by Daryl Sneath
I hadn’t decided yet if I was simply going to come out with it and tell her I’d broken into the laptop and seen her little pornumentary on Danny Mann or if I was going to go for something more subtle and playful like, ‘Hey, you know, I’ve never considered a career on screen, but if you think you see something in me I’m game for giving it a go. My only request is that I see a script next time. I’m not very good at improv.’ But then again I didn’t know yet if she was filming me. I’d only seen the one installment. Daniel: In the Lioness’s Den (episode three).
I raised a hand when I saw her and she walked straight for me, all neatly tucked into her navy uniform, full of purpose and confidence. A step or two away she smiled and in one fluid motion let go of the handle of the suitcase she was pulling, undid her scarf, drew it around my neck, took my face in her hands, and kissed me, eyes open.
Her eyes were always open.
#305 36 WATER STREET, TERMINUS BUILDING: VANCOUVER, BC
As the elevator doors began to slide shut in the underground parking garage of her loft she put a hand on my chest and shoved me against the mirrored elevator wall. She went to her knees, unzipped my jeans, told me to watch, and took me in her mouth. Her eyes never left mine. I couldn’t speak.
The ride up was less than a minute. When the elevator came to a halt she stood, tucked me away, patted the front of my jeans, and wiped the corner of her mouth with a thumb. She stood beside me and gripped my hand. My heart thumped. My whole body thumped. We faced the mirrored doors and she glanced up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling I hadn’t noticed until then. She was grinning. When the doors slid open there was a young couple waiting to get on. The man had a tight grip on his dog’s collar. The golden lab looked at me and barked. The man told the dog to stop, not aggressively, and the dog obeyed. The woman had her hands on the little shoulders of her son who stood in front of her. The son was staring up at me. Like he knew me. Valerie stepped out and past them and I followed. We exchanged nods. The mother guided her son onto the elevator and the husband followed with the dog. As the doors slid shut I looked over my shoulder. The man’s sunglasses hung from the neck of his shirt. He put an arm around the mother of his son and kissed the top of her head. She looked at him and smiled. The boy had his hand on the dog and the dog was nuzzling into him. They looked like they belonged in an ad for the perfect life and I had a flash of Max and Rayn and me as a boy. It was a picture of a time I often longed for and I thought, in moments like these, remembering life before loss, that I might be able to find something like it again in some vaguely familiar way with a woman like Valerie Argent in the role of the perfect woman I loved.
Despite myself, I’d fallen.
. . .
Upstairs she pushed me onto her bed and pointed a small silver remote at four spots in the room. She pretended it was a gun and made a playful little firing sound each time she pushed a button: pshew, pshew, pshew, pshew. Music came from speakers embedded in the ceiling—Coltrane this time—and the fan above the bed began to spin. She turned on the spot and moved her hips to the music. Everything in the room was slow.
She stepped out of her pants and pinky-slid her panties to the floor. With her back to me she unbuttoned her shirt and let it slide off her shoulders to expose the Silver Light tattoo needled cursively between her shoulder blades. She set her head in profile and looked at the floor behind her.
Turning toward me she leaned forward a little and opened her shirt enough to reveal the inside curve of her breasts. ‘Did you miss me, Victor?’
I was sitting on the edge of the bed. I heard her say Victor but I didn’t care. I figured it was part of the act. My stage name.
I nodded and went to stand.
She shook her head and stopped me with a foot on my shoulder. That perfect foot. The subtle weight of it. The grip of her toes.
When I reached up and touched the inside of her leg she bit her bottom lip and I traced the back of my hand down to her foot, which I held, and softly kissed the four-leaf-clover metatarsal tattoo.
I pushed my hands up her body, the heat and the hardness of her nipples against my palms. I gripped her waist again and felt the torsal muscles tighten and move as she worked herself against my mouth.
‘Look at me, Victor.’
I did what she said.
In control of everything, it never took her long. After, she fell forward, rolled to her back, and draped a leg over me, her nose nuzzled into my neck, a hand on my chest. Soon her breathing deepened and I lay there, heart thumping, eyes half-shut like I’d been drugged.
She woke me by squeezing my nostrils shut. I struggled a bit and she let go. I sat up and rubbed my face, adjusted my eyes to the light. She was on the edge of the bed. Her hair was down and she was wearing black thick-rimmed glasses. She was dressed and I was not. Earlier she had woken me with her mouth, then climbed on and moved in a slow rhythm over the length of me until we both reached the end. Neither of us said a word and again we fell asleep.
The day had gone and the evening had come. She looked like a psychiatrist sitting there with her glasses on, examining me.
‘So, Doc—what do you think?’
She sighed and fell into role. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this.’
I put my hands together and leaned forward. ‘What is it? Give it to me straight. I can take it.’
‘It’s an acute case of post-sex siesta.’
‘Is it treatable?’
‘Yes. But it’s a vicious cycle, I’m afraid. The only treatment is more sex.’
She smiled and handed me a beer.
‘Well, fuck me—and I mean that literally—here’s to modern medicine.’
We clinked bottlenecks and drank. In moments like these I thought about taking charge: throw her down, hold her hands together above her head, blindfold her because I knew how much she liked to see, tease her until she ached for it. Take on the double role of director and leading man.
Grinning, she shook her head. ‘I keep forgetting you’re still a boy.’
I grinned. ‘That’s not very nice.’
‘Oh, Victor. I hope by now you know none of this is about being nice.’
I nodded. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You just did.’
‘Right. What’s with Victor?’
‘I usually dub the name in afterwards but since you’re not exactly in the dark about things I thought I’d save myself a little work.’
‘I’m not exactly in the light either.’
She looked at me and drank. ‘The others haven’t been as smart as you. I don’t know which I prefer.’
Others. With an s.
I didn’t ask for a number and she didn’t tell me.
She crossed her arms. ‘I think my members will like the twist of you knowing.’
Members. Again, I didn’t ask and she didn’t explain.
She grinned. ‘Change is good.’
‘Adapt or die.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Rayn used to say that having the ability to handle change is the only thing that separates misery from happiness.’
I knew what I was doing and she knew that I knew. Still, I thought about holding back and not giving her what she wanted. All I had to do was get dressed and leave. It was that simple. Ending something is always simple. All it requires is a conscious switch: cut the current to the light.
‘Rayn was your mother.’
I nodded.
She held up a finger. Reaching for the silver remote she asked me to repeat what I’d said about Rayn. Making the fake gun sound she nodded and mouthed the word ‘Action.’
I drank and fell into my role.
‘Rayn used to say that having the ability to handle change is the only thing that separates misery from happiness.’
‘Rayn?’
‘My mother.’
She touched my arm.
‘Tell me about her, Victor. I want to know everything. I want to know everything there is to know about you. Start at the beginning.’
I sighed and looked at the ceiling.
Now that I knew the game I knew what I had to do to make it last.
I talked for two hours. I told her about how perfect my childhood was, how I was an only child and why. I painted pictures of Christmas mornings and Halloweens, backyard treasure hunts and canoe trips down the Heron River. I told her about the paddle Stephen had cut down and customized for me when I was a boy. I went on tangents about Stephen and Serra. How they’d met. How they’d made their fortune young. How they’d left the city for a quieter life and opened a store they still ran called Down to Earth. How their only daughter, Rayn, fell in love with the river the town was built on and became one of the fastest paddlers in the country. I told her how Stephen had paraded her around on his shoulders one time after a race, saying, ‘Hey everybody, this is my little girl, Rayn Down. Ain’t she something? Ain’t she something?’ I told her the story of when I was four and won a race down the main street of the river town I grew up in as though I actually remembered it. I made it sound like I fell instantly in love with the effort it took and dreamed my whole life of one day making the Olympics. I gave her birthdays and summer vacations. Home-movie-like detail. I gave her a sepia-filtered version of my youth and she loved it, I could tell. She loved, as I would come to know, the character I was becoming.
. . .
Midnight. She was sleeping. I was not. I got out of bed and went downstairs to the window in the living room where I stood for a while and watched the city below. I felt for my phone and when I turned it on and looked there was an unopened email I had missed.
CLIPPINGS (18)
(taken from personal email)
Vector Sorn:
A simple reminder: assignment number one—recall, Why: you tell us—is due at the beginning of your September 2nd Cornerstone class.
Beyond this message—and this is not meant in any way to sound ominous but rather to highlight one of our main policies—we will not remind you. Of anything.
In anticipation and with curiosity,
The Faculty at Quest
~
It took me a while to write it. Although I knew what I wanted to say before I started I struggled with the wording, which in my young academic life I’d never experienced. Words and the diction I set them in had always come easily.
The experience filled me with doubt and at the same time left me satisfied. Writing—so the epiphany came—was like running. I would come to love and hate it with equal vigour.
‘DO-BE-DO-BE-DO’
ASSIGNMENT #1
VECTOR SORN
I needed to escape. I wasn’t being chased but I felt things closing in around me: people to be more precise—and ghosts.
Not that I’m Hamlet—not at all—but like him (and every other breather of air I suspect), I find myself in perpetual wonder. I’m in awe of why.
The word why in isolation, though, is not a complete question (similar to the way a person in isolation is not a complete person). It needs to be around other words to achieve real meaning.
What is meant, I take it, by the word’s weighty forlornness as it comes unchaperoned in the role of this assignment’s singular question is this: why be and why do. Existence and action. Why exist, why act? Sartre suggests that it’s our actions which define why we exist: we are thrust into being and whatever we do becomes the reason.
Allow me to share a personal example.
I came to Quest with the intention of discovering myself (pretentious, I know) and the world around me (as advertised). I had a clear objective. I had reason and direction.
But then, so the story goes, I met a girl. Despite having made a promise to myself not to venture into any sort of romantic do, I found myself doing and being what my brain told me not to.
Enter the heart, which is metaphorical for what the poets have been trying to get at for centuries.
Not to mention the ungainly entrance of the other organ to which (and far be it from me to intervene) evolution and the propagation of the species have guaranteed an unrivalled level of attention.
So here’s what I did.
I skipped the Meet & Greet. But not because I wanted to and not because the girl asked me to.
Let’s go back a little. I met the girl on the plane I took out here, spent the night with her (although it turns out the word ‘spent’ did not carry the same level of meaning as it usually does in such context—I was drunk and recovering from a state-altering punch to the head (a story for another time)), and so, went on an assumption of what happened rather than an understanding (too often this type of do gets in the way of how we be), and waited ten days to hear from her again. Eventually she called and, so the saying goes, I answered. To her door I went a-running.
Why did I do that?
To get laid again (or, much to my ignorance, not again but for the first time)?
Probably.
But why, then, when the act had been enacted didn’t I leave?
Love?
Impossible. I’d read enough early Donne to know better, and having some familiarity with Romeo’s lingual persuasions I knew that a man’s precipitate use of the L-word had far more to do with lust and locomotion than it did trust and devotion.
(Pardon the rhyme.)
So no, I didn’t do it for love.
The night ended and the following day she was gone. Instead of heading directly for Quest I went out and got a tattoo, the design of which came from what the girl herself had playfully finger-drawn across my back the night before. I did this not because I wanted to, and not because she had suggested it.
Why then? Why did I do it?
When I saw her again (which was yesterday, to note—mere hours ago, actually) after yet another ten days had gone by, I neither told her about nor made a point of showing her the tattoo. I’m sure she saw it but she made no mention of it.
Another question: why did I break into the laptop she left in a locked case on the backseat of the Saab she said was mine while I was hers when I knew it was a test? I knew it.
‘Don’t you want to take that?’ I’d said.
I’d noticed the case in the rearview mirror when I dropped her off at the airport. She glanced over her shoulder.
‘No.’ She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I trust you.’
Even more perplexing: why did I tell her about breaking into the laptop even after I’d managed to resecure the lock on the case such that I was sure she wouldn’t be able to detect the breach of privacy? Why didn’t I ask her more about what I’d found? Why didn’t she ask me? Why did I stay with her even after I knew what I knew?
As simple and inconclusive as it sounds, here’s what I’ve come to so far: I don’t know why we do what we do. But we do.
QUEST UNIVERSITY: SQUAMISH, BC
I’d mistaken Karl Knotold for someone only a few years my senior the night I met him at Shebeen. How drastically different someone can seem (or actually be) given where you see him and who you see him with.
I recognized him from the Clark Kent glasses and the way he moved his hands when he spoke. He looked older. It wasn’t his face or the way he dressed that added the years but rather the way the group of students were gathered around him, all raptly listening. An image of Socrates and his disciples minus the sandals and robes.
‘Mr. Sorn.’
I nodded. ‘Dr. Karl.’
I thought maybe he’d stumble a little—realizing his secret identity had been discovered, however inadvertently, by this library-card-toting neophyte—but he reacted to my presence and my calling him Dr. Karl in no particular way. He stood and offered me his hand, which I shook, and gestured for me to sit among his listeners.
> ‘So there I am,’ he continued, ‘walking innocently along, inside my head trying to work through a problematic ending for a story I was writing, the sun going down, the temperature dropping just enough to be pleasant, blissfully alone on a quiet trail in the middle of the woods, ruminating, when all of a sudden, there she is, two maybe three strides in front of me, this wild, lithe-looking cat, staring me down. So what do I do? What are my options here?’
He looked around but no one spoke.
‘Run? There’s no way. Play dead? A lot of good that would do should she decide to pad over for a pre-prandial sniff and nibble.’
Quiet, quickly dissipating laughter.
‘Scream? What if that excited her? Enlivened the blood. No, I could do none of these things. So there I was. Stuck. Nowhere to turn, nothing to do. You always, always have a choice, say the pundits of free will. Well, not me. Not this time. I was truly and utterly optionless.
‘And that’s when it came to me. There is no ending—not in the traditional sense—and that’s when I knew I had something.’
He looked at me, but for no longer than he looked at any of the others.
The first time I’d heard the story I believed it. Why wouldn’t I? Now that I’d heard a slightly different version in a very different context I was skeptical of the details and the actual truth of it, but far surer I understood the point.
A discussion ensued among three of his disciples who had been listening.
D1: ‘So what happened?’
D2 looks at D1.
D2: ‘It doesn’t matter what happened.’
D1: ‘Even if it doesn’t matter, something must have happened.’
D2: ‘That’s not the point.’
D1: ‘Maybe not, but I still want to know.’
D2: ‘Listen. The end is apparent. It doesn’t need to be revealed.’