Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  “Ken. Why do you cast your eyes down?”

  Lor waved off the joint. “All that space. Makes me dizzy.”

  Sid Hoar smiled. They trudged a length of stairs pounded into knots of rock, while Sid Hoar quietly and solemnly served as tour guide.

  “Wildcat Cafe.” He pointed. “Pentecostal Mission. House of Horrors.”

  He placed his hand in the small of Lor’s back. “Old Stope.”

  Lor saw the tree, a crooked Jack pine that reminded him of an old man, once tall, now stooped, still possessed of some barky wisdom. A croak above, and a raven alighted the treetop, where it opened its beak and voiced a harp-like shimmer.

  Lor’s breath snagged. He felt Sid Hoar’s hand stroke his spine.

  “Ken. You okay?”

  Lor stared at the raven. He knelt, began to unbuckle his guitar case. “I know why I’m here.”

  Sid Hoar knelt beside him, whispered: “When you’ve lost the meaning, you can create another.”

  Lor removed the magpie guitar. “I’m here to learn.”

  He plinked a few banjo notes, then raised his head to watch the raven flap into night sky, unspooling a slipstream of arpeggios.

  Lor smiled. “To learn. How to play this guitar.”

  “You may find your muse,” Sid Hoar said. He gestured. “In the Old Stope.”

  “In the tree?”

  “No, Ken. The Old Stope is a hotel.”

  “Hotel?”

  Sid Hoar nodded. “Behind the tree.”

  † † †

  “Telegram for Mr. Lor!” said the concierge. He looked a bit like a handsome witch—beaked nose, black hair tied back, jacket festooned with tiny silver medallions. And dark glasses. Funny thing in a dark lobby.

  “How can he see?” Lor asked the desk manager, Mr. Lifeson.

  Lifeson leaned forward. “He has the inner vision. Like Mr. Milton, the poet.”

  “Telegram for Mr. Lor!”

  Lifeson chewed the tip of his fountain pen. “Well, Mr. Kowalski, everything here is in order. Your room is waiting.” He jingled a key. “Everything prepaid. If you could just—”

  “Telegram for Mr. Lor!”

  “Mr. Lee.” Lifeson tapped the pen on desktop. “Really. It’s quite clear that whoever this Mr. Lor is, he is either unavailable or indisposed at the moment. So if you could just knock it off.”

  “The telegram says urgent,” said the concierge. “Must meet with you. Stop. Everything has fallen apart. Stop. Will you come with us? Query. Please rendezvous at—”

  “Yes, yes, Mr. Lee. Why don’t you go find Master Hoar? He seems privy to all the Old Stope’s secret business.”

  “Very well.” Lee trudged across the lobby.

  Lifeson sighed and turned to Lor. “My apologies, Mr. Kowalski. While the Old Stope is often the very paradigm of indolence, things do, at times, get a little hectic here behind the tree.” He handed the fountain pen. “Now, if you could just sign here and print your home address.”

  Lor signed. Then stopped, befuddled. “I. . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think I have a home address.”

  “Where are you from?”

  Silence.

  “Ahhh.” Lifeson took the pen. “Meeting a sweetheart, then?” He winked. “You have my word, nobody ’round here’s the wiser.” He tapped his forehead. “Why don’t I give you a tour of the hotel?”

  He crooked Lor’s elbow and clutched with a slender hand. “Come along. The Old Stope here was built in ’28. You may be curious about the seemingly anomalous Spanish design.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Our hotel was copied precisely from a moderately famous hotel in Lethbridge, called the Marquis. Bing Crosby stayed there during his annual pheasant-hunting excursions to what must have seemed, to him, the great white north.”

  Lor nodded politely.

  “Seventy-eight rooms, each with private bath,” Lifeson continued. “Meals can be taken either à la carte or table d’hôte.” He stopped, put a finger to his chin. “You may want to take your meals at the neighbouring Wildcat Cafe. Master Hoar and his gang most often do.”

  “The kid?”

  Lifeson squinted an eye. “Mr. Kowalski. You will find the ambience here is such that fraternity and solitude are never at odds. Do you understand me? Your room.”

  “Thank you.” Lor entered the small room and stepped lightly to the middle. He set his guitar case on the bed, slowly unkinked each finger from the handle. Then stepped back and put his hands in his pockets.

  “You move as if the guitar is set with explosives.” Lifeson, eyeing him from the hallway.

  Lor stood silently and watched Lifeson in the mirror. Neither moved. Lifeson said no more. Just stood, an elven boy scout with red jacket and long pale hair.

  Finally Lor turned and shut the door. He went back to the bed to stare at the guitar case, found he couldn’t open it, not yet. There was much work to do here, much to learn. So he stared. His breath slowed until his chest barely rose and fell. He lightly pressed palm to fingertips. At last he blinked and took a breath. Perhaps a walk before the first lesson would clear his head, prepare his mind. He turned, opened the door.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Kowalski?” Lifeson hadn’t moved a millimetre.

  Lor smiled. “I’m here to learn how to play that guitar.”

  Lifeson pursed his lips, turned and strode the hallway. “Mr. Lee!”

  Lor wheeled the other direction and wandered corridors until he found himself back at the foot of his bed. He unbuckled the case and stared at the magpie guitar. His eye wandered the spider cracks, the blues and greens. He reached a finger and tapped a harmonic. Yes, this would take much work. He filled his lungs, plucked one quick note, one spry triad, a ginger strum, a thrum, a dash—brittle chords stacking till they snapped and fell like dust to cold tile.

  † † †

  The magpie guitar did not want to be learned. It twisted each note, spit them in a pile at Lor’s feet. So Lor ripped off a piece of his shirt and scoured the strings, up and down till they stopped squeaking. Once clean, the fretboard had more glide, but insisted on catching his fingers between strings. He clipped and rounded his nails, then tried again. This time a few stray notes seeped between his fingers and hovered as a chord.

  Lor looked at his hand, shook it. “I did not play that.”

  He fingered the fretboard again. Tried for a standard barre chord, got a suspended seventh.

  “Shit.”

  He muted the strings at the bridge, freed a gush of notes. He muted harder, but the notes continued to ring, then wither. This was impossible. He tossed the chords, went for a regular scale, but his fourth finger locked, and the spiteful notes peeled off again. The finger kept locking until he put the guitar down and massaged his palm. What he needed here was more warmup. Give himself tendinitis, fooling around like this.

  The guitar went silent. Lor felt suddenly alone. Frustrated, he left the guitar napping on the bed and headed out through the hotel lobby.

  “Try the Wildcat Cafe,” Lifeson called from behind the desk. “Master Hoar usually takes his dinner there about this time.”

  Dinner? What time was it? Lor suspected he had missed a night’s sleep somewhere.

  Mr. Lee popped his head around the corner. “Telegram for Mr. Lor!”

  Lifeson dropped his head and put hands on hips. “Really, Mr. Lee—”

  Lor darted into cold night. If it was night. The sky was dark, but the snow held a ghostly twilight, almost mauve. Lor squinted as he crunched across iced rock toward the log structure still further behind the tree. He threw open the door. A hot rush fogged his glasses.

  “Ken.” Sid Hoar looked up from a long table set with coffee and a basket of steaming potatoes. “You’re just in time to join us. Sit. Let me introduce you more fully to my gang.”

  For the next few days—they seemed like days—Lor followed a pattern: solitary frustration with the magpie guitar, a walk out to the Wildc
at for a bit of spirit and community. The kids welcomed him as an old friend, introduced themselves each time with poise and gravity. Blackie Anderson, Sid Hoar’s main sidekick, perhaps girlfriend. Sleepy Jim, the laconic one. Jack Castle, Popeye Perkins. The twins, Dorothy and Hazel Cinnamon. Others, whose names he forgot.

  They chatted. Ate. Slurped coffee. Those kids drank a lot of coffee. After winding conversations, Lor would scurry back to the hotel, chased by a creeping sense of agoraphobia, pulled by the enchantments of the magpie guitar.

  On what seemed the third day, the guitar renewed its coyness. Lor, angered, decided to strengthen his fingers. He would sit and listen to Sid Hoar in the Wildcat, all the while squeezing a rubber ball from Lifeson’s surprising stash of toys. But the stronger his fingers got, the worse he played. He began to punch the notes, dig in with the pick, finally switching to a quarter. The guitar only tossed out bloody tonal shreds.

  “What exactly do you seek?” Sid Hoar peered through coffee steam.

  Lor squashed the ball. “I just want to master that damn guitar.”

  Blackie Anderson laughed. “Everyone wants to be the master. And everyone wants a quest. But sometimes the two can’t go together.”

  Lor squeezed. “What do you mean, a quest?”

  Blackie Anderson smiled, buttered her spud.

  Sid Hoar leaned forward. “Ken. Beyond Old Town there is a garbage dump that belongs only to the ravens. Through the dump wends a tiny river of black water. Where does it go?”

  Lor bit into potato, looked up. All the kids were staring at him, red cheeks poised over coffee mugs.

  “Well shit, I don’t know,” Lor said.

  “Exactly.” Sid Hoar dipped a finger in his coffee, then sprinkled a bit of sugar on the fingernail. “Its headwaters are unknown. What is its name?”

  Lor shrugged.

  “Right again.” Sid Hoar sucked the sweet finger. “Ken. Listen. Next weekend we journey upstream from the garbage dump to find out.”

  Lor laughed. “You kids on drugs?”

  Sid Hoar didn’t smile. Beside him Sleepy Jim stood, put his palms flat on the table.

  “Aren’t you coming with us?” he said in a raspy alto.

  † † †

  On the fourth day the sun briefly pierced the clouds like a necromancer’s eye. Lor immediately scuttled back into the Old Stope, back through the lobby—“Telegram for Mr. Lor!”—back to his room and the magpie guitar.

  Again it resisted his efforts. He tried to keep his thumb under the fretboard, but it crept over and sapped his leverage. He tried to use the whammy bar, but notes vanished the instant he touched it. He flipped the guitar to check the whammy springs, noticed a sharp crack reopening across the body’s back, starting at the routing and snaking up. He couldn’t tell where it was going, but it reminded him of the Mackenzie River on the enormous map Sid Hoar would spread across the table, back in the Wildcat, while his gang gathered ’round to sip coffee and squint at possible quest routes.

  Sid traced a finger across the map. “Ken. Where you from?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you have any friends?”

  Lor chewed a lip.

  Sid stroked the paper. “Anyone you love?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Come with us.”

  “No.”

  After that Lor rarely entered the Wildcat, and then only to nuzzle the shadows like a wallflower gone to seed. On the sixth day he tried to channel his frustration into new ways of seeing the guitar, the connections between notes, his own fingers. But the more he stared at the fretboard dots, the more they unmapped. On the seventh day the guitar folded inside out and liquified to utter nonsense. Lor felt his own sense of self begin to bleed, and stormed out of the hotel and across the snow.

  “Why don’t you let it master you?” Sid Hoar peered across the map and a haze of weed smoke, toward Lor’s darkened corner table.

  “You say something?” Lor snorted hot tea.

  He stomped out, back to the Old Stope. If the magpie guitar meant one thing, it was his own solitude, his own freedom from these damned ageless kids and everyone else who wanted to unravel his life to chaos. Friends? He had no friends. He had his guitar.

  He paused under an overhang and a brood of weeping icicles. Three ravens on the rooftop broke off their discussion and eyed him suspiciously.

  “I don’t care for your secrets,” he said.

  They blinked back. When he turned away, he saw the snow with such acuity—each flake’s collected crystals, each pock of dust, the prick and slide of scrolls and needles, hollow columns, spiky dendrites. He suddenly understood the collisions that buffed each particle and tumbled them to snowpack, ice lenses, ribbed and pitted strata.

  He punched up and shattered an icicle, scattering the ravens before the sky could fall on his head. He ran. Just inside the doorway of the Old Stope he slipped and fell to the floor.

  “Gracious, Mr. Kowalski,” said Lifeson. “That is some hurry.”

  “Yes.” Lor stood, dusted snow from his pants, and scurried across the lobby.

  “Message for Mr.—”

  “Yes yes, Mr. Lee. Mr. Lor, is it? I think we’re all well-acquainted with the name at this point. Do you think, perhaps, that it’s time to give up?”

  Lor ignored them and ran to his room, where he sat on the bed and tried to gather the threads of his personality. His stomach hurt. He wanted a drink. His hand shook as he opened the guitar case, reached and poked his index finger on the extra barb of string at the tuning pegs. As blood dripped, he felt the threads re-weave, bright pain.

  He picked up the guitar and simply let go. At first it coughed a spangle of quarter notes. But then, to his surprise, a cadenza of controlled runs, strings attending fingers. He tried a few chords; they shimmered, stayed in place. Playing on, he found he could compensate for the lack of sustain by adding rhythmic articulations, making use of the spaces and pauses between notes. Minutes passed. Perhaps hours. He broke out of the standard blues box and began to skip across a miscellany of more esoteric modes: Lydian, Phrygian, Locrian. Chords wove and unwove. His finger bled.

  “Holy shit.” He put the magpie guitar down and paced about the room. “I’ve got it. I have got it.”

  He strode out into the hallway toward the lobby.

  “Mr. Lifeson, I’ve learned that guitar.”

  A witch’s head popped puppet-like from behind the desk. “Mr. Lifeson is out at the moment,” Lee said. “Back soon, though. By the way, you ever heard of this Mr. Lor?”

  “Never.” Lor laughed. “Stupid name. Rhymes with whore.”

  He made for the doorway, intending to head over to the Wildcat. A bell rang behind him.

  “Oh, Mr. Kowalski!”

  He turned. Lee held up an old phone with a dangling cord. “For you.”

  “For me?” Lor put the receiver to his ear. “Hello?”

  A long pause, the sound of distant breezes. Then the tinkle of windchimes and a delicate giggle.

  “Hello.” A blue wind-blown voice.

  Lor’s fingers tightened. Who was this shithead?

  “Remember me, Kenny? I have to thank you. You’ve given me a voice.”

  Lor’s knuckles cracked around the phone. He strained his memory.

  “Christmas Eve?” the voice said.

  “Which one?”

  “The Pagan one.”

  Something gurgled in Lor’s throat. His eyes lost focus. He blinked. His finger stopped bleeding.

  The blue voice laughed again. “Lucky thing you touched me that holiday’s eve, baby, or we wouldn’t be going to this party at all. Someone’s been helping you hide.”

  Lor pulled the phone from his ear and set it on the desk. He stared at it for a second. Then grabbed it and smashed it against the wall, over and over, till chips of black plastic littered the desk.

  “Mr. Kowalski!”

  “Hang it up!” Lor said, already running.

  “But—”

&
nbsp; “Hang it up!”

  Lor sprinted to his room and grabbed the guitar case. Then fled the hotel. As he burst through the heavy doors the ancient payphone rang behind him. He stopped, considered, then ran on, down the snow-covered rock towards the bay. Another payphone rang just a block ahead. Then another. Suddenly the whole world was strung together with payphones, each one jangling in succession.

  Lor stopped by a red booth. The ringing threatened to pierce his eardrums. He wanted more than anything to leave it. He picked it up.

  “Run, Kenny,” the blue voice said. “As fast as you can. Bring it back to me.”

  Like hell, Lor thought, tossing the phone. I haven’t gone far enough. I’ll keep running, to the North Pole if I have to. Then every corner had a ringing payphone—the end of every street, the edge of every walk.

  He picked up again on Seventh Avenue.

  “Run, Kenny. I’ll break your heart.”

  He slid down a hill, right into another phone booth. Three ravens perched atop, chattering, framed by a pink horizon. Phones rang and rang, until Lor picked up again.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Who are you?”

  He was suddenly washed away in a mudslide of memories, every detail from his recent life gushing forth—his life, his friends, his own stupid name.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I’m late.”

  Coils of smoky blue laughter.

  Lor’s heart skipped. He was late. He had to be somewhere. He had to meet Alistair. He had to get the fuck out of here.

  He began to climb back toward the Old Stope. Halfway up the hill he turned to stare at the ravens, who stared back, pondering the spectacle of Mr. Lor and his blue guitar, climbing to evade once again the wiles of the Weird.

  Which now had a voice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Rock, Raven, River

  The top of the Rock was a tangle of strange avenues. Try as he might, Lor could not fix a single familiar landmark. The roads looked wider, longer, somehow newer. The buildings poured steam at the sky, hummed with bright light. He looked back down at the bay. Still there, squatting beneath aromatic moon and sky.