This Location of Unknown Possibilities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  COMMONER ELEMENTS

  1.

  Perspiration rivulets tickled Marta as she signaled at the 24–hour Husky pillar, the towering red plastic portrait of the gas station’s trustworthy namesake atop a secondary invitation: an electric blue circle at whose centre stood utensils—fork, knife, spoon—in giant silhouette. Shivering, Chaz had admitted the canal water to be far nearer to antarctic than arctic, and requested heat blasts along with sealed windows for the drive. The scent of vegetable broth filled the cabin as he thawed.

  “Cool, Peterbilts, look at all that chrome,” Chaz said during Marta’s tour of the parking lot. Cooling and leonine, a few semis were sprawled near the highway; Marta, braking to survey the options, swerved toward a third-rate spot facing the toilets. A stop for truckers, she reasoned, so the might-is-right rule must apply.

  “That’d be the life, eh? ‘I don’t pay no union dues,’” Chaz sang.

  “I think that song is about being a tramp.” Marta pondered the likely cleanliness of the women’s washroom.

  “Same idea: no fuzzy cubicle, no telephone noose, no nothing to tie you down.” Chaz twisted around to survey the trailers. “‘Believe in the holy contour of life,’ right?”

  “Men seem keen on that Kerouac mystique. When I think of him, I picture debt, a string of bad marriages, and death by alcohol before reaching fifty, an esophagus filled with blood. Not very romantic.” Marta checked the parking brake. “As for the truck-driving life, sorry but I just don’t get that, either. Sitting in a loud vibrating metal box all day, working for a quota-spouting boss, popping NoDoz. That sounds no better than an office, only with hemorrhoids and high cholesterol from a diet of fried food.”

  “Okay, Professor Killjoy. You’re right, but every job is just a job when it comes down to it.” He swung open his door. “You gotta admit, there’s something about a shiny big rig on the open road.”

  “There used to be a drive-in right over there, the Silver Sage,” Marta pointed, in no spirit to admit anything. The night air, summery but overlaid with acrid notes of gasoline fumes, was refreshing after the sultry automobile interior.

  “I’ll join you inside. I want to take a closer look at those babies.”

  Marta wandered toward the coffee shop under the metallic orange glare of mercury vapour lighting, each lamp’s output, she guessed, as blinding as the sun. The canopy was deserted; weary families did not fill tanks at this hour. The Peterbilt drivers likewise stood out of sight, apparently in sleeper cabins or eating inside.

  When Chaz bounded in Marta returned the sample menu to the cashier’s stand. “Look who’s here,” Chaz said, pointing. “Hey, Jake! Let’s go in.”

  “The sign says ‘Please wait to be seated.’”

  “That’s different. We’ll be with Jake, so it’s like we’re meeting somebody at our table.” Chaz had already begun crossing the room.

  While Marta felt no desire to sit across from Jake, a way out failed to materialize. Choosing a separate table would appear impolite. Reluctantly, she trailed behind Chaz.

  “Small world, eh?” Chaz slipped into the booth. “What brings you here?”

  “I went out for a drink with the AD and some crew. They’re staying at the Watermark, down on the lake.” Jake twisted a thumb toward Osoyoos.

  “Ah, so that’s where the A-listers are.”

  Marta looked around as the men talked shop. Solitary nighthawks comprised the Husky’s population; a few thin men—plaid shirts, faded denim, cowboy hats—looked pallid and worn, yet held animated exchanged with the waitress and the line-cook as they sat at the long wood grain counter. Up close the restaurant’s lighting, a beacon to drooping-eyed drivers on the highway, beamed harsh and unforgiving. The floor, seating, and tabletops were moulded from plastics, Marta observed; an industrial product, the pre-fab room expressed durability and efficiency. Barring fire, the formica would be wiped by generations of waitresses. If replaced, scavengers in the distant future would yank the eternal woodgrain from landfills and speculate in awe about the wondrous era before the Great Disaster.

  Chaz pitched a career-growing strategy to Jake. “It’s branding, right. You are your own brand, it’s your skill-set as a product that’s marketable.”

  “You mean like your porn name?”

  “Huh,” Chaz said.

  “You know, that old joke—you take your first pet’s name and a street you grew up on, and that’s your nom de porn.”

  “Cinders Dupree,” Chaz said.

  “Rex Magnolia,” Jake nodded with approval.

  “Spotty Ponderosa.” Marta pictured insects that devastated vast forest swaths.

  “No, this is serious. I went to a seminar about this in the city. You choose two words that best describe you, professionally I mean. The idea is to distinguish yourself from the nameless horde, and to specialize as a way to define your niche.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a cult, like that thing Lora joined?” Jake said. “Sounds idiotic.”

  Marta agreed. “What use does it have after you’ve defined your two characteristics? Do you print cards that say ‘Chaz Murphy X and Y’ and network with them at parties?”

  “Hey, baby, what’s your sign? I’m a Taurus with Scorpio rising,” Jake said. “Man, that’s just like movie Indian names. ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Big Sweating Bear.’”

  In classrooms no one would throw the I-word into a conversation without carefully announced precaution and distancing finger-quotes; Marta kept quiet with the hope of discouraging Jake’s insensitivity.

  The waitress, buxom but haggard, slammed two sweating glasses of water on the table. “Ready to order?”

  “The pie, is it locally made?” Marta asked, no stranger to buyer’s remorse. “I wonder if there’s lard in the dough.”

  “Um, let me check with Julia Child in the back,” the waitress huffed, on hold for further tourist demands. Her tone edged toward exasperation: the hoops I jump through for a lousy tip.

  “Thank you.”

  “The truck came from Spokane,” the waitress answered when she returned. Marta caught the woman exchanging a glance with Jake. Is this chick for real?

  “Oh, okay,” Marta said, peevish. She had passed by at least half a dozen roadside fruit stands minutes before, but the pies on display here arrived boxed and frozen in a long haul trailer. And though the cherries might have been picked and processed by seasonal workers in one of the nearby orchards, the relentless logic of capitalism demanded pie production elsewhere. Small wonder there’s global warming, she thought. “I’ll try a slice of cherry, thank you.”

  “Whip?”

  “No, thank you. Plain is fine.” Marta added “whip” to the inventory of laboratory discoveries in her midst.

  “Can you ask Wolfgang Puck back there if the gravy’s organic and locally-sourced?” Chaz directed a full grin at Marta. “And can you tell me the cow’s name?”

  “Get a room or something, you guys, Christ.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a Royale with cheese,” Chaz said.

  “Hamburger with cheese,” the waitress said. “Fries or slaw?”

  “Fries with gravy. On the side, okay?”

  “Right.” She turned to bark at the kitchen, “Yeah, alright, alright, in a minute, okay?” Facing Jake with raised eyebrows she asked, “You done?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The waitress frowned at the half-eaten meal and walked away.

  “Looks like someone’s taken a shine to you,” Chaz said to Marta.

  “You know, Chaz, the dangerous part of trying to be a hipster,” Jake paused to drink, “is that the trying portion is way more obvious than the hipster portion and you end up looking like a total wanking loser, some lame wannabe in an entourage that thinks cool will miraculously rub off if he makes the right purchase. It’s like those douche bags wearing Ed Hardy shit from
head to toe and saying ‘dude’ and ‘peace out, bro’ every five seconds. I mean, c’mon, it’s fucking pathetic. Every wannabe’s been quoting that one scene since 1994. Christ, even the waitress knew it. Maybe you can bring back ‘chillaxin’ while you’re at it, dude.”

  Marta shifted on the bench to measure Chaz’s reaction. Masculine posturing in seminars wasn’t new to her and, as a result, she counted temperate refereeing as a skill. She felt blood surging nonetheless and imagined a hot pink flame of anger streaking across her cheeks.

  “Ouch, man, that’s harsh. Next time, be sure to tell me what you really think.” Signing defeat, Chaz extended his hands, palms up. “You’re my boss, including after hours, so I guess I’ll just bend over and take it. Hope you enjoy the ride.”

  “I guess anyone could be seen as making a sad grab for hipster status,” Marta said, moved to defend the underdog. “For instance, a tattoo in Helvetica on one’s forearm. How unique is that?”

  Jake replied after several beats. “Touché, Professor.” He couldn’t even drag in the excuse that it stood for a folly of youth. “Look, I’m wound up and irritable, it brings out the dick in me.” He stared out the window. “You’re not a douche bag, man. Okay? I gotta get back to Kaleden. Eat up, the food’s on me.” Jake slid out from the booth and strode toward the cash register.

  “He kinda walks like Chuck Heston, don’t you think? ‘You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!’”

  “Pardon?”

  “Planet of the Apes. That’s not entourage-y is it?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  INWARD IMPEDIMENTS

  1.

  Though Marta had acclimated easily to the impatient nudge of a personal solar eclipse—opaque rectangles of stiff, densely woven drapery a soothing contrast to the invasive corona of brilliance foretelling summer’s ongoing assault—she winced at the intensity of the morning’s fiery display. It must be late, she thought. Pressing fingertips to temples firmly she massaged with slow rotations. She ached dully, as though suffering from the aftermath of excess alcohol or amidst deep-set sinus congestion. Fatigue made her eyes seem dehydrated, faintly sore.

  Operating at full capacity required a completed cycle of sleep, and Marta knew each hour chopped away caused a punishing escalation of symptoms—wandering focus, irritability, and muted wit, the disincentives substantial. As a result she’d rarely been one to tempt fate and stay up late, not even when at university doing so meant Brownie badges of accomplishment and belonging, first partying all night and protesting boastfully of massive, splintering hangovers—“Holy crap, I can’t even see straight!”—in an undergraduate lecture hall and, years later, typing in 4AM finishing touches on the most recent would-be publishable masterpiece, this one about fascism and nostalgia in T.S. Eliot’s late-career essays for “Contradictions in Modernism,” Professor So and So’s exacting graduate seminar.

  The delicate condition, as she thought of it, belonged to that class of retrograde feminine maladies—constitutional but unwelcome—experienced by the enervated angel of the household in a Victorian three-volume novel. In fact, she might be distant cousin to the delicate wasp-waisted specimen prescribed beef broth and ample bed rest after inexplicably collapsing—the poor dear—into a dead faint during an unusually hasty promenade through the rose garden.

  Clutching the quilt, Marta sat up. Chaz snored lightly.

  The habit didn’t surprise Marta. Neither did the unconscious annexing of mattress territory, the ease with commandeering three quarters of the top sheet, or the restless cephalopod traversing of her body throughout the morning’s earliest hours—inquisitive forearm resting below her breasts, thick trunk of a leg across her imprisoned calves. She peered into the bathroom. Check: even without glasses, she could discern the raised toilet seat.

  In the hour of drifting toward wakefulness, Marta’s mood oscillated between stars and gutter: queasy, vaguely out of sorts, and distressed—besides lacking sleep, she was entangled and sweltering in the flannel smock of a nightgown—while bubbling with a novel excitement-dread. The latter, she gauged, did not reflect the uncontaminated innocence of a well-fed suburban child on Christmas morning so much as the sour-sweet disaffected adolescent’s mixture of enchantment and cynicism: “Yay, presents! . . . Eww, bad presents! . . . Ugh, God, how long do I have to sit listening to these worn out family stories?”

  Rolling the quilt downward—cautiously: she’d hold off on shaking Chaz into consciousness—Marta found that her shoulders had grown stiff in unaccustomed and possibly unwelcome ways. Marta guessed that in reaction to Chaz’s roving she’d slid far from the mattress’ centre, half-sleeping while facing the drapes. The other options, entangled limbs or staked and defended turf, had seemed unfeasible and uncharitable, respectively, and since #10 wasn’t large enough for a sofa bed the self-imposed edge-of-bed banishment represented the lesser of evils.

  And Chaz scarcely wrestled with the fine points of bed-sharing diplomacy; he seemed the type who could nod off during a blitzkrieg. Stray light, a dripping tap, or sudden thoughts of the classroom: Marta had long ago accepted inevitable tossing and turning as another constitutional given.

  Sleeping alone was a pleasure to which she’d happily grown accustomed. Although anyone could not help but be aware of snickering, judgmental words surely invented to categorize and dismiss—spinster, crone, old maid—Marta normally remained untroubled about what Dianne in a poetic if blunt maternal turn had christened her “friendless bed,” George and Dianne having slept bundled together like kittens since their Niagara Falls honeymoon.

  Contrary to the holier-than-thou forces of tradition—and mournful verse that spoke of lonely trees and cracked cups—Marta didn’t believe in the destiny of an unpalatable fate, a punishing Sisyphean future of turning over crisp sheets on a fallow mattress each and every night until she grew withered and grey, eyes rheumy and remorseful.

  And even if she stumbled into romance and eventual co-habitation, she’d certainly reserve a bed, or better yet an entire bedroom, for single occupancy. Animals might instinctually nod off in packed furry clusters, but Marta questioned sleeping in such close proximity, received wisdom far better in principle than actuality. Brushing aside the twitching motility, Chaz’s other deep sleep companions—muttering, snorting, snoring—validated this sage perspective.

  Marta straightened the nightgown after a moment’s deliberation. Struggling to unfasten the row of pearl buttons, she pulled the yoke collar and peered beneath, expecting to discover a mark—an abrasion, light bruising, creases—but found instead narrow expanses of undamaged flesh separated by yesterday’s underwear.

  The clothing looked wrong—too plentiful, for one, with an Austen heroine decorousness, and also ridiculously virginal-yet-matronly—but the fitting morning-after ensemble did not coalesce no matter how long she pondered it. Naked merely felt exposed, and without access to the full sheet she could not hope to accomplish a come-hither Marilyn look; and utility-grade bra and panties alone returned her directly to the Blue Velvet universe. A sex kittenish oversized T-shirt à la Bridget Bardot seemed too far of a reach; and for that she’d need accompanying hair extensions at the very least. As for the flouncy satin, lace, and elastic fantasies of high-heeled bedtime femininity concocted by lingerie makers and pornographers, their insult provoked only an inner menaced gyn/ecologist.

  Reaching toward the floor Marta secured a pillow and hugged it. Her thoughts ran to Chaz: he’d prefer Bardot in deshabille mode. Or else the cutesy ploy of wearing his too-large T-shirt. Men, in movies at least, found such childishness irresistible; women facing the same strategy from their men, meanwhile, would run for the hills, Glen or Glenda’s angora sweater-sharing Barbara the rule’s exception.

  Scattershot images rose—including an imaginary one: mutual partners in crime conversing at the Husky, friendly waves goodnight, and keys into the locks of separa
te rooms at the Star-Lite—and Marta fought the urge to organize them into categorical piles that formed a coherent narrative with an obvious thematic thread: here’s what happened and here’s what it means. The evening’s denouement contained comedy of a kind. Travesty, farce, gallow’s humour, she thought sourly, hands folded on a flannel-clad lap, better leave it be.

  2.

  The botched kiss at the gravel pit had inaugurated an circumspect retracting. Chaz kept a polite distance and resumed professional interaction.

  Marta surmised that he saw only a blown chance and that any post-mortem discussion could only worsen discomfort for both parties. Despite the fumble, she’d warmed at the attention and his solid voluble presence; yet in the quest for opportunities to communicate openness, she met only the thick wall of red-faced affability: “I like you, but we’re now friends” she understood the demeanor to say.

  She hoped an unmistakably cordial engagement with him would encourage efforts, but feared gameness had been mis-read as collegial, or the teasing good humour between siblings. As for the direct and obvious—“Let’s grab a bite after the final scene is shot today”—moxie, not to mention SRLFI’s coarse bluntness, evaded her, though the sentiment stayed nestled in her thoughts. Marta paused in wait for the moment to present itself.

  Immediately following Jake’s abrupt departure from the Husky, no psychic was needed to translate the aura of gloom enveloping Chaz. After minutes of silence and scrutinizing the trickles of gas pump activity, Marta glanced at Chaz—avoiding eye contact, crestfallen, studying the menu’s fine print—and wondered about the best strategy to raise the man from the morass-like slump. Between the polar extremes of “Let’s talk it over” and “Let’s change the subject altogether” stood a handful of choices, one of which, she supposed, must be correct. When, apropos of nothing, Dianne’s long-ago telling of “The Three Caskets” floated up, Marta thought, Three choices, as if anything’s ever that simple. Were the situation reversed, she’d want nothing except to be left alone to sulk and, upon reaching equilibrium, indulge in fantasies of complicated revenge.