White Mythology

by WD Clarke

  —I’ll take it … that’s Rick?

  —Or Dick. Dick, I think.

  —Got it. Dr. Ed pressed the button for line 1. Dick, this is Dr. W. Edward Blanchette speaking.

  —That’s Cee Aich Eee Tee Tee Eee?

  —That’s it.

  —And your mother’s maiden name is?

  —Malloy, Dick.

  —Thank you, sir. My name is Rich, by the way.

  —Sorry, Rich.

  —That’s ok, sir.

  —What can I do for you?

  —Sir, Colonial Credit has the policy of contacting its customers in the event of any significant deviation in spending patterns, that is, whenever there are … unusual levels of activity in their accounts, for the purposes of fraud prevention, you understand.

  —I understand. Ah, are you inferring that I fall into that pattern, Rich?

  —Do you mean implying, sir? Sir, over the past 24 hours your account shows a 20-fold increase above the daily average for the past 12 months.

  —It’s a joint account, said Dr. Ed.

  —Yes sir. Is there any way the card could have been recently stolen or lost, sir?

  —The wife, the wife’s out buying up the town, Dr. Ed explained, engaging in pure, nervous speculation.

  —Yes sir. We just wanted to make sure, sir, that you….

  —Yes.

  — … were aware of this, for fraud prevention purposes.

  —I’m aware of it, Dr. Ed lied. I’m all too aware of it. Which town is she buying up, by the way? he added, by way of an attempt to appear gregarious. I’ve lost track.

  —I’ll check for the most recent transaction, sir, bear with me just a minute. Sir, I have the transaction. Saks Fifth Avenue, New York City, 10:30 a.m. today, Thursday December 09.

  —Well, then. Would you mind telling me how much it was for?

  —Of course, sir. It was for 2,495 dollars in U.S. funds.

  —Fine, no problem. That’s the wife all right. Thanks.

  —You’re most welcome. Is there anything else I can do for you today, sir?

  —No, no thanks, thanks for calling, thanks.

  —Good-day, sir.

  Dr. Ed put down the receiver, frowning at the reflection he cast in the computer’s crt screen. There was one last email in his account. It was dated yesterday afternoon, and it was another one from fraser@hoteldieu.org.

  17

  An Orphan

  Cancel All of my afternoon appointments, please.

  —But….

  —I said cancel them, Ted. I have to … I’m going out.

  —What shall I do with them, sir? Reschedule?

  —No. They’re part of the Alba trial. I’ll have Nurse Sloggett deal with them in the morning. Oh, better send each of them down to the lab for blood workups, though.

  —What about Major Plumtree?

  —Has he been calling?

  —You know he has.

  —How do you know that I know? Have you been reading my e-mail?

  —I told you, sir, when you arrived this morning.

  —I don’t recall discussing that. Nevermind. You never told me and I haven’t checked my e-mail, ok?

  —He’s called 6 times at least, sir. Says his wife has ‘pretty much lost it’. Ted invoked quotation marks with a movement of his fingers.

  —What a prick, said Dr. Ed, shocking them both with the unaccustomed severity and aggression in his voice. Resuming a more moderate tone, as if he were giving dictation, he continued: Strike that. If, that is, when he calls back, tell him to have her taken directly to Emerg.

  —That would be impossible, sir.

  —Why’s that?

  —He said Missy disappeared last night, on the way home from Emerg. She got out at a stoplight and just ran off.

  —Oh.

  —I’d call him as soon as possible if I were you. He’s hopping mad, said he was holding you personally responsible for her condition.

  —That’s preposterous.

  —He hasn’t seen her since. She either took all of the drugs, or took them with her, cos she left an empty bottle on the car floor.

  —I see. Anything else?

  —Uh, when can I take my lunch hour?

  —Nurse Sloggett usually pencils that into the daily schedule.

  —She hasn’t.

  —Unusual, hmh. Well, is there a block of time that’s unfilled?

  —Yes, several. Not a full hour anywhere mind you, bu….

  —Just string a couple of short breaks together.

  —Um.

  —I’ll pay you time & ½.

  —Sure.

  —Splendid.

  —Super. Um, I….

  —Just be sure to hang the little sign by the photocopier on the front door to the clinic, plus a notice for any patients you might miss detailing what I’ve just told you.

  —Aye Aye, Cap’n. You ok, if you don’t mind me asking?

  —I suggest you get yourself a newspaper, Ted; you’re going to have a slack afternoon ahead of you.

  —I’ve got a book thanks.

  —Oh. Fine. Well then, I’m off.

  —You want to know what book it is?

  —No, not really.

  —Great Expectations. It’s about….

  —Bye, then, said Dr. Ed, retreating back through the reception room door.

  — … an orphan.

  18

  The Pynchon Method

  Out on the Pavement, walking northwards toward the campus centre, Dr. Ed ‘felt’ a mixture of relief and anxiety: relief because he had just ditched—for the first time ever—his afternoon responsibilities, anxiety because he knew his feet had a destination in ‘mind’, but unsure as yet where they were planning to take him. He soon found out: they turned right on University and made their way up the gentle incline past Alumni Hall, the Registrar’s and the library, and then crossed Union St. at the lights, turning right again at the Student Union building. Then there was just the Physical Education & Recreation Centre, a building he had never been in, not even during his student days, and to which the hockey arena was attached. His feet kept on, towards the long line of doors that made up the arena’s front entrance.

  The doors were all locked. Paper signs, which were scotch-taped onto every other door, advised him as to what his feet’s next course of action would be:

  Caduceus Holistic Fayre

  Thur 12–5 • Fri 12–8 • Sat 9–5

  Please follow your bliss! (through the Phys. Ed. Centre entrance)

  Admission:

  Adults $5.00 • Children 12-18 & Unwaged $2.00

  Children under 12 Free**

  (**with coupon one child/adult please**)

  Dr. Ed ruminated about he knew not what for some minutes, and then glanced at his watch. It was 11:47. This will have spoiled the better part of a week’s worth of somebody’s hockey, he ‘thought’, with malice occasioned by the ingrown defensiveness and scornful haughtiness of one who natural selection has forced out of the life of the body and into the life of the ‘mind’.

  Dr. Ed passed wind, and then burped. He had ‘thought’ (erroneously, it was now made manifest to him) that those particular issues at least were, if only temporarily, behind him. He retraced his steps the 40 or 50m or so back to the Phys. Ed. building, went down a long corridor back to the arena, and found that the doors there, too, were locked.

  Realising that he was obliged to wait 12 minutes before the doors opened, he unbuttoned his greatcoat, loosened his tie, and slumped against the textured concrete wall. By dribs and drabs, he was joined by quite an eclectic assortment of hominids. First came an aging hippie couple. The woman was sporting a pan-African Oxfam fair-trade multi-layer ensemble, and was marsupially encumbered with a genderless infant via a homemade Snuggli. The man held onto a superannuated border collie with one hand and a 1970s pile jacket with the other. He wore a neon orange sweatshirt with black letters that screamed:

  I Made A Mint In Herbal Tea …

  AS
K ME HOW ! ! !

  Soon a tall, pretty but housewifely, fleshy woman in her mid-thirties queued up, with her son in tow. The son, who was about 8 or 9, sported the kind of crew cut that boys get when fathers yank them from their tearful mothers (usually age 2 or 3) and cart them to their barbers, to get rid of those long, girlish curls. The boy was also roughly as wide as he was tall, and while he busied himself with digging with a spoon made of candy into a package of Fun Dips! (a metalloplastic pouch filled with a pucker-inducing, ‘frooty’ powder), the mother stood, with one knee bent, reading a book—The Recovery Discovery1—her long, wavy brown hair falling repeatedly across her face, obliging her to intermittently shoo it back behind her ear.

  Dr. Ed could not, for some reason that was currently opaque to him, take his eyes off of her. Her face said it all, but Dr. Ed’s eyes were looking, not listening:

  1. Lost Intimacies

  i.) The blinking, consubstantial infant, now geargreedy boysboy, grimly eager to find a fitting role for himself in the grim rituals of his tribe. Mornings find him wolfing down bowlfuls of Frankenberry cereal, followed by (before school, if it is springtime) a peculiarly Hobbesian, State-Of-Nature form of scrub baseball—nasty, brutish and short. The war-of-all-against-all continues, rain or shine, each&every mid-to-late afternoon—replete with varying monikers and differing guises, but subsumes, always, under one consistent archetype: Cops & Indians, Cowboys & Robbers, Coppers & Paupers, you name it….

  ii.) Seemingly benign neglect at the hands of the Moneyman husband, and accruing evidence that his eyes (if not—as of yet—his hands) have strayed elsewhere: tattletale corporate credit card receipts found crumpled in the laundry, a SuperSex here, a Babes & Toyland there, all part & parcel of the cost-of-doing-business, he would explain, if she pressed him.

  She knows not to press. Every so often, he gets an unconscious signal to make it all up to her anyway, and they go off alone to Cellphone Laptop Conference Call Spreadsheet Meet & Greet 2nd Honeymoons at Whistler, Palm Springs—or, even, once, Hawaii. All of which of course is extremely diverting and such-and-so-forth, but which ultimately serves only to remind her that her plight is similar to:

  2. The Similar Plights of Similar Friends

  —of Jennifer Kilpatrick and Christina Buryman, bien sûr. But don’t forget: Marjorie Maples, Stephanie Stillwater, even Heather Hippodrome (she for whom absolutely everything is always, maddeningly, ‘super’). Sheer ubiquity makes it all easier to talk about if not to take. She and her friends have thereby been brought ‘much closer’ together, and furthermore manage to cope with a familiar brand of contentment extracted from unending cycles of Powershopping, tennis makeovers at varying locations, group discounts on hospitality lessons, Gardening by Raoul, and the:

  3. Wednesday Book Club

  —which, in reality, functions as a round-robin Mendacity Slowpitch and Four-handed Insinuation Tournament, masquerading as an inebriated cookoff disguised as a ‘Merv’s Moms Reading Group’. Somehow, however, they have managed to ‘discuss’ such recent bestsellers as: The Kitchen Witch, by Clarissa Hopes, The Pot Luck Club, by Toni Grievesend, Patrice Fouré’s Seduced By Bordeaux (sequel to Adrift In Tuscany, prequel to Obsessed With Alsace), and Abby Dawn Ersatz’s A Laundry List For Stormchasers. As uniformly excellent as these reads have been, however, they have given her not even the tiniest bit of insight into her:

  4. Real (if often pre-conscious) Sorrow

  i.) A father recently lost to a mother’s recent loss to cancer.

  ii.) A brother she can’t talk to anymore, a sister who refuses to speak with her, and a husband who has nothing to say.

  iii.) The memory of a long-lost first love making comet-like re-entries into the troposphere of her dreams: gentle Michael Fury, whom she and her girlfriends had teased throughout their childhood together, had courageously declared his love for her during their senior year at high school. She found herself nurturing a growing attachment to him, but he was a socially awkward fellow, and more than a bit of a dreamer. Moreover, it was clear that he had no prospects (and on this she found that she was in agreement with her father)—no prospects whatsoever, and accordingly she forced herself to break both of their hearts when she went off to university in Vancouver. She got over it, studied psychology, made the kind of friends that one in her circumstances makes. Poor Michael took a job in a book store back home, waited for letters that she did not have the heart to write. Inevitably she met Richard, a Commerce student from a good family in Delta, BC, and came back east with him when opportunity knocked, first at P&G, subsequently at J&J, and finally, a couple of years ago, at DuPont, in, wouldn’t you just know it, her old hometown, just after the birth of her third child. Someone eventually told her: during her long absence Michael had finally married someone else, someone a number of years his senior. But then, not so long ago, he’d contracted Acute Lymphoma, or Viral Leukemia, or some such awful disease. You wouldn’t believe how many people turned out for the service. Everyone just adored him, that Michael….

  The doors opened. Dr. Ed turned his head, ‘felt’ a surge of pressure from behind and went with the flow. The little beachball of a boy brushed by his leg and rolled past him down the hall. The mother called after him in a distracted voice,

  —Michael! Stick close, hon, stick close!

  His attention focussed firmly on whatever it was that lay before him and which led him onwards, Dr. Ed did not really notice that he shivered noticeably. He kept moving ever forward into the arena with unconscious purposefulness, passing with obvious scorn the predictable parade of hucksters and wing-nuts. It was some minutes before he came to a full appreciation of a ‘feeling’ of a distinct loss of his centre of gravity. He halted in the middle of the BodyWork section of the fair, and realized that something had been eating away at him for—for how long? It didn’t matter. What did matter was that he now fully comprehended the seriousness of this … evaporation … of his accustomed powers, and that he was determined to get to the bottom of it. He would get to, and yank out the entire root of it, he determined, and started forward again, reflecting as he did so that it had something to do with that G-ddamn ‘Fraser’. And he was hot on Fraser’s tail, he was sure, here in the G-dforsaken ‘BodyWork’ zone, amongst the Chiropractors and Chiropodists, the Reflexologists, Rolfers and Reiki Masters. And … would you look at that? Jesus.

  Not that any of this shocked him (it was all a bit of old hat, the hat covering the ever-greying & thinning top of the Age of Aquarius, surely) in the slightest. No, it galled him. It galled him to ‘think’ that human beings insisted on continuing to be as irrational as this. It was almost 1994, for Christ’s sake, and here we are, still doing this touchy-feely-thing-with-the-hands gimmick: ‘Healing Hands’, ‘Healing Touch’, ‘Hands of Light’, ‘Therapeutic Touch’, ‘The Midas Touch’ (now there’s a good one), ‘Soul Touch’ and (my G-d!) ‘InSoul’! Keey-reist!

  There were indeed, however, some … phenomena that Dr. Ed had not encountered before; systems, methods and techniques that were still far beyond the horizon of conceivability the last time he had checked into the workings of all this lunacy were now … why, they were at this very minute relentlessly proliferating—in this very arena. He walked past one man who was giving a microlecture on something called ‘Metallurgical Frequency Resonance Therapy’. Another entreated potential customers to don what appeared to be gimmicked-up stereo headphones so that they might sample the aqueous benefits of ‘Hydrophonic Neuro-Somatic Integration’. And—get this—there was even someone (unbelievable, in this day and age) actually giving a live demonstration of ‘The Pynchon Method’, which was no more, really, than a shameless & debased repackaging, Dr. Ed observed, of the thoroughly discredited practice of ‘Psychodonture’, which had itself enjoyed a very brief flowering in certain fashionable circles in postwar New York before being driven quickly underground by threats from the relevant regulatory bodies.

  Dr. Ed moved on into virgin territory, into the ‘Miscellany’ sect
ion. He passed quickly by the discounted (not 10, not 20, but a whopping 30%!), discontinued home-use colonic irrigators, refused a free sample of Soynk! (a vegetarian pork rind, or pork scratching), and unsuccessfully avoided the gaze of the roving eye in a 6-foot-tall holographic Rosicrucian pyramid. Twisting his neck around to continue to watch it watching him, he forgot where he was going and crashed into a display table for ChocLite (a fat-free carob-flavoured candy bar, sweetened with sorbitol and stevia extract, and approved by the national governing council of the Cocoa-Nuts Foundation), sending its contents, the surprised sales representative and Dr. Ed himself hurtling to the ground.

  —I’m very, really I’m, I’m terribly … sorry, said Dr. Ed, after the upending had been re-righted, and he had hurriedly helped the fellow re-box the 12 gross or so of Choclite bars.

  —That’s ok, no worries, no worries at all, the Choclite man said. Happens all the time.

  —It was that damned eye’s fault.

  —I?

  —The eye in the pyramid, said Dr. Ed, pointing to the looming hologram.

  —Oh, yes, it’s … hypnotic, isn’t it?

  —Yeah. And … spooky, a bit.

  —I’ll say. But you, you don’t look like a man who’s easily spooked, the sales rep said, turning on what was obviously his ‘selling voice’.

  —Not usually, no, but this has been a … a bit of a weird day.

  —Tell me about it. One of those days when you’re on the road, and every other car seems to be driven by a psychopath.

  —No kidding.

  —Yeah, I came down from the City this morning, and the 401, lemme tell ya, the sales rep said, making a strange back-and-forth motion with one hand near each of his ears.