The Strange Truth About Us

by M. A. C. Farrant

  She’s inside a small cardboard box that’s sitting on the bookcase, he said, and she’s with me now!

  In one morning call he told me he had fallen out of bed in the night. His exact words were I fell out of my skeleton. I turned over and my hip appeared to fall out of its socket. This is what happens to our bodies. It’s like being an old car on blocks and disintegrating bit by bit. I awoke with a sore ankle, too. I’d been dancing in my dreams with a lithesome woman at the Community Hall who called me a naughty boy. He quoted Dr. Johnson: The prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind. And he laughed.

  Once when I missed his call there was a message on my answering machine that sounded like haiku. Unable to contact you my life flashed before me as a series of recorded messages. The message from another missed call said I have some surprising new information for you. This turned out to be his reading of a book on string theory and being taken with the brilliant and beautiful author-scientist.

  For his eighty-eighth birthday he and three of his four friends had lunch at a Greek restaurant near his apartment. One friend was a retired longshoreman, one worked in arts education, one was a writer. The fourth, a former probation officer, had had a stroke and was confined to his townhouse.

  Of his birthday cards he liked the one from the arts education friend the best. It contained a quote from Gertrude Stein: There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There has never been an answer. That’s the answer. I’ve spent my adult life, he told us, believing God is dead and now I want confirmation of the fact before I die.

  He made it clear again at this lunch that after his death his and Brigit’s ashes are to be mixed together and interred near the sea, one of his many instructions. Absolutely no religious component to the funeral service is another. No mention of souls or ascension or descent for that matter. No hymns. No mention of anything everlasting, not even, he says, memories because that’s a lie; memories dissipate like smoke. Music will be allowed at the service, though, something by the Ramsey Lewis Trio, he suggests.

  He then told us Brigit had joined him in a dream. They were strolling along the seashore; it had been eighteen days since she’d died. She was on his left, taller than she had been at the end, and wore a hooded sweatshirt, the hood covering her head. She told him that the peace had entered her and so she came. He asked her what it was like when she died and she said it was like a jet plug which, he told us, he took to mean that the change had been explosive, sudden. Next in the dream, they were in a hotel room, high up, with a stunning view of mountains, sea, and sky. They lay on the floor of this room and embraced, he said, and then Brigit left, descending some stairs with a group of strangers while speaking to a man in this group. Remind me, she told the man, to get your son a pair of new boots.

  Then she was gone, having come into the world, he reminded us, in the Shanghai International Settlement in 1925, as did J.G. Ballard five years later although they never met but whose writings she later admired, especially Empire of the Sun, a copy of which she had given to each of the four friends, friends who had been Brigit’s as well as his.

  When asked his opinion of the world on the day of his birthday he said as usual the world’s affairs were absolute bullshit which was what we expected he would say because he had told us many times that he found the world to be a sad domain of conflict and contradiction. He then stated that an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard, but couldn’t remember where the quote came from. Nevertheless he was trying, he said, to take the quote to heart even when it came to Yolanda, the administrator of the senior’s health centre who treated him, a man who graduated in philosophy and reads physics for fun, and who has spent much of his adult life reading and thinking and talking and arguing about what he thought, like a simpleton.

  One morning he called very early to read a quote by Eduardo Galeano that he’d found in Galeano’s book Upside Down. I’d answered the phone still holding my toothbrush. God, he quoted, sold the planet to a few companies because in a foul mood he decided to privatize the universe. Isn’t that rich? He asked, and then read something he himself had written: the God search is the unending creation of the fictional world which reduces merely living to a second-class temporary existence while casting envious glances at the magnificent world of the spirit. During this call he said he’d begun writing essays and that God was to be his first topic even though God, or the human worship of the unknown as he called it, was the thing that made him most angry.

  In his will he has stated that the funds are not to be used as mercy money or speculation money, but used in the service of democracy and in the interest of knowledge, science, and the dissolution of the heavenly kingdom. The four friends must agree on the allocation though he hopes the money will go towards some branch of science even though one of his friends would prefer setting up an annual grant which would be available to a visionary poet or prose writer.

  Often I call him. In one call he laughed about a newspaper headline he’d read that day. Just a minute, he said, and went looking for it. The Outlook for Quirky Is Grim. This headline, he said, not only summed up our position on the planet, but described his personal situation to a T. He then mentioned he’d thrown the I Ching that morning and it turned out to be Ko, The Image—fire in the lake. Thus the superior man sets the calendar in order, he said, and makes the seasons clear. This is what I am obviously doing, he said, while trying not to suck the essence out of each day by dwelling on what is to come.

  During a recent call, and before signing off with Cheers for now, he told me about a run-in he’d had with another bank official and said there are no wrong questions, only wrong answers and I could quote him on that. He also said, right now I am at your disposal, but soon I will be for your disposal.

  The word call as it pertains to you and me, he has mentioned, means telephone conversation and not an incitement to action such as Stephen Hawking recently made by saying the only hope for the survival of the human species is escape by space travel within the next hundred years, an indictment, he said, that left him outraged. Space travel is merely another attempt, he said, to form a new world religion based on suffering and everlasting life and which completely ignores our present predicament.

  He also said, I’ve heard music in my head for fifty years. Today, though, the music changed, became stuck on a Fats Waller tune. I had to work hard to erase it. Over and over I hummed the opening to the 1812 Overture. That did it.

  His Signs

  All the unsold reindeer, the wire ones with white lights, have escaped from Walmart and are multiplying in the suburbs like rabbits. Now there’s a plague of lit-up reindeer. Do we like this situation now that Christmas has passed? We do not.

  I’m giving the ones I trap to the old man standing beside the highway holding the homemade signs. He’s been there all day and it’s getting dark.

  The reindeer can light up his signs for the nighttime traffic. One sign says, “Death No—Soccer Yes.” The other, “We have a tendency to oversimplify the summons of the moment.”

  Waiting

  I am putting on my boots, my husband waits. So I ask him, generally speaking, if waiting bores him. He’s been cracking his knuckles. I say, doesn’t waiting provide us with the opportunity to scrutinize things? Like when you’re in the waiting room at the dentist’s office and time gets caught in a cement frieze? Or like the other day when you were waiting at the Dollar Store behind that man in the checkout line? You with your discount birthday card, the man with two coffee mugs and a stack of pale yellow towels? You said you were so close to him you could see the hairs on his neck and wasn’t that a strangely intimate thing to occur? Or then there’s the glance any of us may take out a window? The way traffic, pedestrians, clouds, birds, sky confirm that our lives will one day be excluded from the scene? Doesn’t that give pause? Or now while I’m putting on my coat with you standing there in your muffler and heavy gloves. Look at the way dust swirls in a sunbeam atop the kitchen counter and how splen
did that is? What about that?

  Fuck off, he explains.

  We are heading out to buy Mayday emergency survival blankets and SOS food rations. The stock in the survival bin needs rotating. We’ve been waiting years for the earthquake.

  When the Time Comes

  Stars don’t cost that much, my mother-in-law once said, one hundred, two hundred, five hundred dollars. Some include planets.

  She bought a small one near the Big Dipper and named it Irene, after herself.

  Somewhere there’s a proof of purchase ticket from the Own-A-Star Foundation.

  Irene would point at the sky after a few drinks. That star is mine, she’d say, the dinky pinky-blue one.

  She liked a good time and would ask the dog during Saturday night cards: Well, what do you think of the weekend so far?

  We had her cremated in her full-length mink coat. That was something you had to have back then—a mink coat. That and a Cadillac and a pair of diamond earrings.

  Though when the time came there was no Cadillac and we only found one earring, a stud. My husband wore it until the dog came into the story again and the earring disappeared off the bedside table.

  We searched the boulevard for days but all we found was crap.

  Let it be said that our generation also likes a good time—we have an appreciation for loud music, for easy laughs. We have our own stars, too, mainly the cerebral kind.

  When the time comes they’ll cremate us with our drugs, our bamboo flutes.

  b.

  January 24

  Two bombs exploded at a Moscow airport. Said to be the work of terrorists. Said to be a deadly blast, a scene of carnage. The death count’s thirty-five, with countless injured. We can’t stop watching the online video. A mother shows a picture of her missing girl.

  Personal reaction: air loss, bile in mouth, pain in eye, constricted heart, maybe next time us.

  Countless us.

  Q & A

  There’s a new affliction called Disappearing Cell Syndrome, a condition whereby death crosses the barrier into life and begins the work of decomposition before it technically should be doing so. It causes a person to disappear cell by cell and the cells aren’t replaced by the body.

  You catch it from endangered species.

  The result is that a person’s skin, bones, muscles, tendons, and eventually the internal organs—liver, spleen, lungs, intestines, and heart—slowly disappear.

  My heart, yours—exposed and disappearing.

  You catch it from the most endangered species.

  Tree toads, brine shrimp, bald parrots, African elephants, armoured snails, blue butterflies, small bellflowers, Floreana coral. As their numbers reduce they emit a deadly airborne toxin. There are over sixteen thousand life forms currently doing this. Critics call it ironic retribution from the life forms that are dying out. Scientists say this idea contains an unpleasant whiff of God.

  A trial vaccine made from the remains of our least endangered species—centipedes, worms, spiders—is in the works.

  Q: Should we humans who are interested in breathing, eating, and reproducing, and in philosophy, art, and religion, and in the fact sheet of questions answered, and in change, too—should we eradicate the centipedes, worms, and spiders of this world in order to save ourselves?

  A: Of course.

  It’s happening all over the earth.

  The Age

  When laughter was finally banned it was a crime to crack jokes. Humorists were strung up from lampposts. Stand-up comics were hunted down and shot.

  We wore sunglasses, bit our hands, stuffed socks in our mouths, anything to keep levity hidden. But the new American Jesus was relentless.

  She wore a black leather cape, rode a Harley, and was followed by her disciples, a storm cloud of hungry buzzards. Most carried guns in their talons.

  They were touring the country. Their proclamation: A just and moral century lay ahead.

  Almost everyone thought this was wonderful.

  When the hourly cannon went off to remind us that nothing whatsoever was funny, we couldn’t help it; we laughed outright. One of us had fiddled with the firing mechanism and the sound the cannon emitted was a loud, wet fart.

  That time several merry makers busted a gut on the way to the killing fields.

  Trajectory

  I was perched on a ledge near the top of the gymnasium with only a cellphone to file my story. Beneath me hostages bound ankle and wrist were stacked like cordwood around the perimeter of the room. In the room’s centre naked women danced with chimpanzees; fat men fornicated with goats; old people dressed as babies stood in clusters bawling. The noise in the gym was deafening.

  I was on assignment for a women’s magazine. “Check out the wilderness. See what’s happening in the animal world.”

  I interviewed the hostage-taker crouched on the ledge beside me, a skinny young man grinning at the scene below.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Just who are these hostages you’ve got stacked down there?”

  “The usual bunch,” he said. “The curious. The decadent. The bored.”

  “But how are they captured?”

  “I charge them admission.”

  I filed my story. “Nothing much has changed. Wilderness is still about the tamed yearning to be wild.”

  Years later in this same gymnasium three tigers will gnaw on the body of a woman who, not yet dead, wears the face of rapture.

  That will be me ...

  Shift

  We didn’t see it coming. We were in New York or London or Hong Kong or Vancouver. We were members of the Blind Suicide Brigade, the Save-the-Humans Brigade, the Restore-Our-Hope Brigade. Or we were simply shoppers, citizens going about our business. But it happened everywhere. In the blink of an eye, in one unremarkable intake of breath, the world slid into the future.

  Slid quickly and quietly like a thing well oiled. Like a life hastening towards its death. The solid present slid around a corner and was gone. The future is here, shaky, indistinct, and we, the voyeurs of peril, are standing in it, unsure of our footing, yet breathing its strange new air.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen; there wasn’t supposed to be a future, only a continual present. But all that has changed. The present has dissolved, become a thing of the past. From now on it will be the future and only that. Everything that was about to happen will be continually happening and we, here in this future world, will be continually startled awake by its strangeness.

  I was texting when the shift occurred. I was standing at an intersection sending a message about a dinner party next Thursday, then another about a shoe sale at Wosk’s. The outside light suddenly changed. That’s what I noticed first—the pale yellow light. And then the streaky yellow clouds that drifted through the streets and around buildings, over cars, like phantoms in a dream.

  I didn’t think of beauty. I thought of clouds of mustard gas from World War I, something lethal like that. I thought of terrorists, that they’d released a slow-seeping chemical. I became afraid.

  My hand flew to cover my face but I found that my face was already covered. In fact, all those around me who were hurrying by, bent over as if against a strong wind, wore a mask like mine. But not everyone seemed aware that the shift had occurred, or else they were aware but paid no mind because only a few of us were standing motionless, confused.

  I noticed: more beggars, more beaten families huddled around street corner fires, more bodies lying in drifts against building walls, and cars as plentiful as before.

  Plentiful as before. What did that mean? What was before? What was now?

  I looked to the tops of buildings for help. The electronic signs were still there.

  The news stream said:

  The wheat shortage remains severe but officials are hopeful ... Fired government minister says the plague was mishandled ... Sex terrorists continue their deadly east coast assault ... Cadbury shares hit an all-time high ... No survivors found in the waters over the former Philippine
s ... New drug holds promise for eternal life ... Stars take over the White House ... Russia and China square off at global talks ...

  Then a woman stopped beside me, pulled down her mask, and looked around. “My God!” she cried. “I hadn’t realized. Everything we have feared, everything terrible and trivial is already here.”

  And she was right.

  And here we are.

  What Is Shown

  The volcano spewing smoke and ash is shown. The darkened valley is shown. A crowd hurrying down the hillside with two men carrying an old woman on a stretcher is shown. The first casualities in the emergency ward are shown—a man on a bed, his legs pocked with burns; a woman wearing a face mask; a man in a hooded sweatshirt standing bewildered. Crying children are shown. The raining ash from the volcano is shown. A young taxi driver grins at the wipers smearing ash on his windshield. An emergency shelter is shown. People lie quietly on mats while a man in a yellow T-shirt shouts through a megaphone in a foreign language. A street scene is shown. Fashionably dressed teenagers hurry towards the subway entrance while a girl on a cellphone pauses in conversation. A man on a veranda is shown pacing with a baby while a woman nearby smokes a cigarette. A map of the location is shown. A small red dot marking the volcano is shown.

  c.

  A Serious Story

  I’ve got stories strung in my head like lines of wash. I remember this one. The time I got a fortune cookie at Ming’s Restaurant that said: “Love is a few moments in the lives of lovers.” I read it to Len and he snorted. “Now, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”