PRAISE FOR ARCTIC SMOKE
“UNLIKE ANYTHING ELSE OUT THERE. NOUNS PUSH AGAINST VERBS IN WAYS WE’VE NEVER SEEN.”
—Mike Resnick, Hugo Award-winning author of Kirinyaga and Santiago
“ARCTIC SMOKE IS A PUNK ROCK FEVER DREAM. LIKE BRUCE MCDONALD CHANNELLING ANNA KAVAN, SCHROEDER’S PROSE HOTWIRES YOUR BRAIN AND TAKES YOU ON A SURREAL JOYRIDE THROUGH ARCANE CANADIANA.”
—Greg Rhyno, author of To Me You Seem Giant
“A WINTRY AND PSYCHEDELIC ELEGY TO THAT SPECIAL ALBERTAN BRAND OF DESPAIR. AN ABSURDIST PUNK-ROCK ADVENTURE THROUGH COUNTER-COUNTERCULTURE’S MOST OTHERWORLDLY SPACES. SCHROEDER WRITES WITH URGENCY AND GRACE, VIVIDLY DESCRIBING A ZOMBIE CAPITALIST WASTELAND WHERE THE STRANGE BECOMES FAMILIAR AND THE FAMILIAR STRANGE. READ THIS BOOK.”
—Mike Thorn, author of Darkest Hours
NeWest Press wishes to acknowledge that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.
Copyright © Randy Nikkel Schroeder 2019
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication — reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Arctic smoke / Randy Nikkel Schroeder.
Names: Schroeder, Randy, 1964– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190075074 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190075082 | ISBN 9781988732701 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988732718 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781988732725 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8637.C5757 A73 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Board Editor: Kit Dobson
Cover and interior design: Michel Vrana
Author photo: Nathan Elson
NeWest Press acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.
#201, 8540-109 Street
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6
www.newestpress.com
No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
Printed and bound in Canada
1 2 3 4 21 20 19
For Jennifer, my true north
In memory of Coco, who still has my guitar in his coffin
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part One: All the Old Haunts
Chapter One: Black Metal
Chapter Two: The Museum of Evil
Chapter Three: One for Sorrow
Chapter Four: Bring It Back
Part Two: Family Reunions
Chapter Five: A Walk Instead
Chapter Six: Ten Bottles of Coke
Chapter Seven: A Map In the Ashes
Chapter Eight: The Silver Circle
Chapter Nine: Chasing the Devil
Chapter Ten: A Welcome Dark
Part Three: Brown Alberta Blues
Chapter Eleven: Four Creatures
Chapter Twelve: Small Ice On the Hat
Part Four: Concerto Druggo
Chapter Thirteen: Don’t Forget the Reviving God
Chapter Fourteen: The Tip of a Drowned Witch
Chapter Fifteen: A Furious Goodbye
Part Five: Expeditions
Chapter Sixteen: Grains of Water, Beads of Dust
Chapter Seventeen: The Circus of What
Chapter Eighteen: Unzippings
Chapter Nineteen: Behind the Tree
Chapter Twenty: Rock, Raven, River
Part Six: Further, Farther, Forward, Backward
Chapter Twenty-One: Ends With the Serpent
Chapter Twenty-Two: What Sharp Teeth
Chapter Twenty-Three: Rush, Nickelback, and David Suzuki
Chapter Twenty-Four: Pause for a Drink
Chapter Twenty-Five: Her Invisible Beard
Part Seven: And Now, the Weird
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Bushes At the End of the Giants’ Bridge
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Hotel Agartha
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Hotel Agartha
Chapter Twenty-Nine: All Tables Are Covered In Vomit
Chapter Thirty: Need to Be Tied
Chapter Thirty-One: The Visitation
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Visitation
Part Eight: The Restoration
Chapter Thirty-Three: Odin’s Hat
Chapter Thirty-Four: The True Hallucinogen
Chapter Thirty-Five: A Few Deep Breaths
Chapter Thirty-Six: Enough Storms
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Reunion
After Word
Over the last few years a great evil has been descending over our world.
—Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 2015
Prologue
The Marquis Hotel has a century of murmur in its bones. Tales, too—inhaled at twilight by hissing vents, circled through hallways and hidden rooms, exhaled at daybreak. Downtown Lethbridge crouches under the edifice, toking its secret histories: the coal baron and his paramour, the runaway pastor’s daughter, the felon on the lam—clandestine meetings, illicit love, voyeurs known and unknown—Mormon bishops, gamblers, whores.
The Marquis is over a hundred years old, ancient history on the Canadian prairies. By day its fading brick reaches to the sun, slate shimmering reds and greens, stonework cooled by shadows. At night the Marquis casts a spell: its pinnacles slice and crack the moon’s light, then strew it in peppercorns across the tangle of gardens, while starlings gather on pitched rooftops to watch. Windows gulp the remaining moonbeams; behind the glass, fires spark and dwindle in the hearths.
Townfolk say an entire floor has been closed long as anyone remembers. Ghosts, demons, murder—depends who tells the story. Some say two brothers came down from the High Arctic in the Roaring Twenties, stayed in the Marquis a whole year. Haroot and Maroot Darker, both eccentric, both in love with some Japanese woman inexplicably named Zurah. When she fled northward with a new lover, a white knife thrower from the carnival, the brothers’ eccentricity turned to madness. Room One Thirteen, people say, demolished, sprayed with blood, but who killed whom? Some old Lethbridge folk tell the story differently, cackle over dark rum Cokes or burnt black coffee in taverns grimed with failing light. Insist the brothers did not die—could not die—for they were dark angels cast from heaven to wander earth, to feed on malice, to tear apart the bonds of love.
But the story can never really be told, because no thread is ever lost: every hard choice and chance encounter weaves the tale out of itself—stitching, whirling, snaring—forever knotting and unspooling at the same time. So the angels may still haunt the hallways, but who would know? For the Marquis has lost its voice to carpets, drapes, and pictures—to thick coverlets and layered dust.
The century is about to turn.
PART ONE
All the Old Haunts
Canada is a vast and empty country.
—Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 2005
CHAPTER ONE
Black Metal
Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. The late 1990s—
Black Metal. Death Metal. Nü-metal. Hardcore.
Lance Armstrong in, Wayne Gretzky out.
Economic psychosis. Terrorism.
Grunge out, rave in.
Hoodies, chinos, bombers.
Quiffs and buzz cuts.
Paul Bernardo.
White people.
Modems.
<
br /> Suicide.
Drugs.
Joy.
Snow.
A freak autumn blizzard blowing off a frozen moon. North winds rattling streetlights, howling glassy streets, air cold enough to crack its own molecules.
Kenneth “Lor” Kowalski sat wreathed with chill in an otherwise warm Marquis Hotel room, head tilted forward, eyes wide and unblinking, breath delicate. Snow crystals wove up the window at his elbow, ice knitting itself against glass, collecting shadow and spinning out twinkling patterns of light.
He shivered.
His guitar began to ring with overtones, light strumming its harmonics. Lor sat, salt stinging tonsils, tears on his lip and tongue. He let them sting. Just sat by the window in the darkened room, a universe pocked with a thousand stars.
“Damn freezing out there,” a whisper from the shadows in the corner, the clink of ice cubes in a glass. “Supposed to be El Niño this year. Get you a drink, sir, something to chase the cold?”
“No.” Lor wiped a tear. “Thank you.”
“Just clear away the dishes then?”
Lor paused a moment. He scraped a fingernail across the window, shaving off curls of frost, squinted at the shapes melting on his knuckle.
“Something troubling you, sir? Maybe a woman, lost love, lost time? An unwanted birthday, perhaps?”
Lor started, but ignored the question.
“Birthdays are the time for communion and community. Family, sir.”
Lor touched the frosted glass. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The overtones. The music. Do you see the stars?”
A sniff from the shadows. “I don’t hear anything. And I can’t see the stars from here.”
“Not . . . those stars. The ones in this room.”
“No, sir. Sure about that drink?”
Lor sighed.
From the shadows a man emerged, cloaked in baggy black uniform and brimmed hat, like a priest or cunning witch hunter. He stopped his cart near the window and bent forward, eyes hidden beneath the brim, remaining features speckled with moonlight.
“Sometimes a birthday is a dangerous thing,” he said.
† † †
Three weeks before his birthday Lor fled north from Underwood, Montana, chased by a vague, relentless horror. Twenty-nine years of uncertain rebellion, he thought, bad sons returning home to kill the father. An ill-considered adult life, lived always in the moment, always in opposition to some real or imagined System, now coming to collect the rent.
But who was the landlord?
For six years he had scuttled Underwood’s underground, playing with every post-punk band that mattered: Greasy Skank, The Peace Dogs, Molly Vomit—awake in late-night taverns, facing nameless lovers in strange beds, crouched beneath the covers or his wrinkled jacket, living on Twinkies, Slurpees, and cigarettes.
It occurred to him that he was a cliché, ready for yet another report on counterculture clawing the seamy undersides of zombie capitalism. Lor believed it. Here he was, dragging whatever shit he could into the light where it could be kicked and scratched to pieces. He itched to rip corporate logos, fire rocks at software execs.
“If you can’t see it, you can’t tear it up,” he told nascent and stray black metal legend Bård Guldvik “Faust” Eithun at a deeply unlikely chance meeting in the woods outside the Grimwater Theater one Christmas Eve. “We’re clinging to the underbelly,” said Lor. “Exposing the lies.” He spit. “Lies. Mystifications!” Faust put away his knife.
“What about God?” asked Lor’s current girlfriend, a pale Norwegian Catholic, after posting his bail for harassment and hauling him to her apartment to wash up.
“You know there is no God.”
“Are you some kind of satanist?”
“Ridiculous.”
Lor himself became a minor punk god when he smashed an entire collection of vintage guitars onstage at the Fleetwood Forum. They weren’t his; they belonged to some French Canadian black metal band called Trône du Sorcier. Lor beat up a university music reporter for a backstage pass, then crept ratlike through the tunnel past security and one protective keyboard tech to the stage, where he began the systematic destruction of a ’57 pearl Strat, a sunburst Les Paul with rosewood fingerboard, a pink paisley Tele, and a polished black Hentor rumoured to have once belonged to Alex Lifeson of Rush.
The show went on. So well, in fact, that Trône du Sorcier incorporated an increasingly bloody staged version of the destructive act on subsequent tours. Lor was dragged off by The Man, in a routine by now familiar.
Watching himself on the local news, wrestling the white policewoman, so soon after his twenty-ninth birthday, he realized that each year the routine became a little more like a corporate logo. A little more like something to be ripped off, then burned.
. . . Faust?
† † †
Ice.
Snow morphing to freezing rain halfway between clouds and pavement. Rooftops hammering, streets dancing a violent sheen of translucent spikes. A darkened city, a delinquent moon.
Lor lay on the bed, listening to rhythms. The old clock on the nightstand, the storm’s rumble, ice cubes in a glass.
“Do you have it, sir?” The whisper from the shadows.
“Nope.” Have what, exactly?
“You’ve touched it, sir. You’ve touched it, and now he will want it back, and you must bring it to him.”
Lor raised himself to his elbows and stared into the shadows. “Just who are you anyway?”
“The night bellboy. The concierge. The room service waiter. I have many names.” He leaned out of the shadows, hatless. His pupils were huge. “Tell me, tell me—do you have it?”
“What are you called?”
“I have many names.”
“Yeah, man.” Lor sat up on the bed. “But what’s your name?”
The clock ticked. Between beats, deep silence. After what felt like a century, the bellboy spoke again.
“Do you have his powder from the Museum of Evil? Because he is definitely going to want it back.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Museum of Evil
One of Lor’s Underwood girlfriends was a bleach-skinned Lutheran, an old friend’s ex-wife. She informed Lor he was a victim of the Weird.
“The Weird?” Lor said.
“God gives us our sense of place, our sense of order. You, being an atheist, are experiencing disorder and strangeness. The Weird.”
Lor snorted. “Order comes from a good hard look at the shit around me. The Weird? Fuuuuck. That’s just too many drugs and the stress of my birthday coming.”
“I doubt it.”
“What have I done with my life? Smash stuff. I’m seeing things, losing sleep, getting ’cid flashbacks.”
“Thought punks stuck to speed.”
“Hey.” He bit a Twinkie. “I know who I am.”
“Really? That’s what Franklin used to say.”
Next morning, while his girlfriend was at work, Lor thought about her ex—Franklin—his old bandmate.
“He was a bit like you,” she had said. “Always pretending he didn’t like company, didn’t need anyone’s comfort.”
“Don’t have to tell me.”
She did anyway. Oh yes, Franklin: so full of bullshit boys’ tales, all sins of the father stuff to justify his own bad behaviour and family neglect. Elaborate, ridiculous, fanciful lies. Like the one about his great-grandfather, the Padre or whatever, who had killed himself on his birthday by jumping from the Wind River Bridge. A symbolic act, according to Franklin, a totem of despair. Pretentious, irresponsible, self-pitying bullshit.
“Do you know the old Museum of Evil down in Sevens?” she said.
“Never been.”
“Who has? Anyway, Franklin used to lie that his great-grandfather had built it after coming back from an Arctic journey, in which he had seen things that no human ever should.” She laughed. “Melodrama right out the ass.”
�
��Yeah. Exactly.”
“Actually,” she said, “that museum was built by Canadian evangelists who came down from Alberta at the turn of the nineteenth century. Pale émigrés from Old Europe: they set up a huge tent revival, across town from some travelling circus, to combat the wicked shows and general atmosphere of paganism with the clear cool word of God. One of the evangelists painted oils of the circus performers, then exorcised the paintings right in the revival tent. Meanwhile, in a mirroring twist, the circus was performing perverted puppet shows based on the most freakish tales in the Old Testament.”
“And who won this showdown?” Lor hoped it was the circus.
“Well, nobody,” said the Lutheran. “Went on for months, one long hot summer, finally the Canadians missed home so much they packed up and headed back north. Circus was gone the same morning.”
“Tremendous.” This morning, Lor missed his old friends, Franklin and Alistair, in a way he hadn’t felt for years. It surprised him.
He dug out an old map of Underwood. Here it was—Sevens District, Rotten Belly cul-de-sac, the old Museum of Evil, closed for half a century. What better trip for a hot summer’s day, an ironic journey into the magic kingdom of memory?
† † †
“Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour.”
“What?” Lor sat up in bed and glared at the shadows.
In the half-light he could see the bellboy, caught between stars, pale as a crescent moon. “Ecclesiastes, sir.” The bellboy read from a hotel Bible. “It seems to dramatize your present state of mind. Yet you must press on, and bring his powder back to him.”
“You’re starting to sound like my Lutheran ex.”
“Will you continue north?”
“What are you talking about? Who’s he?”
“Chapter two,” the bellboy continued. “Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me.”
“Okay.” This was getting more and more like that freaky fucked up drug-dream back in Underwood, everything he was here in Lethbridge to escape.
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