by WD Clarke
The eighth ball hadn’t yet shot up when I began to feel my right hand getting hot. I looked down. The smoke bomb was already alight, and was starting to burn my hand. I didn’t stop to think, let alone wait for the fireworks to finish off. I simply hucked the thing, just to get it out of my hand.
Gipper’s fort erupted into flames. The smoke bomb had landed right on top of it, a direct hit. Gipper’s guards panicked, scattered. I instinctively wheeled around, to look back for Gerald. Standing right behind me was Victor, tossing and spinning a Bic lighter in the air. He winked at me, and grinned.
—What did he do? Amē asks, somewhat agitated now.
—Guess, I say.
—Did he… ?
—What do you think?
—But, what happened with the fire?
—Hey, no big deal, Gerald ran to the house and got a fire extinguisher.
—Was it far? She says this last word loudly enough to turn heads a few tables over.
—Not very.
—And?
—And, I guess, he somehow managed to put the thing out.
—Jesus! How’d he… ?
—Beats me. He only took a minute or two to get back, but by that time the fire was, I dunno, 20 by 20.
—Feet?
—Yards.
—But Victor? What about Vic—Victor?
She is surprisingly angry about this, almost as if she were me, the me I used to be.
—What? I say.
—What, she says, just what was that bastard’s fucking deal?
—He was just a kid, I say. All of us, we were all just kids. You know, boys.
—Yeah, I know. Boys. Yeah.
We got into a predictable amount of trouble over all that. I never told Gerald what had happened out there, just before the fire, and I doubt that Victor would have, either. The upshot, anyhow, was that I didn’t speak to my brother for the better part of a week, content to let him silently and mistakenly blame me. Keeping him in the dark and angry gave me something on him, I knew: possessing information that he lacked raised me just a little bit higher in my own estimation. It gave me an edge, an edge that, before, I never knew that I needed.
I felt smug, I felt powerful, I felt as if I had been given a peek into a book of esoteric knowledge of some kind. I had to guard it, I had to keep it to myself, lest it be taken away from me.
Something new, something given to me? I wonder, now, if that’s the way it was. Or was it, rather, that this edge or power or whatever it was that I now felt I had was in fact the result of something having been already taken away? Was this new presence, in fact, an absence? Or what?
It was, in any case, a new development. Change of some kind, if not progress or growth. This was a whole new way of thinking about myself and others, and it had just arrived like that, unbidden. It was just a part of the architecture of adolescence that I was entering, I supposed, like pubic hair and body odour. I was, of course, unaware that adolescence was itself merely an opening, a gateway. Looking back, I’m now predisposed to see it in terms of descent, or fall. I know that if I had had a less happy childhood, or if my experiences in ‘adult life’ had been better, I might see it differently. I might, but I don’t.
Here’s how I see it. For me, adolescence is an opening into a kind of chute, into which the fuel, our blinking childhood, is poured. There’s a furnace in the basement; it’s inefficient, and it pollutes. But it produces energy. Energy to keep us going. Energy for other purposes.
—Victor was Gerald’s best friend, I say (aware that I am being underhanded, that I am as tendentious as they come). I am his brother. You are/were, whichever, his girl-friend.
This seems to confuse her, is not the answer that she expects, or wants. She gets defensive, gets her back up a bit. Good.
—Are you equating us, you and me, with Victor? she says. Because there is no us, Isaac, despite what you might think or desire. You can’t make me feel guilty: I haven’t done anything.
—Yessss. But you are running away.
—Not running—going. Leaving a mess that I didn’t make.
Perfect.
—That’s right, it just ‘happened’. I agree. You’re right. Point Finale, case closed, bye-bye.
—Ok, go ahead, mock me, fine. But this, er, ‘attraction’ between us has showed me that I don’t really love him the way I thought I did, that it’s time to, to move on I guess, to be blunt and callous and all that crap about it.
—That’s it, you got it. Move on. Ease on down the road.
—Funny.
—Keep on keepin’ on.
—Ha.
I decide to accelerate the process of this ‘facilitation’.
—You don’t love him at all, I remind her, as gravely and with as much ‘concern’ as I can muster.
—I don’t love him.
—Me neither.
She turns away now, cups her poor forehead in a support formed by her thumb and forefinger, and I know that the best part is coming. This is what she came for, what I’ve been preparing her for, and now she’s found her place in the script. It should all be downhill from here. Wait for it, now, breathe, take it in, bud:
—I don’t love you either, she says, bravely.
—Me neither.
—At least we’re clear on this, she says.
—Crystal, I say, adding a jaunty little wink.
—Your problem is … she says, looking skyward now….
But then she jumps the gun a little, slaps a tenner on the table, stands up, takes two paces away, one back, as if remembering that she’d forgotten to finish her sentence. Her mouth opens, closes. She goes. She misses out on the punch-line, on the totalising revelation or epiphany. She doesn’t get to hear what happened next.
What happened next was I went to the little red-haired girl at the bus stop, the one Gerald was oh-so-shyly sweet on. Phooey to that, of course. I went and I told her what Victor had said to me after I’d burned my hand. I told her that Gerald made it a habit of following her through the hallways at school. I told her that he timed his arrivals at the bus stop to hers. I told her to check it out: guaranteed he’d be sitting one table over at lunch, facing her. She took it all in, mostly blank-faced, but with a tiny movement at the corner of her lip, which I took to be meant for me, for my concern for her well-being. She started getting rides to school with her dad.
Advent came (and with it the mandatory trip to the Confessional), leading up to Christmas and New Year’s, which were uneventful. Then big winter storms dumped all over us, and when one of them caused the State of Emergency to be declared we learned that Governor Michael Dukakis showed great fortitude and leadership. Spring came and went, and when school got out Mr. Jones got my dad nominated, seconded and voted in for membership in the Yacht Squadron two towns over, where all the Newcomers went. Dad moved us into a bigger house in an older part of town, about five miles away. We all got new friends. Gerald stopped going to church, and got an after school job to save up for a stereo and for college, in case his plans for the Air Force Academy fell through. Then I blinked and school started up again, and I discovered I’d somehow made it to Grade 8, and had been thrown into the bmoc category at the middle school. Then quite suddenly we’d come full circle, and it was nearly Thanksgiving, and I found myself dating my first girlfriend just before my thirteenth birthday. We met at a pep rally, just before the annual homecoming game against Cohasset. Her name was Liz. She was older, in Gerald’s grade.
8
He Grew Out Of It: 1997, Toronto
Then, Amē says, blushing and covering her mouth with the back of her hand, the way an embarrassed Japanese woman might. Then I simply pedalled off. To Japan and Tim, then to Oz, and then to Singapore, and then back here and….
—And the ‘Kid’? David says. ‘Kid River’?
She doesn’t say. She says:
—The Shawinigan Kid. Roger Scruton.
—It’s a bit odd, isn’t it, that he met this Victor fellow on his way …
to see you?
—The Kid’s a press secretary now. For the Minister of Finance, or the Shadow Minister, whatever.
—But this Victor, I don’t quite get it, get him, quite. I mean….
She fixes the Entrepreneur in her gaze, stabs her third half-smoked Marlboro into the ashtray in front of them, which is shaped like Elmer Fudd’s befuddled head. She assesses the situation for the umpteenth time that evening. No, he doesn’t appear put off. Quite to the contrary: he seems smitten, almost—if one can use that word anymore, nowadays. Yes, smitten, maybe, as if all her indiscretions, her bumblings and stumblings through her own and other people’s lives were not pushing him away at all, but drawing him very much ‘in’. The fact that she intrigued him intrigued her.
—Victor? she says carelessly. Him? There’s nothing to get. He was just a little shithead, that’s all. Maybe he grew out of it, who knows?
9
The Extasie: 1977, Duxbury
They Are Back at Victor’s house, at work on another Project. This one is a 1:18 scale model General Dynamics F-16A Fighting Falcon (affectionately known by its pilots as ‘The Viper’), done up in the red, white and blue markings of the original 1973 YF-16 prototype. Gerald watches as Victor tenderly dabs the tip of the needle of the delicate, slender nose of the jet with just a drop of TesTors Model Master FS37038 Flat Black from out of one of the dozens of ½ oz. bottles on the counter, while Victor lectures on the jet’s chief innovations: its ability to engage in dogfights (unlike the fighters of the 1950s and 60s, which had sacrificed manoeuverability for speed—on account of a spurious Pentagon theory about a permanent historical shift in the nature of air combat), and its afterburner engines, for heretofore unbelievable range in such a compact plane.
Victor, who has better fine motor skills, has done the majority of the assembly and the painting. Gerald is the one with the cash flow, and has procured the paints, which were not inexpensive, and has helped out otherwise where he could. Gerald holds their fragile little baby and proudly dotes on each precious detail, tenderly caressing each & every curve. It looks pretty damn good, he has to admit. Victor pulls out his walkie talkie, and motions for Gerald to do the same. It occurs to Gerald that both he and his friend’s last names are represented by the same call sign.
But O alas, so long, so far
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though they are not we, we are
The intelligences, they the spheres.
We owe them thanks, because they thus,
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.
On man heaven’s influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air,
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.
As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle thought, which makes us man:
—So, then, Victor says, Geronimo Tango, over.
—I read you Victor Tango, over.
—Uh, did it go smoothly? Over.
—That’s affirmative Victor Tango, over. Putting down the walkie talkie, he continues: It was wicked awesome. Got to tell ya though, I had a friggin’ sweatball happening, nearly shit myself thinking she’d come back before I was done.
Victor puts his walkie talkie down. —Wicked, he says.
—Yeah. You remember A Bridge Too Far? We saw it in Hanover?
—With my friggin’ mother?
—Yeah.
—Uh-huh.
—That scene with Robert Redford, where he’s paddling across the river at night, is it Nijmegen or Eindhoven—
—Nijmegen.
—And shells are bursting all around? That was me. I was him, saying Hail Mary’s over-and-over, I don’t know why, but I did, I kept saying ‘em, like a tape loop or somethin’ as I crept towards those plants. I don’t know why, but those 20 seconds seemed to take hours.
—I know why.
—Why?
—Simple. You were afraid. Afraid she’d catch you with my dad’s test tubes, near her precious things. There’d have been no excuse you coulda made that woulda been good enough. You knew it. So you were afraid.
Gerald is embarrassed. He stares at, shuffles his feet.
—You’re right, I was, he says.
—There’s no shame in being afraid, Gerald. It was a brave thing you did today. Unethical I grant you, but brave nonetheless. And there’s no bravery without fear, you know.
—I know.
Silence, as both boys reflect on this thought.
So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
—But I kinda feel sorry for her, you know? Gerald says.
—I know. But you had to teach her a lesson. You had to show her.
—Miss Stone.
—Her.
—You think so?
—Not really I guess. Nevertheless, the fact remains, you did show her.
—I did. I guess I did.
—Let me tell you something, Gerald. The mission you accomplished today was real, it was true, do you follow?
—Yeah, I guess.
—Let me tell you something. My old man? He’s been a liar and a coward all his life. He was a draft dodger, Gerald, I’m sure you heard it somewheres, his name, Roger the Dodger. And I’ll tell you something else: you know how he used to tell me, us, that he was a scientist, that he worked on inventing these new pesticides and herbicides, the very ones that were in your arsenal today? Well I’ll tell you something I’ve known for a while now, a long while actually, and I’m glad I don’t have to keep it to myself anymore. Fuck it, Gerald, my dad was no scientist. He’s a technician, a fucking quality control fucking laboratory technician. He does fuck-all for a living, Gerald, and it’s not a very good one, I don’t have to tell you that.
Gerald says nothing, but looks at him with understanding. He picks up the F-16.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love revealed may look;
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
—She sure is a beaut’, he says, with a tentative finger on the fuselage. You wanna go test her out?
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the following artists for the use of their work in the making of White Mythology:
Front Matter—Emblem VIII (“Take the egg and pierce it with a fiery sword”), Atalanta Fugiens—Michael Maier (1617).
Pg. 1—Scrooge Extinguishes The First of Three Spirits, fourth illustration in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol —John Leech (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843). Courtesy of Philip V. Allingham, Victorianweb.org.
Pg. 117—Emblem IX (“Putrefactio”), Philosophia Reformata—Johann Daniel Mylius (1622).
Pg. 233—Proserpine (oil on canvas)—Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1874). Courtesy of Art Resource.
Pg. 235— lithographed by W.E. McFarlane “The wedding-guest sat on a stone…”, Plate 2, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner—J. Noel Paton, (Art Union of London, 1863), Courtesy of Chris Mullin, Fulltable.com.
Pg. 284—Doggerel verse sung by Ted inspired by “The Stranger Song”, Songs of Leonard Cohen (Copyright 1967 Sony Music Entertainment (Canada) Inc).
Pg. 407—Emblem XXX (“Luna is as requisite to Sol as a Hen is to a Cock”), Atalanta Fugiens—Michael Maier (1617).
Pg. 416—Song lyrics inspired by “Like Soldiers Do”, Brewing Up With Billy Bragg—Billy Bragg (Copyright: Sony/ATV Music Publishing (UK) Limited, 1984).
End Matter—Alchemical Wedding, from Rosarium Philosophorum (1550). Also reprinted in Artis Auriferae (1593), Biblio-theca Chemical Curiosa (1702), C.G. Jung’s Psycho
logy and Alchemy (1953), and Leonard Cohen’s Death of A Lady’s Man (McClelland And Stewart Ltd., Toronto, 1978).
Capsules image on back cover—Beschreibung: Kapseln *Fotograf: Markus Würfel *Copyright Status: GNU Freie Dokumentationslizenz.
Selections concerning weather forecasting—Quoted verbatim from The Weather Handbook (Bloomsbury press, 1994) by Alan Watts.
The author would also like to thank the following for their support and assistance in the making of this book: William and Joan Clarke, Dr. Kenneth Clarke, Karen Christie, Evie Christie, and Dave Bricker.