by Tony Burgess
Even if it is.
Why, Ed?
Because it has already been decided that you have drawn the outline of an airplane. Long and sleek and powerful, it flies at 33,000 feet at a speed of 660 kilometres per hour. You have captured, marvelously, the roar of air as it pipes across its wings, the fine application of pressures that articulate its body — jointed, fluid, expanding. Now, in the centre of the circle, stab a pencil. The little cone of lead that snaps off means that something dreadful has happened. See? The plane is falling from the sky, a spinning top, and as you brush the dust from the page, people are screaming, swinging by their hips over the deep interior of the fuselage. A baby that had been sleeping at someone’s feet has become a pink little marble rolling under chairs. Several sleeping adults have stopped breathing altogether.
The disaster, you say, as you pull the knuckle from your mouth, is not preventable.
But you’re wrong, Ed. You’re wrong.
The disaster is merely Caesarea.
Your plane has hit the ground and scattered itself around a lake in the form of a small town.
Caesarea is situated in a corner of Lake Scugog, and consists of a number of small roads that curve along tiers rising on a hill from the lakeshore. The main road is a paved semi-circle between the base of the hill and a thin white beach. On this road there is a video outlet, a shoe store, a Salvation Army store, a Becker’s, a post office, and a Royal Bank. They are all less than five years old — except for the Salvation Army, which has occupied the same spot for almost three decades. In the winter, snow drifts up from the shore, feathering across the main road. It deepens in larger drifts around the homes and cottages up the hill. In summer, the wind blows puffs of sand across the road and the hillside is swallowed whole by the trees that had hid the previous fall. Caesarea is one of those small towns that serves as a backyard to the urban south, not far enough away to be independent, yet not close enough to be part of the city. Like the weather in this part of the world, its seasonal shifts are dramatic enough to suspend its character above depths.
Caesarea is a rapid, superficial place, an arctic where people stomp ice from their boots in the doorway of one of the two stores that stay open in winter. In the summer, it’s Florida — a big bang of Corvettes and mesh muscle shirts.
Anyone entering Caesarea could say that it is either a place to flee from or flee to, and so, those who live there have chosen to ignore the rest of us.
We are weather.
We are leaves that will fall under their feet, potatoes that are kicked into baskets.
What preoccupies Caesareans is the business of their town council, and that business very rarely has anything to do with tourism; rather, like a team of scientists in a biosphere, they work at engineering complete independence, utter disconnection, and the survival of their present world into the next.
The council is busy trying to upgrade all the local systems — water, hydro, and waste management — that will one day free them of their dependence on fat city people and their urine-wet children. Nothing of this marks Caesarea as different. It’s like any other place on earth; or, for that matter, any segment of a worm. (Actually, Ed, it’s more like the people who politely but persistently decline your invitations.)
No, what marks Caesarea is the pencil you stabbed her with when you drove a piece of lead right into her heart.
★
Ed is on the landing, alone, beside the heavy oak door that is closed on the town meeting in progress. He is holding a piece of paper, rolling his thumbs in a well-worn crease down its middle. Ed is a short man, with a large middle that looks strong. He has huge, beautiful blue eyes that are rimmed with slightly swollen lids, and he has a short beard that doesn’t add to his tiny chin, or hide the cauliflower of skin that it rests in. He is famous in town for his sense of humour, but feels somewhat insecure about this. A sense of humour was something he acquired to explain to himself why folks laughed at him. He has perfected a minimalist approach to amusing others. It’s a shuffle and mumble combination that never fails to bring tears to people’s eyes. His eyes — when they’re not being used to look through, they almost lean off his cheeks — are so clear and sad that perfect strangers passing him on the street spend the rest of the day trying to shake their poignancy.
Ed hears footsteps coming up the stairs. It’s a young woman. She smiles, almost recognizing him, but decides not to say anything as she turns to open the door.
Ed clears his throat.
“Yes?”
“Oh. I don’t want to bother you.”
“What is it?”
The woman is caught by his expression. Something important in the man’s sad gaze.
“Are you going in there?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Oh forget it.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was just wondering if … Oh forget it.”
The woman is impatient with the game, and is about to tell Ed that she has every intention of forgetting it, when he starts to move off, shuffling toward the stairs.
“Listen. Is there something I can do for you?”
Ed’s voice cracks as he speaks. “Well, I have a proposition. I want to show films in the lake.”
Ed recoils at what he has just said. He wonders if it looks as odd as it sounded.
“I mean, I want to show films on the beach.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, I think it’d be good. I’d set up a projector on shore and have a screen mounted on a boat in the bay. Show family movies, like Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years, BC. That kind of thing. Do you think the town would give me a permit?”
“What’s your name?”
“Ed.”
“Hi Ed. My name’s Kathy.”
“So what do you think, Kathy?”
Kathy touches Ed’s arm and he purrs involuntarily. She withdraws it.
“OK, Ed. The only problem there is, if you put a screen on a boat, well, what you’ve got is called a sailboat. The wind’ll come up and your movie’ll go racing across the lake.”
Ed rubs a fist into his eye. He holds out the paper and, after a short pause, Kathy takes it.
“It’s not a bad idea, Ed.”
Kathy draws the door open gently and slips through. Ed remains standing in his spot. He is mesmerized by a new possibility. Someone stumbling to the water’s edge in a remote cove. He looks up and sees Raquel Welch in a skin-tight wet suit. The wobbling forms of orange antibodies are nibbling on her hips, pinning her shoulders back. As the setting sun braises a bank of clouds low on the horizon, the light in the cove dims and the whiteness of Raquel’s eyes is caught on the tiny waves that skip across the water like flying fish. And then a light breeze sends a ripple across her breasts, flapping her chin once against her forehead before pushing the boat out of the cove altogether. The person on shore falls into the shallows and paddles off, behind her, out of his depth.
TWO
The meeting is called to order. The Mayor’s at the head of the table: he is half serious, a Robert Stack look-alike, and his skin and hair are dyed the colours of Italian food. His fingers slide up and down the length of his tie — recalling not so much a compulsion to masturbate as a compulsion to cut ribbon. (Or, perhaps, when viewed quickly, as a fleeting gesture; there, across his tie, his fingers are conflating, and out of the corner of an eye it becomes a bris.) The Mayor wears a soft yellow short-sleeved shirt with purple piping running along the edge of his collar. He looks exactly like the kind of fifty-year-old man that a five-year-old would like one day to be. Sporty. Thin. Smiling.
A woman sitting beside him swings her head up, sending the giant ivory triangles that stretch the lobes of her ears twisting. One ear ornament catches its edge on a large mole along her jawline and stays there, swaying at a right angle from her face. The Mayor puts his hands in hi
s lap and looks to her, smiling.
She is the first to speak.
“Brian?”
The woman is looking at a short man in a suit at the other end of the room. He has been hunched over and turned away from her. At the sound of her voice he slaps his hands on the table and blinks.
“Brian? Are we about ready?”
“Oh. Yes Madame Treasurer. Always ready.”
The woman bats her large heavy eyelashes. Everyone smiles as she flirts. Her bright pink lips gather up under her nose and she appears to be holding her breath. Beneath the heavy feathers of blush that fall across her cheeks a stress to her heart becomes visible as discolouration. The Mayor looks at her face. It now appears purple with anger. He continues smiling, but leans forward anxiously. Brian, who had been performing a little bad-boy-caught face for a woman in a tight black skirt leaning with her back against the wall, also looks to the widening eyes of the Treasurer. Her lids are pulled back so far that her eyeballs have become uncomfortably pronounced. Brian cannot hide a flinch of repulsion.
At the height of her contortion — as her face distorts in a way that nature had intended only for frogs, and only when bluffing aggression to larger predators — the Treasurer releases the compression with a loud barking laugh. No one in the room laughs back. They manage faint smiles, but look away, passing on to their neighbours the duty of joining in. The Mayor, however, is enthralled.
She is mad. The woman is mad.
The Mayor’s brow knits slightly as he spots a blue welt glistening against the side of her tongue. Her mouth claps closed and she stiffens her chin.
“OK. OK. There are a number of new items here. Before we get to them does anyone have any old business that needs resolving?”
A thin blond man in his late twenties flips open a folder.
“Uh, yeah, I have something.”
The Treasurer slaps her hand over her mouth and stares at the Mayor. Her eyebrows jump and hang midway up her forehead. The Mayor looks back at her, but he knows that — despite the energy she uses to lock their eyes together — there is nothing but an uncomfortable flamboyance between them. He widens his smile and after some time cinches the corner of his eye. This is an attempt to direct her away, back to the blond man who is caressing the folder he has closed. The mad Treasurer, sensing the rejection, flares her nostrils, inflates her cheeks, and with great élan dislodges the ivory plate from her mole. Seconds before she bursts into laughter every head turns small degrees and braces for the concussion.
“I just want to get back to this business of getting more people on town water.”
The Treasurer blows out more air and leans, bored, across the table. She believes she’s seconding the room’s unanimous disinterest here; people, however, are interested. And they begin flipping pages to initiate a discussion. When she realizes this she gestures dramatically with joined clenched hands that she stabs out across the table. Brian, the Deputy Mayor, leans behind the Mayor’s back and whispers. The Mayor’s grin widens but his eyes sharpen, become darker. The business of town water is, in fact, a controversial topic.
“OK. Um, I think we left off, Madame Treasurer and Mr. Mayor, with a decision to extend town water to all residences, both year-round and summer. I think the council has responded well and nobly, and the intention is good here. It’s just that in reviewing the estimates we have for carrying this out, I was a little distressed.”
The Deputy flips his hand open in front of the Mayor. He doesn’t look down, but lifts his closed fist from his lap and drops a pen across the Mayor’s fingers. The Mayor looks down briefly to watch the pen spin once in a 360-degree blur, and then he bares his teeth in a powerful grin.
“Well, it seems that there is some inequity. That is, not everyone in town is going to pay the same. In fact, the difference in some cases is extreme. For instance, folks up Trillium Parkway are gonna pay sixty-seven dollars a foot, whereas down Angel Crescent it’s, like, four dollars a foot. I think we have to level the playing field a bit here.”
Several people nod in agreement and look at the Deputy whose job it had been to work with contractors to establish these estimates. He turns his head slowly towards the Mayor, who blows a whistle silently and runs a finger down his purple piping. The mad Treasurer makes a series of strained faces back and forth between the two men, telegraphing messages to the room: The Deputy’s a bit shady, huh? Look at the Mayor squirm!
Everyone ignores her. The Mayor speaks with his eyes closed to the imagined glare of a bright sun.
“Well, there are a number of interests at stake here, and I’m afraid that, while we recognize there are some initial inequities, they just represent a necessary stage in the development of things. Why don’t we say these figures aren’t fixed. That they’re a preliminary look at actual costs before … before subsidies and scaling are put into effect.”
The Deputy rocks his hand at the Mayor’s elbow, clicking his pen three times like a stopwatch.
“Um, did I say they aren’t fixed? Not fixed? Hmmm, maybe that’s not quite accurate. Let’s say they are fixed; however, they include shifting variables.”
The blond man goes to speak but makes the mistake of glancing at the Treasurer first. She is holding the glass jug of water in front of her face and it appears to the young man that her head is made of bright pink and purple weeds. She squishes her tongue against the glass and it looks like a mussel being tortured under a magnifying lens. The man cannot talk. He cannot recall his thoughts. A woman, sitting safely to the side of the Treasurer, tips a folder against the table edge and speaks.
“My God, Robert, my God. We have to get this situation resolved in a hurry. Last month there were forty-six plumbing emergencies answered in town. People are living with the stench of an outhouse in their living rooms. Bathing in brown water. Just take a walk down Pollong Point and look in the yards. In every yard there’s a rectangle of lawn growing like a little field of wheat. That’s not super grass, Robert, that’s shit grass. Grass growing outta shit!”
The Treasurer pinches her nose and fills her cheeks.
“As Mayor I’d like to address that problem. I think we should put together a little pamphlet describing the symptoms of septic failure and distribute them around town. We don’t have to ignore the problem. Let’s put it in the people’s hands. Let’s give everyone a fighting chance here.”
The Treasurer suddenly bursts out laughing.
“We live in a goddamn Mega-shitty!”
Robert, relieved of the attention, rests his hand on her shoulder. This hand is magic with properties. It has slipped scissors through thousands of ribbons.
“Goddamn Mega-shitty! A Mega-shitty!”
The Deputy, laughing, drops his forehead against his wrists. The moment his face is obscured he whispers, with lips that catch on the dry table, “Jesus Fucking Christ.”
“They can have their Mega-city, Robert. We have our own Mega-shitty! Isn’t that funny?”
“Yes, that’s funny.”
“It’s really funny, because it’s true: we live in a Mega-shitty!”
★
Pollen erupts from the dark woods like fire and turns the air molten white. The lawns that are bright fecal green snatch these low-flying clouds and feed upon them hungrily, soaking up starlight and semen into their brooding wet hearts. All of life’s chances increase tenfold here in these foul, busy chambers, these sources of heat. And when children lose their baseballs beyond the blinding lime edges, the stitches and leather burst into the ground. The balls release a single juicy root like a wondrous leg, and drink from a network of earthen beams. Nothing resists or escapes the black welcome, and just beneath the surface of the earth, in these long patches of nitrate, is an energy so close to disintegration that it breeds light.
When the child runs into the wave to retrieve his ball, he’ll lower his exploring hand and feel a breath released i
nto his palm. He’ll feel this first. And then he’ll feel the searing cutlery as his knuckles and fingers break open with flowers. The last flower blossoms in his eyes — and the cutting edge of a petal severs the sunlight from his brain forever.
THREE
Robert Forbes is the Mayor of Caesarea. He was born here, on a kitchen table, under the strobing light of a lantern, to a mother in her mid-forties. Because of her age, and the powerful muscles she developed squatting on the front lawn to pick night crawlers, her birth canal was cabled with inflexible tissue and hard powerful webs. It had become less a life-bearing portal than an ingenious bait trap. When Robert’s little body entered this foyer in her vast corpus, it was immediately ambushed by strangling devices and vengeful cutting strings. Like a cage for catching minnows, it discouraged his journey outward with the burred edges of soldered screens and coarsely cut wires, their sharp tips separating baby flesh in shallow slices. Robert was an alien in this womb, a womb that had long ago changed itself into a hollowed-out anvil of might. It now treated the invader as both hostile and weak, something that should be suffocated and expelled. He managed, however, by wiggling his hips in the safe mucous that he drew up around himself for protection, to slip his tiny foot past the serrated opening: he got out. His father, who was sitting in a chair at the table, heaving on a bottle of gin, saw his son’s little pink fin emerge. He registered his wonder by testing the numbness of his tongue with his false teeth. When the shoulders of the baby fell onto the table and his wife let out her final war cry, Robert’s father slid his chair forward and rinsed the blood of mother and child away with a shimmering flood of gin. He leaned across his son’s body, and stretched his head between the dark red shadows of his wife’s legs.
“That’s a fine goddamn vagina. Hold ’er there and let me put my rise in thar fer a second, will’ya woman?”
Some parents never actually love their children, and some even beat and starve them; in fact, far from being the compulsory objects of love for which they are famous, children are more commonly the playthings of sadists. In the Mayor’s case his parents simply ignored him. They treated their toddler like an animal. Not as a pet — they had an ancient pipe cleaner of a cat for that — no, the infant Mayor was regarded as one of those animals that run up and down the edge of the yard, liminal and wild, hanging at the periphery of human sight, afraid of bears and wolves, but unable to step up to the picnic table, mad and nibbling on things in the long grass near the fence.