This Location of Unknown Possibilities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  Demons do indeed live.

  SWINBURNE

  (grabs his hand)

  Reserve your breath, good man.

  POTTER

  I have loved you always, Harriet. Always.

  SWINBURNE

  Fear not, we shall commune again on the other side.

  POTTER

  Au revoir.

  SWINBURNE

  Au revoir.

  Lady Swinburne turns to the doors of her chamber. They open and the few remaining villagers rush in. They stare horrified at the alien and then begin to chant Lady Swinburne’s name in celebration.

  Marta agreed that there would be little need for historical accuracy. In cut-rate movies like this desert dwellers in off-white robes would suffice; attention to actual details of national fashion was pointless, a costly indulgence. And the audience, as Jake and Lora had underscored, cared about cleavage, scary aliens, and gory action sequences, not fidelity to cultural history.

  Marta waved to the waitress as she exited the booth. The woman strode to the till and handed Marta a scrap of paper. “They can leave a message if I’m not home.”

  3.

  Marta gripped the wheel, poised to shift into gear but unsure about the next destination. With her lettered expertise rendered as useful as an expired coupon, she’d been stripped of qualifications. What menial tasks Lora had in mind, Marta couldn’t guess; this time tomorrow, Lora might ask her to go on coffee runs or taxi studio dignitaries alongside Chaz. Perhaps. Errand-runner was such a distant cousin to the nerve-centre job she’d projected that it scarcely registered. Speculating if she’d swallow the insulting demotion, Marta saw herself on the Skytrain platform on the day of the studio interview, a living definition of a sinking feeling. Still, the ready silent answer now—“Definitely not, if only for the sake of saving face”—comforted her.

  Idling moments later, mitigating factors weakened her resolve. While cramming clothes into a suitcase, hurriedly checking out, speeding toward the coast while spewing a cloud of eat my dust, and being well paid thanks to someone else’s oversight—the easy choice—made perfect sense, Marta felt invested in the chance invitation and the radical change of pace. And backing out because of fizzled plans smacked of unadventurousness, a species of cowardice.

  The prospect of staying at the Star-Lite for even two days sounded dreary nonetheless; she hadn’t packed many books and always wrote in close proximity to a library, a real one. The all-expenses-paid summer holiday the production’s legal counsel told Jake to offer also had a limited appeal—vineyards and orchards would quickly fade as interests, and reclining under an umbrella at a lake while buttered with sunblock looked no better than biding time in a darkened motel room. Maybe it’s time to revisit Angel, she thought. While no respected critic named Angel an underrated masterpiece, it definitely overshadowed Angel 4; she could in similar fashion strive to guarantee that The Battle for Djoun became all it could be—not gold, but containing use-value nonetheless, like copper or zinc. Quality was quality, and serviceable B-grade ranked higher than Mansquito. The office weighed in too; frantic and quarrelsome, yes, but the overall Gemütlichkeit atmosphere refreshed with a tonic’s effervescence.

  Options existed, then. Marta backed up; touring around for a few hours would allow for productive brooding.

  4.

  For the unscheduled free day Marta challenged herself with an assignment: to wander without items on a to-do list. She deemed fretting and organizing irrelevant; she’d been tasked with arriving at a decision and well over half a day remained before Lora required the answer. Disappointed at the turn of events and apathetic about Lora’s proposed choice, Marta guessed that being penned up with plans and schemes in room #10 would only squander time and breed resentment. As the solution gestated, she’d answer the beckoning of the valley’s lazy bends and their powdery byways.

  The habit of writing a few points in a notebook to outline the day’s agenda was, as always, compelling; Marta resisted, tentative in her belief in the advantages of a break in orthodoxy. Still, she couldn’t drive blind; she mimicked arbitrariness instead. About to signal a left turn for the sloping ersatz-Spanish main street of Osoyoos—a questionable master plan begun by one town council and abandoned by another—she accelerated directly onward, stopping at a roadside stand for cherries before approaching the low-volume border crossing. Her memory of Oroville, the region’s flat farming hub on the American side of the border, wavered slightly. While overlaid with images of other small towns, the recollection of her grandmother struggling to change gears—“Cheese and crackers,” she’d mutter at distressing grinding sounds—in the black interior of the shuddering red Chevy Nova while en route to the shopping bargains there possessed a photograph’s detail.

  The place hadn’t grown much, though its economy still flourished with agribusiness; pallets and faded red plywood bins, fruit processing plants, farm machinery, sprinklers, and ditches bursting with weeds stood out as the only interruptions to the acres blanketed with trees laden with ripening fruit. Further south in higher altitudes the climate dried out further and business switched to resource extraction of another kind. Besides the region’s searing winds, Marta recalled cattle pens and windowless slaughterhouses, stilt-legged truckers with plaid shirts and etched silver belt buckles proclaiming loyalty to truck brands, and an annual stampede with a parade of covered wagons, beauty queens, carnival rides, deep-fried batter, and widespread animal cruelty. She would drive no more than ten minutes southward today.

  After another impromptu turn, Marta stopped for water—and toilet tissue, to replace the Star-Lite’s supply, criminally flimsy yet seemingly manufactured from recycled bark—at the deserted supermarket where her grandmother had shopped for discounts decades before. Pulling over again minutes later, she spent a few silent and appalled minutes exploring a forlorn collectibles shop that specialized in settler cast-offs and grime-filmed ashtrays shaped like cowboy hats. Eyes watering, Marta tugged down a leg of her jeans, surprised that the snug fabric didn’t amplify the impact of the heat. Further stops and starts to gawk at Americana struck her as ambitious as well as needless, especially since such a bounty of government-funded Points of Interest towered nearer to the Star-Lite.

  Marta threw the final cherry pit out the window before approaching the return border crossing. There, a stiff-postured guard waved her through with a half complement of questions. It must be my honest eyes and unthreatening face, she thought.

  She met the remaining destinations of the day with tinges of unwilled nostalgia. Before nosing the car up to the Anarchist Mountain lookout to ponder the immense blasted panorama with a congregation of RV travelers, Marta crossed the solid yellow line at an ice cream shop housed inside an imitation Dutch windmill. Standing a few paces from the menu fastened above the order window—the same hand-painted sign, although updated with taped-on cardboard adjustments to flavour offerings and of course prices—she concluded that besides the area’s inevitable tourist- and retiree-targeting real estate build up, the only significant change appeared to be personal: a radically diminished tolerance for dairy products.

  Following take-out lunch from a Thai restaurant in Penticton—eaten while seated at a willow-shaded picnic table facing Skaha Lake—Marta drove along gravel roads running toward railway tracks and farm houses and climbed higher on the banks for sips of wine flights at plateau vineyards with clever names. As much as she enjoyed the meandering, by day’s end Marta felt satisfied that she’d seen enough. An additional week? None other than a sentence in a prison masquerading as a recreational paradise. Just ask Robinson Crusoe, Marta thought. Solitary confinement on the Island of Despair cannot be disguised by lush plant life and seductive beach sand. Whole days in the valley, heated stretches of hours—not a chance: Marta’s limit for leisure was hardly a secret; and as mellifluous as the words looked on the page, dolce far niente didn’t enchant her in the least.<
br />
  Yes, she’d explain the situation to Mrs. Simms, pack, and speed away into the night. Chaz might pass by and report the vacated room to Lora. A few days later she’d send a terse, unrepentant email with instructions for payment, the relationship terminated.

  5.

  Marta pulled in front of #10 moments after the early evening sun—pretty but strange: fulvous, the yellow-brown of topaz—had dropped behind the mountains. The sky had turned darker than comfort for driving, but an exasperating search for the public library—simple pragmatism: the motel offered no computer access—delayed arrival. Eventually spotting the set of green awnings the gas station clerk described, she soon unearthed nothing about one of the script’s co-authors. The second, however, kept busy: his name appeared promiscuously as a contributor to an extensive list of straight-to-discount-bin feature films as well as TV movies and apparently lacklustre episodes of short-lived series, the names of most Marta didn’t recognize.

  Marta noticed that the writer possessed talent of a diminished kind, adept—if that word fit—at churning out sequels and enfeebled formulas: science fiction, action, romantic comedy, holiday-themed dramas and issue-of-the-week specials. Dismayed, she read that he shared co-responsibility for Ms. M.P., a ridiculous updating of Mildred Pierce she’d watched with condemning eyes late at night a few summers before. As visual and intelligible content it had struck her as depleted and sad, like a black and white photocopy of a Rothko canvas. Obviously, a predatory alien traipsing around in Lebanon circa 1825 wouldn’t faze the screenwriter whatsoever; the man could cobble a script together during the office commute.

  Marta removed the plastic DO NOT DISTURB sign she’d hung outside. The room was warm and as stale as before but undisturbed. She preferred to make the bed herself and avoid exposing the presence of sheets packed at Undre Arms.

  After shucking off the canvas sneakers and jeans Marta stretched out on the bed and stared at venous ceiling plaster. Since no note had been jammed under the door and the phone’s red nub of a message indicator light threw no light, Marta sighed: she’d have to swallow the reluctance to call Lora. And though that simple conversation hinged on a response—yes or no—Marta realized that the day in the valley had not resulted in one fateful answer; her mind vacillated instead. Marta looked once again at the door step: no envelope. Lora hadn’t mentioned per diem at the production office, and Marta guessed she might have to pick up the cash-laden envelope in person. The nocturnal drive to town might steel her nerves; and by the time she reached for the glass doorknob at Joan’s, a solid answer would have coalesced.

  Marta recognized Chaz from the thudding knock. Retrieving the jeans, she said, “Hold on a moment, please.”

  “Zdravstvuj,” he exclaimed as Marta swung open the door, “I brink you givt from Rossiya-Matushka.” A donut sat atop the napkin resting on his outstretched palm. “They’re scrumptious. Sour cream and chocolate. From a bakery run by a Russian Doukhobor family. Who knew? They have pyrahi and borscht too.” He pinched his cheek. “Boy, I am going to pay.”

  “It’s been years since I indulged.” From the door frame Marta took in the scene. The cloak-like ambiance of a cloudless night, incandescent bulbs of Christmas-tree wattage, and fluttering moths now softened the glare and heat of their morning exchange. Traffic—an occasional flash of headlights trailed by a glowing slow-motion ray of red—was similarly transformed, subdued by insect chirps and the delicate rustling of breeze through leaves.

  Chaz turned around to follow her gaze. “Yeah, it’s nice, eh. No wonder strippers like soft lighting.”

  “You have a poet’s eye, apparently.” Marta felt the peculiar bloom of the moment vanish.

  “So, is that a ‘No’?” He coin-tossed the donut into the air; it landed perfectly in place.

  “Actually, it’s a ‘Yes, thank you.’” Marta wrapped the corners of the napkin around the donut and clutched the packaged gift. Refusing would be impolite; she’d seal the donut’s fate later. “Thanks again.”

  “Sure, no problem.” Chaz extracted a beer can from a back pocket and lifted the tab. “So, I hear you were pissed about the script change.”

  “I’m surprised you heard.”

  “Any production is a small town, basically, so gossip’s a fact of life, and our office is the information switchboard. Even the lowest of the low gets word eventually.” He stepped back and sat—arms crossed, beer bottle wedged between thighs—on the hood of the rental.

  “Would you like me to disengage the alarm?” Marta noticed that she’d crossed her arms as well, hip against the doorframe.

  “Yeah, sure, or you could haul out a chair. I’ve been on my feet all day.” She opted for the former. She expected he’d return to his room momentarily.

  “Okay, where were we?”

  “Change of plans.”

  “Right. The re-genrification.”

  “You people are fond of that word,” she said. “I’ve never heard it.”

  “‘You people’?” Chaz’s widespread arms encompassed miscellaneous crew at the Star-Lite. “We people make them up, of course. Every group has its jargon, right? You oughta know. I sat through enough seminars lorded over by self-involved gasbags, and their vocab made my ears bleed.”

  Marta smiled: outmanoeuvred. Naturally, she was no stranger to a slow rotation of fashionable terms imported from Europe that would be nonsensical only steps from campus: Verneinung, alterity, liminality, méconnaissance, aporia, space of abjection, opacity of the subject, regulatory discourses, Ideological State Apparatus. As with spices, she used them sparingly; she too had attended flatulent seminars.

  “Anyway, TV’s a different pile of bull.” The hood proving unyielding, Chaz moved to lean at the driver’s door. “It’s cheaper and crappier, more bottom line too, basically Entertainment Product. And it’s parasitic, right, like those knockoff designer purses you can get at the Chinatown night market: the script borrows—that means steals—ideas from better and box office big-performer feature films or recycles plots and characters from other successful TV programs of the moment and puts them in the mash-up blender. Sells it for cheap too. It’s like when porno flicks capitalize on the names of multiplex movies. Foreskin Gump and Hung Wankenstein; Shaving Ryan’s Privates, get it? They leech on to the trendiness of whatever they’re borrowing from because they want to—” He drank from the can. “Ah, better. It’s like when you mention that you’re friends with someone famous. The connection makes you a celebrity by proxy, well kinda. Same deal with TV, sort of, but with cable the budget’s way smaller. Cash in on somebody’s else’s success.

  “So Battle for Djoun’s no different. Ready to shoot, but not even close to original. It’s Cheez Whiz—factory fresh, yes, but with no socially redeeming value. Um, kinda like a forgery too . . . Predator, Aliens, Star Wars, even bits of The English Patient, Pride and Prejudice and that movie where Sally Field rescues her daughter in Afghanistan. I forgot Outlander. The script picks off lots of meat from that carcass. It’s a ‘dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants’ kinda deal.”

  “I suppose.” Marta detected rationalization. “By the way, it’s Iran, in the Sally Field movie. Not Without My Daughter. Possibly Norma Rae too?

  “Sure, why not. Some anal Film Studies grad student could probably find the source of every single line.”

  “You’re awfully cynical.”

  “Nope, not at all. I’m not writing or directing or really doing anything creative. I consider myself part of the production, like a secretary or a factory worker. If it was—or is that were?—1974 and we were—um, was?—talking about my job at the Ford plant assembling Pinto hatchbacks—a crap car if there ever was/were one—you wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, you’re so cynical, knowing that your daily grind contributes to another ugly death trap being on the road.’ No, you’d say, ‘Wow, that gig’s union,’ or, ‘Think you can get me on at the plant?’ You’re paid to deliver t
he goods on time and maybe under budget, and that’s what you do. I don’t think you have much of an idea what it’s like to work in the real world.”

  “Thank you for the psychological profile.” While hardly novel, the assessment stung. “You can call me old-fashioned if you want, but I’m invested in the longevity of a work. Why bother with so much effort only to arrive at product that winds up in a virtual landfill, like plastic junk from a dollar store? It’s counter-intuitive.” If Chaz knew about her own dabbling in junk he’d see the disingenuousness of the claim. Marta couldn’t pin down her earnest stance on the matter; her responses bleated out abstractedly, in the spirit of debate.

  “Okay, gotcha. If I had a job assembling crap plastic whistles that would end up in a dollar store, I could still say I was making something meaningful—someone buys it and plays with it and has fun and, oh, by the way, I’ve fed my family. That’s not nothing. It doesn’t all have to be The Cremaster Cycle, right?”

  A man from #9 poked his head out, the glaring expression a perfect substitute for words.

  Chaz stepped close to Marta. “Christ, chill man. It’s not even close to eleven.”

  “We’ve just managed to get the twins to sleep,” the man whispered. “The wife and I are grateful for the break.”

  “Okay, we gotcha, man. I hear ya. My sister has kids and says they’re quarter-pint vampires that suck out her life force.” The man closed the door gently. In low register Chaz said, “Christ, it’s not like the Pope held a gun to their heads and screamed ‘Procreate!’”

  “I’ll take this awkward moment as my cue to depart. Thanks again for the donut. I’d better meet with Lora before she disappears for the day. She’s still there, right? We need to hash out if I’ll be helping out tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so.” He checked his watch. “Oh, right. My car won’t be ready by the morning, so I’ll have to impose on you one more time.”

  “Okay, we’ll see. You’re in my debt now. Goodnight.”