by Peter Unwin
I did not want to die. Just the opposite.
There were books that I had not yet read, so many books, Heda Kovály with her unflappable courage walking barefoot out of Auschwitz. Would I really die without reading her? I hadn’t even finished my Schnitzler yet. Gaping holes in my life: Ricarda Huch but no Heine, or not very much of it. What was the point of dying if Muratov’s book had not yet had a chance to guide my life? It struck me with a crushing weight that I had read “Todesfuge” only in translation.
“Elaine,” I sobbed. “Forgive me.”
In my final moment I longed for the big bosomy warmth of Elaine with her meatloaf and pastry recipe, the kids, the rescued starlings, the gentle snoring and everything, even the shitty Depeche Mode CDS if I had to. I looked up. The sky flew apart and I made out the stars still, giving way to the daylight. I never doubted the stars, or the constellations either; those two tributaries of the milky way that had only hours earlier flown over me waving like white, nebulous seaweed. All of those souls up there, all of those drowned people. I was about to join them.
Elaine, I thought. Why not?
From my knees I looked up and in the light of dawn I found the face of my killer. He’d removed his glasses and hat and I saw the dark, smooth face. Avuncular it was. Why is it that they look the same, these men who kill for their bread? Why are they all so familiar and so damned avuncular? This one, in fact, looked very familiar.
“Doug?” I whispered. “Is that you?”
13.0
WHO IS JOHN GALT?
I TRIED TO get up from my knees but failed. Doug stood towering over me, as tall as I remembered him. The only thing missing was the hockey bag.
“Hey, Jack old man. Good to see you, buddy. How the hell are you?”
“I’m good, Doug.”
“You don’t look so good. What’s that door handle doing sticking out of your leg?”
“Car accident.”
He nodded. “Blonde? Blonde in a thong, right?”
“Brunette,” I said. “Brunette in a bikini.”
“You’re lucky, Jack. You got 2.0. 2.1, the upgrade, Blonde in a Thong, no one survives Blonde in a Thong. One hundred percent kill rate, very effective software. Believe me.”
I looked at him carefully. “You’re telling me that was a program?”
“Holographic Digital Display. HDD. They transmit from a microwave tower up on Montreal Hill.”
“Who does?”
“Who?” He laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Leggit? The chicken people?”
“Yeah, the chicken people. Think of them like the government, Jack. The people get the chicken they deserve, right? Abraham Lincoln said that, I think. And every piece of chicken comes with a price. That’s me. I said that.” He waved his pistol. “Anyway, enough talking politics. You still married?”
“Sort of.”
“Me too.”
He took the safety off the Colt .45.
“Doug … wait a minute. What is this? Suddenly you’re a hit man? You vanish from a Barton Street rooming house without so much as a goodbye and become a hit man? Suddenly you’ve got no time for small talk? For friends? For old times?”
Doug frowned. “I don’t like that term hit man, Jack, never have. If I had to call it anything I’d call it clerical worker. What’s wrong with that: clerical worker? I mean, it’s not, like, my core identity or anything. It’s just something I do. It’s an entry-level position. External facilitators, that’s what they call us in Human Resources, EFS. I prefer that term. I’m more than my job, Jack, I do other things too. For example, I fish, I surf the Internet. I collect Soviet-era submarine clocks, and I’m taking a course in creative writing at Humber College.” He levelled the Colt .45. “Nothing personal, Jack. Just a matter of rational self-interest.”
“Doug, listen to me, I know what Ayn Rand has to say about brotherly love, okay. She’s entitled to her opinions, okay. But so am I, right? Like it or not, we’re brothers. You and me. I mean, we share time, space, and memory. That is a type of brotherhood. Remember? Remember that room? Mohammed Mohammed. That extremely large prostitute?”
He smiled. “The three-hundred-pounder with the fainting spells?”
“Exactly.”
He stopped smiling.
“He’s dead. Mohammed Mohammed is dead. About her I don’t know.”
I stared at him. “Christ, Doug. What is it with you?”
“Wait a minute. I had nothing to do with that. He got himself beat to death with a pool cue in a fight during a snooker game in a pool hall in Toronto. It was an Eritrean–Sudanese thing. I warned him about Toronto. All that multicultural stuff. He didn’t listen.”
Doug was starting to get bored, I could tell. My time was running out.
“Doug,” I said, “there is something you need to know.”
“About what?”
“About existence.”
“Existence?” He perked up.
“Existence, Doug …”
“Yeah?”
“Existence … Listen to me, Doug.”
“Yeah?”
“It exists! It really does. A consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. Just grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms. You are one of the few people I know who gets that!”
“Yeah, I do get that. You’re right.”
“It all leads us back to the central question.” I looked straight at him. “Doug,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Who is John Galt?”
Doug nodded. He more than nodded. He leaned forward in anticipation of a marathon talk. He rubbed his leather gloves together. Then he squatted down beside me.
“That’s the question, Jack, you’re right. That’s the whole crux of it. It’s like, okay, he’s Prometheus, sure. Everyone knows that. But he also represents everyone, or maybe no one. Get what I mean? He’s like an Everyman. Except he’s not really an Everyman because he’s special. He could be a hit man, right, but he wants to write a book or something. So what’s he do? Both, Jack. He does both. He excels at both. Get it?” Doug stared at me, his eyes on fire.
“Both?”
“Exactly. Both.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Are you kidding? I should write a book. I am writing a book!”
“No kidding? A book? That’s excellent, Doug.”
“Really? You think so? You don’t think it’s a little too much maybe? I mean, who isn’t writing a book?”
“Listen Doug, many come calling but few are answered. You write a book about Ayn Rand and the digital fried chicken industry and you’ll have a bestseller on your hands in no time. Critics’ll go wild.”
“You think so?”
“Guaranteed. A book like that would blow the lid off a lot of things.”
“It sure would.” Doug was in raptures. “I’ve even got a title. Want to hear it?”
“Are you crazy? Of course I want to hear it. The title is everything.”
Doug pressed the revolver to the side of his face and shooed some mosquitoes and blackflies with it. “Okay, get this: Atlas Hugged …”
“Wow, Atlas Hugged? You thought that up yourself?”
“Hold on, it gets better. Atlas Hugged: Embracing Your Inner Fountainhead.”
“Doug, Doug, that’s killer. Really.”
“You think so? I like it too. It’s just, I mean, the thing holding me back is I don’t know how to get in the front door, once it’s written. The book world, it’s pretty closed up, right? It’s all who you know, right? Everything is who you know.”
“Don’t worry, Doug, I’m willing to help you out there.”
“You will? You’d do that?”
“Listen carefully, I don’t give out my agent’s number to just anyone, ever, okay? It’s not something I do, not even under torture. You understand?”
He nodded. By this point his eyes were glassy.
I slipped my wallet o
ut of my back pocket and snapped the card in front of his face; it was gold-laminated.
Doug took the card carefully, stared at it. He even held it up to the moonlight.
“It’s real, Doug, trust me. What you are looking at here is the actual business card of a real live literary agent.” The real live part was an exaggeration; the woman was dead of drinking-related causes, but her card lived even if she didn’t.
“Wow!” Doug was breathing very heavily, nearly panting.
At that point a furious car horn blew twice from up above on the highway. Doug managed to get his attention off the card.
“Listen to that guy.” He jerked his pistol up top to the highway. “Have you ever seen a suit like that? Every day that suit. It’s killing me. I don’t get it. The more ruthless the killer, the higher up the corporate ladder, the worse the suit. Why is that?”
“I don’t know, Doug, publishing has the same problem.”
He shook his head and put his attention back on the card. Reluctantly he slipped it into his inside jacket pocket then raised the Colt .45 above his shoulder and fired three shots into the air.
“Wait five minutes, Jack, and then get the hell out of here. Don’t use a cellphone, stay off the highway, and whatever you do, don’t eat any chicken, I mean any chicken. And don’t touch anything. Don’t put your fingers on anything. Don’t vote, don’t fill out any surveys. Don’t flush a toilet. Don’t scratch your balls. Don’t look in a mirror. Retinal scans, right? Stay away from all surfaces. Biometrics, you wouldn’t believe. It’s a black art. We’re living in a surveillance society, trust me. They know, they know about Petronius Totem, they know Peter Tidecaster. They know you two go way back. They’re closing in. No loose ends. That’s what you are, Jack, a loose end. So don’t do anything stupid, right? Don’t order takeout coffee either; if you do, make sure you’re wearing gloves.”
He stopped and looked at me. I could tell he wanted to reach in for the card and take it out again and only by a serious force of will was he preventing himself from doing that.
“Once my book gets published, we’ll have to have a book launch, right, I mean, that’s what it’s called, when the book comes out? A book launch, right? Like for a ship.”
“A book launch,” I said. “That’s right.”
“Then they make a movie out of it, right?”
“That’s right. A major motion picture.”
“Wow.” Doug beamed. “I love you, buddy.”
He leaned in and gave me one of those great big nineties-style man-hugs and nimbly made his way up the hill.
14.0
THE BITE ME BAIT SHOP MOTEL RESTAURANT AND DANCE EMPORIUM
I WAITED TEN MINUTES before I laboured up the embankment to the highway. The pavement fell away in front of me. The road stretched empty and pure, and I put one injured leg in front of the other.
I hobbled east.
After some minutes of hobbling I approached what appeared to be a partially collapsed dew worm and lottery bunker on the other side of the road. To my amazement the proprietor of this building crouched in front of it with a flame flickering in his cupped palm. He was dressed, for some reason, in pyjamas. His ears were enormous. He had assembled in front of him a heap of lottery tickets that he was setting on fire. Strangely, he waved to me or gave me the finger, and then, finding this gesture inadequate he took his forefinger and drew a line across his throat before returning intently to the strange business in front of him. None of this cheered me.
From the bottom of the embankments on either side I heard the clattering of the grasshoppers and the rustle of slugs. The country was snug in the emerging morning and the wilderness throbbed with the murmurous lamentations of living things. Bugs and insects mostly. A car approached. I hauled myself gingerly over the guardrail again and hid, hugging my body to the hill. Torturous memories invaded me while I waited. There was that curled yellow Post-it Note on the fridge deconstructing me as a doomed skirt chaser. There was Maddy in my lap while I read to her the essays of Czesław Miłosz in translation, Alex fielding his first short hop in front of my eyes. Soft hands, kid. Soft hands.
Two thousand kilometres of this? Of dead man limping? Every limp punctuated by tormenting memories of my children? Of Elaine? I took a breath and tried to evaluate the situation.
I could in all likelihood make the gas station/dance emporium where Petronius had scribbled his wisdom on the condom machine. Beyond that my event horizon was limited. I entertained a grim picture of myself slumped against the pay phone up there, pushing my last coins into the slot, waiting for a connection. “Elaine,” I moaned, “I’m dying.” “Promises, promises,” she snapped, and hung up. My outlook was not positive. The door handle stuck out from my thigh; I’m no doctor but I thought it wise to leave it there for the time being. The last thing I wanted was to be leaking out all over the north shore. In back of me my shadow drifted off. I was listing like a freighter in a Lake Superior gale and I was bleeding more than was good for me.
I made the steep hill and felt the grade levelling out beneath my feet. After about an hour of laboured shuffling the Bite Me Bait Shop Motel Restaurant and Dance Emporium showed darkly against a background of forest and rock. The “24-Hour Dew Worm Service” sign hung at a forty-five degree angle; it was clear the dew worms had decamped en masse a long time ago. On the lawn a forlorn plastic birdbath stood covered in green fungus. The remnants of three lawn jockeys rose nearby, decayed, their heads busted off. One possessed a head, but only one eye. Fungus dripped from its mouth. What temple have you been cast out of, buddy? Behind it the mullein stalks poked above the window frames of the dead motel; a freshly inscribed, handwritten “4 sale” sign fluttered from the wall. Gaping holes showed in what I took to be the office roof. It looked like a flock of digital chickens had gone kamikaze here, and bombarded the place. Stray feathers stuck to the shingles or fluttered down, like snow.
I pounded on the door of the office with my fist. I pounded hard enough to set the tacky hardware store letters that spelled ‘o-f-f-i-c-e’ dancing and rattling on their screws.
“Lady!” The sound echoed across the tarmac and lost itself in the black spruce and the black rock walls where it fell in with the honk of a heron. They never shut up, those herons, day or night with them it’s “cronk cronk, cronk.”
“Lady, I know you’re in there, let me in. Hey, I’m dying out here. Hey.”
Dying or not my pleas brought no response. I put my ear to the door and heard what I took to be the silver hiss of an old-fashioned television and the idiotic bark of a laugh track. I pictured the room full of mummified children with their video game consoles blinking over top of them while they clutched hand-held devices. Grand Theft Auto and Donkey Kong battled it out for the supreme literacy of the universe. The woman did not answer. The television murmured to no one. The gamers did not game.
I kicked the door, a straightforward front kick, striking precisely with the ball of my left foot. A few drops of blood hit the door; the car door handle impaled in my right thigh screwed itself in even tighter and made me scream. Nothing happened. I was not kicking my way into anywhere.
“Let me in,” I cried stupidly. My God, I sounded stupid. Everything I said was stupid, I was stupid. Everything on the planet had become stupid. Only Elaine was not stupid. Her eyes, her face, her breasts, these were not stupid things. Her toes, her touch, and the smell of her hair put her beyond the reach of stupidity. Elaine in fact was smart. She was far away from me. Like a smart person. Smart people made a point of being far away from me. I was getting maudlin, I knew it. Loss of blood does that to me.
A vehicle approached on the highway, sounding like the surf getting closer. The twinned white headlights slid uphill, levelled off, and went away. I was terrified by them.
This is how a man dies! it struck me. Like this. Since the beginning of history he dies in front of a broken-down bait shop that has long been baitless, crawling wounded toward a vacant motel/one-time dance emporium, to p
erish alone with a snapped car door handle sticking from his thigh, rejected by wife and children, his minor and major works ignored or misunderstood by the reading public. His shoes smeared with bear shit. I would bleed out, like my poor great-great-uncle Jack Vesoovian on the corner of Portage and Main, without even eating my last bowl of Bird’s Custard. My life would come to an end out front of a motel bait shop that offered “24 hour emergency service” for the discerning fisherman.
“Elaine,” I put the word on the air. The air took it from me at once. The air does that. The word was a talisman, a one-word prayer for redemption: Elaine. Her name was a stone for me to suck on in times of thirst and need, which were legion. The air had it. I saw the pay phone, twenty yards away, the receiver off the cradle, hanging down. It did not look good. My pockets were empty. Whatever loose change I once possessed in my meagre life had fled from me in the car crash. I was bereft and broke with blood draining from my leg.
From close by a sound came out of the air, a muffled echo from the rocks and the sighing of leaves. Then a hard-sounding shot pierced the wood and the forest and the slug rustles, and the gnawing of porcupines, and the squabble of nature in general. Someone was chopping wood for Christ’s sake! Had been for some time. The sound drummed into the lofty foliage of the pines.
Bracing my wounded leg with my hands I lugged myself as quickly as possible around the side of the motel toward the sound, angling to the back of the building where the rusted air conditioners lunged from the rooms. A chip truck loomed, without tires, or hope, or even chips, resting on cinder blocks. The blue paint had peeled off in sheets from the hull. The roof was staved in. Behind it raspberry and blackberry canes drifted, and a few flattened and rusted beer cans lay on the ground. Another not very hopeful “4 Sale” sign scribbled by hand lay limp against the chip truck door and lifted in each breeze.
I shuffled forward beneath the rock face, through the brambles and the canes and abandoned mattresses. What a scrapyard the north is! A dirty yellow light still burned from a bulb bolted to the motel, and illuminated a woodpile, fifty cords of it anyway, stacked the interlocking way by someone who knew how to stack his wood.