The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  pray make no mistake we are not shy we’re very wide awake the moon and i

  Anthea thought it was pretty, which was nice because she hadn’t expected Mrs. Kilgour’s voice to be up to much. At four that afternoon she left Rm 023 with five brown-papered 78s in the portable turntable’s side pocket.

  THE AQUARIAN CENTRE

  Anthea didn’t know where Jasmine found the Aquarians, but they very quickly gained on the Wiccans, whose passion for sisterhood and material reality only held her interest for a few months. From Anthea’s point of view, the nice thing about the Centre was that it tended to hold events like barbecues, and firesides with tea and cookies. Anthea had even gone to a potluck for the autumnal equinox, and a Samhain party that ended with s’mores. These gatherings reminded her a little of the United Church basement potlucks her parents had taken her to as a child, for the NDP riding association or the Voice of Women. The politics were exactly reversed—the Aquarians were traditionalists, and talked a lot about government as an unnatural intervention in the subtle forces that guide real human life—but the earnestness felt familiar, though the Aquarians valued orthodoxy even more than feminists and socialists.

  The Centre stood on a brick-paved, west-side street lined with heritage plaques and chestnut trees lit by white LEDs. It was a large bungalow with a deep porch, a stone foundation and granite plinths. According to the blue and gold plaque on the front gate, it was built in 1922 by a lawyer named J. Somers. Anthea knew this because she always stopped to read heritage plaques.

  “But, like,” Anthea said when she first saw the beautiful house, “how do they pay for it?”

  “Oh, money,” Jasmine said. “You’re way too obsessed with money. If you’re aligned with the universe, money happens.” Anthea said nothing. Money did not happen to her, at least not yet. “Seriously. Mrs. Layton doesn’t even cast money spells—I do that, you know, before I apply for loans, and they always give me more than I need—it’s just there.”

  “But it has to come from somewhere.”

  “Money is energy, and energy is fluid, like water: when you’re aligned with the universe’s will, it will flow toward you. You just have to arrange your life so you’re in the right place to catch it.”

  The bungalow was Mrs. Layton’s home, temple, and place of business. Like the building, she was elegant, with hair that had once been dark blonde, but had faded to platinum with the help of a little peroxide, or so Anthea guessed: the strands of silver at her temples were so perfect she could not believe they were natural. She accentuated her cheekbones and pale eyes with Cleopatra eyeliner in dark grey. She preferred silver to gold and amethysts to diamonds. Anthea first saw her at one of the Aquarian Centre’s firesides, to which Jasmine had invited her, promising, “They’re doing really cool and important work and I can feel how much it’s changing me. They think long term, like seriously long term, about human evolution, and that’s awesome. It’s not like the goddamn witches, or the Synchronites or anything.”

  Their topic that first night was the Akashic Texts, a name that made Jasmine nod and Anthea roll her eyes. They arrived early in the large front room, and sat on cushions at Mrs. Layton’s feet, in the circle around the fire, with their artisanal mugs and a shared plate of macaroons on the floor between them. When Mrs. Layton finished speaking with the man to her right, she turned to Jasmine and held both her hands, and said, “It’s very good to see you here again. I had hoped you’d come back.”

  According to Mrs. Layton, the Akashic Texts were written in the structures and patterns of nature itself; the oldest words in the world were hidden in the world, and to access them was to access the secret history of the universe. “Mankind was brought into being,” Mrs. Layton said, “to read those texts. We have no purpose but that, to apprehend the subtle language of the cosmos, and to find our name in God’s manuscript.”

  Anthea looked at her socks, and the sliver of toenail showing through on the left. Beside her, Jasmine nodded vigourously and glanced across the room at other listeners, the whole group telegraphing understanding and interest among themselves as Mrs. Layton spoke. Anthea wondered how many times she had made this address, and how often she had called on men and women to study the Book of Their Own Lives, which they would find was one with the Book of Nature, and the Book of the Sky. When Mrs. Layton opened up the floor for discussion, the conversation was a lot like an undergraduate seminar, but with new keywords beyond “akashic”: flow, energy, consciousness, transcendence, the uttermost west, the subtle body, the universal principle. Once someone mentioned the theory of general relativity as a proof for the existence of the ghosts. Another recounted a long and complex dream about learning to fly.

  Colm had impressed upon her that one should never look at the time in an intimate group, or at least not to do it conspicuously, so as she listened she did a forward fold across her outstretched legs and glanced at her watch as she held her feet: she decided that manners required at least another hour of thoughtful attention.

  After that she just looked around. There were very old books on the shelves with titles she had never heard, and on a dedicated side table an elegant orrery under glass. All the heavenly bodies orbited the sun in clockwork, but pieces were missing, as though it had been roughly handled at some earlier date. It included comets among its wheels, passing in wide ellipses around the cluster of planets. It looked antique, made of bronze and enamel, glass and green Bakelite. For the first time she wondered how old The Aquarian Centre was, and how long it had stood on this genteel side street, quietly devoted to the transformation of human consciousness and the rising Aquarian Age.

  After they were released from general discussion, Jasmine turned to Mrs. Layton and engaged her on specific points of interpretation, until there was a gap, and Anthea said, “Your earrings are really pretty.”

  Mrs. Layton nodded. “They belonged to my mother. A gift from my father.” Anthea looked at the pattern—moonstones in stylized papyrus settings—and wondered if the Centre’s economic equilibrium originated with her father: not a gift from the universe, but a trust.

  “This is a beautiful, beautiful house,” Anthea said.

  “Yes.”

  “It must be expensive. I mean. I mean for a non-profit to maintain this sort of place.”

  “It is worth the expense if one is sensitive to one’s environment.”

  “Oh yes. Yes. Of course.”

  “But, since that seems to be your question, I’ll tell you that it belonged to my mother and before that my grandparents. My mother started The Aquarian Centre.”

  Knowing what she was about to ask, but unable to stop herself, Anthea said, “With your father?”

  Mrs. Layton excused herself, saying, “Why don’t you talk to our other members? They can tell you more about the sort of work we do.”

  Anthea wandered away from the party and the fire, into the dining room where it was cool, and then the kitchen where two women were laying out cheese and bread on large plates and making more tea. From there to a small porch that faced the back garden. It was raining. The heat and noise of the house fell behind her, and it was good to be in the dark where the air smelled sweetly of leaves and wet grass.

  Almost a year later, she wondered if he had been at the fireside, too, unrecognizable in shoes and a regular shirt, no drum, no attendant blonde. She didn’t know what he’d been before that, if he’d been clean-cut, or suburban, if he’d been an art school dropout, a barista, an engineer, a cab driver before some cerebral incident so disordered his brain that he was no longer quite like the rest of them, his mind a moving detonation that unsettled the world as he moved through it. Perhaps Mrs. Layton had recognized something malleable in Jasmine and overseen their meeting. Perhaps, in wandering away from the heat and conversation of the house, Anthea had missed the moment of contact, the bright flash of recognition between them, illuminating the crowd and the sky above their heads, while she stood in the garden, her face averted from the flash. Of course they m
ight not have met under Mrs. Layton’s influence at all, but by accident, only later discovering their mutual affinity for the Aquarians. On the street, maybe, when he volunteered to correct her aura and she submitted to his caresses, and they communed on the plane of spirit, a half-storey above the pavement.

  Sometimes she imagined that she had seen him in a far corner of the room, out of the firelight’s reach, watching Jasmine with predatory eyes. He was waiting to slip in beside her, and draw her away to the dark highway and the woods north of the city, and then beyond the woods where all things lead, eventually.

  THE PLACE OF THE STONES

  Panther knew that you had to climb around the second point, not the one with the cliff and the stone that jutted out toward the low-tide line, like a wall, but the other way toward the Taberners’ if you wanted to see the little house. Later, Dad would tell her it was the Place of the Stones, which some people called the House of Mystery. She was climbing over the rocks to see around into the next beach over when she looked up and saw the little house standing in the undergrowth and the trees, between the Taberners’ garden and the high tide line. It had two little windows boarded up and a little door. The whole thing was covered in ivy, like it hadn’t been built but had just grown there. She wished it was hers, because Max had forts and one time last week he didn’t let her play in them because he had friends over and then Dad told her to leave him alone so he could play with his friends and she felt sad.

  Later she was back on the beach, when it was time for pink lemonade and Max was building a driftwood lean-to with Grandpa. She should have thought about the rocks, but she was excited about the little house. “Dad I climbed around the point there was a little house with a door and two windows and it was covered with ivy.”

  “Around the point?” Dad sat up in the gravel. “Did you climb around the point?” Panther looked down, wondering what to say that wouldn’t be wrong. She had not been told not to climb around the point, not the one on the Taberners’ side, at least. She had been careful not to ask. But now it seemed to be another inexplicable naughtiness, like standing in front of an open fridge door or not saying hellohowareyou to visitors. “You shouldn’t climb around the point. Do you know what happens when you trip and fall on the rocks?”

  Panther shook her head, her eyes still fixed on the gravel, shrinking under her skin in the way she did when his voice worried.

  “Panther.”

  She wriggled.

  “Panther, look at me.”

  She didn’t want to look at him.

  “Panther, do you know what could happen if you fell? If you climbed up too high and fell down, you could break your leg, or you could fall into the water. Sweetheart?” Panther looked up. His eyebrows were close together and his forehead was all bumpy. “You shouldn’t climb around the point by yourself. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” she said. She had liked the little house. He lay back on the gravel, settling in again, the bad feeling easing slightly—never gone— but still wound up tight in the back of Panther’s neck and in her legs, so she wriggled again.

  “Was the little house on the Taberners’?” Dad asked. She shrugged. “If it was the one I think, I know that house.”

  For a bit they were both quiet, but then Panther knew that it had to be okay again. “I want that house, one just like it only it would be right down on the beach and I would keep stuff in it.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “Like my red cape. And Bennycat would live there, too.”

  “That sounds nice. You know, I hear the house was built by a prophet.”

  Panther didn’t know what a prophet was.

  “A strange man built that house a long time ago. He thought he had messages from God about what he should do. I hear he used to sit in that house and listen to them.”

  Panther looked at the water, pretending she understood but she didn’t really. Max and Grandpa were having trouble with the roof, the pieces were too short and kept falling in, and she heard Grandpa explain something about crossbeams. Panther’s mother wasn’t there yet, she was bringing down deviled eggs and sandwiches and pink lemonade from the kitchen. Grandma Hazel was writing and couldn’t be disturbed. Dad kept talking anyway, though Panther stared at the opposite shore and the mountain that rose above all the other mountains and islands. It was blue and white, pretty now but prettiest at sunset. It was a volcano, they said, and used to smoke a long, long time before.

  She hadn’t ever seen the mountain smoke. If she had the little house, she would paint it red.

  “So, Panther, back in the thirties, or maybe it was the twenties—when Grandma and Grandpa were little kids like you—he got a lot of people together and convinced them that something awful was going to happen to them if they didn’t live the way he told them to.”

  There was a fly. Panther batted it away. Dad was stretched out on the gravel staring at the water and he hadn’t even taken off his tie; his arms were crossed behind his head. He hadn’t even taken his work shoes off. He was tired, Mom said again and again when Panther or Max asked. He was tired.

  He was still talking. “So he got all the people together and promised he’d keep them safe.”

  The house would be right out beside the water, and she would keep a bucket in there for a sink and a box for food and a little hibachi she would cook on, and she would fish right out the window and at night she would sleep right next to the water.

  “And when they were all gathered, he said that the world was going to end.”

  Panther looked at her dad sideways. His eyes were closed. The sunlight and shadow flickered over his lids and he put up a hand to shade them. “The end of the world?” she asked, and an unpleasant shiver spread over her, and she felt chilly like her feet were in cold water even though she sat in the sun. She started digging in the gravel beside her. It slid away with each scoopful so she dug faster and faster. You couldn’t dig in gravel properly, and the waves were up over the sandy parts of the beach, which was the only place you could do castles. Down the beach Grandpa and Max had found a long stick they could use as a crossbeam.

  “The end of the world,” Dad said. “He told them it was coming very soon. He’d say ‘Any day now! The world will end!’ and they believed him.”

  In her little house she would be all alone when the world ended, because there wasn’t room for anyone else. She would have her bucket and the fishhooks and the hibachi. She would have a bunk bed. She would sleep right by the water. She would always wear her red cape and Bennycat would always get to sleep on her bed because no one would ever tell her she was allergic.

  “So they got everything together they would need if the world ended—horses and goats and ploughs and food and clothes and seed, and they waited. They waited for a long time.”

  She would wait in the house. She would wait and a great wave would come up all around her and flood the world, all but her in the little house she would paint red, she would be all on her own with nothing in sight but the waves around her rising and falling. Nothing but the little house and around her the water going down down down to the bottom she could not see.

  Panther stopped digging. She looked at her dad.

  “The world didn’t end, though, so they all packed up and went home. He left. He left everything behind, even the little house. No one knows what happened to him.”

  Panther nodded, pretending she knew what he was talking about. His eyes were still closed. “When’s supper, anyway?”

  “Mom said soon.”

  “You shouldn’t climb around the point by yourself, Panther. You could get hurt. There are some big rocks and some places you could get stuck.”

  She nodded.

  “We worry about you.”

  She nodded. And because she also knew, though not in words, that he wanted everything to be alright with her, she did not talk about how much fun it was to climb around the rocks and find starfish and spider crabs all by herself, but instead said, “I like the lit
tle house. What was his name?”

  “Simon Reid.”

  Anthea repeated the name. It felt familiar, like the name of someone she could’ve known once. A teacher she maybe had in pre-school. Mr. Reid.

  Max came up the beach then. Behind him the lean-to looked very nice and tidy. Dad kept his eyes closed, stretched out in his work clothes on the gravel and Max fell down beside him.

  “You ever hear about Simon Reid, Max?” Grandpa was there and looking across the water.

  “Who’s Simon Reid?” Max asked, and Dad started in again.

  Panther was going to tell him to stop, but felt ashamed that she didn’t want to hear it because it would remind her of how it felt to think about the little house and the water all around it and her alone with her cat and her red cape. If they kept on she would go down to the edge of the water and splash and blot out the sound of their voices. She wished she had before, but too late the rising water and the little house were something Panther knew and Simon Reid, whose name was so familiar. She looked at Grandpa, who was squinting at the water.

  “Oh, they don’t want to hear about that,” he said, and Panther was happy.

  WAKE THE DEAD

  Okay, so she had been a Searcher, too, in the capital “S” sense of the word that’s so common in esoteric bookshops and meditation centres. Way back, on a night that probably involved Butter Ripple Schnapps, Anthea told Jasmine the story of The Place of the Stones to gain a little occult credibility. They hadn’t known one another very long, but already felt like deep-time sisters, permanent threads in one another’s lives. Jasmine even pointed to the line on her palm that was like Anthea’s, evidence of other lives spent in one another’s company, at Delphi or Machu Picchu.

  “So yeah,” Anthea said, “apparently there was this guy who lived on my Grandma’s place like a million years ago? And he was a kind of a prophet.”