Famous Last Meals

by Famous Last Meals (Candidates; Famouse Last Meals; The Woman in the Vineyard) (v5. 0) (epub)

  Alexei said he owned a truck and made a living moving things for people. Most of what he talked about had to do with mechanical matters: a motorcycle he had bought and was restoring and assembling; diesel trains; an annoying camera that beeped when the flash was primed but which failed to operate if the electronic sound component malfunctioned. He fixed it by removing the tiny circuit board that governed the beep. Adam could not place his accent. Perhaps French Swiss? A hint of Afrikaner?

  Alexei restored old bicycles for people, more as a conservational, car-reducing measure than as a business. In fact he seemed committed to making as little money as possible. He described old passenger rail cars he had seen recently in the Annapolis Valley. They had been newly painted with gold lettering on purple. He called it their livery as if referring to a horse and rider decked out in their stable’s silks. He spoke at length about automobiles of a certain vintage, but not just any old cars. He was interested above all in innovation. Renault, for example, had built a modular car a few years back in which the left back side panel, say, could fit the right front or any other quadrant, reducing the number of different components any factory or repair facility would have to stock. It frustrated him, as it would any thoughtful person concerned with efficiency and waste reduction, that so much of what we buy today—radios, CD players, toasters—can’t be easily repaired. It would cost more, for example, to fix the music player Adam had in his bedroom than to scrap it and buy a new one. Where older appliances and the more expensive current models were made out of metal and had parts held together with screws, today’s toaster was made of modular plastic parts fused and attached with rivets, since it was so much easier to design a production robot that put modules together with a simple rivet gun than to have one turning tiny screws into place. What was the true cost of the downward spiral that business had created by moving away from reparable appliances?

  The result, Alexei answered himself, was that workers were paid less and less because they were doing less skilled work than had their predecessors, and so could not afford to buy the better made items, those assembled with screws. Thus was perpetuated a culture of diminishing value. Items broke sooner, had to be replaced sooner, went to landfills sooner, all because they couldn’t be replaced economically. The trend toward managed obsolescence extended even to fruit. Apple growers in British Columbia, said Alexei, tried to get their produce to ripen all at once to maximize their sales to the US market. Consumers in California wanted their BC Delicious apple to look and taste a certain way, to be of a uniform size, and so the trees were sprayed all at once with a maturing hormone. Apple pickers sat around until the appointed day, when they would go madly to work, an army of them competing during a relatively short period of time to pick as many apples as they could. The trees themselves were pruned to grow in two dimensions, rather than three, to facilitate picking, and so tended to keel over in high winds.

  Adam thought about what Alexei was saying and decided that if he were running for office he would make this the basis of his election platform. It would take a plank from Don Feeney’s slogan: Adam Lerner Makes It Work. The thought made him smile. To think that whoever would be responsible for getting him elected would actually let him stand up and speak his own thoughts. Absurd! Still, what if, he mused, as the dull landscape lining Highway 102 flashed past, what if we as a country made it a priority to make everything work as well and as efficiently as possible? Cars that didn’t break down, that had easily replaceable parts, that ran on fuel cells instead of gasoline? It seemed the current system hinged on nothing but greed. Those making business decisions wanted always to make more and more money by replacing workers with machines, using ever cheaper parts and processes, contracting out manufacturing to eager poor countries, polluting because the resultant fines were still cheaper than having to keep the waste products out of the environment.

  Who were Adam’s handlers? Were they representatives of corporate interests, some cadre of the powerful operating outside the law, the Russian Mafia, the Opus Dei, the Hell’s Angels? Any of these seemed equally plausible.

  The 102 changed names at the intersection with the highway that ran in one direction to Cape Breton and the other to New Brunswick. Alexei the shirtsleeve economist had fallen asleep. I’ll hire him to be my ideas man, thought Adam, and I’ll hire Tracy the casino hostess to be my communications director. He hoped that before the bus trip was over he might meet a dozen more people like them, and if they wanted a job he would install them in his parliamentary office or in offices of their own. Eugène, his old office mate, Adam figured was going to get elected on his own eventually. Isaac the deputy premier’s son was too afraid of his father to have an original thought. Pookie and Gilles—who knew? Adam saw them opening a restaurant on Somerset or Queen West or Bourbon or Clinton Street. Probably Montréal. Anywhere less urbane and Gilles would shrivel up and blow away.

  The bus stopped in Wentworth, Oxford, Springhill and Amherst, Nova Scotia and in Sackville, New Brunswick. In Moncton Adam waited in the terminal for the bus going to Montréal and Ottawa. It didn’t leave for another forty minutes. He went to the washroom and when he came out he saw Mrs. Fallingbrooke’s Cadillac pull into the parking lot. He knew it was hers because there was LB getting out and opening the door, holding it as she emerged, incrementally like cooling pillow lava flowing up out of a depression.

  His stomach began to climb. Sweat beads broke on his forehead. How could they have known? What, did he have a tracking device planted on him? In a few seconds they would see him. He had to get out of there. But to what end? If they knew he was here they could find him anywhere. Where could he possibly flee? It was no use, none at all. They were coming inside. Adam had overheard a bus passenger say she was transferring to the train in Moncton, that the station was close, just down and across the street from the bus depot. He had no diversionary tactics in his arsenal. What arsenal? He wanted to cry, a wholly different feeling from the night before on the phone with his father. This was making him crazy. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He was no politician. The electorate would see that as soon as he stood up to speak. Nobody, inside the Party or out, knew who he was. Weren’t you supposed to have some sort of presence, weren’t you supposed to have people behind you? He wasn’t even a card-carrying member. It was as if they had pulled his name randomly out of a hat. If this was the way the country was run, he wanted out. But there was no way out without being seen. So what if they saw him? They could follow him all the way home to Ottawa for all he cared; they couldn’t stop him. He stood, picked up his suitcase, and walked out the door in the direction of the Montréal bus.

  LB saw him and opened his big hand in greeting, the palm a lighter shade than the rest of the hand, like the soft, rubbed, oiled inside of a cherished bowl. He smiled as though it were the best surprise ever to be meeting Adam here. The old lady caught sight of him, too, out of the corner of one eye. She was still turning away from the car and toward the depot. The car door had yet to be shut and it was a considerable effort for her to lift her head and take in everything that demanded to be seen. LB stood with his hand under her elbow and together they were the epitome of colonial symbiosis, he in his huckster white suit and pimp-pink fedora, wrap-around shades, red kerchief at the neck, and she in her impractical black dress with the ever-present string of fat pearls, and a hat that looked like something picked up off a pew one Sunday after services, 1955. Were those flowers and feathers and birds all together on a single headdress? Who was expressing her tribal connections and who looked like a fusion of Tom Wolfe and Marvin Gaye? Together they were some cruel joker’s idea of bad taste, quite a few shades of subtlety shy of enigmatic. Seeing them made Adam want to shout with mad glee or curl into a ball, the urges alternating like an electric current.

  Why even stop to talk with them? He had to, he knew, because he had grown up in leafy, staid, suburban Ottawa and was just now discovering he had a mind of his own and a curiosity that could
n’t be sated in the classroom. He had to because this was the most intriguing thing ever to happen, not just to him but to anyone he knew.

  There was no avoiding them. He put down his suitcase and waited for them to reach the spot where he was standing. How had LB’s press conference gone? Had he shown up on time, shown at all? Had Mrs. F. been there? All of a sudden he understood that it didn’t matter if she was there or not. She was running the show. She was a gradually hardening shell encasing a brilliant manipulative mind. How else could she appear to be aligned with the fringe and still be pulling the strings that made the middle dance, strings that reached past the visible and were attached to people and processes and policies that worked beyond the reach of accountability. She was Kurtz. She was Margaret Thatcher free of the stricture of Parliament. She was Charlotte Whitton, Indira Ghandi, Elizabeth I. What did she stand for? What would he be required to do under her auspices?

  “Adam. Explain yourself,” she said, Miss Havisham, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Miss Jean Brodie.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Yes, your departure was noted.” He didn’t need to know more. One of the hotel bellhops was probably a cricket buddy of LB’s. Maybe the bus driver had pressed a secret button. Adam’s theory of a homing device somewhere on his person, perhaps as something he had eaten, was not out of the question. “I would like you to come back with us.”

  “No thank you. I’ve had enough of this.”

  “Adam, ultimately I can’t make you do anything. What Hannah said to you in the restaurant, she should not have said those things.”

  “She said that you,” turning to LB, “were—are a terrorist.”

  LB’s face broke into a series of ever increasing smiles punctuated by laughter that built to a crescendo.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Fallingbrooke when LB had finally run out of hilarity, “she really should not have said that.”

  Who was Hannah Pachter? What was going on?

  Hannah, explained the old woman, was her grandniece. She did work at the BSC, but as a technician. The day Adam had come for his interview, the man who was supposed to ask the questions had tried to kill himself in his car. He had not been a well man. His name was Jack Blaylock and he had been rescued before he could be successful in his suicide. Adam’s alertness that day had apparently saved the poor man’s life. Blaylock and Hannah had been a couple for a number of years until Hannah told him that she wanted to end the relationship.

  The day of Adam’s interview, Hannah, who wanted to be a full-fledged communications security officer but lacked the training, happened to be in Blaylock’s office waiting to talk to him—they had had a particularly awful fight on the phone the night before—when Adam was escorted in. Hannah, not knowing where Blaylock was, and perhaps assuming that the man hadn’t come to work that day, decided to conduct the interview herself.

  “She shouldn’t have done it. She knows that. But she was the one who saw something in you, Adam.” She had no authority to hire him and could not even make a record of the interview. She gave him her phone number at work in case Adam called about the status of his application. She knew that he would eventually give up. But when he let it slip one day, in one of his last calls to Hannah, that he had taken the position at the PMO for the summer, she phoned Mrs. Fallingbrooke. She said, “I think I may have your Roy Romanow, Aunt.”

  “I have my connections with the Party, as you well know. The rest—well, you know as well as anyone. Hannah spoke with you at my behest. Again, I apologize. She had no right to say what she did.

  “I’m not a monster, Adam, and I’m not some old Black Widow weaving intricate threads of intrigue. We just don’t want you to go.”

  “Don isn’t stepping down?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “You don’t want me to stand in his place?”

  “An unfortunate rumour started by Hannah and spread to your young colleagues. Romance at short notice is my niece’s forte, to steal a favourite line from Saki.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “Help LB get elected.”

  “You want me to switch camps.”

  “It’s what we’ve wanted all along.”

  “LB never did hold that press conference, did you, LB? The reporters had been assembled, rumours were building like thunder clouds—oh, sex scandals involving Don and you young interns, national security secrets leaked, revelations of a past criminal record, kidnappings, planned revolutions with LB at the helm—but he let them stew in their own innuendo, didn’t you, LB? As for my grandniece, I sent Hannah Pachter packing, advised her never to meddle in political affairs again, told her to stick to what she did best, which is finding information for people. Lucky for LB, Hannah’s inflammatory depiction of him went no further than her chat with you. I could tan that girl’s fanny, I truly could.”

  They drove back to Halifax together, LB at the helm, the old lady intermittently asking Adam questions, recounting long stories from her past, and nodding off. Where, of all places he had been, would he prefer to die? He had to think about that one because he had not travelled widely: Florida on a family vacation, England when he was four, British Columbia on a school trip, Lake Placid to ski.

  “Iceland,” he decided. “I’m soaking in a hot spring. It’s winter, there’s snow all around and the sun is shining. It disappears behind a cloud for a while. I wait for it to return, and when it does, when I have to close my eyes against its brightness, the warmth soaking into the skin of my face, people around me speaking a language I don’t understand, I drift away. Then.”

  He looked over at Mrs. Fallingbrooke, who had fallen asleep again. Why exactly was he returning to Halifax? He pondered the answer to that, too. Not because they had asked and not because he felt any more fervently about LB’s party and campaign than he did about Don Feeney’s. It had been something Mrs. Fallingbrooke had said about people his age, about not being co-opted by authority. Always push through the obfuscating barrier, she told him, ask the difficult question, lead with the glass chin of his idealism. But what if the government was right, what if it did know best? How to tell? He had been the dutiful son, doing the right thing, for too long. It was time to do the wrong thing, the questionable act, the dance only he knew the steps to.

  He stayed with Mrs. Fallingbrooke in her left-leaning house for the few days that remained in the campaign. She received phone calls from Don, Lorne and Monica, each expressing the measured, diplomatically worded, angry but still smiling message—the doyenne did, after all, contribute large sums to the Party despite what they would characterize as her recent misalignment—that if Adam Lerner did not return to Ottawa immediately he would face severe consequences.

  “Don’t let the blustering bulls and hissing snakes intimidate you. You are entirely within your rights as a free citizen to change your mind and do whatever your heart instructs. After all, what, really, do you know? You know that the town of Feeney, Manitoba, is due for an overhaul of its sewer system and you know whom to call if you need information about the federal remote sensing installation at Crystal Crescent Beach, Halifax County.”

  “I do?”

  “You had lunch with her. You don’t think she came to Nova Scotia just to talk to you, do you?”

  “Ah. Well. Okay.”

  “And you know that Don Feeney has all the resources of the Prime Minister’s Office mustered behind his campaign. Is that fair? No it is not. Partisanship rarely admits the governance of fair play into its realm. Will he make himself available to the good citizens who will bear him to Parliament? Think again. That’s all you know, Adam Lerner, except for what’s in your heart.”

  He had, against his instinct to flee, returned to the port city, where for generations they had been dumping their waste untreated into the harbour, and where now many were making pitiful moan and outraged squeak against the construction of a sewage-treatment plant
in the vicinity of their rose gardens. Something about this fractious, halt-step, reeling march toward environmental responsibility Adam found attractive, and as he went door to door, again, to many of the same doors as before, he talked about what he guessed LB would do as their representative. He couldn’t say for certain, because LB did not make his thoughts or his promises or his inklings known to Adam, his only campaign worker, let alone to the voting public. The only thing remotely connected to the election that LB talked about was the means of transportation he planned to use for his triumphant entrance into the nation’s capital. He was split between paddling a dugout war-canoe up the Rideau Canal and floating in a hot-air balloon across the Ottawa River from the Quebec side. What LB would do, Adam said when asked, given that he would not be sitting in the governing block of seats unless all polling was wildly incorrect, was lobby strongly for more federal funding for the harbour cleanup.

  One resident reminded him that the feds had already anted-up millions for just that purpose. “Already spent,” said the man as he wheeled his green organic-compost container away from the curb and back down his driveway. “Walk with me,” he said with a snicker, and Adam laughed. “Spent on snow removal or some such or other. Things don’t change. Never will, until you make people put on wet-suits and take a nice refreshing dip in their very own municipal toilet bowl.”

  “We’ll make it a priority.”

  The householder looked at him. “That I’d love to see.”

  “I mean the cleanup.”

  “Right. Right on. Go for it, bye! You got my vote.”

  “We do?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There you are, then. Your known unknown.” The man laughed and went inside his house.