by Tony Burgess
6
CALLING
Grant Mazzy lives, much like everyone else on Earth, in an apartment. In spite of his occupation, he is less vain than you’d expect. When he’s at home he spends no time in front of his reflection; in fact, he keeps only a small shaving mirror, and he has only seen his face at home bent by steam and encircled with moisture.
The face reminds him of work. His reflection makes him think of an alarm going off at 6:30 in the morning.
No, at home Grant kicks back by being facelessly, anonymously good. Grant’s true passion, the reason he keeps living, is to work tirelessly for charity. He sits on the boards of three major charities, lending his name and profile for their benefit. What he loves most, however, is the anonymous time he devotes to lesser known charities. Particularly the anti-crime program that is run in one of the city’s meaner parts of town, Parkdale. Grant volunteers his time as a counsellor on a distress line. This number is publicized in laundromats and bus shelters. Strictly small time, no budget, nonprofessional, a do-it-yourself, hands-on, community repair kit.
Grant pops open his small humidor and drops the point of his finger along the shaft of a dark cigar, a Montecristo A. He rolls it into the corner and separates a robusto that lies heavily on a bed of Punch Double Coronas. Grant hangs his hand over the box, rocking the robusto between his fingers before pulling up the A. He rolls a silver bullet into its tip, softly popping out a plug of tobacco. He lights the cigar in big wet sucks. When the phone rings, Grant expertly rolls the cigar to the corner of his mouth with his tongue and slaps the speaker-phone button.
“Hello, my name is Bill, you’ve reached the Parkdale Crisis Hotline, how can I help you?”
Grant rolls his head, twirling the smoke in the air until it hangs evenly across his face; then he sits forward through it, closing one eye and hanging the cigar down loose from his mouth.
“Hello? Anybody there? Hello?”
Grant spreads his fingers above the phone and when the sound flattens he pats his thumb down to disconnect.
When Grant was in university, studying political science, he lived in Parkdale. Back when the Queen Street Mental Health Centre opened its doors to free its residents of their institutional bondage. Once freed, these high-functioning mercenaries swung into action and with strange ability they frightened the proto-Yuppie colony that had just recently moved into the area. A certain segment of Toronto had clearly developed a crush on Parkdale’s depression.
Grant Mazzy was renting a room on Wilson Park from an exiled Polish religious leader whose insane son almost always stood beside a grandfather clock in the hallway. Grant had a serious masturbation habit at the time, and his room was a sort of Jugs and Beaver emporium, smelling of curdled seed. Being unable to afford furniture, Grant was forced to make love on the coveted hardwood floor. The battering of his elbow against this floor drew complaints from the security guard who lived below. A soft, giant man who was orange from head to toe, this security guard worked sixteen hours a day and spoke aloud only once or twice a month. When Grant moved in and commenced his school term with one-handed procrastination, the security guard leapt into action and complained to the landlord daily.
One day the religious leader, a truly fanatical man, decided that with an insane son impersonating a suit of armour in the hallway, and a hot pervert in the attic, he needed an exorcism. When Grant climbed the stairs that day and opened his door he met with a flying Bible, candles, and wild Latin keening. The girlie mags were stuck together with red votive-candle wax in the middle of the floor. The landlord, now moaning loudly through a perfect O in the centre of his beard, was clad — they were visible between black robes that fell open — in white jockey shorts.
Grant wasn’t angry. He was frightened. He turned to go down the stairs, only to see the bearded son lurching up, his face apple red in the candlelight. The son bared his teeth, raised his limbs against their medicated stiffness, and closed his eyes tightly. Safe distances were closing. Grant sat down on the stairs, and he too closed his eyes, waiting for either the madman to pounce on him or the papal dervish to strangle him with a soiled holy thong.
A loud siren from outside distracted the men on the staircase, giving Grant enough time to break for the door. The house across from Grant’s place was spewing black smoke into the sky. Several police cars were pulled up on the lawn and people, mostly in hand-cuffs, were being led out of the building. Grant learned later that the fire had two sources. A man on the first floor who resembled an overweight General Custer had fallen asleep. A neglected pot of beans on the stove caught fire. Meanwhile, on the second floor, a struggling art student had ignited his upper body while experimenting with free-basing. The two fires failed to disturb a man who was pressing a pillow down on another’s face on the third floor. And when the killer’s victim was dead, the perpetrator ran down the stairs to help orchestrate the rescue. In the middle of this pandemonium, an older woman mentioned to a fireman that General Custer on the first floor had raped her on several occasions over the past two years. When they dragged him from his bed it took a team of paramedics two hours, not to save his life, but to wake him up.
It was at this moment, the inauguration of Parkdale’s new reputation, that Grant discovered two things. First, that his sanity was a goldmine. And second, that he would do whatever it took to save anyone he could from the dangerous squalor of this part of town.
“Hello, you’ve reached the Parkdale Crisis Hotline.”
Grant held his robusto out and watched a long grey toe of ash tumble end over end into the ashtray.
“Hi.” A tiny voice. Casual. Scratchy. Male? Female?
“Hello. What’s your name?”
“My name’s Mark, what’s yours?”
“My name’s Bill, Mark. Hey Mark, waddaya want to talk about?”
Grant opened his refrigerator and shrouded the milk in cigar smoke.
“Well, I have a crisis, Bill.”
Grant peeled the plastic wrap off a glass plate and nudged the pickles and cheese that were arranged there. He re-sealed the plate and flipped open a plastic lid.
“It’s good you called, then, Mark.”
Grant grimaced at a smell that shot out of the container, and he hit back with a spray of smoke, then closed the fridge.
“It’s not gonna sound like a crisis.”
“Doesn’t matter how it sounds, Mark. You tell me it’s a crisis, that makes it one. So shoot, buddy. What’s up?”
7
ZOMBIES
A long cord stretches out across the lake. Its frayed surface prickles the water. A needle width of blood and bone courses along the interior of this rope with such force and speed that if directed it could easily shave the poles clean off the planet. This is a dreaming AMP victim. This is what its dream is. The AMP victim doesn’t fall asleep. Instead, it collapses from exhaustion and, before going under, batters itself to prevent sleep. Most unconscious AMP victims put themselves there with a blow to the head which is, in fact, meant to keep them awake. The AMP victim who is having this dream now is lying on the floor of the Wheelers’ cottage. His throat is crushed and his eyes are draped across open fingers at his side. His spinal column is broken at the neck and a glistening area of spinal fluid laps at his shoulder like a lake teeming with fish. But he lives on, this thing. He sails on for the rest of his natural life striving towards his goals, different now, surely very different, and he’s cut down before he can reach them.
His heart stops and he dies.
8
ZOMBIES EXPLAINED TO US
Dr. Rauf pulls at his sides as if looking for seat belts. He wiggles his hips in his chair, trying to fit his legs onto them. Eventually he settles. Grant pauses, scanning over Rauf’s cluttered pose, and phrases the question like this:
“Dr. Rauf, the explanations for this disease are very baffling, to say the least. It’s been said over and ov
er again that this is not a physical disease or a mental one. And I suppose, while you’re here, we can clear the air totally. Is this a spiritual plague, as has recently been suggested? Clear that up for us now, could you doctor?”
Rauf rolls his upper lip under his nose, sealing his nostrils with the slick insides of his mouth.
“No. There’s no such thing. A very motivated speculation, indeed.”
Grant smiles. In fact, he is prepared to laugh if any answer turns out to be funny.
“OK. So we hear a lot about what this virus is not. And in fact, once we run through all the negatives, it appears that the thing doesn’t exist at all. So how is it that people are testing positive?”
“Well, one of the first things to understand about this virus is that its existence is incomprehensible because it exists contrary to the way our rational minds comprehend. And because the virus is situated, quite physically, anterior to the process of comprehension itself.”
Grant cannot hide his discomfort and his next question is impatient.
“OK. If you had to answer quickly, what would you say? Where is this virus?”
“Simple. It gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organizes us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself. This causes all sorts of havoc. A common effect being the sensation that the present moment is a copy of itself. It’s been misnamed déjà vu. Other early symptoms occur when the act of selecting a word becomes jammed. This process finds paradigms attempting to reinvent themselves as syntagma, and this manifests in the patient as fairly common aphasia. The person wants a fork but asks for a table or an oar or a knife. The next stages are more chaotic. As conditions within the personality become ultra-sensitive to their own construction, there is a kind of sped-up production of reality. This is a compensation for, or an escape from, the rending of their once invisible frames. Or horizons. Horizons that are quite literally looming. A frightening and painful type of madness ensues, and some of the incidents that we’re hearing about, cannibalism and whatnot, start to manifest themselves in the later stages of the disease. There are some radical metaphysicians now speculating about the potential for this virus to destroy the constitution of things beyond those physical individuals who have the disease. I would suggest that this, of course, would be suicide for the virus. It has, after all, a vested interest in keeping its host alive. I believe that the host is, in fact, everything beyond the boundaries of infection. Or, more conventionally, the host is the reality constructed to support us, and produce us, and on and on. Reality is an organism to this virus. That is, however irrational it may sound, a serviceable version of what has happened.”
Grant is in the grip of frenzied self-consciousness. He is close to understanding this disease and he can feel a terrible fear gathering in his good looks. He worries that his next question, that any question, or worse, that communication itself, is unsafe.
“OK Dr. Rauf, how are we catching this disease, how is it contagious?”
“Well, that’s a difficult question. One that is now being asked by teams of doctors, semioticians, linguists and anthropologists worldwide. A whole host of disciplines are working together on this one. It seems that people are waking up with it, so dreams seemed the obvious site of entry. It has been suggested that it is more likely that people are catching it as they move into a dream state. The structure of consciousness, identical to that of the unconscious, moves from the more or less illusory conditions of the personality into an automatic concrete version of the self found in dreams. The redistribution of elements may leave a person momentarily vulnerable to the virus, which may have already been there, dormant. Some specialists are suggesting that we use as little connotative language as possible, and to definitely avoid metalanguage. Like, well, like we’re using right now, Grant.”
“What does the virus look like, Dr. Rauf?”
“The immature virus looks a bit like a sunfish, brightly coloured, with spiky fins. And it has two long, pointy fangs, which it uses to practise scratching at the paradigms it will eventually invade. It’s important to remember, of course, that it is also becoming a tangent, and eventually the mature virus resembles the figure of abjection. The copy is a different matter. The copy is a strange, full and undetectable presence.”
Grant prepares his next question, pushing his finger into pursed lips, but he doesn’t ask it. Instead, he slides the finger into his mouth while making a slashing gesture across his throat with his free hand.
9
LOVEY PULSEY PHONEY
Grant has strong convictions when it comes to counselling the young, and he believes that adolescence is almost entirely a political passage. Young women should be made aware of the plight of their older sisters in shelters before being introduced to the thrill of the blouse. The connection, Grant acknowledges, is a male one, the short length of a long, punitive and controlling chain. He advises girls to seek out women who have enthusiasm, energy, exuberance. He instructs young men to proceed cautiously, to become aware of the complexity of the world, to seek out men who have a wide range of feeling. He cheers on the teenage homosexual, while sadly noting the complicated degrees of acceptance that await him. Grant listens with principled uncertainty, never hearing a wrong note in the broken voices of young men, or an awkwardness in a teenage girl, that isn’t important to the whole world. He gathers young people up and down, along the sides of his soft, kind voice, and asks some of them, with a hand dipping down through a circle of sunlight, if they would like to come and work in a big, beautiful television studio.
“Hello, Parkdale Crisis Hotline. My name is Peter, how can I help you?”
“Hi … uh … Peter. I got a strange question.”
Grant sits up on the couch and scrapes the label wrapped around a cigar. He flicks too forcefully with the back of his thumbnail and tears through the outer layer of tobacco.
“Oh … I’ve heard it all. You can’t shock me. Hey, first of all, what’s your name?”
“Uh, Warren.”
“OK, Warren, how old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven, eleven … I spoke to an eleven-year-old girl yesterday morning who wanted a sister so bad that she was pricking holes in her father’s condoms. So, Warren, I know all about you eleven-year-olds.”
The boy laughs and clicks his tongue. Grant can tell that, right now, this troubled little man can’t understand anything that isn’t directly his problem.
“Warren, I want you to take a deep breath and tell me, exactly, what you called to say.”
“Mmm. OK … I think I got the dog pregnant.”
Grant presses a finger on the edge of an ashtray, tilting it up off the table.
“Warren … that’s not possible.”
“I took the dog down into the crawl space and I poked it between the legs.”
Grant lifts his finger and the ashtray clicks on the glass.
“What do you mean you poked it?”
“I went inside it. You know.”
“OK. Warren. No matter what you did. No matter what happened, you can’t get a dog pregnant. It’s physically impossible.”
The boy breaks in, crying and talking furiously.
“I’m so scared. I keep looking at her. She comes to me at the dinner table. What if she’s pregnant? What if? I don’t want a little dog brother! My parents are going to kill me! Shit! What if she’s pregnant?”
“Whoa boy! Slow down there, Warren. First of all, I wish you’d listen to me. Are you willing to listen for a second?”
“Alright.”
“Are you listening, Warren?”
“Yes.”
“OK. This is big news. This is important. Here it
is: you cannot get any animal pregnant. None. Not a dog, not a squirrel, not an ape. Not ever. Ever. Never. Are you listening, Warren?”
“Yes.”
“OK. Now that’s fine. That’s definitely not your problem. But. But you still have a problem, don’t you?”
“What? What’s my problem?”
“Well, Warren. What you’ve done has made you feel bad, hasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a good thing. It’s right that this makes you worry.”
“It is?”
“Oh, yeah. The important thing here is simple. Simple. Just listen to your feelings, Warren. What are they telling you?”
“Uh … I don’t know.”
“They’re telling you not to do it again.”
“I won’t. I won’t. I promise. I won’t.”
“There you go. No harm done, right Warren?”
“No?”
“No. You have just become a little boy who thinks sex with animals is wrong.”
“I have?”
“Do you think it’s OK to drag the family dog down into the basement and give it a poke?”
“No.”
“Me neither, Warren. And that makes us both pretty decent guys, dontcha think?”
“I guess so.”
Grant smiles and tilts the ashtray again. He applies a tricky pressure with his finger, rotating the ashtray on its edge.
“Everything else OK, Warren?”
“I guess so.”
“OK, buddy. I’m gonna go now. You call anytime, OK?”
“OK.”
“Goodbye.”
Grant pulls his hair back and stands up from the couch. He spins two invisible pistols off his hips and says, “Fuck the dog.”
By the time he makes his way across the carpet to the refrigerator a charge of electricity has built up and it snaps between his finger and the handle. He jerks his hand up and blows on the finger, then shakes it out and returns it to the invisible holster.