White Mythology

by WD Clarke

  —Of the month: first, second, which?

  —The second, he said, moving towards the front door.

  —Well, then, Sam’s at the Lodge.

  —The Lodge?

  —You, know, the Lodge, she said in a stage whisper. The Masons.

  —But he’s, but you’re … you’re both Catholic! said Dr. Ed, opening the front door and putting his hand on the cold aluminum latch of the screen door.

  —So? That don’t matter none. It’s a business thing. Sides, you know Sam, he likes everyone, and vice the verse it appears, vicky verky.

  —Well I best be off, he said, then, turning back to face her: but, um, did she by any chance, did my wife say … where she was going, or when she was coming back?

  —No.

  —She didn’t say.

  —No.

  —Oh, ok, goodnight then.

  —But you know me. I wouldn’t say even if she did say.

  —But she didn’t say.

  —You got it, Pontiac.

  Dr. Ed went across her lawn to his own front porch.

  —Hey Eddy boy, she called out, good luck eh, bust a gut!

  He didn’t look back, and couldn’t summon the conviction to utter a ‘Huh?’ to this last remark, his supply of snappy questions and tolerance for stupid responses having simply run out. Closing his own front door behind him and re-entering the near-polar conditions (his wife not being home to frustrate his thermostat-programmed settings of 14°c/57°f daytime/evenings, 8°c/47°f nights) of his dark, empty, Max-less house, he did not hear The Midge/Smurphetella call after him one last time.

  —Your Ex says Max’ll be fine!

  Dr. Ed slipped into his flannel pyjamas and put a mug of milk into the microwave. When it was done he stirred in some Horlicks malted milk powder, went up to his bedroom, found the remote control under a pile of his wife’s ‘things’, got into bed and tuned in the local news station. He took one sip of his Horlicks, and placed it on the night table beside him, lying back into a pair of hyperstuffed goose down pillows (one of his wife’s many ‘little finds’). He ‘thought’ once more of what Missy Plumtree had said to her husband, internally hmm’ed, ha’ed and huh’ed into putting it at the back of his ‘mind’, and promptly fell asleep, not giving another ‘thought’ to the matter. Nor did he give another ‘thought’ to ‘that dream’ he’d awoken from that morning, or to the whereabouts of his wife. As he nodded off (with the tv still on, something which was, it must be said, more to be commonly associated with his wife), he had only one image in his ‘mind’, that of Max, his most trusted friend and companion. Thus, as Dr. Ed fell asleep, worried by but also somehow strangely reassured by the presence of Max’s absence—which floated through the room of Dr. Ed’s ‘mind’ like a Ghost of Christmas Past—Dr. Ed missed the night’s top news story: tomorrow’s weather.

  Tomorrow’s weather, the weatherman said, promises a definite turn for the worse: it is going to get warmer, but boy, is it going to snow! A monstrously large, warm gulf air mass has col-lid-ed with an ‘Alberta Clipper’, owing to a pronounced southerly dip in the jet stream down as far south as San Antonio!

  The upshot? Well, this little doozy of a system has started out nasty and is only going to get nastier as time wears on! This morning, residents of North Texas woke up to lightning and racquetball-sized hail! Pounding on their roofs! By afternoon, the storm had moved on, into Arkansas and Tennessee! Hammering both Little Rock and Memphis! With a one-two punch. Of hail! And Ice! Provoking Governors in both states to declare a State of Emergency. The storm then proceeded to cover Jackson, with up to 3 centimetres! Of freezing rain by rush hour commute time! And by early evening strong winds had driven a dumping of over 30 ceee-emmm of snow into 1 metre-high! Drifts! In southern and central Kentucky!

  It is snowing hard at the present moment in Louisville, and the storm—is projected—to pum-mel the Ohio Valley during the dead of night. And! It’s tracking north-northeast incredibly quickly, and will cross the Detroit River and begin to blanket Windsor! By sunrise.

  Eastern parts of the province should expect to be hit tomorrow in the early afternoon. What’s that, John? Wait … reports state that it is al-ready snow-wing in Bowling Green … is that Kentucky or Ohio?

  We’ll get a fix on that, but tonight’s Weath-er Word is, that by the drive home tomorrow evening, we should be absolutely plastered—by the white stuff!

  Coming up in other news: leash laws for cats proposed at City Council; results from the Houseproud Club’s annual Hometown Townhome competition; coverage of the pre-qualifying rounds of (one of December’s highlights!) the Celebrity Pro-Am curling bonspiel; and: local lamb makes mincemeat of the competition at the Royal Winter Fair….

  This just in: an alleged discovery of unaccounted-for, unidentified human remains at the Logan Crematorium. Municipal police spokesperson Polly Purfoy declined to comment on the discovery, as it is ‘currently under investigation’ … Details after this:

  THURSDAY

  —PUTREFACTION—

  In the first Decoction (which is called Putrefaction) our stone is made all black, to wit, a black earth, by the drawing out of its humidity; and in that blackness, the whiteness is hidden.

  —Khalid ibn Yazid, Secreta Alchimiæ 44:16

  13

  Never Wonder

  His Pre-set Alarm had gone off at 06:50, and then again at 07:00, at increased volume. It went off a third and final time at 07:10, and did not stop ringing until its Die Harder batteries gave out, at 07:36. Dr. Ed awoke at 07:58, ‘feeling’, as the Scots say, ‘absolutely guttered’, as if he’d had a dozen pints of 90 Shilling ale. But he hadn’t, of course. Instead (and Dr. Ed knew this, was aware of it with the kind of clarity that only prophets and demagogues ordinarily lay claim to), he had merely dreamed. Oh, the doughnuts certainly hadn’t helped matters, matters which, hard upon waking, forced him into yet another lengthy sojourn on the toilet. But the doughnuts were just the fall guys, pasty patsies that were mere accessories to a crime perpetrated inside his own ‘mind’—that is, his brain. The real criminal was ‘that dream’, the exact same one which had troubled him the day before, and the details of which were now receding faster than a steroid-user’s hairline. As the panic of diarrhoeal (aptly taken from the Greek -rhoia, from -rhein, ‘to flow’) convulsions (in the midst of which the conviction now presented itself to Dr. Ed’s ‘mind’ that he had an inkling of what epileptics went through) gave way to the mere cacophony of flatus, all knowledge of the contents of the dream passed from his consciousness. What remained was only the vague sense that it had something to do with a woman. The question was, though: which?

  His wife had not come home overnight, either. Christ. He got dressed quickly, taking his customary two coffees in a thermos on account of already being late (it was 08:00, and the first of his patients would, with increasing impatience, already be waiting for him, in the waiting room. Christ. Jesus Christ. Christ Jesus.

  He put his galoshes on and stepped outside. It was 08:09. The sun poked its timid nose through the branches of dormant trees; the sky was light blue and getting bluer by the minute. Nice day, anyway, he ‘thought’, unaware that the approaching storm (of which he remained unaware) had become stalled, and that it seemed to be more interested in wreaking havoc upon southern Ohio than in taking it out on Ontario. It was now moving northeastward much more slowly, and its anticipated arrival had been pushed off until late Thursday evening.

  The air was bracingly cold, and dry. An agitated little breeze was stirring sand out of discrete little piles on the roadway, getting everything moving. The morning was still young, but it was sending a signal: this was no time to be standing idly by while the world swept past you.

  A few in-breaths reminded Dr. Ed of what it was he had forgotten the night before, of what he had forgotten to do—to plug in the block heater for his Peugeot. There was no way it would start in this, he ‘thought’, meaning the temperature, which was -16°c or just above 0°f. In fact, the
Peugeot needed a block heater for anything under -3°c/25°f, which meant that the drive to work was scuppered. He tried starting the car anyway, but it was as he had predicted: the car would not turn over. When he turned the key in the ignition, nothing—a great big nothing—happened. For a few moments he sat there (while his bum froze on the black leather seat) wondering what to do. This was not like him. It was not like him to wonder.

  The Suburban would start, of course, but there was no question of taking it. He daren’t. To say that his wife never let him drive it would be like—it would be like saying that all triangles had three sides, or that all bachelors were unmarried men. It would be, it would be tautological, that’s what it would be. It would also be tautological to say, because it was fucking true by definition (there, he said the f-word, something else that was not at all like him), to say that he was freezing his ass off, not his bum or butt or buttocks, his ass, sitting in this idle—no: dead—car, ‘thinking’—no: idly wondering—wondering just what his friggin’ options were, on this cold friggin’ morning, in this friggin’ cold world.

  Lessee: first off, he couldn’t hoof it. He lived in the suburbs, where the taxi service was significantly worse than in the city proper, where it was reckoned by those few who had ever managed to hail a cab to be several million rungs below the level of frequency provided by the notoriously underfunded public transit system. Cars. Cars were the thing. You had to have one, at least one, and although Dr. Ed owned three cars, he did not, not at least for the moment, have even one. The trouble was, Dr. Ed needed to have one, to operate one, to use one, not at some other, later moment, but at this moment. Now. Now, G-d Damn It. Now.

  He called the answering machine at the office, left a message for Nurse Sloggett’s Temp explaining his situation, and resigned himself to trudging to the bus stop, to freeze and to wait in the gritty suburban winter landscape. And: ‘feeling’ a caffeine withdrawal headache coming on, ‘feeling’ the breeze coming on, ‘feeling’ the breeze mature into a wind. The bus was late. The breeze was climbing, from Force 4, past Force 5 on its way to Force 6 (which it would reach, later in the day) on the Beaufort scale. The bus was 15 minutes late.

  Correction: the bus was 15 minutes late, but 15 became 20 as the bus driver picked Dr. Ed up, shifted the transmission into Park and let the diesel engine idle. 5 minutes later, an Out of Service … Sorry! bus pulled up behind the one Dr. Ed was on, and the two drivers exchanged places.

  —Cutbacks, said a student, seated across from Dr. Ed, to his companion.

  —Unions, said the other.

  —Ruling class toadie!

  —Prole wannabee!

  —GATT fatcat!

  —AFL/CIO simpleton!

  —CIO?? CIA you idiot, CIA!!

  —No way, moron, no way. N-double-a, NAACP!!

  —Fascist bastard.

  —Pinko Commie Faggot.

  —‘Pinko’? Whaddyou mean, ‘Pinko’, what the, what in the hell’s that?

  —Beats me. Pink. Not quite red. Fucked if I know, don’t ask me.

  —Don’t ask me? Bluesuit/Blackshirt, pink/red/whatever, right?

  —Pink, then, fuck-face, pink. Not quite G-ddamn red. Almost fuckin’ there, but not fuckin’ quite.

  —So let me get this straight, I’m a not-quite-red commie faggot?

  —If you like.

  —I’m a not-quite-red Red?

  —If you wish.

  —I don’t wish anything, buster, I’m only repeating your words back to you.

  —Words? Words. Words! Them’s not my words, pal.

  —Mine neither. Then whose are they then?

  —No one’s, fuck. Fucked if I know, just fuck the fuck off with that. Words. Just words, got it?

  The one then looked on in mock consternation as the other commenced in song, quite near the top of his lungs:

  Words, words, words, oh!

  S’all pooh and pee and turds!

  Chew’em, Spew’em

  Piss-n-Shit’em out

  Cover your eyes, close your ears

  Shut your mouth, they’s still appears

  Ya just can’t stop those words

  From gettin’ out….

  Your mind is in the gutt-er

  Your brain is in the sew-er

  Tho’ yer livin’ high up on the hog up on the hill

  You can screw the lid on tight

  Keep your daughters home at night

  But you just can’t stop your mouth from spewing swill!

  An old man who was sitting near Dr. Ed and who noticed the look of disgusted incomprehension on his face, leaned over and whispered:

  —They go through this every day, they do.

  —This?

  —Or some such thing.

  —Who are they?

  —Boys. From my neighbourhood.

  —They should be removed from the bus.

  —We’ve all gotten used to them. They’re a bit daft, but they’re harmless.

  —They’re young. Young and brainless.

  —Well we’ve all been that.

  —Not me, pal.

  —Not I.

  Dr. Ed stood corrected. —Not I, Not I, he conceded, slumping, uncharacteristically, into his seat.

  Suddenly the bus pulled into the central terminal and lurched to a halt, not at its designated loading bay, but in the middle of the parking lot.

  —This bus is no longer in service, a digitized voice said. The next vehicle is due at … Bay … 11 … in … 7 … minutes … Please disembark at this time….

  Dr. Ed decided to walk the rest of the way to the hospital. This took 20 minutes more, but further lateness seemed a small price to pay for sanity’s sake. But he did not just walk; he never ‘just’ walked, or ‘just’ did anything. No! Dr. Ed made his way along the tidy sidewalks and streets with the unrestrainable vigour of a man in the full rudeness of health. He strode along determinedly, swinging his arms purposefully, in satisfaction of having the possession of the full knowledge concerning a certain undeniable fact: the undeniable fact that it took more than a few minor nuisances or chance inconveniences to put Dr. Ed off of his stride!

  As he strode along, then, Dr. Ed made mental notes to himself, which he then sorted, arranged and stored in the orderly, legal-sized filing cabinet of his ‘mind’, as was always, on walks such as this, his wont. He made a highlighted, boldfaced and exclamation-marked mental note to cut to the chase in getting to the bottom of Max’s whereabouts. He made a sober but liberally italicized sans-serif mental note to give his wife a stern but compassionate talking-to, regarding Max of course but all the rest of it as well. And he made a tertiary but no less significant, Times New Roman mental note to immolate the Peugeot as soon as was humanly feasible. This was urgent, and could not wait until spring, until his rx-7 was back in action.

  No. The previous year’s mild winter had lulled him into complacency, but he was now fully roused. This was urgent, and reasonably so. He needed something, and what he needed was something trustworthy. Something Japanese. Luxury and style, to a certain extent, yes, but on his own terms. As he matured, reliability was becoming more and more important to him, in so many ways. Individuality and flair were good, were all well and fine, but did one have to sacrifice reliability to obtain them? Dr. Ed wanted something bulletproof. And he’d get it, too. And soon!—after which that damned Peugeot would thus be … no more!

  When he arrived at the hospital, and had followed a newly-erected detour route around the cafeteria (in which there had been an electrical fire overnight, due, presumably—or so one of the many females scurrying about had said—to ‘some rodent or other making a picnic out of the wiring’), he lurched headlong into F-Wing and up to the 4th floor. As he did so, Dr. Ed began to ‘feel’—that is to say, began to imagine—a ‘force field’ pushing him back, away from his departmental offices. This was both odd and disconcerting, in part because Dr. Ed did not believe in force fields, but also because he did not believe in the imagination.

&n
bsp; Dr. Ed was, when it suited him—which was almost always—an ontological materialist. He believed that all reality was erected from the building blocks of matter. Psychological reality, then, was constructed by the building blocks of the brain, brain cells which in turn could be reduced, broadly speaking, to chemistry. Psychology depended upon biology, which amounted, in the end, to chemistry. There is no ‘soul’, there is no ‘mind’, or at least one which is not epiphenomenal, i.e. the mere by-product of the chemical processes of the brain. Dr. Ed was happy with this position, and it put paid to all manner of silly, mystical notions, the very kind of notions that misguided patients tended, more often than not, to have.

  There was only one problem with this position, however: free will. If material causality was a fact, then it ruled out free will completely. Free will, which Dr. Ed very much believed in, was a bit of a spanner in the works, as far as materialism went, because free will was not ‘free’ if it was materially caused. How could you get perfectly sane, competent people to accept responsibility for their actions if they knew that all their behaviour, indeed everything about them, was a mere by-product of chemical interactions? You couldn’t.

  Dr. Ed was no philosopher, and had never heard of the half-way house called ‘soft determinism’, whose adherents had attempted to map out and negotiate a passage around the Wandering Rocks of scepticism and between the Scylla of nose-to-the-ground materialist determinism and the Charybdis of pie-in-the-sky libertarianism. Nevertheless, Dr. Ed found his own trap-door: it was simple, yet ingeniously effective, and it sorted the world out quite nicely indeed. It involved paying attention to the practical, lived experience of normal, everyday people, people making normal, everyday decisions, and it ignored the conundrums of the wider philosophical debate altogether.