This book is for Bluebell
(For Evermore)
Contents
Cause
(Prologue)
Rocks and Rockets
Trajectory
The Final Ring
Blink
The Code
YYZ55
Declination
Moving Is Easier than Renovating
Inconvenience
Property of Riskey and Gamble
Maple Leaf Sermon
Impact
The Receptionist
Royal Blood
Half-Life
You Deserve Better! You Deserve More!
Escape Velocity
Sangria Red and Ocean Blue
The Toes of One Foot
James Yeo Is Going Away
Coronation
Effect
(Epilogue)
Storm
Notes
Acknowledgements
Gratitude
Synchronicity
syn·chro·nic·i·ty
sIŋkrǝˈnIsIti
The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.
* * *
Chaos Theory
cha·os theory
ˈkeis ˈθɪǝ.ri
The branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.
Cause
(Prologue)
Rocks and Rockets
The flutter of a butterfly’s wing.
The typhoon halfway around the world.
You linger in her doorway. Your molecules mingle.
In the sky outside, the vapour condenses.
(The sensitive dependence on initial conditions.)
If you gently brush that raindrop from her cheek, the slight cool wetness will amplify and warm, until she beckons you into her perfumed inner sanctum, where you will kneel to anoint her fragile, sacred orchid.
Then, these enraged men will lower their stones. Others will pull their fingers away from the buttons that launch the rockets.
They will hang their heads in shame and think again.
And the rockets that fly instead will escape the tyranny of gravity, will float free in space, will explore new worlds.
But, if you try to take her from behind right here in the hallway, then tomorrow the stones will pummel the earth, and the rockets will fall from the sky.
So, do what you will.
Trajectory
tra-jec-to-ry
trǝˈdƷektǝri
1. The path that a moving object (as a rocket) follows through space.
2. A chosen or taken course.
The Final Ring
Stan is sensitive to screaming. It is almost like an allergic reaction. When Sheila has a tantrum, it feels like rusty nails being driven through his temples, like crackling high-voltage wires pulling tighter and tighter around his heart.
Yet Stan’s tolerance for physical pain is superheroically high.
When that axe glanced off a rock-hard knot that he couldn’t see, and the rebound shattered his left knee, Stan drove himself in his pickup truck down the cratered logging road to the medical centre. He sang along to the scratchy AM radio the whole way. “Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, Lavender’s green, When I am king, dilly dilly, You shall be queen.”
When Bobby’d had a few more swigs from the flask than usual and cleaved off two of Stan’s toes with the splitting awl, Stan didn’t even take his boot off to look. To save Bobby’s ass, he finished the last half hour of his shift without slowing down. He didn’t even fill out an accident report.
So physical pain is no problem for Stan. The other guys on the crew call him the Man of Steel.
But whenever Sheila shrieks, he cringes as if he’s being seared with a cattle brand.
“Gawd-dammit, Stan! Gawwwwwd-DAMMIT!” Her wail is scarcely muted by the cellphone’s tiny speaker. “Not again! How could you be so irresponsible? Are you a man or a child? Gawwwwwd-DAMMIT, Stan!”
The inside of the simple silver band was engraved with the words Forever More. Stan was pretty sure that the correct wording would have been For Evermore, but Sheila had insisted that her way was the correct way.
Sheila’s way would always be the correct way. Forever More.
The first time he lost his wedding ring was on their honeymoon.
It was April 12, the same date that Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space back in 1961. Stan had a model of Gagarin’s Vostok 1 rocket, along with several other spacecraft, displayed atop the coffee table in his one-bedroom bungalow. Stan had been fascinated by space travel since he was a little kid, but guys who flunk out in grade six don’t get to be to be astronauts.
On this particular April 12, Stan was sunburned, drunk, and feeling generally numb when the first ring slipped from his finger and into the blood-warm salt water. He watched it spiral downward, disappearing into the crevasses below.
He almost drowned diving for it. The salt water stung his eyes. The chemical burns from frantically groping the fire coral seared his hands. But none of these things were anything compared to the way that Stan burned and stung and choked for breath after Sheila got finished with him in the hotel room that night.
As punishment for his irresponsibility, the side trip they had planned to Cape Canaveral was cancelled, and Stan’s model rockets were tossed in the trash bin by Sheila on the day she crossed the bungalow’s threshold, to be replaced by her collection of Marilyn Monroe dolls.
Early the next morning, before Sheila woke from her snoring slumber and before the garbage truck began making its rounds, Stan tiptoed outside to rescue the rockets. He hid them alongside the axes and awls and pry bars and chains inside the tool box in the back of his pickup truck. Sheila would never think to look in there.
Stan wasn’t quite ready to let his rockets go.
Stan lost the second ring in a poker game.
He’d had his reservations about going with Bobby to that strip club in the city. Although the place had a classy, French-sounding name (the Ooh La La All-Nude Gentlemen’s Club), it didn’t have a great reputation.
The last time Stan went there, his wallet was stolen, adding insult to injury after paying twelve bucks a glass for watered-down beer and a steep cover charge to watch a raccoon-eyed single mom lumber around on stage, obviously thinking about the diapers and dishes waiting for her at home. But it had been ages since he and Sheila had been intimate, and Stan longed to see and maybe even feel some female flesh, even if he knew that the half-hearted winks and come-ons were only preludes to financial transactions.
When Bobby disappeared into one of the back rooms for a private dance, a tough-looking customer sat down at Stan’s table. He wore a blue Toronto Maple Leafs jersey with the name SPRINGTHORPE spelled across the back in white iron-on letters.
“Wanna play some cards?” this gentleman asked.
“Sure,” Stan said, without thinking much about it.
After three hands, Stan didn’t have enough cash left to pay for his twelve-dollar beer, so the slick sunnuvabitch took Stan’s ring instead.
Stan removed all of the model rockets from inside the toolbox in the back of his pickup truck, and he exchanged them at the local pawnshop for enough cash to replace the ring before Sheila ever noticed that it was missing. At the last minute, he decided to keep the replica of th
e Saturn V that carried the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon, and he still received enough money to pay the local jeweller.
It was a bittersweet victory for Stan.
Stan lost the third ring while wrestling with a logjam in the flume.
He hadn’t had time to pull on his gauntlet gloves or even to grab a pry bar, and as he grappled with the log that had turned sideways and caused the blockage, his fingers got caught between its scaly bark and the rough-sawn head of another log. He pulled as if his life depended on it (because it did), and in the end he managed to keep all of his fingers. In exchange, he gave up some knuckle skin, some blood, and his replacement wedding ring.
By the time Sheila was finished with him that night, Stan almost wished he’d gone down with the rumbling stampede of logs. She banished him from the house, pulled down the blinds, and locked the doors.
He curled up inside the cab of his truck, but he couldn’t sleep for the ringing in his ears. He switched on the radio, and the voice inside the speaker informed him that “Today in history, January 28, 1986, all seven crew members of the NASA space shuttle Challenger were killed when the spacecraft broke apart seventy-three seconds into its flight.”
Stan cried for the rest of the night.
And now Stan’s ears are ringing again as Sheila screams at him through the cellphone speaker, “Gawd-dammit, Stan! Gawwwwwd-fucking-DAMMIT! That’s THREE FUCKING RINGS! How could you lose THREE FUCKING WEDDING RINGS?”
It is actually four rings, but Stan isn’t about to correct Sheila. When she pauses to refill her lungs, Stan simply says, “I won’t need a replacement.”
“And just what the hell do you mean by THAT?”
The forest floor is cool against Stan’s neck. His back is cushioned by the fallen leaves. Above him, branches reach up like skeletal fingertips into the lavender-blue sky.
The chainsaw smells like burnt oil; its engine sputters on the ground beside him, finally stalling.
The spatters on the trees blink faintly in the day’s dying light. The shimmer on the dark pool of blood turns matte as it is sucked down into the dark forest soil.
In his soft but rumbling voice, Stan finally says, “I also lost the hand the ring was attached to, Sheila.”
With the hand that is still attached to his body, the last thing that Stan does in his life is switch off the phone.
And then there is silence.
Sweet, sweet, beautiful silence.
And there are stars.
For evermore.
Blink
Clementine was fond of that red light, blinking gently atop the radio tower in the distance. She found it reassuring, like the tolling of the church bells, which she had heard for her entire life; or maybe it was more like the heartbeat of a sleeping lover, which she hoped she might someday feel throbbing against her skin.
Light on, light off. Light on, light off.
From the musty-smelling cot in her tiny bedroom, she could see the red light pulsing, amplified by the warped glass of the small single window, which was not masked with curtains or with blinds.
“Can’t we even get some cheap venetian blinds, Mother?” she had pleaded. “People can see me undressing through the window!”
“What people?” her mother had scolded. “There isn’t another farm for five miles. Vanity is a sin, young lady.”
Leave it to her mother to interpret her modesty as vanity.
So she had become accustomed to the red light winking at her from atop the radio tower through the uncovered window. Its repetitive glow lulled her to sleep every night
Light on, light off. Light on, light off.
Everything in the farmhouse was over a hundred years old, passed down from one generation to the next; even her own name: Clementine. The other girls at school, the ones with their matching boutique-store jeans and purses with brand names displayed on huge brass tags, the ones who constantly chirped “OMG!” and “Like, totally!” all had postmodern names like TV sitcom characters: Shaniqua and Kaylee, Makayla and Amberlindzy. Clementine was stuck with her great-grandmother’s recycled name and the feeling that she belonged in another time.
When she concentrated on that blinking red light, Clementine could ignore the sounds of loose shingles flapping in the breeze overhead and the scratching of mice inside the walls; she could ignore the faint smell of fertilizer and insecticide wafting in from the fields outside; she could ignore the bearlike snarl of her father snoring in the adjacent room.
But sometimes the red light wasn’t calming. It didn’t always lull her. Sometimes it was stimulating. Sometimes it throbbed.
Light on, light off. Light on, light off.
On summer nights like this one, when the air was heavy and humid and smelled like a sweat-glazed farmhand, she would kick off the abrasive wool blanket, and she would allow her fingers to snake down between her legs, into the slippery wet space beneath her thick tangle of pubic hair, and she would stroke herself to the rhythm of that pulsing red light.
Light on, light off. Light on, light off.
As the only girl in the family, at least she had her own bedroom; her four older brothers shared a single room not much bigger than hers. She imagined that such nocturnal releases were nearly impossible for her brothers to enjoy undetected.
She found it difficult to believe the popular implication that boys needed it more than girls; she needed it almost every night, and the need built up inside her during every minute of every day that slowly ticked past.
Light on, light off. Light on, light off.
Then her father allowed them to put up that billboard on the edge of their property beside the concession road, right between Clementine’s window and the radio tower. In exchange for ten percent of the advertising revenue, Clementine’s father sold away her view of the pulsing red light.
Now all she has to look at in her room at night is the peeling wallpaper, which was pasted up by her great-grandmother, the original Clementine, back in the days when the house was new, and working the land was noble and profitable — God’s own work.
The current, living Clementine looks at the wallpaper now, with its repeating diagonal pattern of unintentionally vaginal-looking pink orchids and phallic purple irises.
Or maybe it wasn’t so unintentional, she thinks. Maybe, behind closed doors, those Victorians were a lot sexier than they would have us believe. Maybe they were just more subtle about it.
Maybe my great-grandmother did exactly what I’m going to do now. Maybe these miniature erections and moist vulva petals helped get her going.
Clementine has to bite her lip, flip over, and press her face into her earth-scented pillow to prevent herself from crying out loud, from screaming the name of a lover whom she doesn’t yet know.
She can no longer see it, but she knows that the light is still there, shining, pulsing, radiating.
Light on, light off. Light on, light off.
Aleksander almost enjoys it when they pick fights with him. It is always so predictable. In a way, it is reassuring. It reminds him that the universe follows a certain set of rules: rules of geometry, rules of physics, rules of mathematics.
It is more or less the same fight every time, which is why he always wins.
One of them will inevitably saunter across the parking lot, wearing the standard uniform: the unlaced boots, the faded blue jeans, the untucked plaid lumberjack shirt, the varsity team jacket with the purple felt body and the white leather sleeves.
“Hey, faggot!” the tough guy will bray. “You like sucking cocks? Wanna suck mine?” Or some other variation on this theme.
Most of the other guys in purple-and-white team jackets will laugh along. One or two will pretend to laugh. And at least one, usually the guy standing farthest from the potential altercation, will not laugh at all, will not even pretend to laugh. Standard and predictable pack dynamics.
&nb
sp; Today’s declaration of war is, “So, weirdo. You like black leather, eh? You a perv or something?”
Aleksander doesn’t stand up. Not yet. It’s best not to seem too eager at first. Between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Aleksander casually twists the simple silver ring that encircles his left-hand ring finger.
Clockwise, counter-clockwise. Clockwise, counter-clockwise.
“Yep,” he finally says, “I do like black leather. And it appears that you like white leather. Which I suppose begs the question: Are you a pervert? Are you a white-leather pervert?”
“I guess you haven’t been going to this school for very long,” Mr. Team Jacket says, striding toward Aleksander, opening and closing his fingers like Venus flytraps. “Do you know who I am?”
“Well, I don’t go to this school — or to any other school, actually — but I’ve observed that the sleeves of your jacket are embroidered with the words captain and football, so I’m going to deduce that your name is Captain Football. That’s some very pretty embroidery, by the way.”
Captain Football is standing right in front of Aleksander now, his belt buckle level with Aleksander’s nose. The scent of cologne wafts downward.
“So, answer my question, assboy,” Captain Football demands. “Me and the boys wanna know: Is your black leather some kinda feetish? Are you some kind of sicko?”
“I believe that you mean to say ‘The boys and I,’ not ‘Me and the boys,’ ” Aleksander says, rising from the concrete parking divider. “And it’s pronounced fett-ish, not feet-ish.”
“Oh. Sorry. Fett-ish,” Mr. Team Jacket says, taking a step forward. “You got a pain fetish, gimp? I hope so, ’cause I’m gonna …”
One of two things will happen at this point. If the guy is a hockey or basketball player, he will lunge forward and throw a punch at Aleksander’s face; but if his jacket has Football embroidered on its white leather sleeve, he will run at Aleksander and try to tackle him, to force him onto the ground.
Rockets Versus Gravity Page 1