by WD Clarke
—Ha, ha, said Randy.
—Uh, Ed … , said Stu.
—We really need, said Randy, to eyeball, those anecdotals.
—Either that or we haefta interrogate the Residents, said Stu.
—We’re, heh, only semi-unserious, Ed, said Randy.
—Ha, said Stu. Only semi.
—Well I’ll tell you what, said Dr. Ed, enjoying what at the moment ‘felt’ like a brainwave, can you come back tomorrow?
—Tomorrow’s not workable Ed, said Stu, with suddenly increasing impatience.
—It’s a non-starter, said Randy.
—We’ll be in Quebec-ville, up to our tomahawks….
—Up to our trousersnakes in red tape.
—Fucking frogs got their jurisdictional vicegrips out, said Stu, shaking his head with some vehemence.
—Ratchet drivers, said Randy.
—Socialist nightmare.
—Commie bastards.
—Well … said Dr. Ed coolly, sensing he had them over the proverbial barrel, and having heard all of this, and thensome, before, …well, my administrative nurse is off sick and she has the—
—Password? said Stu.
—To the files? said Randy. C’mon, Ed, level with us.
—Don’t dick us around, pal, said Stu, with sudden violence.
—We’re on your side, Ed, said Randy, attempting to sound a reassuring note.
—Er … yeah, said Stu.
—Ok, ok, said Dr. Ed with a pretense of anxiety, for he was by now ‘feeling’ very calm indeed. Ok. I’ll be straight with you.
—Like a fucking arrow, said Stu.
—Attaboy, said Randy, and then, to Stu: No arrow straighter.
—Straight’s fine, but, said Stu. But who’s the archer?
—You see, said Dr. Ed with not-too-easily feigned gravitas, I’m on my way out to, I just stepped in to, there’s been a, someone’s, now just how do I put this? He paused and looked each quadrilaterally in the eye before continuing, as if (and only as if, for Dr. Ed really & truly ‘felt’ absolutely nothing whatsoever just now, was wholly & completely discarnate, disembodied, a floating, comfy, pillowy, cumulus cloud of quasi-semi-consciousness), as if he were a judge assessing the character of 2 recidivist pot growers, or the Lord Almighty extracting what remained of their eternal souls from the quicksand of their bodies and weighing them up on His empyrean balance beam….
—Can I, may I be candid? he said.
—Hell, shit yeah, said Randy.
—Go boy, git, giddyap, said Stu.
—Someone… , said Dr. Ed, has died.
Dan Shboom’s cab moved westward along one-way Brock St. at a pace that was timed just right to make the synced lights as, one after another, they turned green, green, green. Dan’s fare had dozed off in the back seat, but he knew where to take him.
—Aeh, Mister, we’re aeh, there. Mister….
Dan reached back and gave Dr. Ed a gentle shaking at the knee. When that failed to rouse the dishevelled gentleman in the rumpled blue suit, Dan’s second attempt shook him with considerable force, as if the matter were of some immediate urgency.
—Hwa? said Dr. Ed.
—We’re there, said Dan. That’ll be $8.50.
—Buh, uh… ?
—That’s 8 dollars and 50 cents, sir.
—Yuh, I, uh, here, kip, kipit, said Dr. Ed, handing Dan a 50 dollar bill.
—That’s far too much, sir.
—Kip it.
—Aeh, I better, um, let me help you.
Dan got out of the cab, opened the left rear door, reached in, took hold of his fare by the right wrist and left lapel, grunted Dr. Ed’s feet out the door and heaved the rest of him upright, and then half-guided, half-carried him up the drive to the front walkway.
—Keyth, Dr. Ed mumbled, and as he fumbled iteratively but without haste through his pockets, Dan took in a 360 degree panorama of, of….
—Some place you’ve got here, Dan said with polite understatement—in a manner which was, if not innate, certainly essential and not accidental to his character, for he really didn’t think it was ‘some’ place at all: he knew that it was, in fact, one of those houses that broadcast its superlative qualities down the street, up the avenue, and then out, up & over the entire subdivision with such clarity and singularity of purpose that it became the paragon & prototype of the style that eventually would become known as, variously, the Monster Home, the Contemporary Suburban Nightmare, or the EgoBox, truly a beacon to ticky-tacky elephantiasis if ever there was one, shining its powerful beam of bad taste out into the countryside and across the Great Lake. Try as they may, lesser lights could never succeed at appropriating to themselves the bravoura of this most singular of mansions, with its mismatched mishmash of styles, its Mock Tudor meets grey vinyl clad Cape Cod exterior, and its serene, Apollonian Greek columns—which guarded an imperial Roman entranceway that led to a vaulted, Gothic Cathedral-ceilinged foyer. Just to the right of (and strikingly proportioned to 3/4 the size of) the main house there was a 3 car garage/granny cottage (currently unoccupied), which was connected to the main house by a glassed-in sun room, and in front of one of whose sporty wood-grained aluminum doors was parked Dr. Ed’s wife’s capital-T Truck.
The exterior was lit up, quite literally, like an Xmas tree, although there were no trees on what remained of the property per se. There were, rather, quite a large number of small topiary shrubs centre-justified to the east-west boundary of the lot, clustering around a pair of leering cherubs, which in turn hovered over and mimed (for it was coming on winter) urination into a 4-stage quartz/resin composite waterfall, which fed a small, currently-drained fishpond, which was itself connected to the stolid poured concrete of the front porch via a primrose-lined pathway of crushed quartz interspersed with composite flagstones and lit by motion-sensing black plastic pot-lights.
—Keyth, here, Dr. Ed ejaculated, handing the Eumeta-sponsored key ring to Dan Shboom, who opened a kind of porter’s gate and led his charge inside.
Inside, the aspiring cauchemar des banlieus motif continued, although betraying the kind of bicameral, split personality that results from an uneasy truce in the everlasting marital tug-of-war: a step to the right of the foyer took one into the usual (if admittedly ‘high concept’) Living Room that no one had ever, or could have ever, lived in. In the centre, an X-tra wide hallway was lined on one side with newfangled giclée reproductions of Miro’s and Kandinsky’s greatest hits, on the other with hyper-realistic paintings of ducks & geese, and a wood-veneered balustrade spiralled up and away from this contested terrain to the 2nd floor. A jump to the left dropped one into a sunken, Whopper or Big Mac of a ‘Family’ Room, done up with The Works—red shag carpeting, a granite-fasciaed gas fireplace, black ‘pleather’ furniture, a 1970s, pleather-wrapped bar complete with a mirrored backdrop and chrome-legged, black pleather-topped stools, and a tv that had (G-d knows how) only just managed to fit through the front door.
Dan was going to deposit Dr. Ed on the recently re-covered Victorian love seat in the Living Room when the latter shook his head, uttered the word ‘bencil’ and pointed straight ahead into the belly of the house, and owing to the obscene amount of money he had just pocketed, Dan felt duty-bound to allow himself to be led onward, into the (frankly pornographic) kitchen. On the solid ebony Bauhaus-inspired kitchen table Dan saw a pencil clipped onto an Edvard Munch ‘The Scream’ notepad holder (one of Dr. Ed’s wife’s touches).
He picked it up and handed it to Dr. Ed.
—I will nid you litter, Dr. Ed slurred at him. Yor carrh mumb, mumber, phone, tanks. Dan wrote: Amy’s Taxis, 541-1111, Car 36, Dan, and then he helped Dr. Ed into a cushioned ebony kitchen chair. He was going to thank him for the tip (one that was large enough to enable him to buy groceries for the week), but his fare had already fallen fast, fast asleep, his head resting upon a Pre-Raphaelite placemat, which bore a reproduction of a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
It was a depiction of a pomegr
anate-eating Persephone, the model for which was one of the painter’s lovers, a certain Mrs. William Morris. Dr. Ed could not see this, but Persephone not only resembled his wife, she also bore more than a passing resemblance to the mother of his ‘son’.
* * *
2. Canadian Association of Psychiatric Pharmacologists.
3. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 6th Edition. DSM-iv and v were published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1994 and 2013, respectively.
FRIDAY
—SECOND WIND OF THE OPSIMATH—
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
23
Babyfresh Atom Bomb
Dr. Ed Awoke to what he ‘thought’ was thunder, but it was only the sound of his own anxious and shallow, gulping breaths that filled his now all-too-conscious ears. He’d had that G-ddamned dream again. His heart was racing, his blood pressure was through the roof, his entire head was crammed up inside his most-likely-brroken nose, and his nose ‘felt’ like a fucking war zone, like G-ddamned ground zero. He was still in his clothes, still at the kitchen table. The ‘Starry, Starry Night’ kitchen wall clock read 00:17. He was in a world of hurt.
—Fuuucckkk meee, he groaned as he searched the pockets of his slacks and greatcoat in vain for the bottle of painkillers, having similar luck with his briefcase. He must have dropped them—where? In the back of the cab? He wasted no time speculating on such matters, but climbed (with some difficulty) the stairs to the 2nd floor, went into his wife’s cavernous bathroom and encountered therein the pre-historically hideous, repellantly tumescent creature that was his own schnoz.
—Jee. Zuss. Jesusmaryjoseph.
He would re-bandage it momentarily, but the fact of his resemblance to a hypertrophied, genetically modified, morbidly alcoholic Mr. Potato Head definitely took a back seat to the much more compelling fact that Mr. Potato Head’s uranium-yellow nose had gone nuclear on him, the heat blast radiating outwards at the speed of, well, heat?
—Owwwwww, fuhh, sweetmotherof G-d.
He frantically searched, but with a forgivable (considering the circumstances) lack of systematic thoroughness through his wife’s medicine cabinet. At the front was an assortment of herbal shit: ma huang, Valerian Combo, dong quai, St. John’s Wort, etc., etc. The real deal was most likely towards the back, and he impatiently swept the entire contents of the cabinet out onto the floor to get at it. Lessee, lorazapam, Paxil, lithium, diazepam, Curtol PM, Stomach-It, Vivra-Pep!, Less-On, Diet Rite—damn it, none of this would do, but he swallowed a couple of Midol anyway as he lurched out of the bathroom and over to the bedside table. In his haste he yanked open both the drawer and the cabinet-style door at the same time and, lying as covert as daylight beside the bestselling Making The Most Of It (the sequel to last year’s sleeper hit, Having It All), why, lordy lordy look who’s 40, there, there they were by G-d, his wife’s migraine pills. He clumsily hurried off the childproof cap and, as they were somewhat less potent than what he’d gotten at Emerg, dry-swallowed 4 of them.
Then, before he knew what he was doing, his sinister left hand was dialling the number, 544-1111, on the portable phone as he stumped back into the bathroom and swallowed a gulp of mouthwash.
—Car 36 bease, it’s a … a sbecial … delivery. 1216, Boutelliers Boint. I bant to hire him espressly … excellent serbice … nid him right, right abay.
Soon Dan Shboom was speeding Dr. Ed back downtown in his tank-like ’88 Chevrolet Caprice ‘Classic’. Dr. Ed was freshly bandaged-up and his hair was combed, but he was still wearing the severely-wrinkled suit—and he had left his greatcoat behind. While he had slept, the temperature had risen precipitously for some reason, and it could not now be more than a degree or 2 below freezing.
Dr. Ed handed Dan Shboom another 50 from the back seat. —I nid a drink, he said. Sebaral, in fact. Where do you rec….
—Last call’s at 1 a.m. You’ve only got 25 minutes, said Dan.
—Is dere a, where would one, what you’d call a?
—An after-hours club?
—Yes. Becisely.
—Hmm, yeah. But it’s a student-run thing. Off-off-campus, obviously. Problem is, it’s a bunch of friggin’….
—Berfect, dake me.
—… engineers.
A few minutes later, Dan Shboom pulled up at the rear of an uncared-for limestone building in the downtown core, and, pointing at the metal fire escape, said:
—Street level’s a Pharmatopia, and there’s an artists’ co-op on the second floor; the ‘boys’ are up in the friggin’ rafters, which is accessible only from back here. S’not a proper attic or anything, s’all under the table. Landlord’s actually an English prof, owns half of the student ghetto, who knows where he got the money for it.
—Bhat’s his name? Dr. Ed asked, genuinely interested.
—He’s gotta couple. Lord Slum Chum’s one, but you might know him as Perfesser Fraser, said Dan. The mentioning of this name sent Dr. Ed’s stomach into the floor of the cab. I’ve never had him, Dan continued, but the undergrads call him Monty Hall.
—Bh-bhy? was all Dr. Ed could say.
—Cos he’s always willing to make a deal.
—Bhat kind of deal?
—Depends what you’ve got to offer, I guess. Like I said, I’ve never had him, but some Grad students I know have T-Aed for him, and they hate his guts.
—Why?
—Don’t know exactly, but they do have names of their own for him.
—Such as?
—Some call him ‘BulletProf’, others, particularly the women, just call him ‘The Penis’.
This information only served to confuse Dr. Ed further. He said:
—You don’t habben to know of a Fraser who works at Hôtel Dieu?
—The hospital? No, but this guy’s no doctor, though; from what they say, he’s barely a PhD. Anyways, to get into the club you’ll haefta go up these stairs, and…. Dan paused, wrapping his knuckles on the dashboard.
—Just knock, knocka-knocka, knock-knock on the door, like that. And only do it once, or they won’t open the door.
Dr. Ed nodded, and then repeated after him, knock, knocka-knocka-knock, but not too loudly, on the hood of the Chevy.
—That’s it, said Dan. You got it, ace.
—Bait here, said Dr. Ed, backing away towards the fire escape. As long as it dakes.
—Oh, just a sec’, said Dan in a stage whisper, gesturing through his window for Dr. Ed to come back towards the car. I almost forgot. The password. I’ll haefta warn ya, though, they do make ‘guests’ run quite the gauntlet here….
Dr. Ed, setting aside the nervousness that the name ‘Fraser’ had provoked, and ‘feeling’ conspiratorial now, bent over the car, resting his arms on the roof. —I’m game, he whispered back. What is it?
Dr. Ed wrapped on the door, as per instructions, but there was no answer for some time. The stairs had led him up to an exterior door, which he passed through into a short hallway, at the end of which was another door. There was nowhere else, no other door he could have gone to, so this had to be it. The hallway was lit by a single, bare bulb, which could have been no more (if that were possible) than a 20 watt-er. Something, probably the shit-brown indoor/outdoor carpeting, smelled to highest high heaven, emitting a combination of odours so vile that Dr. Ed had to get a willful grip on his gag reflex as he waited, waited, waited for someone to answer the door. He wanted a drink badly all right, but this badly?
Now, Dr. Ed had a good nose on him, nay, a great nose. At the moment, due to circumstances (the contusion, to be sure, but also the opiates, the opiates) beyond its control, it was operating on 50 or 60% capacity, but that still made it a very good nose. And so, as he stood there in the hallway, he performed an intuitive kind of spectral analysis on the location’
s several, stratified olfactory layers. There was (obviously) urine at the ‘base’ or ‘foundation’, but also beer of course, at a slightly ‘higher’, er, ‘level’. And, yes, or he ‘thought’ so anyway, there was, sitting (as it were) on ‘top’ of these 2 smells, several different … vintages … of vomit. Then (and he could not decide whether ‘circumscribed’ or ‘circumfused’ was the most precise term here) came the residual fumes of a commercial-strength, lemon-scented cleaner, naturally.
And while none of this effluvial data was particularly earth-shattering, Dr. Ed’s nose remained troubled by 1 final, teasing smell, something lying beyond these others, in another—what, exactly?—dimension? Something Other, at any rate, trying not to so much ‘cover up’ these baser smells, for that particular metaphor could never successfully work in this most peculiar case for the truly first-rate nose (something which Dr. Ed had never claimed to possess, but which, he was certain, was a reality somewhere out in the greater gene pool). No, even the adjectives ‘mask’ and ‘cloak’ were insufficient here, for Dr. Ed smelled a smell of truly audacious ambition, but whose osphretic reach so far exceeded its aromatic grasp that any nosebled numbskull or nasal naif, any dainty Dorothy lately arrived from cornpone Kansas could see that it was just not happening—that anyone’s anyhow nose would know, if it paused for more than a second or two, that this attempt at olfactory invisibility had in fact achieved its opposite. For, while it might momentarily deceive this the most primal of senses in the shortest of short terms, anyone prone to giving pause for ‘thought’ would ‘think’, would bloody well take notice, that this scented Wizard, like that of Oz, was nothing more than a failed fake, a complicated, incompetently fraudulent … façade!
Dr. Ed knew. He knew what it was. He’d smelled that smell before, but he had to name it to tame it. And it was on the tip of his tongue. It was just a few notes to the ‘left’ of the smell of Max’s flea mousse. —Wizard, he said to himself. Wizard….