The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  “Okay, but. I don’t know.”

  “A payphone. Let the answer rise in your mind.”

  Anthea found that her mouth was open and her lips were dry. She licked them. There was only one payphone that came to mind as Mrs. Layton spoke.

  “There’s. What kind of building is it?”

  “It’s large. It’s unusual in some way I can’t see. The walls are crooked.”

  “There’s the Glass Castle. It’s made of beer bottles. It’s on the highway outside of Duncan’s Crossing. There’s a payphone out front, by the main office where you buy tickets for minigolf.”

  Mrs. Layton closed her eyes and nodded. “Yes, Anthea, that’s right. When I think of the Glass Castle, it’s dark. I sense that Jasmine is nearby. I sense that she wants something from us, something urgent.”

  “She was seen there. One of the last times anyone saw her. It came up on a missing persons site, where people collect articles and police reports.”

  “Yes, that’s right. But does the Glass Castle mean anything else?”

  “We passed by there, too. On our way to somewhere else.”

  Mrs. Layton sat back in her chair, and while she didn’t make a sound, there was a feeling in the room like a sigh. Anthea shifted as well, just enough to see out the window and into the deep, green garden that surrounded the Aquarian Centre. “I don’t know.”

  When Mrs. Layton opened her eyes again, her look was urgent and she said, quickly, “Anthea, it is not given to me to know the future, but I do sometimes see the past, and the present, and in our few encounters I have recognized you as a woman marked.” She reached for Anthea’s hand and held it in her hard fingers. “You and Jasmine did something, something you should not have done, and something you cannot escape. I think if you want to know more, you might return there.”

  With the suggestion, Anthea felt the now-familiar sensation of portent, as though the subtle currents of Jasmine’s reality were about to reveal themselves. She felt a new pressure in her eyes that seemed to say revelation is imminent. It left a mark in her peripheral vision, a sunspot, a retinal burn.

  “We can’t always know the consequences of our actions. Where did you go after the Glass Castle?”

  “We were going to visit someone.”

  “Yes, Anthea. I can see it. Amends must be made when you disturb the dead, or the living. You have already noticed the signs. You are often attended by black birds in the sky. You have bad dreams.”

  When Anthea shook her head the sunspots followed her glance. “Maybe. Maybe that’s true.”

  “I’m going to ask you to do something that will sound strange, something you might not like to do. But I want you to promise me that you will think about the Glass Castle, and what happened there, and then you will come back to see me again next week.”

  “Okay. But.”

  “And when you have done this, I want you to bring me an egg.”

  Anthea peered through the glittering field of her vision, about to say, What? when Mrs. Layton continued, “An egg from your kitchen. Do you have any?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Buy some today. Let them sit in your refrigerator, and then bring one of them with you, the same time next week.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “There’s no need for you to know, just do as I ask, as a favour. Bring me the egg.”

  “Alright. Maybe. But I want you to tell me something in return. I want you to tell me his name.”

  Mrs. Layton made a face Anthea had seen before, a look of confusion that suggested Anthea’s very nature was incompatible with the rising Aquarian Age. Then she said, “I don’t know his name, but we called him Menander.”

  Menander, Anthea thought. She stood. She decided, suddenly, that she would go north to Duncan’s Crossing and visit a castle made of beer bottles that stood, shabby and out-of-time, on the edge of the highway. What would happen after that, she wasn’t sure. It would involve an egg.

  “I know you do not trust us, but we only want to help. And think, Anthea, where are you going? And what are you looking for?” An egg was all she could think to answer, so she said nothing.

  On the sidewalk outside, she willed the shadows and flickers that lit her left periphery to coalesce into vision, but by the time she was home, her eyes were full of scintillating architectures that meant nothing but the onset of headache.

  PART TWO

  THE

  PARADISE

  ENGINE

  PART TWO

  THE CROSSING

  If they were lucky hitchhikers, they could have reached Duncan’s Crossing in a few hours. She thought they would be lucky on the road north, before plunging off the highway into the unmarked places. Taking the same road, Anthea left just after eight on Friday morning, suddenly believing that Mrs. Layton’s vision meant she was on a path, that there would be a real sign, not the wilfully obscure messages of the dead.

  She would stay with her parents on the way. Though she had hated the Crossing while she was growing up—it was Hicktown, Nowheres-ville— she liked the country, the hills around the valley, the coast, the rivers and farms. In the years since she had left, it had become more and more fashionable, a destination for outdoorsmen and foodies. Now there were biodynamic vineyards, unusual organic vegetables, herds of Italian water buffalo specially imported for mozzarella. Though old families still survived—mining families, farming, logging, fishing families, tuned-in drop-out blended families, second generation polyamorists, the children of remittance men and pioneers—the newcomers tended to be wealthier, with exacting tastes regarding food, wine, and real estate. They were often retired baby boomers from Toronto or Alberta. Anthea liked that she could get really excellent bread—made with local wheat and organic hazelnuts from a farm down the road—at a bakery in the fishing village near her parents’ place, but sometimes she was sad that it was so hard to find a bad cup of coffee, and an old guy to talk to while she drank it.

  While the neighbourhood grew more refined, the Glass Castle Minigolf and RV Park grew smaller and shabbier every year, until Anthea no longer even noticed it. When she was little, it had seemed exciting—a castle made of glass!—but her grandfather Max had taken her into the parking lot to look at it, and she had seen the cement that joined the beer bottles together, trowelled right over the glass in many places. You couldn’t see through it, and it didn’t have a proper tower or transparent battlements or pennants: it was a crooked wall of brown and green, crenellated with stubbies. When Max asked if she wanted him to pay the dollar for a tour, she had shaken her head in disappointment.

  Getting out of her car, Anthea wondered what she’d do now that she was there. She started along the old-timey boardwalk that ran from main office to minigolf to general store to hotdog stand. As she walked, she imagined Jasmine and her hollow-eyed prophet. She imagined the two of them walking in off the highway, their jeans grubby from hem to thigh. Their long hair parted in the middle, falling down their shoulders in symmetrical wings. They were barefoot on the cool, wooden floors of the general store. After all the fasting, and walking late at night along the bone-dry highway, they were as lovely and attenuated as figures in an Arthurian Burne-Jones tableau.

  Tourist season bewildered them, and anyway Jas always hated tourists. She’d hate the minigolf on sight, if she could still comprehend it, and the opaque blue paint on the bottom of the swimming pool and the ludicrous folk-art Mounties riding wooden horses outside the beer bottle wall, the one punctuated in no clear pattern by the green of Canada Dry and 7 Up. The two of them descending from their quest along the heat-glassy highway, just long enough to beg for food before they left again.

  Her parents knew enough not to ask her about work. That made her snappish. Since she had taken the job at the Institute—which had rescued her from the more obvious opportunities in coffee shops or retail—she had gone out of her way to discourage her father’s interest, mostly by accentuating the dull and pointless aspects of her research. It
was unfortunate that he wanted to be interested in what she did, because that meant it had taken a long monograph on Mrs. Kilgour’s handkerchief inspection ledgers to dissuade him.

  This time, though, she arrived in a better mood than usual. When her mother asked about the handkerchiefs, Anthea said something about new theories regarding hygiene and cotton production, and then talked about a burlesque show she’d gone to the week before, how she’d watched a man swallow a neon sword that made his throat glow blue, and how she’d had a cold so she thought it was time for a long weekend. It was important that they not suspect anything unusual, as they tended to ask probing questions about how she felt regarding her “career,” her ambitions, Jasmine’s disappearance, provincial politics, gentrification, globalization, their retirement plans. She wasn’t even sure how to explain why it mattered that she go to Jas’s last known whereabouts, at least, not without relying on esoteric language. Words like “haunting” and “illadvised séance” would disturb them far more than her aimlessness.

  For some reason, the four-day weekend worried Colm and he asked carefully, “But, yeah, Panther, how does that work with the Institute?”

  “It’s cool,” she said brightly, “I brought some with me.” She reached into her backpack and yanked out the wad of papers she’d screwed up and shoved in on top of her socks and underpants. “See!” She unpeeled one of her lists—“Mrs. Kilgour’s ‘fashionable ensembles,’ as witnessed by the social pages of the city’s papers”—which was grubby from living in her bag for the last couple of days. In her mother’s kitchen, it smelled strongly of Rm 023. She dropped the papers onto the table, and then added a few proofs of Liam Manley looking hot, and one of Mrs. Kilgour’s ledgers. If they asked, she could show them a new part about the handkerchiefs and call it “evidence,” and make them read it until they gave up.

  “So you’re working at home a lot now? I bet that’s nice.”

  “Oh yeah, totally. And even if I was totally slacking off, like, what are they going to do? Fire me?” She laughed. It wasn’t as though they paid a living wage, and she was pretty undemanding. Besides, it was just the 2,000 words that mattered, and if they did try to fire her, they’d find she was the only one who could untangle the filing system she had established in Rm 023, or find the bits of the Kilgour Legacy that she’d removed to other locations. Eventually that kind of knowledge would pay off.

  Anthea’s mother picked up one of the fallen photographs.

  “Who’s this one?”

  “This guy? Okay. Mrs. Kilgour liked to sing. This guy was, like, a tenor? You know. Yeah. You know. Vaudeville.” Teresa looked at Anthea with an expression half-amused, half-anxious. Anthea remembered how once people had thought she was clever. She would win prizes, they said. She picked up another picture of Liam, one where his left arm draped over the piano’s rack, his fingers brushing the keys. “He’s pretty hot,” she said. “I bet he looked superhot on stage.” She didn’t want to talk about anything important, like akashic texts or correspondences. Jasmine’s voice said, it does not do to let the uninitiated know too much. Then her mother’s eyes flicked downward and she said, “Anthea, you’ve got got your cardigan buttoned wrong.”

  As she re-buttoned, she turned to Colm and asked, “How’s the other place going anyway?”

  That was a quick way to redirect the conversation. “Yeah. It’s pretty steady. Your Mom’s working on the house, and I’m just trying to figure out what’s what in the woods.”

  Colm and Teresa had inherited Hazel’s house and property, but since her death it had remained empty. Only recently, they had taken on the huge task of cleaning it up: Anthea’s grandparents had collected compulsively, so the waterfront property was a wooded junkyard, overgrown with invader species: English ivy, Siberian blackberry, Scotch broom, sometimes mint or lemon balm in the woods left over from the old gardens and cottages. Inside, the house was not the problem it had been, as Hazel had spent weeks before her death burning letters, photographs, clothes, and books. From Anthea’s point of view, she had left an archive so carefully edited it was useless. At the time of the fires, Colm had asked gently, in his circumspect way, and Hazel had explained that she was dealing with it now because no one should have to do it for her, she wasn’t the sort of woman who left a mess for other people to clean up. There had been a week of fires in the barrel by the woodshed as Hazel burned a whole career of negatives, a whole lifetime on paper.

  Anthea had been in her second year, writing the last of her December finals. She was nineteen. When Colm called to tell her, to ask if there was anything she might like that he could save, she had snapped and said no, she didn’t care about that sort of thing. She said Hazel can burn it all. It’s all her stuff. She had believed what she said.

  “I kind of want to go down on the beach. And do you guys want some help?”

  Colm looked brighter as he answered. “Yeah? You want to help? I could use some help sorting through things. If you have time. Only if you have time.” A sudden spasm of regret distracted her from her mission. She should have asked sooner, seeing him so happy. “But only if you have time,” he said again, and looked at the stack of grubby papers on the kitchen table, the photographs, the ledger, the notes in Anthea’s tiny cursive, the lists.

  Again Anthea smelled Rm 023 in those objects, on her skin and in her hair. She turned to her father and her eyes were very bright and very dark. “I have time this weekend,” she said. “I have lots and lots of time.”

  INVENTORIES AND ASSESSMENTS

  The next morning was the first Saturday of Anthea’s haunting, with 3,634 words written, and 3,153 deleted. They left early for Hazel’s house. Colm smiled in that way Anthea remembered from being a kid, though it had been a rare, holiday thing when he was working full time. Even though it was better than his work-week frown, it had still annoyed her as an adolescent, the way he looked when he ate a bowl of ice cream or watched a hockey game or kissed his wife. At a time when Anthea strove desperately for the cool, the copacetic—when she still thought those words might describe her—his uncomplicated enjoyment of ice cream and hockey and kisses had seemed like a curse, a spectre of the adult she would one day become. The evening before she left for her parents’ place she had been out walking and stopped at La Casa Gelato. Carrying her cone out the door, she caught her own eye in La Casa’s plate glass window and spotted that familiar smile as she took the first lick. It was one scoop of Grand Marnier chocolate and one of durian, selected after ten minutes contemplating more than two hundred flavours. She really did like gelato that much.

  In the truck she wondered if she had looked as happy as Colm did.

  She waited until they were on one of the narrow lanes, driving between the woods and the hayfield that lay just beyond their property line. The last crop smelled nice through the open windows, and after Colm told her it had been a good year—three crops from that field, and maybe a fourth. All that rain in July did it. She asked, “Do you remember that guy? That guy Mr. Sweeney? He lived in one of the old cottages. He used to fish. And he wore brown pants.”

  “Brown pants?” Colm thought a minute. “Old Sweeney. Right. Yeah.”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He didn’t talk much. He and Dad used to fish together sometimes, but mostly I remember old Sweeney going on about raw milk. He didn’t believe in pasteurizing. Which is an E. coli risk, of course. But he called it dead food. I wonder what he’d think of irradiation?” Colm went on a little longer about the consequences of untreated milk, finishing up, “I’d say pasteurization is a good idea.”

  Anthea tried hard to listen and be patient. “But about Mr. Sweeney. He lived in a cottage.”

  “From the old estate, yeah, but it’s gone now. He only had a couple of acres, though the way he acted, you’d think he owned the whole point and both beaches. He went everywhere; they had a sort of a system where Dad would say don’t trespass and he just would anyway. I know he used to pick the yell
ow plums and Dad was always telling him not to but then old Sweeney said, well I planted that tree, I guess I’m entitled to a few dozen and they sort of left it there. That tree had the best plums.” Colm looked reverent for a moment, thinking of yellow plums. “It’s way past bearing. We should plant another one this winter.”

  Anthea gave up. “I like yellow plums,” she said. “What are we doing today anyway?”

  “Yeah. Right. So. The plan. The plan is that we’re going to start sorting for the recycler. There’s a lot of stuff. There’s the scrap metal. And the things in the buildings, and the things that are buried.”

  Anthea shivered. “Buried?”

  “Oh yeah, buried. With the backhoe. Some of them by hand, I guess.” Colm’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Fridges. Stoves.

  Iron. Galvanized steel.”

  “Teflon frying pans?” she suggested.

  “Frying pans? Where? I haven’t seen any frying pans. Are there a lot?”

  “Well,” Anthea began, “I kind of remember a pile under that big bunch of blackberries to the left of the shop doors. But what do I know?” He looked overwhelmed so she added, “I could be wrong.” On her last visit she had recognized the orange and green diamond pattern on the lid of an electric frying pan, and remembered Sunday dinners: pot roasts, potatoes, mahogany gravy. She guessed Hazel was bad with Teflon and had to replace it often, dumping the old pans in the woods. When Anthea looked down, she found her fingers wrapped tight around her travel mug. She forced herself to relax and they flicked out.