A twenty is good, the man said. Try to slip it through here.
No! Justin said. Put the money away, Janna. He was groping in the dark, flashing the LED, trying to find her hand.
Justin, for God’s sake, I’m going to get us out of here. Someone has to.
Let her give me the money, asshole. The voice was closer now, the man kneeling, it seemed. I think you can slip it out here.
How do we know you’ll even help us, Justin said, if we give you the money?
It’s like you got a choice here? The voice was sneering. Justin inhaled sharply. Then the man added, Duh!—and this, for Justin, was the end. This soft little duh.
Fuck you! You can take our keys and your phone call and your—shove them up your ass, if you know how to find it. And I’m going to find you tomorrow! The cops are going to—
A horrific slamming beat down on them from above, then it seemed to emanate from all directions, a pummelling they felt inside, slower and steadier than their bolting hearts, as the man hammered the trunk with a fist or the flat of his hand. It could have been a street gang smashing the car with tire irons, bats. Justin rushed his hands to his ears and then to Janna’s ears, to protect what was left of her nerves. Stop! he cried. The slamming went on, Janna making a steady high whine of pain or terror. He tried pushing up on the trunk with his fist to absorb the vibrations. He rammed his palm upward once, a feeble counterblow the man nevertheless must have felt, because now he whacked the metal harder and faster. Justin curled on the floor of the trunk, clamping his palms over Janna’s ears, then over his own, back and forth. Though their bodies were jammed together at many points, in this extremity he was fully alone. She must feel the same. He guessed she must feel the same. The beating ended. Heavy footsteps stalked away. The night was quiet again. She was breathing slower—small, sobby catches of breath coming at longer intervals. There was a smell like ammonia and he thought he felt dampness through the right knee of his jeans. He rested a hand on her hip. She seemed to be drifting into a kind of sleep, or a gradual faint, her nervous system, he guessed, no longer able to take the stress.
Now that he didn’t have a conscious Janna to coax along, the full weight of his own fear and anger returned. He sobbed for a moment, no tears, eyelids clamped on dryness. Not for the first time he wondered if they actually could suffocate in here. Maybe that was why she’d lost consciousness. His breathing felt tight, but that could just be fear. The trauma of his head blow. A car passed, then another, and he made no effort to cry out.
After a time, soft footsteps approached.
Hello! Please help us! He tried to shout gently, afraid of ripping Janna from her stupor.
Is someone in there? A soft tone, a sort of eunuch voice—the vocal equivalent of the footsteps. Justin explained things, trying to sound calm, murmuring through the crack through which he felt, just once, a cool breath of air. The man listened with a few faint sounds of encouragement. He seemed to be kneeling close to Justin’s mouth. The man was an orderly, he said, on the way to the hospital to start his shift on the maternity ward. It was almost five a.m. He would flag down the first car he saw, he said, and get somebody to phone the police, or he would find a payphone, or call from the hospital if all else failed. That would be ten minutes from now. He would run. The odd, adenoidal voice trailed off, and soft steps—rubber-soled, Justin guessed—jogged away into the night.
Justin left his head against the cool of the metal, his mouth as near as possible to the crack from which that one clean breath of air had seemed to seep. As another draft reached him, tears surged into his eyes with a wide-angle shot of great vapourless skies and fenceless emerald meadows … like a tourist still of the prairies, although he could smell the fields. There would be air enough, at least. The police would come soon.
Surely, whatever happened, they would live differently now.
A car was nearing slowly. It cruised past. Perhaps the police, searching for the Volvo they had been told to look for. But the car didn’t double back. Another passed, then another. The sparse traffic of early dawn. It was 5:12. In the eerie light of his watch, her sleeping face was peaceful except for the abiding crease between her eyes. Now she was nestled hard against him in the cold, his arm tight around her, his hand splayed wide on her back to cover as much of her as he could. Were old married couples ever buried in the same coffin? he wondered. He had never heard of it, but surely it happened. Or was there some law against it? Another half-hour passed and the little pre-dawn rush hour seemed to end. Why was he not mystified, or at least puzzled, by this latest lack of help, or by its slowness? He felt just numb. There was never any telling. Now and then other cars came from the west or from the east, but none slowed or stopped. Real help would come eventually, of course—the sidewalks would soon be thronged. Another hour or two. Three at most. What was another hour or two in a lifetime together?
——
A curious thing he noticed in the years after: in company, he and Janna would often discuss that night, either collaborating to broach the story on some apt conversational cue (which they would both recognize without having to exchange a glance), or readily indulging a request from guests, or hosts, to hear it for the first time, or yet again. And even when passing through a troubled spell in their marriage, they would speak of each other’s actions that night only in proud, approving ways. Janna with her granite will, he would say, had faced a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare and remained the more rational of them throughout. She’d probably have got us out of there hours earlier if I’d just listened. Justin, she would insist, had been competent and forceful the way she had always wanted him to be and had kept her from totally “losing it.” Justin would then profess chagrin at how he himself had lost it, screaming at their potential saviour, though in fact he was partial to the memory of that recklessly manly tantrum—and on Janna’s face, as she watched him replay the scene, a suspended half-smile would appear, a look of fond exasperation. But when the story was done and they left to drive home, or their guests did, a silence would settle between them—not a cold or embarrassed silence, but a pensive, accepting one—and they would say nothing more of that night or its latest rendition. When they were alone together, in fact, they never spoke a word of it.
[ OUTTRIP ]
Late afternoon, your third day in the desert, the Fisher catches up with you. You’re not sure why he’s called the Fisher and you’ve never had the balls to ask him. According to one story, he got the alias a few years ago, back home, after the period when a number of cats and small dogs turned up dead and mutilated, and for a while people in the Heights guessed they were the victims of some psycho. It turned out they were killed by a fisher—a kind of large, nocturnal weasel—that had come down out of the woods along the Cataraqui.
Maybe too the nickname stuck because it sounds a bit like “pusher.”
When the Fisher comes walking toward you up the dry streambed, tracing the path your own boots have left in the dirt, you are not surprised. In fact you have the feeling you’ve summoned him here, though even now—after three days alone in the wilds above Osoyoos in a heat wave, parched and hungry—you’re sufficiently self-aware to wonder if it’s really him. Really anyone at all.
It was not supposed to be this hot, even here, in mid-July, but the Program doesn’t cancel its “client” OutTrips. Rain or shine. (You’ve never seen rain here.) Your first OutTrip was three days, in June. Afternoons on the desert floor were smelter hot and after midnight you shivered in your thermal blanket. Still, there was never a moment when you feared you wouldn’t make it out alive. This five-day trip—the climax of the Program, after which you’ll debrief and fly east to face a few months’ probation and then, supposedly, get on with your life—is different. Though you’re way, way fitter and tougher now than when you arrived sick and skinny at the camp, you’ve been struggling. By the end of day 2 you were struggling. The “staple quotient” of water was challenge enough on OutTrip 1. This time you guess it’s dangerous.
If it gets too hot, travel at night and sleep through the day—that was the instruction, and starting tonight you mean to follow it.
It’s around five p.m., you guess, and with hours to go until dusk you’re resting in the louvered shade of a stand of stunted firs. You can see down the streambed to the valley, a full day’s walk away, where irrigated vineyards roll greenly to a cool blue lake: a small, V-shaped vision of the promised land. Not even a breath of breeze. Sweat pearls on your face and trickles from your armpits to the waistband of your boxer shorts; as if you can afford to lose fluid. In the silence you think you hear the needles of the firs drying up and falling onto the dead ones with the sub-audible ticking that ice crystals make as they form from your breath and fall on the coldest winter nights, back east.
You keep dreaming of such cold.
You plan to walk by the light of the moon—not much of a moon these nights, but it’ll have to do—using your map and compass. The next cache of water and food is fifteen kilometres from here. All you want is the water. In this ragged terrain it’ll take you until five or six in the morning, just after sunrise.
What are you doing here? you ask, your voice hoarse and corroded.
Serious efforts were required to locate you, the Fisher says as he slows and stops, spotlit by the sun behind you and this puny, pathetic brake of firs. He looks unfazed by the incinerating heat. He has on black sport loafers, designer jeans manufactured to look worn and ripped, and a form-fitting, large-collared yellow shirt he wears open to the third button and tucked stringently into his jeans. He’s older, maybe forty, but that doesn’t fully explain the tight tuck; a lot of guys his age dress loosely, like teenagers. He seems to model his look on porn stars of the ’80s—a compact, gelled helmet of ginger hair, ample sideburns, aviator shades with red lenses that allow just the slightest glimpse of the eyes behind. He wears a black belt, thick, an ostentatious silver buckle. The gold Rolex is likely real.
He looks down at you speculatively. Slowly he bares those even teeth with the large, jeering gap between the front incisors. It’s a smile that always enjoys itself a little too much. A coarse smile, a cannibal’s wide rictus; every time he smiles, he belies his pretensions to refinement.
You ran, Ben, even though I told you Upper Mongolia wouldn’t be far enough. (A classic Fisherism. He sees himself as a superior being, a polymath, and in fact he knows a great deal about many things, but his information is all a few degrees off, as if his brain makes slight data-entry errors with the info he probably gleans from dicey blogs and websites. It’s the same with his extensive but wonky diction.)
I’m not running, you say, holding your voice in place as it tries to slip up the register, thin out and vanish.
You don’t look like you can even walk now, Ben.
Are you going to sit? I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything. I have to hike from meal to meal here. Drink to drink.
Sure, I grasp completely how the Program operates.
Of course you do! you insist, as if to convince yourself: the Fisher cannot be here in front of you, even if all the details are right, including the voice that he always slows down and gruffens, like Donald Rumsfeld. You’re just me! This isn’t for real—I’m dreaming you.
He takes another step toward you and nimbly folds downward, without the aid of his arms, assuming a loose lotus position. He always moves with this easy aplomb—a Zen abbot’s serene poise crossed with a pimp’s air of dignity. A self-pampered, theatrical dignity. But he does feel the heat: perspiration glazes his tanned, lined face, sequins of sweat dot his auburn chest curls. There are stains around his armpits and you smell deodorant—his usual perfumy brand, incongruously feminine. Over his shoulder the far valley of vineyards wavers in convected heat as the sun sears these arid slopes like the surface of Mercury. The rocks are about to crack, like clay in a kiln.
Your father, a Baptist minister, left your mother and you in Kingston ten years ago and started a second family out west while founding his own church, or cult, as the Saskatchewan RCMP now call it. He’s rich, his acolytes give him everything they have, and he’s paying for your stay out here. He has not seen you or your mother since he left. The money he sends—not a lot—is conditional on this continuing estrangement. His commune is based in the Palliser Triangle, a near-desert about a thousand kilometres due east of here. You could walk there in a month of nights.
You hear yourself ask, Got any water?
I thought you concluded I was some kind of … figment.
Where’s Vladimir, then? you ask, knowing the Fisher goes nowhere without him. Vladimir is a stately but stunned-looking borzoi that some folks assume the Fisher must sedate, for reasons of his own. All of the Fisher’s reasons are his own. You suppose that’s one definition of freedom.
Oh, come on, Ben, you know what it’s like flying long-haul with a dog. They have to travel caged up in the fuselage.
Hold, you mumble.
What’s that? Ah—correct. It is cold in there. And dark. No food or water. It’s sickening to think of the atrocities people afflict on animals. And now you know how it feels to need water.
No, I meant “hold” as opposed to “fuselage.”
What?
Nothing.
You owe me a fuck of a wad, Benjamin.
I have nothing to do with you anymore. You’re not even here! I’m asleep, or delirious, or something. Fuck, maybe I’m dying …
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Ben.
Do you have any … you don’t have any water?
Correct and incorrect.
You actually lean toward him, though for the last few minutes you’ve been edging away—edging away without feeling yourself move, your spine now clamped against the trunk of a fir. Its bark pricks and itches through your damp T-shirt, which you would remove if you had the energy. You say, What do you mean, “correct and incorrect”? If you have any …
(There it is again—that stretchy grin unscabbarding those teeth.)
I have just enough water so you can mix up what I brought you.
What? You brought me oxy?
You have the vague sense—the opposite of déjà vu—that you know in advance what he’s going to say. As if he’s a speaker in your own lucid dream. This whole scene is a kind of neurological confidence trick, your own brain the trickster. Still, you can’t restrain a terrified, credulous excitement.
I’ve even pre-powdered them, the Fisher says. They keep making that harder to do. I don’t let that stop me, though. I don’t want anything to stand between me and a customer, Ben—even one who no longer has a triple-A debit rating.
Credit rating, you think. I don’t owe you anything, you say in your dried-up voice. You took everything! Three years, maybe a hundred thousand bucks, my fucking freedom, my peace of mind. I owe all sorts of people money, but you I owe nothing.
Ah, Ben. You’re like everyone else. You believe that due to my not assuming an official business, I don’t retain scrupulous accounts.
No, I’m sure you do.
And your attitude, Ben—frankly it’s a disappointment, not to mention a forcible kick in the balls. You think I usually jet across the country to resupply clients like this?
The thermals rising off the rocks and sand of the gully floor behind the Fisher now seem to rise out of him, like steam above an angry cartoon figure. Figure, figment, phantom. You scrunch your eyes closed and feel the dryness in the corners and between the eyeball and lid, an itching, gritty distress like a corneal abrasion. The body is a machine that, like any other, breaks down if the lubricants run out. You open your eyes: he’s still there, looking down at the sunglasses he now holds in his hand. The reason his glasses sit a bit crookedly on his face is that a chunk is missing from the top of his right ear—deducted by a switchblade or a bullet, according to rumour.
His black eyes swivel upward and meet yours. Your breathing stalls. The whites of his eyes are very white, healthy-looking, though the skin below is puffy and discoloured. It’s a r
are view. Seeing at intimate range those contused pouches, it hits you that he constantly wears the sunglasses not so much for purposes of intimidation as out of vanity.
What do you want from me? I’ve got nothing here. We carry nothing out here—no money, nothing. I don’t even have a watch. And it’s not like I have hundreds of bucks back at the camp, either.
Hundreds wouldn’t begin to cover it, Ben. Aren’t you a little old for a juvie boot camp?
There are a bunch of guys in their twenties. It was a condition of my sentence.
I told you, I’m fully cognizant of all that.
Of course you are. You’re in my mind.
Ben, I’m losing patience—though I have to say this is an original gambit. No client has ever tried to infer I was a vision, or a demon. Brilliant, Ben. Of course I know you have no money on you. But your debt, honestly, your debt is only one aspect of the issue. You see, in a way I’m sentimental about my customers, Ben. They’re like … extended family. I don’t have a family to speak of, you see. Besides Vlad.
You? Sentimental?
A weakness, I know.
He glances down and slips the red sunglasses back on.
I liked having you as a customer, Ben. I valued that special relationship we had and to tell you the truth I still do, even though you’ve abused my credibility. I can forgive that. I committed mistakes when I was your age. I can even forgive that you referenced me to the authorities, Ben—the fucking authorities. Men with no class. But I expect our special relationship to continue after you come home.
I’m clean now. Just leave me alone.
Honestly, Ben, it’s more about … about principle than money.
Why aren’t you locked up? you croak. Why am I the one who ends up hallucinating in the desert and on fucking probation?
It’s not like I haven’t done time, Ben. But it was the making of me. I grew very focused in there. I read expansively and learned to meditate. I quit smoking and I had to quit drinking and I started to keep fit—maybe a bit like this boot camp of yours. I now eat a Neolithic diet: no refined flour or sugar, minimal meat, lots of nuts, seeds and beans. And lentils, Ben—lentils are an excellent food.
The Dead Are More Visible Page 6