The strange words.
Jeremy spun, standing in the middle of the empty nighttime street. From her expensive apartment window high in the concrete and glass monolith behind them, had the resilient old lady of the West End risen for a nocturnal glass of grapefruit juice just then, she might have looked down and seen a small, charged scene on her quiet street. A rumpled figure, tired, authoritative, holding court on the grass by the curb, his arms crossed, his head back looking at the sky. And opposite him, a leaner, younger frame of a discernibly similar type, angular, also in black, hands in his jacket pockets rigidly, critically, dubiously. Staring at the older cast of himself.
“From the file in the library,” Jeremy said.
The Professor pantomimed applause.
“And if you’ve read it,” Jeremy went on, “may I ask why I—”
“Because you are a part of what is going on here.”
Jeremy stared. He didn’t want to know. He plunged.
“I accepted an offer.” Even to his own ear, the words clanked coldly out into the night air between them, but he couldn’t have predicted that the statement would bring the Professor’s arms limply to his sides, that it would pull him a step forward. Out of the park. Onto the curb. Into the gutter. The Professor was staring at his son, his blood. Standing in the street, in the city. “Oh, you have made such a mistake.”
“It’s a good deal. It gives me freedom.”
“Freedom. So many things done in this name.”
Freedom from debt, Jeremy tried to say, but the Professor was looking past him now. Over his shoulder and up between the buildings. Beyond. He was whispering.
“Too often, I think, the desire for freedom masks the desire for destruction.”
The words a thin stream. A last breath.
“You want to destroy everything around you, everything you have created for yourself or been given by others. To be free.”
Tapering. Diminishing. Losing angularity, presence, power.
“Natural for you, perfectly natural,” the Professor whispered. “Natural to refuse the key that is given. To be blind in the darkness of knowing. To be filled with a dark light that we must shine on the people around us. A light that makes us weep and pull down our own houses.”
The wind spoke in the cherry trees, a hissing speech through purple leaves and thin black branches. The city hummed, hypnotic. Winding through the deepest part of a Wednesday night.
“Come stay with me,” Jeremy said. He could hardly hear his own words. “Do your research but sleep in a bed. Write your notes at a table. You could shave.”
“Stay involved,” the Professor said. Back. Alert. “Stay interested.”
No second for an answer. He turned. He descended the hill at a determined trot. He threaded through the cherry trees, from the branches of which hung the fruits of their joint linkage to this place.
Around the lagoon went the Professor, dwindling down, then swallowed by the blackness.
BABES IN THE WOOD
At first, “business as usual” was painfully accurate. A week after coming to his understanding with Inferno International, he was still enjoying a daily flurry of hostile incoming letters and phone calls, complicated by the fact that Dante disappeared to New York City. Meanwhile, there was something like a virus loose among his various credit cards. Business was up enough to permit small payments; he was actually winding the kite in. Still, nobody was happy. Diners Club cancelled the card. After late payments in seven of the past twelve months … MasterCard sent him a stern reminder about an unpaid delinquency assessment, and it was hand-signed. He’d only ever had correspondence from the computer before.
Then there was the Canadian Tire lawyer. Doug Acer called half a dozen times, each time a little earlier in the morning. He was screening calls by this point, so Jeremy never had to deal with the young lawyer directly, but he was beginning to get the impression it was a sport for Acer. We should be able to work it out. Let me know a convenient time to reach you. If it’s too early, I can try you later in the day.
Jeremy was forced to track Dante down in New York.
To his credit, Dante provided help quickly. He made one or two power calls of his own on Jeremy’s behalf—everybody would be paid out by the end of July—and this precipitation of irritable calls abated immediately. Jules hadn’t noticed anything, they were still very much open and business was steady. It was like the sun had come out after a day of rain, which it had, in fact; the weather was brilliant. And then, Last Chapter booked a table for twelve for the first Saturday in August. Twelve people, they wanted a prix fixe menu, leaving it to Jeremy to decide. There could have been no better way to start the new “business as usual” era, thought Jeremy. A deliciously good omen.
Here, then, was the happy substance of Plan A as it framed up in Jeremy’s mind. By the end of July debtors would be paid out or otherwise mollified. Dante would return from New York and take him for lunch at the Terminal City Club. Maybe Philly would come. In either case, they’d talk pleasantries during the main course, about Chicago and New York. Dante would have stories, and he would tell these without the need for feedback beyond the conversational punctuation of Jeremy saying “sure” or “oh, really?” and thereby demarcating one of Dante’s observations from the next. It wouldn’t be so terrible. Over dessert, Philly would review the situation. There would be papers to sign. Inferno would buy 95 percent of the business (Paw Incorporated d.b.a. The Monkey’s Paw Bistro). The price would be a dollar, and all assets would thereby pass to Dante. In return, Jeremy imagined he would have to sign an agreement relating to his terms of employment, a commitment to work for a couple of years at a modest salary.
The plan offered stability without undue humiliation, but more than that, Plan A, in Jeremy’s calculation, meant that Jules, Zeena and Dominic would be kept on. And Jeremy was confident that, by the end of a couple months, anybody exposed to Jules would need no more proof of her abilities. Dante would learn to love her. Jules would eventually tolerate Dante. Everybody would be happy again.
Unfortunately, there was no Plan B, despite the failure of Plan A prerequisites to materialize. First, the end of July came and Dante hadn’t played his part. Jeremy tried him at his offices, but no, Mr. Beale was still in New York. He tried the cell number repeatedly, but Dante either had the phone turned off or was deep underground somewhere. Jeremy’s signals weren’t getting through. He left messages, three in total before he stopped. Was it possible Dante had changed his mind? Jeremy didn’t think so. He didn’t think Dante changed his mind.
So August arrived without action on anybody’s part. Jeremy left his fourth message in a voice mailbox somewhere out there in phone-space; he didn’t even know what mailbox he was talking to any more.
Dante, it’s me. And then he ran out of words, stumbling to a close with: I’m in Vancouver.
Brilliant, he thought after hanging up. Of course you’re in Vancouver—where else would you be? It’s only the Dantes of the world who had unplugged themselves from the planet and were doing their business on a plane that hovered just above the actual surface of the earth.
Living on the plane below that one, where passage over the ground was still measured in some fashion—kilometres, life left in a pair of soles—transactions had a stickier quality. They were tangled more in the social and personal foliage of the place, in the analogue uncertainties of human behaviour. And that might explain why, Dante’s lofty assurances not withstanding, on the Friday, the day before the Last Chapter party, it seemed that everybody in the Vancouver financial community who had ever had any association with Jeremy or The Paw boiled over at once.
He had just placed the single largest daily order of his life, and paid everyone confidently by cheque: sockeye salmon, Queen Charlotte crab, Saturna Island lamb sides, Fraser Valley ducks and crates of assorted produce from Garrulous Greens. He had walked serenely back through town to The Monkey’s Paw. And as he was sipping a coffee and contemplating the uncomfortably larg
e stack of mail, a courier arrived. It was an ominously thin package. Inside, Jeremy read the following on Toronto Dominion Bank letterhead:
Dear Mr. Papier:
Re: Principle and interest due and payable immediately:
$233,436.73
It is the duty of this office …
He didn’t finish the first sentence, and his heart was palpitating. A familiar dying two-step with the associated wave of dread—sweeping, systemic dread like only the realization of personal financial ruin can precipitate. And then the eerie prickle as microscopic beads of sweat bristled to the top of every pore, minutely lubricating him for flight in response to the adrenaline coursing through him. He was, he felt emphatically, fucked from a great height.
But he didn’t pass out. He hung on. He phoned Dante again, immediately. No answer. And this time, no accessible mailbox either. Instead the robotic femininity of Nellie the mail matron informing him: This mailbox is full. Please call again.
Jeremy lost his temper. He made a fist and hit the wall, not hard, just enough to crack the plasterboard and peel a length of skin off his knuckle.
Which only meant that he had a bandage on his right hand as he sat in the downtown Toronto Dominion Commercial Banking Centre opposite a beige individual named Custer Quan. A short man, about forty-five, plumply wedged in his swivel chair, adjusting his round glasses every ten seconds or so with a stubby forefinger and a well-chewed thumb.
Quan was fidgety. There were nine garnishees on the account already that morning. Jeremy’s mention of the Inferno payment did not appease. He insisted it would come, and Quan only became embarrassed. His hands, he said, were tied.
Jeremy promised payment Monday. He all but got down on the teal carpet and begged. Monday. End of story. No excuses. Personal commitment. Monday was fall-off-a-cliff day.…
Quan agreed eventually, visibly unhappy. But he walked Jeremy out, polite under the circumstances, hedging his bets in case the Inferno assistance really was in the wings.
Jeremy jogged back to The Paw. It was just after lunch. Zeena was bitchy about being left alone over the busy period, even by necessity, with only the sandwiches, salads and onion tarts that Jeremy had managed to prepare.
“Everyone was suitably impressed,” Zeena said. “Some people actually look forward to your hot lunch specials.”
“I trust you apologized. How’d we do?” Jeremy asked, still trying to re-oxygenate.
“How’d it go with you?” She asked him accusingly.
“How did we do? How much?”
Zeena popped the till open for him and walked slowly into the back carrying the empty wicker basket from the sandwiches.
Jeremy counted out $253 onto the counter. The phone rang.
“Papier,” said the familiar voice, tired, amused and mean spirited.
“Acer …,” he started, and he thought to himself just then: Here goes, I’m going to let someone have it. Doug Acer from Simms, Brine and Lothar. Couldn’t be more perfect.
But Acer beat him to the open air, charging onward, clearly having something to say that he wanted to get out in one chunk. “The cheque you sent me bounced, and I’m sorry to say that the Inferno didn’t catch it. I’m in an awkward position here, Papier, a position made more awkward by my discovery that there are twelve other lenders in the picture.”
Acer had to stop for a breath, which he did quickly, not knowing that Jeremy was on his heels, also out of breath. Trying now to slow the heart palpitations, feeling a vertiginous, telescopic expansion of the space between his chin and the floor. He began to stammer a response, but Acer was off again and the words were getting harder. He heard illegal. He heard fraud. He heard kite. He heard conceivable involvement of law enforcement authorities. And when Acer was finally finished—and Jeremy had nothing, not a single word to say that might reasonably counter any of what had been alleged—the line ran silent. Acer gave him fifteen seconds of dead phone air to come up with something. Then he hung up.
Jeremy stood quivering, alone in his silent front room. Zeena, he imagined, was hiding in the kitchen.
It was worth one more shot. “Riker.” On the first ring.
“Philly!” Jeremy almost shouted.
“Who’s calling?”
“Jeremy. Jeremy Papier. What is going on? Nobody has been paid. I have the biggest reservation I’ve had in my life for tomorrow night. Last Chapter. And I’m getting smoked from ten sides here. Quan won’t pay the Happy Valley. Says he wants to lock the place up. Acer is threatening fraud charges—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Philly said. “Hang on.”
The line crackled as Philly’s hand went over the receiver.
“Gimme ten,” Philip said.
“Where is he?” He must have sounded pathetic.
“Busy, extremely. All right? Call you back.”
He tried to think about dinner during the long minutes that followed. It was one of the strangest undertakings of the week. Everything he had ordered for today and tomorrow had arrived: the gorgeous red salmon, the crabs still squirming in buckets of ice, the beautiful sides of lamb, ready for butchering and portioning, the ducks and all of his greens. And yet he couldn’t remember a thing that Jules and he had planned to do with them. He hadn’t made any prep lists yet, so he couldn’t even use these to jog his memory. He stood in the centre of The Zone, and all he could think of was a roast chicken in the backyard, cooked over a fire just outside their tent. His mother turning it on a stick. And the lamb dish, what was that? She cubed it and left it in a bowl of yogurt and lemon overnight. The next day she skewered it with potatoes and grilled it on the backyard Weber barbecue that was otherwise his father’s domain.
“Nomad lamb,” he said aloud, just as the phone rang again. It had been more than fifteen minutes.
“Monkey’s Paw,” he said, trying to sound businesslike.
“You know?” It was Dante. “I never liked that name.”
And he didn’t sound particularly busy at all.
Plan B was revealed, different in a number of painful ways. The Last Chapter dinner, Dante at the very least agreed, would proceed as planned. Jules arrived Saturday morning and they got down to it. She looked tired, wasn’t talking much. He asked her if she’d been out the night before, and she nodded but didn’t say where. Nor did she look up from banging out small-dice onions for mirepoix. A technique-machine right to the end. Eight vertical cuts, three horizontal cuts, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. Perfect dice.
They had a number of other tables, including Olli and Margaret, which was unexpected. But Last Chapter closed the place down. Luke Lucas left a one-thousand-dollar tip. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Jules just shook her head. Jeremy too. So the servers split it three ways between Dominic, Zeena and the stunned dishwasher. Then they all quietly called it a night.
Plan B formally went into effect the next morning, with Jeremy reporting to Inferno International Coffee corporate offices. They were open seven days a week, it turned out. At the front desk he asked for Dante and got a short, dubious look from the receptionist. Mr. Beale was still in New York. Mr. Riker was back but in a meeting. If Mr. Papier would just wait in the small boardroom off the entrance foyer, someone would be with him straight away.
Jeremy did as he was told, and five minutes later the Inferno delegate arrived. A junior in the legal department he guessed, an articling student. She looked about seventeen, but she had pearl-hard eyes and a brutally direct manner.
“Your signature is required in thirteen places,” she said, after shaking his hand and offering the thinnest possible veneer of social preamble. She had fanned out a sheaf of papers on the table, pages marked with purple stick-it notes where he was to endorse the various agreements and terms.
“Can’t we …,” he stammered, “… walk through it together?”
The young woman thought Mr. Riker might have explained things already. But she took the time, leafing through the pages, explaining how they would file for protection from cred
itors, push Paw Incorporated d.b.a. The Monkey’s Paw Bistro into bankruptcy.
“Bankruptcy?” Jeremy said. Plan B was framing up.
“I understand there were some …,” and here the pearl eyes reflected a trace of pity, “… some legal matters. Cheques and so forth.”
In any case, starting fresh was the term she preferred to bankruptcy. Inferno International Coffee had started fresh with a subsidiary corporation to re-establish a restaurant in the same location. Jeremy would be 5 percent owner of this new company, as agreed. 101239 BC Ltd. There was a disclaimer to sign about IIC’s involvement in the business before the sale. A certification that all employees of the old company had been properly terminated.
Hello.
Jeremy started to say: terminated? But the word didn’t make it into his mouth. It lodged in a place between his brain and his throat. Jammed there, half formed. Term … And in a swirling, suffocating instant, Jeremy’s heart—the physical ticker—was the site of a disturbing convergence of muscle memories. The first, a long ago familiar arrhythmia. A stutter, a partial resumption, a fluttering, failing, vertiginous two-step. The second, the effect of a face, from close. An effervescence behind the breastbone that seemed to lift the heart from its cavity. He was there. He was staring into that perfect face. Her strong green eyes, her magnificent nose and eyebrows and black hair. They were poised above a kiss that was never completed, that might have changed everything but did not. Hovering, Jules and Jeremy, canted an inch towards one another, absolutely ready to do what came next. Kissable over brown-crayon-flavoured coffee at the Save On Meats sandwich counter.
And so, standing in the IIC boardroom, the beats of Jeremy’s heart were dissociating and floating from his chest. Perhaps, he thought, reaching out with the fingertips of both hands to steady himself against the boardroom table, this was what it felt like to be terminated.
The woman took no notice of Jeremy. She was still talking, meting out words of freezing certainty. A Professional Services Agreement for Chef Jeremy Papier would be signed and would begin immediately. After the restaurant reopened, his remuneration would be augmented by profit sharing. “A share based on profit after interest and tax as outlined in Schedule G,” she said. “This is Schedule G. Your initial is required here. And this is the agreement transferring Monkey’s Paw assets to IIC. Your signature here.”
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