta had noticed, picturing a tour along them after hours, air rushing though open windows, dust plumes trailing.
The other burgs between the amoebic city sprawl and the Star-Lite’s roadside solitude—scrappy agricultural pockets and malnourished communities built in close range to mined hillsides of tailings long abandoned and overgrown or close to exhaustion—did not appear to have been touched by the aspirant’s grab-the-future-by-the-horns outlook so pronounced on the valley’s wine grape plateaus.
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