Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  Rusty played on.

  Lor flopped down on the stage and clutched his guitar. They were all going to jail, and those assholes would never leave town. He glared out, quickly blinking, to the back of the gym. There, staring back, stood the boy in the red jacket. Something familiar about that smile—

  Lor smelled fire. Fatty was loose, perched atop the remaining amp, setting a match to Captain Canuck’s cape while the twins leaped and tried to knock him over. No! Not fire, Lor thought. It was happening all over again, exactly.

  He gripped the guitar’s neck, and couldn’t tell where his hands ended and the wood began. His spine turned to melody. Lilac blood painted his bones: wine, violet, sapphire. He heard buzzing at his thigh. The guitar lid was wide open, leaking flies. They hummed up in a dark cloud and cruised straight for Fatty’s head, now wrapped in smoke.

  Flash!

  Frump jumped onstage and started shooting.

  “The flies!” Lor pointed. “Alistair!”

  Alistair shrugged, then disappeared in a haze of blue molecules.

  Out over the sea of bobbing heads, at the far corner, the hatted boy stood on a chair. He pulled a knife from his red jacket, held it by the blade, drew it back to his ear.

  “Shit!”

  Lor leaped to his feet, shaking. Scents of pine and cinnamon exploded. Merry Christmas, Lor, get the hell out of there. He watched the flies circle Fatty’s head, angry as bees, felt a wrench deep in his gut. So the flies had followed him all the way from Underwood. So there was no longer any distance between: his old life was sparking against his new one, his Underwood now inside his Lethbridge.

  He fled, as everything fell to pieces—fled offstage and out of the narcotic swirl, out of the pine and cinnamon into the smell of new paint, through a cheerless, jingleless, untwinkling hallway with stage props crashing down around him, under a busted exit sign, into Bible-black night, Ecclesiastes ringing in his head—one for sorrow, two for mirth, all is lost, all is vanity, crash, crack, crumble.

  Christmas Eve.

  † † †

  “This way!” The freak from Kresge’s perched beneath the glowing exit sign. “Flee north from the snowman, my warding, beyond which the Knife Thrower cannot pass.”

  Slam. Lor tumbled out the door. A cold wind smacked his face and rushed his nostrils. His eyes watered. His heart banged up over one-hundred-forty beats per minute, thrash tempo. He ran.

  “But do not touch it!” the freak called after. “Whatever comes, do not touch—”

  The path zigged through the woods, roots splitting ice, leaves choking moonlight. Lor felt underbrush rip his clothes and fingers. Frozen berries fell. Poplar scent soaked his lungs.

  This path, he thought. This is not the path we came in on. He almost stopped, but heard muted buzzing behind him. Then the path swiftly dipped and went silent—no buzz, no birds, no wind. A path which no bird knoweth.

  Lor slipped. Fell onto his back, skidded down the sloping path, shadows rushing, underbrush catching his jacket. His spine cracked on a rock. He spun sideways and crashed into a stunted birch, unleashing an avalanche of wet snow from the branches. He lay for a second, cold seeping into his chest, then staggered to his feet. He shook the snow from his hair. He wiped his eyelashes.

  The world was bright with moonlight. He stood in a small clearing hedged with tall trees, in which a ring of old stones and ashes smudged one mummified pizza, single slice missing. Directly over the fire pit, from the tip of a long branch, a staring glass-eyed dolly hung swinging from its hair.

  Lor shivered. Beyond the trees was deep darkness. The cabaret seemed a hundred miles away, a hundred years.

  He turned to scan the clearing’s far side and felt his lungs tighten. Behind him, melting under a giant black cottonwood—an abandoned snowman, broken-down and dirty. Two poplar wands for arms, no eyes, no face. Lor took a step forward. Somewhere the drip of water, sound like the smell of dirt after rain.

  A faint buzz, growing.

  Flies.

  The cloud zoomed over the far trees in a low black drone. Lor covered his ears. The drone faded and swelled, till the flies reached the clearing’s end and banked. They made a low pass over the blinking dolly, then kamikazed as one mass into the snowman. Pock, pock, pock, and the hum sizzled out. Steam rose from the snow.

  Lor uncovered his ears and kneeled, stared at the pied creature melting before him. An urge to touch grew. He could almost taste the texture, the knurl of pinstuck flies and cobbled snow.

  Let me touch you, said the snow angel.

  Lor rose, stepped toward the snowman. The cabaret was gone. Somewhere in another life, lanterns swayed and spilled silver light, mixed with camera flashes and revolving reds and blues, cop cars, voices, hell to pay. But here: here was water and moonlight, no more.

  Lor reached out a quivering finger, paused, reached further, then slowly, gently, pressed his finger into the snowman’s face.

  Someone blew the moon out. The night went black. A crash of blues and greens seared Lor’s retinas. He heard sleigh bells and laughter, the same wicked laugh from the Crystal Room. His heart clenched.

  Then voices.

  “—out here somewhere—”

  “—he did?”

  “Hey! Lor!”

  “—the fuck are you, man—”

  Then,

  Yes. Let me touch you. . . .

  The snowman, alive in the darkness. Lor could feel it. Solid. Dense. At the centre of things.

  Bring it back to me. . . .

  Light chips splintered from wickerworks of rainbow. The snowman melted to snow angel, poplar wands to honeycomb wings.

  Let me touch you. . . . A laugh from deep down in the sky.

  Lor tried to roll away, so heavy he could barely move. He lifted his head, stared at two blinding lights. Someone grabbed his shoulder.

  “Lor, fuck sakes, man, we got to fly, cops are here and that shithead Frump’s got everything on camera, and I do mean everything.”

  “Fatty?” The twin orbs brightened, grew.

  “I am in serious violation of bail, boy-o, no going back now, just fucking fly.”

  Lor turned his head. Alistair’s white brim was soaked with blood, streaking his cheeks.

  “Your plan?” Lor said.

  “No plan, ’migo, I just . . . fly, man. We’ll see you in Yellowknife.” The hand unclenched on his shoulder. Alistair rose and fled into the trees.

  Lor turned to the bright orbs, heard an opening door.

  “Hey! Way to wreck the snowman, punky,” someone called from behind the lights. “You Lorne?”

  “Lor.”

  “Well, get in the van. We were about to leave without you.”

  Lor clambered to his feet and stumbled toward the headlights. He stepped on the old pizza. The hanging dolly brushed his face.

  “Here.” He felt a warm hand on his arm. “Help you up. Hurry now, I think the police are looking for you. And we have a date in Yellowknife.” The door closed. Seatbelts buckled. The van backed up, smushing whatever was left of the snowman. It felt like a violation and an invitation. The moon peeped again, illuminating a dashboard twinkling with lights, three heads bobbing in the mirror.

  “You okay?” A woman. Lor could smell her rose perfume.

  He nodded, then pitched forward. “My guitar, I have to go back.”

  “Don’t worry. Dawn Cherry gave it all to us. We packed it for you, along with the other gear.”

  The van lurched forward. Lor touched the bag of glitter in his shirt pocket. He felt a thrill of menace at the bottom of his thoughts, as if going north was his heart’s desire, and his worst nightmare. The van sped up, dark trees and shadows tumbling outside the windows.

  “To the Arctic,” a voice said.

  Somewhere, deep in the foliage, magpies chattered a furious goodbye.

  PART FIVE

  Expeditions

  The understanding that most Southerners have of the North has been shaped more by romantic imagery than p
ractical experience.

  —Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 2006

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Grains of Water, Beads of Dust

  “Let’s go.” Rooke broke a full hour of silence. Seri had spent the entire time in prayer.

  “Yes.” He pinged his teacup to its saucer. “Let’s move.”

  Seri spilled her own tea. After two pots of caffeine, almost anything jingled her nerves. But she recognized the new resolve in his voice. That was good. She had done her job.

  “To Lethbridge, then,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

  Rooke tossed coins on the table.

  In the car, he turned in the passenger seat to stare out the window. In a few minutes he pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and withdrew the tiny scissor, then began to trim his fingernails.

  “Ted, I just stay on Highway 2, right?”

  He did not look at her. “You say you love Saint Augustine.”

  “I never said that. Number Two, all the way to Lethbridge?”

  Rooke snipped. “What about his counterpart, the gnostic Mani?”

  Seri scanned for road signs. “He was a bit Zoroastrianist, a bit Buddhist. Straight south, right?”

  Rooke scratched his cuticles with the scissor, unfolded one of the blades and sliced lengthwise down the nail. What was he thinking? Seri felt relief that they were moving, that she had put Rooke back on the path. The next goal was to clarify the mandate and proper channels for report. But she hated this silence.

  “Ted. Mani was a heretic. Augustine renounced him.”

  Silence.

  She continued. “The gnostic view of evil is—”

  “Mani’s thinking is highly symbolic and alchemical. North is the direction of light, spirit, and goodness. South is the direction of darkness, flesh, and death. Corruption.” Rooke briefly looked her way. “Stay on Highway 2.”

  After that he would say no more. The miles roared by, and Seri realized she was speeding in increments. She began to worry: had she pushed too hard, bumped him onto a path more twisted and shadowy than she intended?

  “So Ted. What is your one true thing?”

  He began to scrape the hair from his forearm, pressing harder each stroke. Seri felt her bladder tighten with two pots’ worth of tea. Rooke notched the blade between fingers, looked about to slice. “Are you an angel?”

  “You mean, symbolically?”

  No answer.

  She cleared her throat. “Are you speaking in a metaphorical sense?” Silence.

  “Ted, I didn’t study Mani all that much. My pharmacology and geography are solid, but my angelology and theology are actually . . . .” She felt herself pressing the gas. “My humanities project was mainly about angels. But not real angels, only people’s beliefs about angels.”

  Still the silence. She hastened to fill it.

  “I started the project with a lot of enthusiasm, but it pretty much ended up in disillusion. I had to find one true thing to get through. Can you guess what it was?”

  No answer.

  “Pride, Ted. Pride to stand my ground, and finish what I started, and not run away.”

  Still the silence. It stretched to the fringe of what Seri could stand.

  Oh dear Lord yes, she had begun her humanities project with such enthusiasm. She’d been young: who wouldn’t be enchanted by a heretical religious text, printed on stone tablets, found somewhere on the Arctic islands? The stones, the Pica Mithra, were supposedly found in the late twenties by two brothers, Haroot and Maroot Darker. The text supposedly described a tribe of angels cast from heaven to wander the earth till time’s end. Their story was one of disenchantment and madness: under the spell of a single charismatic figure named only the Angel of Knives, they became increasingly capricious and jaded, like humans or ancient gods, and fell in love, and committed violence, and hated each other instead of God, until their community unravelled to diaspora, and all their tales became infected.

  “Their leader, the Angel of Knives, still hunts for reconciliation,” Seri said. “He sends magpies as his messengers, winging ’round the earth in search of the others. But the others are lost to hatred. His own wife searches for him, to kill him, meanwhile taking and casting aside human lovers as a way of maintaining the fires of her hatred.”

  It was nonsense, of course. The Darkers turned out to be hucksters, and maybe opium smokers. In fact, they were performers in some tiny Arctic circus that was rumoured to travel between Inuvik and Yellowknife, well-versed in the fantastic and the bogus. Seri knew the tablets would be fantastical; that much was obvious. But she wanted to feel their hard text beneath her fingers, wanted them to be a real gesture against the mundane and secular, not the invention of two entertainers.

  But the detail that bugged her most, the one that alchemized to insomnia, was the Angel of Knives. Because though the angel was legitimate, and mentioned in scholastic literature, he was nameless. How could an angel be nameless? Attarib, angel of winter. Anael, angel of December. Gabriel, ruler of north.

  Then Seri would put her knowledge to work, try to devise a rational explanation. Perhaps the Ad Lateran Synod of 745, which condemned the naming of angels. But none of the other names were lost. Perhaps Dante’s Inferno, where Lucifer was frozen in a lake of ice because of his incapacity for love. But Lucifer was a fallen angel, in hell, with his own set of tales. Perhaps there was no Angel of Knives. But then again, there was, there was. Finally, up late before her oral exam and strung out on too much Earl Grey, the sensible realization that the Darker brothers were charlatans anyway, that there was no visitation, only a story. But still, still, the name. . . .

  † † †

  Rooke stared at the incisions he had made along his fingers and knuckles, neat clean bloodless cuts. He turned a hand, held the knife to the veins on the inside of his wrist. By the time the car reached the Lethbridge outskirts, he seemed completely empty. The whole landscape echoed—empty plains, distant cattle, distant shore of the horizon.

  Seri was determined to reconstruct a mandate from what she already knew. She tried to remember what was known of Rooke, but found very little. Only his former official position as operations supervisor, his outward appearance. Somewhere there must have been a hidden infrastructure of details. But where? Rooke had always been ghostly, like his silhouette barely held together.

  She suddenly missed Granny Finnegan, missed the sensuous green tangle of Vancouver, the mist and smell of sea salt. She remembered the drive from Vancouver, how she had gazed back at darkening fields of cloud. Now, the emptiness of the prairie made her feel like dust. Endless, arid, exposed. How long before she fell into the sky?

  Rooke began to breathe through his teeth.

  “Ted. Do you know a good hotel?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “How do we pay? What’s our budget, our per diem?”

  Rooke pressed knife to wrist. “None.”

  Fine. Another detail to track. She braked in front of a small independent grocer. Danny’s, said the sign. “Okay, Ted. I need some information here.”

  Rooke put the knife on the dash and traced a nail across the bloodless cuts on his other hand. The skin pinched between his eyebrows.

  “Fine.”

  Seri began to drive again. She only knew one hotel in Lethbridge. One creepy hotel, with a sentient elevator and an ongoing convention of shadows.

  “Ted. I’m going to the Marquis.”

  Rooke clenched his fist, and all the cuts burst at once to trickle blood across his knuckles.

  † † †

  Seri gasped. Room One Thirteen of the Marquis was trashed—an overturned cart, broken dishes, green glass from a bottle. She looked away, thesn returned her gaze to the disorder. “How can a hotel rent a room that hasn’t been cleaned?”

  Rooke nudged a chunk of glass with his toe.

  “Okay, no problem.” Her stomach bunched. “We’ll clean it ourselves.”

  Rooke looked at her, face solemn, index finger dripping bl
ood. She recognized the set of his shoulders: he had satisfied his doubts, was about to tell her everything he knew. Her persistence had paid off.

  “Just go home,” he said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Thanks for the ride. Your part is finished.”

  “What? Ted. Damn it!”

  His face flushed, rising from the neck upward. “You were the unexpected visitor, the message girl. Your message is received. Your work is finished. Now go home.”

  “No. Absolutely not.” She shook her head, crouched, began to pick up broken dishes.

  “This is not your calling.” Rooke made a fist, squeezing more blood. “Can you imagine? The world is dry as grains of dust, all of us living useless lives, wound to the Internet, timed to pizza delivery, speeding playground zones, cruising suburbs in search of what? Another piece of microwave bacon?” He shook his hand, spraying red droplets. “The world is wafered with microwave miracles, wine to water, precious little communion. Go home. This is not your commission.”

  “Wrong. Wrong. It is.” She stared, aware of her tongue. “As I’ve been saying—”

  “Something still prowls this world, and more than just the brute facts of wickedness and suffering.” He dragged the bloody hand through his black hair. “There is an actual presence, my young visitor, evil like sweet poisonous blossoms growing in the secret places, the bad wiring among the refrigerators. You have no idea. Go home.”

  “No!” Seri chewed her tongue.

  “You do not understand where I’m going.”

  “God does.”

  His teeth clenched until they squeaked. He raised a fist, let it fall. Then turned and fled the room.

  “Wait!” Seri started after him, just about breaking her nose on the slamming door.

  “Ted, wait!”

  He was already in the elevator. She chased after him.

  He held the door with a hand. She sniffed hand soap. Under his perfect nails?

  “We’ve already been through this,” he snarled and flung back his hand, sprinkling bloody droplets. “Don’t you listen? Don’t you get it?”