by Tim Bowling
“No fuckin’ way. Fifteen hundred was a deal I was giving you until I found out you were a couple of fuckin’ thiefs.”
Thieves, I said, but only mentally. To Metalhead, I offered reason. “We have the monkey right now. And we paid you nothing. I could just hang up.” Hang up? Push the off button?
Metalhead’s barrage of curses overwhelmed my pedantic interest in the effects of changing technologies on language. He certainly wasn’t the brightest pixel on the screen. But he did manage to get his point across through all the expletives. Basically, no one stole from him and got away with it. If the cops didn’t get us, he had friends who’d be happy to find us, and we’d better hope the cops found us first, because @?**!x!zz#@ and Z!@**!?xx, oh, and also, !!**&$!xxq@!Z.
By now, I thought the phone was indeed an explosive device, or at least an expletive device. I held it an inch from my ear until the effin ceased. Then, surprised by my own anger (normally aggression and confrontation turn me milder, as though there’s a kind of emotional pendulum between people and I need to swing it back from one extreme to the other before balance can be restored), I did something I hadn’t done in years, probably not since my last dust-up in a competitive soccer game. I joined the vernacular current of my times.
“Yeah? Well, why don’t you go fuck yourself, you Iron Moron. We’re keeping the fuckin’ monkey.”
At this point, I would have loved to slam the receiver down, leaving Metalhead with an extra droning tone in his clouded cerebellum. But modern technology had removed that subtle pleasure, replacing it with the silence of Internet hate. In fact, it just occurred to me most poignantly at that instant: Keaton had moved from silence to sound because of technological change, and now, over eighty years later, we had started moving back. It was in silence I held the phone out to Chelsea, whose large eyes had widened at my outburst. The little device chattered away with Metalhead’s rage, and Chelsea, quite brilliantly, decided to give Greg Arious his moment in the Samsung. She put the phone up to his pink-purple lips and let him shriek. “Ha! There’s fifteen hundred dollars you’re not getting back, you Daft Leopard.” I silently applauded.
Then I realized that I had actually spoken aloud, and that I was laughing and slapping the dashboard. For the first time in months, I was richly, deeply, wildly, fully in the moment. I hadn’t considered the consequences of the phone exchange, I wasn’t planning my sensible escape from Chelsea’s company, I wasn’t worrying about Metalhead’s posse of goons piling out of a four-by-four with tinted black windows. I was laughing, and tears rolled down my cheeks.
“That’s the spirit,” Delmore shouted above the din. “You won’t get many chances like this, chum. Seize the day, as my buddy, Bellow, liked to quote the old Romans.”
“I love it,” Chelsea kept repeating, “I love it, I love it. We’re keeping the fuckin’ monkey. I love it!” And Greg danced on the steering wheel, holding Chelsea’s hands and shrieked, not like a banshee but like a living creature who’d been saved from a life of misery. Was that also how I laughed? Was I, too, captive and miserable and suddenly, briefly free? No. Everything was much more complicated than that. I loved my wife and children, I loved too many people, and too many small things in life gave me joy for misery to be an accurate description of my state. And yet, when had I last enjoyed myself so much? More importantly, how could I keep it going?
Delmore groaned. “Too late. It’s already too late. You’re on the way down now.”
And there was Keaton’s ghost, on the hood of the car, sitting cross-legged and gazing at me with that stoic, unblinking expression of legend, as if I was part of a preview audience for the film of his eternity. I couldn’t stop it from happening, I simply could not stop it. The years, the accumulation of the years, the ordinary processions of the sun: five decades could not sustain the euphoria in the way that two decades could. My laughter stopped and my worry started while Chelsea was still fist pumping and shouting, “I love it! I love it!” Delmore didn’t even have to speak. I knew he’d spent his whole examined life between such extremes, the emotional highs and lows of the creator. Many people – perhaps Charles Sleep, certainly Metalhead – lived somewhere on the slopes. Was that preferable? To swallow the Aldous Huxley soma, to medicate the child’s disordered attentions, to antidepress? But when the line on the heart monitor beside the hospital bed goes level, the patient is dead. Seize the day? Yes. But some days are warm flesh, some days are bone. We have to seize under all conditions. Go gentle on yourself, for the world will make no such effort.
I enjoyed the girl’s happiness and the monkey’s antics, even as I felt the underground go wine-dark around the little yellow car and knew that we had to move on, as the race moves, as the language moves, to stay alive.
In the eventual subsidence of noise, Chelsea announced that she was starving.
“You must be hungry, too, Professor. We really need to eat. But . . .”
I anticipated her concerns. “In for a penny, in for a pound, as my mother would say.” To combat her bewilderment, I added, “I’m not going to say goodbye now. Besides, weren’t you going to help me find the homeless guy? You haven’t forgotten about the bank, have you?”
“Oh shit.” She banged her palm against her forehead. “I did forget. Hey, if you do sell it, maybe I can borrow that fifteen hundred to get a different coat of paint for my ride.”
Her ride? It took a few seconds, but I finally caught on. More than caught on, in fact. Now I really began to sober up. We were in a Keaton chase for real now, with the cops and Metalhead’s friends at a considerable advantage. The underground parking lot was still the safest place to be. If it was food we needed, we needed to get out and walk. And since the day was so nice, we had to conduct our search by foot, too, if we should conduct it at all under the circumstances. Christ, let me think. There was still the little matter of my class at four. I hadn’t cancelled that one yet. A sessional lecturer had to be careful not to cancel too many classes if he wanted his contract renewed. At the very least, I’d have to return to campus so I could put another message on a chalkboard that required no chalk. The desired streetcar ride seemed an impossible pleasure, but that only made it more appealing. Human nature. Try as we might, there’s no escaping it. The little monkey was lucky. Or maybe he was unlucky. What on earth did I know of a monkey’s life? Except that he wasn’t living where he was born, which made him as North American as anyone else. It was time to go.
“How about the food court in the mall?” Chelsea suggested. “I actually work at the New York Fries there. I can get us the employee discount.”
Why not? All the wild salmon in the stores came from China now, so I might as well eat fries from New York. At least New York was on this continent. Then again, the potatoes probably came from China. And they weren’t wild either; they were also farmed.
“I’m glad to see you taking it so well,” Delmore said. Once again, he laid a heavy paw gently on my shoulder. “Whenever I came down, I’d write a nasty letter to an old friend. Or, if I was married, I’d take it out on my wife. You’re healthier than you think.”
“But am I healthier when I think? That’s the real question.”
“What the hell do you expect me to say to that? Of course you are. Just stop thinking for a while and see how much you like it.”
“I can’t stop thinking. That’s the problem.”
“That’s not a problem, you dope. That’s your salvation. The world’s filled with unthinking automatons. Farmed at the people farms. Unhappiness is independence. I might have been crazy, but I was my own crazy. I was Delmore Schwartz crazy, and I was Delmore Schwartz happy, and I was Delmore Schwartz miserable. All the way down the line, I was Delmore Schwartz. You think I’d be here if that wasn’t true? You think the old boy out there on the hood would be here? The dead don’t visit the mindless, you know.”
“You can see him?” For some reason, the idea almost took my breath away. “Keaton? You can see him?”
“Sure. Have
n’t you been paying attention? I can talk to him, too. Though I don’t. He’s not the chatty type. Besides, I saw all his films when I was a kid in my twenties. I prefer to let him be silent. And that’s the way he prefers it. Anyway, his voice is all wrong. Real deep and rough.” Delmore chuckled. “Like a bear’s. Actually, to be accurate, the old boy’s voice always makes me think of a tombstone being slid across another tombstone. There’s more smoke in his lungs than genius in my poems, and there’s plenty of genius in my poems.”
A shiver ran right up my spine, which isn’t a cliché, because that’s exactly where shivers travel. “Could I talk to him?”
“You ain’t dead, pal. That’s a privilege for which you have not paid the ultimate price. And there’s no credit card for that.”
“But I can talk to you.”
“Ah.” Delmore’s paw still rested on my shoulder. It felt more and more like a meteor burning into the earth of my flesh. “That’s a special circumstance. Poets help poets. In fact, only poets help poets. It’s one of the perks of the profession. Okay, it’s the only perk. And since most people don’t want a poet’s help, and would never think of turning to a poet for help, it ain’t much of a perk. You know the Jimmy Stewart movie It’s a Wonderful Life? There’s that guardian angel, Clarence, who helps George out so that he can get his wings. The angel. Are you paying attention? Well, this is the same thing, except I don’t earn any wings, and I make no banal promises that life’s wonderful. It isn’t. So, what’s in it for me? Simple, pal. You’re not a half-bad poet. If I can help you through this, it might mean a few good poems for the world.”
“James Agee described Keaton as a poet,” I said. “Maybe I could –”
“Oh, I get it,” Delmore snarled and bared his fangs. His claws bit into my skin. “I’m not good enough for you and your crisis. Keaton’s the genius. I’m the cut-rate replacement. Fuck! You’ve read my best poems and stories, you know what they cost me, just as much as The Navigator and The General cost him. More. I had nobody’s help. Anyway, if you like, I can bugger off. There’s this poet in Rwanda . . .”
“No, no, no. I’m grateful you’re here. I’m sorry. You’re a big help.” The damage control had to be quick, because Chelsea was standing outside the Pinto, with Greg Arious on her shoulder. “Please. I’d appreciate it if you stayed. You know how much I love your poems. I even wrote an essay once, saying how much I hated people describing you as a writer who never lived up to his promise.”
He growled deeply, but at the moronic critics, not at me. I hurried on.
“What exactly do we promise anyway? We don’t owe anyone our poems.”
“Everyone,” he contradicted quietly. “We owe them to everyone. But not the rankers, the schemers, the ladder-climbing academic bean-counters. They can choke on their sulphuristic jargonistic effluence.” He drew in a long, raspy breath. “All right, apology accepted. To be honest, I’m almost fond of you.”
“Thanks.” I wasn’t being sarcastic. His spirit was a help, and I sensed I’d need a lot more help before the day was done.
I CLIMBED OUT of the car, my damaged knee stiff, the heavy fumes of the cement circle of hell washing around me like a back eddy. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, which was true enough, but oh – Suicide formerly known as Prince – it’s hard sometimes, especially as you get older. I walked around the unexploded trunk of the Pinto and tried to let Chelsea’s smile return the euphoria. But all I could see was trouble. First of all, the monkey was going to need a diaper eventually. Second of all, and even worse, I knew without having to ask that she intended to take him into the food court. And, strangely, I knew that she knew that I knew.
“I can’t leave him in the car. He’d be freaked out. Besides, in the wild, he’d be with about twenty or thirty others just like him. They’re very social. At least according to the stuff I found online.”
The little primate had both arms roped loosely around her neck. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to state the obvious: he’d been stolen from the jungle, put in a box and flown for hours in darkness; then bought and owned briefly by some idiot who changed his exotic pets probably more often than he changed his underwear; and finally kept in a cage in a dingy, foul pet shop in a strip mall in northern Alberta run by a fat ex-roadie for Thin Lizzy. I thought Greg Arious could probably handle an hour by himself in a locked car. On the other hand, we’d already committed theft, so the police were already looking for us. Getting kicked out of a mall’s food court wouldn’t make much difference.
I sighed lengthily, but only for appearances, then shrugged. “Okay. But he’s not having any of my fries.”
The grin on Chelsea’s face widened until the dimple appeared in her cheek. “I’ll keep him tucked up inside my coat. No worries.”
So we ascended via the grimy, vomit-stained, urine-reeking stone stairway to the sun-splashed avenue between Churchill Square and the main branch of the public library. If not exactly a pilgrimage from hell to paradise, the change was nonetheless an improvement.
But the downtown of Edmonton had very little human touch. It was, much of the time, a sterile place, poorly planned, designed to accommodate skyscrapers and to arrange them to maximize two effects: the eradication of sunlight and the intensity of wind chill. Churchill Square itself, which had once allowed for sightlines from corner to corner, had recently been cemented and blocked up, mostly killing whatever hope of openness downtown workers might experience on their lunch hours and coffee breaks.
As for the library, I really couldn’t bring myself to consider it, for its fate was the fate of all libraries in the digital revolution. The downtown branch had become a crossroads where recent immigrants, security guards, troubled youth, emergency vehicles, schizophrenics and other mentally ill outpatients, and some caring, hard-working professional librarians met to work out a bizarre transition from the book age to the computer age. Everyone and everything felt dispossessed and fragile.
We slid away from Churchill Square into the valley of the skyscrapers, Greg’s baby-faced head sticking out of Chelsea’s duffle coat. It was just like sliding between the panels of a black-and-white comic book. Then, bypassing a few panhandlers – and I did take a close look, thinking of the scruffy balloonatic who had sold me the toys – we stepped into the scrubbed, contemporary glare and glitz of the mall. So much light! But not sunlight. And such coolness from the air conditioning, though it wasn’t warm enough outside to merit the energy expense. A faint chemical smell, mixed in with a faint leather smell, flowed through the wide corridor, as if somewhere behind the happy storefronts Alberta’s cattle were being slaughtered by the latest toxic method. I could see a white-smocked Avon lady dabbing the killing perfume behind a cow’s ears. And, as always happened to me when I entered a mall, I simply wanted to lie down and weep until security came to kick me in the head unless I agreed to leave this private property that masqueraded as a public market.
Chelsea, however, was completely at home, even with a monkey in her coat. We passed a Dollarama, a Second Cup, a Gap, a Sport Check, a Winners and then took the escalator into the antiseptic bowels of the place. Here, we passed a video game store, a Starbucks, another Gap. We passed some stunning women dressed to the nines who might have stepped straight off the glossy streets of Manhattan, and, as we neared the food court, we began to pass the damaged and the broken: a shaking old woman with a moustache and a shawl more frayed than together; an elderly man whose bronzed and weathered face crawled with blinks, as if he suffered from phosphorescent blindness and couldn’t make it back to camp; a skinny, pockmarked girl with long greasy hair whose hands shook like half-erased parentheses around a Booster Juice Styrofoam cup; four hooded young men with cellphones who probably weren’t Buddhist monks calling to make reservations at a vegan restaurant.
Finally, like a depressed bull arriving in the stadium, I looked around at the ring of franchised food joints. Each one appeared to be staffed by a bored teenager or re
cent immigrant, not one of whom was smiling. Their gloom lifted my spirits because, well, they should have been gloomy. Despite the light and the close proximity to consumer paradise, the mall was an unhappy place. It was like walking around inside a slow computer game, and I was about to eat something as nourishing as whatever Pac-Man used to chomp down on.
Only when Delmore exhaled noisily did I realize that he’d galumphed along beside us. He seemed particularly sullen and morose. “Why are most human beings living?” he grumbled. “Because they’re alive and haven’t died yet, that’s all.”
Given his mood, I saw no point in conversing with him. We continued on in silence.
The food court, unlike the rest of the mall, at least had a clear smell. Grease. The air was greasy. I thought if I just walked through the court a half-dozen times with my mouth open like a whale’s through a cloud of plankton, I’d fill right up. Maybe that was why so many street people squatted at the sixty or eighty low brown tables. They could eat without having to buy anything.
Chelsea spoke quietly into her coat as she approached the New York Fries outlet.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I think you could probably let him out. I’m not sure anybody would notice.” The semiconscious quality of the food court was beginning to affect me. I felt like a poorly fed tropical fish in one of Metalhead’s aquariums, just floating, waiting, not really hoping, my belly almost rising in the murk.
Delmore, who had been sucking on his paws for lack of any other nutrition, returned to his earlier gloomy theme. “All this talk of being born again. Ha! Being born once is no great pleasure.”
Finding no sustenance in that accompanying ghost, I looked for Keaton, and found him, not surprisingly, inspecting the espresso machine at Starbucks.
“What can I get you, Professor?” Chelsea asked. “There’s more than just fries here.”