Alone we are uncertain, as watery as the sea’s reflection of the Woodward’s neon “W.”
Christmas Eve means Jester will find himself a whore to offer a ring, just as he did last year and the year before that.
Tell me, love, he asks, what do they call you at home?
Christmas morning finds us on cots in the Patricia, without the women we’ve paid, with the bright glare of sun piercing through curtains thinner than cheesecloth. The city has been cleaned by the rain, but we are not clean, and there returns whatever we tried to drink away. Scratch at the bites around ankles. Rattle the twelve-pack of beer by the bed.
Drink makes wishes roll in our minds like the night rain that covers the buildings, each drop full of sheen from the lights, all that colour that is not the water’s own. Hastings, Granville, Seymour, Burrard – the streets of this city are never named for the men who built it. A man could walk these streets and never know of Desolation Sound or Suicide Cliff, could sleep in these buildings and never touch the trees that support the walls. Through the window of Oscar’s are signed photographs of Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth, their lipstick faces alone in empty booths. A few more days through our wads of cash and we’re stealing lemon extract. Then we line our debts under the sign for the Logger’s Employment Agency, cursing and tipping our hats to its red neon light.
Seagull turd mottles the ship’s plank. We kick at it and watch the town folk who do not watch us. They hold their packages and stare right ahead until it seems they are walking with their eyes and not their legs. The turd sticks to our boots like splotches of paint that someone hasn’t bothered to spread. The turd stinks. First day of the year, the days not yet filled in.
Some of us sold our boots for booze and so when we board the ship we step up the plank in new boots, fresh laces that tie us in hock to the company store. New Year, new debt. Some of us won’t live to make the trip next year, cheat-ing Mac-Blo out of what we owe from our last drunk.
Logging Camp B
We carve our addresses on the slabs of wood that travel to London where soldiers and civilians stand shivering underground, inhaling the armpit closeness of their neighbours and waiting for the long slow whistle of the next bomb. They look up at the cedar walls of their shelters and there we are.
A woman’s fingers reach up to rub the words we have carved, the wood splintering her skin just as it so often splinters ours.
The Londoners read the shelter walls and all around them the buildings collapse. In the cramped stinking air they write letters to Camp B as if they could tell their secrets to the alphabet itself. Sometimes their letters smell of talc, sometimes of smoke. An old man writes of his wife and how he misses the way her upper arms shook when she thumped the rolling pin back and forth across the dough. One boy wants us to send him a saw; another tells us his sister isn’t a virgin. In the middle of a bombing raid, a woman aborted her child with the end of a broom handle and she writes this nameless fact in black spotty ink and sends it to Still-water.
Each Sunday we read these letters, the edges darkened by the dirt from our hands, and then we step outside in the cool evening light cast by the camp generator. The air is sweet with pine. We play tug-rope, four men on one side of the knot, four men on the other. The coils twist painfully against our palms and we dig our boots into mud that offers no traction as we feel the rope slip.
Spring
Where the trees were, the white wake-robin is already blooming – scattered bits of paper. A bear paws the dirt, clumsy with sleep. Our smell is on the wind.
In this quarter, new logs lie on the ground, waiting to be bucked, choked, hooked to the cold-deck pile. We’ve left one tree standing – the highest and straightest – the spar tree, for the high rigger. He works alone. It’s a Doug fir, two hundred feet high, as tall as Woodward’s neon sign that guards Vancouver’s inlet, and our afternoon’s entertainment will be to lean back our heads and watch him walk the trunk to the top.
We call him Thorvald, which is really his name. To call him a nickname would be sloppy. He’d just shrug off our attempts.
Today he swats a lazy hand toward our voices, his eyes only for the tree. Barrel-chested and thick-limbed, he’s built like a trunk himself. He examines the roots, runs his palm over bark that is creviced deep enough to take his hand. He pulls at the bark, sniffs it, walks the tree’s perimeter eyeing each crevice for the stains that warn of cat’s face. At this point he could still walk away. A tree can appear healthy on the outside, the bark thick, branches green, and on the inside the cat’s face has been rotting the wood through winter and summer, through season after season until the rings at the core disappear into moist crumbling fungus. No man wants to tie himself to a dying tree.
We can tell when Thorvald has made up his mind because he reaches up to press his hat tighter to his head. Then he wraps the high-rigging belt around the trunk and around his hips. He grips the belt, leans back to test its give. He steps forward to jab the spikes of his caulk boots into the bark, shifts his footing, feet splayed, breathing easy just to sense the solid base of the tree under his boots. In these adjustments there is a stillness – he might tweak the belt or check his ax or nod as if to confirm his decision but for a moment it seems his legs are fixed to the tree, that he is growing out of the tree, and would be no more capable of walking away.
He runs. Not away from the tree but straight up the trunk, held by the belt he shares with it, bark spitting a trail beneath him. On the way up he axes off the branches so the tree narrows as he climbs fast as a zipper. We crane our necks, press our hats snug, rocking on solid ground. Some of us reach for chewing tobacco, our cheeks crammed tight, mouths slack in the same awed boredom of circus crowds who grow used to watching men climb into air.
When he reaches the top, he trades his ax for his saw and begins to work away at the fir’s wavering tip. It snaps from the trunk. It is twice the length of a man. As it falls, the trunk kicks back. This is the most dangerous part, more deadly than the climb. He’s strapped to the tree while it sways back and forth twenty feet to draw a giant arc across the sky. If the core is cracked or weak or rotting, the force will cause the trunk to split in two, and he’ll be crushed, boneless, into the tree. We know that high riggers fear this death more than they fear falling.
Today it takes a good ten minutes before the tree stills to vertical. When it does, the clouds keep moving behind it.
Now we can take out a roll-your-own or just roll back our shoulders and stretch. Above us, Thorvald slips off the belt. Easy as a man on a kitchen stool he sits on top of the tree, feet tucked behind him or crossed in front of him, his body tied to nothing. He’s having a smoke, or perhaps a sandwich, his satchel in his lap. It’s hard to see him from the ground.
Only when he starts waving his hat do we realize he’s not sitting but standing – a two-hundred-foot salute – and we know it’s this gesture that enables Thorvald to be so quiet in the rest of his day.
We wait for what he does next. The maypole, we call this trick: no other man comes down the way he does.
He doesn’t come straight down. Belted to the tree and dropping, his boots bouncing off the trunk, he twirls. He corkscrews around and around the tree as he descends, around and around, the bark spraying behind him, his feet wrapping a ribbon around a day’s work.
We keep quiet. All we hear is the sound of his boots.
His body appears, then is behind the tree, then appears again, flickers like a zoetrope, the air around him a spiral of bark, his arms gripping the belt and then his hat is floating off and coming down more slowly than he is – he makes one last leap to reach the ground, lands with a grunt, looks up to check the sky, takes a few steps, then holds up his hand to catch the hat.
He lets his high-rigger’s belt drop to the ground and jumps out of it two-footed, the way children hop from chalk circles. Then he walks slowly back to us.
Gregory Betts
PLANCK
It’s easy to imagine yourself with a super
power, isn’t it? You can slip into these fantasies without much convincing, have probably already mapped out the advantages and consequences of various alternatives. But I know how you abandon them when you realize the first genie’s twist: super strength leaves you mortal and hungry, seduction prevents you from ever trusting a lover. Jumping, climbing, swimming, even flying, you quickly realize, are just bestial projections. Sun, ice, fire and storms are only elemental. These are the last vestiges of the Greek gods and we have all moved past their moment. Only eventually do you come to realize the advantage shared by all of the comic-book figures, which is their timelessness. This is the real power that pulls us into their mysterious lives, abstract even from their backstories or superficial foibles. Every action of theirs accumulates a history without the cost of history or the consequence. They act and act and act and never scar or age. But imagine tapping into that power, that mystery. Imagine possessing the power to stop time and to move outside of its movement. Not time travel, not local freezes. Time itself unhinged from its ceaseless progression, ever ever more.
Now, imagine that you also give yourself the ability to move freely in this freed moment of time, the freedom of space. It is more complicated than it might at first appear, for what is the moment upon which time might stop? It can be of no duration – therefore it cannot stop upon a second, for a second is a span built of an infinite fan of moments however brief, arrayed in sequential order. You have to push deeper into the splicing of time – down through milliseconds to microseconds: the last unit meaningful to human sensation. Shake past the microsecond to the nanosecond, the picosecond, the femtosecond, the attosecond, the zeptosecond, and you start to wonder if there might be an infinite depth to time, bounded only by our ability to imagine ever-greater numbers, never able to reach a final singularity. The jiffy, for instance, is built of 33 trillion yoctoseconds – one septillionth of a second. To put this in perspective: while there are 1018 grains of sand on the planet earth, and 1021 stars in the universe, there are 1024 yoctoseconds in a second. After this depth into the abyss of time, things get remarkably abstract and less stable – similar to the experience of an atom’s life on a gaseous planet. Stability is negotiable.
What is not negotiable, though, is the planck. This is the ground floor of time, the smallest time measurement that will ever be possible. There are 1044 plancks in a second – or the number of stars in the universe multiplied by the number of grains of sand on the planet earth. This is not the smallest measure of time meaningful to humans; it is far too small to be meaningful. This has atomic implications and quantum consequences. The planck is the quantum of time. Frozen, the actual porousness of matter would be revealed. Consider a simple fan. When it is turned on, the blades blur and create a solid presence (sped up fast enough, they would be the equivalent of a solid). When the machine stops, though, you can see the empty space between the blades. This is how atoms and their constituent parts create the illusion of solidity. Blades on a fan may take up to half the space of their circle, but the atoms that make us material occupy less than one percent of the body. Without the movement, locked in an irreducible instant, perched upon a single planck, the feel of all material would alter. Without the charge of atoms, gravity would dissipate (not disappear). Were you to move freely in that frozen moment, your strength would increase by multiples of thousands. Movement would never tire you. Your strength would never sag. Moving back and forth between the second and the planck would be an epic journey, in the original sense of the term.
Imagine your first day with this power. You stop time, descend into the frozen moment, and appear across town at a friend’s house. You spend your first morning playing practical jokes throughout Toronto. Moving objects – pens, fruits, cushions – until you grow more adventurous and extend the experiment. Your friend is already giving you a slightly terrified look as you laugh at the fridge appearing and disappearing, at the seemingly random encounter of strange objects in the living room. For them, it is to experience a mind completely unhinged, framed only by your dis-located laughter. Was that a tiger? Was that a pile of gold bars? Was that their parents? They recoil from you, the obvious source of the madness. They have to, and you realize your immaturity now. This isn’t the power of tricks; this is the power of gods.
You stop time and walk across the continent. Your strength astounds you, and your endurance is enormous. As you walk, you struggle to come to terms with this new dilemma. As you walk, everything on earth starts to feel smaller. You return to your friend’s home, but pause to explore every geography of interest in between. You shoplift food, but are never really hungry. You move through these geographies leaving small markers of inexplicable absence: store inventory that doesn’t add up, gas subtracted from stations, the odd luxury vanished, a missing car, a little less Scotch.
You know that your effect will linger in those places that will struggle to reconcile the missing goods once time resumes. Jobs will be lost, trust shattered. “I just…” people will start to say, before self-doubt and accusation floods in.
Walking impossible distances, you sometimes forget to breathe, but your body doesn’t seem to mind. You are like a ghost and a hulk combined: an ethereal monstrosity. You are outside of biological pressures, markers of decay. Still, you carry a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, captured from an upscale liquor mart in California. You don’t justify these thefts anymore because you imagine yourself preter-naturally removed from the human economy. When you make it home, you have completely lost any meaning of time (the sun does not move in the sky, only you across each horizon).
You sit down across from your friend for a moment before restarting time. You have grown sanguine and serene about your powers, but she will still be startled. You look at the bottle as a cheap trick, but it will make a point. So you resume time and hope to convince her without jarring her into histrionics.
“What’s happening?” she pleads. “I keep seeing things. This is insane. I’m going crazy.”
You realize that you forgot to return the tiger. From her perspective, it just disappears. She shakes her head and clicks her tongue.
“I’m not sure how to explain. I’ve discovered a place between the plancks of time and I can go there. Or maybe it is in the plancks, or on the plancks. It’s hard to imagine.”
“So, what are you, a magician or a time traveller? I thought these were all tricks.”
“Not tricks, no, these things are quite real. Do you remember that summer on Lake Joseph? There was a day when we were sprawled out on the dock, soaking up sun-shine. A motorboat slowed, do you remember? It nearly cut its engine as it came near. And you looked and then nudged me and said, ‘Look!’”
“Mick Jagger.”
“Yeah, it was Jagger and his wife or girlfriend, the one who married the French president. And he was kind of showing off for her, smiling, and waved to us when you screamed.”
“Yeah. Can you take us back there?”
“No. But do you remember just as the boat passed, we saw a man rise from the backseat that we hadn’t seen?”
“Keith Richards.”
“Keith Richards. He just kind of looked at us from a place far off in the universe, like he was completely outside of the world. We laughed about it then.”
“He is the only living cast member of Body Worlds.”
“That place. That place where he goes is where I go.”
“I would give all that I am to be unchained to Time.”
You look perplexed. “What’s that?”
“Shelley. It’s just an old quote from Shelley about a friend who died. Keats.”
You realize that Shelley is a better analogy than Keith Richards, especially in light of the monster you feel has been unleashed with your power.
“But I haven’t died. It’s not into death I go, but down into the moment. It’s Zen without any of the work.”
“Awakened from the dream of life.”
“It feels like that. It really does.”
> She asks you to show her, and you do. She blinks into China. Blinks into Moscow. Blinks into Cuba. A commu-nist tour of the world in under five seconds. She is naturally astounded.
“Did that really happen?”
“Yes.” You point to a small pile of trinkets you collected on the way.
She picks up a Mao bobblehead. “How long did it take you?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Maybe a year, maybe more. That’s what I mean by unhinged.”
You watch your friend tremble as she wrestles with this new thought of you, what you might have done in that year. You aren’t feeling as earnest anymore.
“Have you told anyone?”
“No.”
“Don’t.”
“You wouldn’t know if I did.” You pause. “And I might need help…thinking through this. It’s a lot to bear. The temptations.”
“Let me help,” she says rather quickly.
“I was thinking…” you let your voice trail off. It is still resonating in the air when you return with the Dalai Lama. “…something more along these lines.”
“Cute,” she says, concerned.
The poor man is flustered and you can’t get anything from him, so you take him back to New York. Before you return him, though, you pause for a moment on the roof above his hotel. This time he is less perplexed (he has grown accustomed to New York roofs). You tell him about the plancks of time and he seems to understand. He tells a story about the Buddha’s experience of nirvana. This is what you wanted. You ask him if there is anything he wants, anything you can do for him.
“Oh, no!” he laughs.
“What about China out of Tibet?”
“No, no, no,” he waves, smiling at the naiveté of the thought. “They have to go when they are ready. They will go on their own.”
This disappoints you, and when you return home, you compensate by installing a gorgeous swimming pool in her backyard. You restart time and call out to her.
“So this is where you’ve got to, these past seconds. I was worried you were gone. Thanks for the pool.”
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