7. Kabbalah
8. –mancy
i) cartomancy
ii) necromancy
iii) oneiromancy
iv) ornithomancy
v) stichomancy
7. The Prophet
8. Scrying
9. The Aquarian Centre
10. Theosophy
11. Wicca
This was just off the top of Anthea’s head and incomplete, but it helped her to think about Jasmine’s trajectory. It should end with the Prophet, since he was the terminal point on Jasmine’s descent, but then it wouldn’t be alphabetical. And actually, “descent” was Anthea’s word: when Jas described her initiation into the Prophet’s circle, she suggested upward movement, the ascent of some sharp mountain face, toward clearer air at the summit.
Of course, from Anthea’s point of view it didn’t look anything like that. Jasmine—once so carefully groomed, so dressed—grew blurry, then invisible in the crowds on the east side of the downtown core. Like for instance the hair she once got from carefully applied bleaches and dyes, the hair turned from gold back to her original frizzy honey. Her clothes had lasted a little longer, but then there were only T-shirts and jeans and ugly runners. No modish miniskirts, or Mitford-esque tweed, tortoiseshell, pincurls, Jackie Kennedy sherbets or glamour girl rhinestones: no retro where she was going, and no vintage.
During those latter days Anthea sometimes saw Jasmine when she was out walking, or in a cab on some late night. She’d look down from the windows of the train to the intersection where the squeegee kids worked, and there was Jas, dishwater hair and backpack and greasy rag in her right hand. There she’d be, stringy in polar fleece, watching him lay hands on girls lined up outside some bar. And every single time Anthea caught sight of contentment, and if he was there she turned her own eyes on him from across the street, or the train windows, and wished that she could see what Jasmine saw. She’d turn to whomever she was with and tell the story of Jas and her Prophet, and make it funny, or sad, or creepy depending on her feelings at the time, and how much she’d had to drink.
One day Anthea noticed that she hadn’t seen Jasmine for a while, and it occurred to her that Jas might be gone in some new way. She kept looking, though, going out of her way to cross and re-cross the familiar intersections, the mural that read “Jesus Saves,” the recycling place, the corner by the library. As she walked, she thought through again and again the last time she had seen her friend, and how on that day she didn’t know it was a last time.
It was a weeknight. She was walking alone, and found her way to the Temple Theatre’s boarded-up windows: the Institute had just officially joined the reclamation project and the theatre was on the gentrifying edge of Jas’s new neighbourhood. Anthea spent a long time in front of the old vaudeville house looking at the façade and trying to imagine it without the dull brick-coloured paint, and with the broken faces on the columns rendered whole, and the broken leaves on the lintel, too. She thought about her grandmother as a little girl, going to hear Fritz Kreisler. She thought about her father, Colm, seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Midnight Cowboy, back when it was a movie theatre in the late Sixties and served all the dropouts near the waterfront. He had liked it a lot, and talked about the fancy plasters inside and the egyptienne paintings on the ceiling of the auditorium, and Anthea had wished she could break in with a flashlight and explore what was left before the Kilgour Institute and the provincial arts board remade it into a World Class Venue.
Back then the Institute’s work seemed relevant. After a long look at the building, she wandered west again, toward the posh shops that were also, indirectly, part of the Temple reclamation project. She was ready to go home when she looked down the block and saw Jas with another girl, a skinny teenaged blonde. They were standing at the corner, the girl silent and Jas calling out to the people who wandered in and out of the expensive shops and cafés, people who didn’t stop, but texted with their eyes downturned or just looked away.
Across the street Anthea looked at a display of Scandinavian furniture, all tweed and blond wood. She kept Jasmine in the corner of her eye, watched her hands alternately outstretched in blessing or cupped in the Buddha’s begging bowl. After a half-dozen tries she succeeded and stopped one man in a group, so that his friends hung back in a semicircle around the two of them.
Anthea looked at the next window, with its three mannequins in black and grey and chocolate. Cashmere. Linen. Sometimes a Merinosilk blend. In her peripheral vision and reflected in the plate glass she watched the little knot of men around Jasmine, something she had seen quite often before, though never before in the context of street evangelism. With her eyes still on the asymmetrical hems, she planned things to say, how she would be kind, or clever, or just tell Jas to call her mother forgodsake. While she rehearsed, more people joined the little group on the corner, and then Anthea had to cross the street to keep watching.
“The Father,” she heard first, “you might call him God. He gave us the way to healing in the laying on of hands. I saw you walking down the street and I knew that you’ve been hurt. Someone put the evil eye on you. It’s here.” Jasmine laid her hands across the man’s neck, then down either side of his spine. She plucked at the man’s left shoulder blade, then worried at it with her fingers until she held something heavy Anthea could not see, and cast it from her with a great effort. When she was finished, he turned to face her and she held her hands together and bowed, “Namaste,” she said.
Anthea waited in back of the little crowd and she thought maybe Jasmine spoke extra carefully and clearly even though she also seemed to avoid looking in Anthea’s direction. The blonde girl made a mark in the little black book she held.
“Haruna ke felach. Spiritus Sancti!” Jasmine said. “Parach me Laruna Mundi! You are the five hundredth—is it the five-hundredth, Steph?—soul I’ve attuned! Parach mo parach! I feel something about this moment, about you, too. Are you a Seeker?” And Anthea watched Jasmine take on another familiar attitude with the man, something she had seen her do many times before, with her head inclined and her eyes upturned, one hand on his bicep, the other resting against her cheek. He smiled at her, a new initiate though he might not know it. That was when Anthea let her own eyes drop and walked on, pretended she wasn’t being cut. She didn’t even know the crazy lady either, who picked up stinky men right on the street, with her laying on of hands and her speaking in tongues that wasn’t Reiki, or Wiccan, but a more recently made-up practice. But then when she was past, still feeling the crowd behind her and wondering whether the man would go with Jas, to some place where money would change hands, then she’d felt all shuddery through her legs and her mouth was dry. And she thought, that horrible, mean woman, who did she think she was?
And that had been her chance. She’d gone and spent the toonie she’d had ready in case Jas was begging, she’d gone and spent it on more tea for herself instead of thinking of her friend, whose bones stood out in her face, and whose skin seemed thinner than it should be. She told herself that if Jasmine had winked, even blinked, waved a hand, she’d have given her the toonie, at least. She told herself that if she had known it was the last time, she would have done something, anything, differently. She did not always believe her own story.
ESCAPE ROUTES
She liked to watch the flight of crows each evening at sunset, the commuter birds who spent their days by the water, but roosted inland. They crossed overhead from the west kitchen window to the east-facing bedroom, earlier and earlier as the summer ended until it was fall and they crossed while she was still at work. She watched them against whichever sunset she happened on; the crows were constant where the colours changed, sometimes pearly, sometimes layered from pink to gold like a Shirley Temple. The crows spilled like black beans across the west, but when they were close she saw that they were crow-shaped holes, little glimpses into the void behind the sky.
She probably loved the crows so much because she knew that they could survive the
comingdarktimes, a phrase she used to describe the unspecified misfortune that awaits the world-in-decline. Of course, it was not always unspecified, though any name she applied to such a disaster was necessarily inadequate. Sometimes it was distinctly nuclear. She has seen past the first flash and the dust cloud, and after that the wasteland of the fused city. When she saw these things, she remembered the crows, because she imagined that the time after the flash will belong to them, that the city will be reclaimed by their forward-backward-forward migrations through the rubble. Of course there were more than just crows. Her mental list of survivors also included dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace. And what else: brown rats, and rattish black squirrels; raccoons and skunks and coyotes. And cats, too, she thought, and ants and spiders, and broom that will cover the melted metal and glass of the detonation’s heart, and underneath it will be the territory of scratchers and biters and scamperers, who eat and fuck and bear blind, pinkish babies in the razed city.
This is not to say that Anthea stored up water and astronaut food in some exurban cache, or bought gold or contemplated prophecies in order to determine the date of the coming apocalypse. She left that kind of thing to Jasmine. Her private Kali Yuga was not so epic. It was something that accompanied her, rather, like the decaying hum in an overheated engine or the regular, sub-aural twick-twick of a bit of loose plastic hitting the edge of the turntable each time the disk goes round.
Insubstantial as it was, the hum, or the twick-twick sound can be traced to one night when she was seven years old, eating golden raisins and sitting on the counter in the kitchen of her parents’ house in Duncan’s Crossing, two hours north of where she now lives. She was listening to a radio documentary about the impact of a nuclear strike on the city. In her memory the house was empty. Her feet did not touch the brick-coloured battleship lino of the floor, not even when the fire in the stove died and it grew cold.
It would begin with a high elevation burst above the hospital at the centre of the greater regional district. The resulting EMP would still traffic and trains and streetlights and pacemakers. So it’s five o’clock in the afternoon, and the boats in the harbour drifting, the stock exchange frozen, and all across the city people climbing down from buses, or leaning out of windows to look up and to the south. All of them poised for flashblinding as the second missile detonates the water in the harbour and the skyscrapers and the piles of yellow sulphur on barges that line the northern shore.
“In the centre of the city,” said the CBC announcer, “some will have taken refuge in bomb shelters or wine cellars. They will be crushed or suffocate as the earth above them liquefies, then sets in a hard crust.” Outside the blast site, perhaps fifteen kilometres from the centre of the city, those who hid in basements of reinforced concrete will emerge, if they were not trapped, and upon them falls the fallout. This descending sky, Anthea decided as an adult, would be the green of smog at sunset.
Those who are still coherent, though adrenalized, flashburned, endorphined, walk east, along the river, to escape the city. The prevailing winds are westerly, and these refugees will be on foot; they will not outrun the cloud which creeps eastward from the coast at wind speed.
Some will make it out of the city, but find that the EMP has destroyed all electronics west of the mountains. Doctors perform amputations without anaesthetic, prepare solutions of sodium bicarb for the radiation sickness that will level survivors hours after exposure.
It is unreasonable, and the memory contains no explanation for her focus, but in Anthea’s mind the story ends with the refugees walking out of the city. She explained this to Colm, long after she listened to the radio program. He wanted to know why she had to sleep with the hall light on and the door opened just enough to cast a yellow beam across the foot of her bed. All night, she insisted, not telling him at first that it was a way to know about the EMP, which would approach them silently, she knew from the CBC.
But when Dad asked about it, she could not explain at first, too dreadful were the ragged survivors walking out of the city to Hope. She thought they would have to travel a very long way; she knew they wouldn’t all arrive. She could see them walking at night when it was very dark and the hall light did not entirely convince her that the blast had not hit somewhere, silently, far away beyond the shroud of mountains that separated them from the two likely targets. Her brother Max had explained about these two targets: the submarine test range north along the coast, the port city. You want to stop them from fighting back and destroy infrastructure, he said, you want to cripple reconstruction. Infra-struc-ture, she had sounded out. Reconstruct. Cripple. Max was twelve and understood these things.
They wouldn’t see the blast, Max further explained, except if they were looking that way and it was cloudy out and then they’d see the light hitting the cloud. They would hear it, of course, but much later, as sound travels at 340 m/s. Then if it was at night they might go outside and look south and see an ugly glow on the horizon, like sunrise. That was the city burning. So in Anthea’s mind there was the flash, something you could miss unless you were looking up and to the south at the exact moment it reached you. But then there’d be the lights suddenly gone, the radio dead, and it would be like when a storm knocked out the power, and suddenly the sound of the fridge died in the kitchen, and the TV stopped downstairs. And you knew that night you would be eating wieners and beans heated up on the woodstove, and then playing gin rummy by lantern light.
But on that day it would be the end of all wieners and beans, all steady yellow lights, all sunshine. Nu-ku-lar Winter, Anthea sounded out. “Nuclear,” Max corrected and told her what that was.
So when Dad came in to say goodnight, and as he was leaving she reminded him again to leave the hall light on, he stopped, silhouetted in her bedroom doorway. “Panther, what is it?” Panther was his special name for her.
She couldn’t say it out loud.
He tried again. “Did you see something scary on TV? Were you watching Twilight Zone again?” She shook her head. “Did you read a scary book?”
She looked up at Colm, her covers pulled right up to her chin, and her hands and feet underneath, because no matter how hot you were, you couldn’t put anything out of the covers, if you wanted to be safe. “I heard on the radio,” she started, then stopped, then started again really quick, like she was running, “I heard on the radio about what would happen if they dropped a bomb and how we would all have to walk out of the city if we weren’t killed and then and then.” She stopped.
“Bomb?” Colm asked. “What kind of bomb?”
“And there wouldn’t be anything in the hospital and we’d all be burnt and have no clothes ’cause our clothes were burnt.”
“Oh, buttercup,” Colm said. “Oh, sweetheart. I don’t think we’d walk out. Maybe we’d stay here. Or go to Grandma Hazel’s house on the beach. Then maybe we could eat fish, and grow vegetables in the big garden.”
He figured they’d work it out, when it happened, and she shouldn’t worry just then. He got her a glass of water, and then pretended to trip and spill the water on her, only the glass was empty and that made her laugh. Then he promised again not to turn off the hall light.
What she remembered after was that he said: “I think it’s unlikely, Panther,” which sounded like he had thought carefully about the problem, and determined that her worries were unreasonable. Later, she realized it was unlikely—and she hoped this was what Colm meant— because there would be substantially more damage done than that described in the radio story, which accounted for the effect of only three nuclear warheads: the first high-elevation burst; the detonation in the harbour; the detonation over the suburban hospital.
Even though his voice was cool and kept its distance from fear—it was a voice like the one in her own head when she wanted not to be scared—he could not stop the figure who now walked through Anthea’s imaginings. This figure walked along an empty road out of the city, one that passed between ashy mountains, and there was no sound but the wi
nd. And this figure accompanied Anthea in dreams, or emerged in the darkness behind her eyelids when she was half-awake and always unprepared for the familiar silhouette.
And later the figure resolved a little, as though in the intervening years it had begun to draw near to where Anthea stood: she was a woman whose dark hair hung down into her eyes, where it was not burnt, and whose eyes were also dark, whose feet were bare, and in whose arms rested a bundle, that might be a child or might not. Anthea did not like to think about what it might be, and when she dreamed it, did not like to imagine unwrapping the bundle and discovering what it was that lay under the dark rags, what child, or thing, might be carried in the woman’s arms.
ON THE BRIXTON CIRCUIT
The dark-haired man at the back of the car was too tall for the second-class seats. He could not stretch his legs and in the cold they had begun to cramp. Twisting slightly to unbend them, he rested his knuckles against the window to his left and watched telegraph poles flick through the reflected interior of the train. He did mental arithmetic—subtraction, as he set possible grosses against inevitable nets and came up with a red tint to his numbers, as he had done quite often on this circuit.
While he’d been embarrassed for months, the present crisis went back to that patch of unwellness in Portland one week previous, when he’d been cut to 3/7s pay ($64.28) for missing twelve shows. It could not have been helped, his lungs were that bad and singing out of the question, even for a crowd as undiscerning as the one at the Portland Palace Theatre. He thought now he had been so ill as to be hallucinating, because in his memories the air in the communal dressing room was textured like glass, through which floated bubbles of viscous yellow stage light. The nice lady with the ballerina dog act had touched his face and said that if one of her pups had a nose that hot she would send him right home to his basket and give him ginger tea. He had taken that as permission and crept out in the dark and rain and found his way back to the boarding house.
The Paradise Engine Page 3