by Peter Unwin
In front of the woodpile stood a man wearing the checkered lumberjacket shirt of the type that Elaine always associated with serial killers and dairy farmers. His hair was a tangled mess of thinning strands, the shoulders broad but stooped with general fatigue. He worked without enthusiasm but easily enough, like a professional woodsman who has been replaced by a machine and has made peace with that.
With one downward cleave of the axe he neatly split the wood at his feet, then pressed the axe, head down, on the earth and leaned on it, before picking it up again.
“Hi Petro. How are you doing?” My voice echoed off the rock face.
He did not look. But he paused and put the axe back down.
“Jack. Is that you, Jack, buddy? I thought it might have been someone else.”
“It’s me.”
“It’s been a long time, Jack.”
There was a silence, the thick kind that exists between figures in a painting. Hopper, I thought. Easy call. It’s always Hopper when the light is dim and the isolation becomes overpowering.
“You alright?” He was looking at me now. “You look a little rough.”
“I’m holding my own.”
“What’s that on your foot, bear shit?” At least he had the decency not to laugh.
I nodded.
“You got something sticking out of your leg too?”
“Door handle, from Elaine’s car. I had an accident.”
“Let me guess. Brunette in a silver-grey two-piece?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and pinched his jaw between two fingers. “You might want to get that looked after, Jack. How is Elaine?”
“She threw me out of her house and she’s not speaking to me.”
“Yeah, well.” He looked around, checked his watch, then nervously examined the sky.
“Let’s get in,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”
15.0
THE PORTAL
PETRO’S MOTEL ROOM smelled of socks and garlic, sardines and man sweat, and something I sniffed out to be electronic overload, something that was not entirely alive, and had not been tended to: the odour of a computer that never got shut down or unplugged. A bear rug lay on the carpeted floor. This did not surprise me. A thick muscle of wires dangled in cords about the place, snaked up and down the drab walls, and were fixed to the ceiling with duct tape. On the counter near the sink sat a grease-blackened hot plate where pork chops had gone to die.
In the middle of the room a laptop computer rested on a table and next to the computer sat a heavy ashtray stolen from the Prince Albert Hotel in Thunder Bay. The table was covered by a red-and-white checkered picnic tablecloth.
“Have a seat,” said Petro looking at me, critically. “You shot? Or what?”
“Sure, I’m shot.”
“Husband, or wife?”
“Husband, wife, I’ve lost track … All these hit men out there nowadays, Pete, all they want to do is get their books published. Blogging’s not enough for them anymore.”
“Tell me about it,” he said with great weariness.
“Elaine shot me three times a while back. Never did heal right.”
Petro snorted and put his feet up on the table, cascading dirty plates, cups, computer cables, and greasy manuscripts over the side. “She still make those pies?”
“She does. It’s been a while.”
“Amazing pastry she makes, Jack, amazing.” Petro looked at me with a narrow, critical look.
He was right, of course. Elaine made the sort of pastry a man, if he’s fortunate, encounters once in his life, an impregnable, no-nonsense, cold-water recipe handed down from Viking times through eighty generations of red-headed women and smuggled out of Flores, Scotland, four centuries ago in the hold of a ship where it made its way to the new world and was finally secured in the dotty brain of Elaine’s grandmother who passed it on to Elaine on her sixteenth birthday.
For a moment we were lost together in the comradeship of good pastry, each of us adrift in memories of the eternal pie: raisin, peach, apple, blueberry, every slice of it coming fast at a church dinner social, the plank table groaning. “A man has to be a pudding head to not appreciate a good pie,” I said finally. It was a quote.
Petro nodded and stared at me.
“Looks like you been shot up pretty good, Jack. It’s what you signed up for.” He coughed and slid up his left pant leg, revealing a rut of hard red flesh. “Look at this. I been shot more times than Jesse James. Nature writers are the worst, Jack, you know that. Little disagreement about the passive voice, next thing you know the shotgun’s out. What’s a nature writer doing with a shotgun in the first place you might ask? Wouldn’t hurt a house flea, this woman. Live-trapped the mice. Transport an injured raccoon two hundred miles to a vet’s office. What’s she doing with a shotgun, right? She’s cleansing the world of men, Jack. Artistic types in particular, they drive her nuts, see? Artistic men are a provocation to her. She’s wiping us off the face of the earth like vermin. Like purple loosestrife. No mercy, Jack. We’re the new Asian carp of humanity. We’re nothing but emerald ash borers now, without the emerald. Get used to it.”
He pulled off his sweater to reveal an old moth-eaten “Thousands in Heat for Art” T-shirt, and then pulled that up, tapping himself on the chest, or where the centre of his chest would have been if not for the billiard-ball-sized cavity that occupied that part of his torso.
“You know what this is? This is not your run-of-the-mill writer’s gunshot wound. This is special. You see that? Musket ball wound. I’m not kidding. Upper Canada musket used in the Rebellion of ’38; she took it out of a glass cabinet and shot me at point blank range. Was it because she recognized herself as a minor character in Ten Thousand Busted Chunks? No, it was not, Jack, no. Simple question of mistaken identity. I mean, she thinks she’s my wife. Okay, fair enough, honest mistake. Wouldn’t be the first woman to make a mistake like that. Even my wife made that mistake. But if she’s my wife, what’s that make her daughter? Think about it. Girl’s nineteen years old, Jack, she wants more than a room of her own, let me tell you. She’s at the Rimbaud-Verlaine-Jean Rhys stage of her life, right? She wants her season in hell and her death in the afternoon and her naked lunch and her watermelon sugar and she wants it right now, baby. She’s on the road and she’s ready to howl. She’s all over me. She’s on my knees. She’s going after my interior monologue with her tongue. So fine. Her mother comes in the room all excited. She’s been reading too much Rilke again and she’s got an eight-page manuscript, neatly typed, a linked sonnet series on the subject of mature love or something like that. Well surprise surprise, she does not take well to the scenario in front of her. I mean, there’s her daughter in a flaming red bra and panty set and she’s sat on my knee like I’m a barstool, and she’s got her mouth open and she’s trying to suck out my interior monologue.
“Confusion ensued, let me tell you, Jack. Things happened fast. Mommy dearest goes into her husband’s office only in her mind the guy’s not her husband anymore. The guy’s a microbiologist. I mean so what? It’s a job, right? Someone’s got to do it. Only this guy’s published a book called, get this, The History of Slime Mould. Very highly acclaimed book. Critics have called this the greatest book on slime mould ever written. Only she’s had it with him. So what if he’s the Shakespeare of slime mould. She is not going to climb into bed with some guy who has written a book called The History of Slime Mould. She wants, like, Under Western Eyes, The Emperor of Ice Cream. She’s all hot for The Snows of Kilimanjaro, even Ten Thousand Busted Chunks. It’s driving her nuts. Her husband is not her husband anymore. He’s not even a man. He’s a petri dish to her. She wants the real thing. Me. Fine. I’m a man for God’s sake, I’m not fussy. Get in line. Only for some reason she gets all upset about the daughter thing, runs into Mr. Slime Mould’s office and comes back with his original British musket circa 1830, fully loaded, stuffs it against my chest, makes an unnecessary remark about my early work, and blows a h
ole in my chest the size of a shoe. She would’ve killed me, Jack, except that musket ball, it’s expanded over the centuries or something, so it’s too big to come out the barrel. No shit. Whole muzzle end of the musket blew apart, hits me like a cannonball, throws me thirty feet across the room right into an antique curio cabinet filled with dried butterflies. I love this country, Jack, you know that. But it’s no place for artists. Believe me. You know that too.”
“It’s not supposed to be,” I said. “I thought that was what we liked about it? No giant shadows to work under, no fame, no audience, no nothing. Pure art. Isn’t that what we said?” Petronius shook his head and finished assembling a complex twelve-paper joint. “Yeah well. At least we can finally grow good weed.”
“I’m bleeding on your floor,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it.” He licked the papers. “It’s a rental.”
16.0
THE SKIN THAT WROTE SHAKESPEARE
BETWEEN THE SMOKE and the blood loss I was starting to go a bit woozy. Petro’s computer flashed in front of me, a dizzying slideshow of endless depictions of women. I watched a throbbing sequence of women in their entirety, women in their nudity, women in their bathrobes, in graduation gowns. Torsos, toes, eyelashes, lips, thighs, noses, and other body parts whipped across the screen like telephone poles outside the car window. It took me a moment to remember I was in fact no longer in a car. My car was ruined. Elaine’s car. It did not exist anymore.
“That’s a lot of women, Petro.”
Petro nodded. “More than a lot. That’s all of them. All of them, Jack. All women, all skin, all the time, all of history. The future too for that matter. I mean it. Look at this. No more broadband bottleneck. They call it comprehensive digital genetics, CDG. Top of the line. All from one single chicken egg embryo.”
He tapped at the keyboard; the flashing figures and body-bits were replaced by a revolving diagram of a generic female form. The figure resembled a cross between a mermaid and the DNA helix, with the DNA helix fitted into her bone structure, winding intricately through it.
“5.1. Beyond sublime. Amazing what they can do. You are now one of four people in the world to have ever seen 5.1.”
The grid figure executed its languorous, skeletal roll until Petro knocked the space bar with his thumb, at which point the screen filled with amoeba-type-thingys. I saw fat senseless blobs bumping into each other, turning into two and then four.
“Take a look. That, Jack, is skin that hasn’t been born yet. It doesn’t have to be born anymore. Why bother? The whole birth thing is rapidly becoming retro.” Petro stared deeply at the amoeba-type-thingys as they banged away at each other like bumper cars. “Believe it or not, Jack, that is the skin that wrote Shakespeare. Okay, not exactly that perhaps, but a relative of that.”
It was a sometimes prickly point between us that Petro insisted the major works of Shakespeare were written not by Edward De Vere, but by a young woman named Amelia Bassano, the dark-skinned daughter of a clandestine Moroccan Jew. Out of nowhere I began a limp recitation of “my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and would have gone on but a vision of Elaine’s eyes, flashing and delightful, as she got out from the bath singing, overcame me and I was gripped by a sob. Petro was not feeling it.
“Get a hold of yourself, Jack. It’s not the nineties anymore.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry.”
“The nineties were a million years ago, Jack. At least.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
Petro gave me a stern look and continued to tap at the keyboard. The cellular bumper cars stopped bumping and turned again into the revolving DNA mermaid helix.
“There she is. The great Amelia Bassano, in the flesh, the pre-flesh, the molecular Amelia Bassano if you like. All from one partial fingerprint lifted off a sixteenth-century manuscript stored in the parish church at St. Botolph’s. I guess they ordered in some Elizabethan chicken balls for lunch or something. That is her, Jack, the cellular dark lady of the sonnets in digital format.”
Petro clicked the mouse, clicked it again, then knocked it on the table.
“And there is Amelia Bassano in a bikini.”
Sure enough instead of molecular thingies bumping into each other, I was now looking at a remarkably attractive Elizabethan in a bikini. A size twelve, it looked like.
“Dance-skin,” said Petro. “You want dance-skin, you got dance-skin. The first woman on earth to write a book of poems in English, there she is in a red latex dance-skin, reaching over to touch her toes. That is one flexible Elizabethan poet. You got to admit. You got a taste for female Elizabethan poets wearing latex, Jack? You got it. Check it off the menu. Put it in your cart.”
He clicked. Indeed there was latex. Infinite Latex.
He clicked again. “Rubber? Where do you stand on rubber? You flexible on rubber? Not everyone is. Imagine. In our lifetime. All skin. All the time. Anytime. Anywhere. Anyone. I mean look at her. Amelia Bassano doing the downward dog in rubber. Author of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Hail God, King of the Jews for Christ’s sake. Five hundred years ago she writes a four-thousand-line poem. The first woman in history to do that. Hopefully the last. No offence but who needs four thousand lines of anything? Even coke. After that she writes the plays of Shakespeare and now she’s doing a lap dance on your cellphone in a latex dance-skin, or rubber, or a Purity flour sack, whatever you want. She’s an app. This ain’t cut and paste. This is the future, my friend, get ready for it. Prototype ES.”
“ES?”
“Extreme specialization, Jack, where you been?”
I stared stupidly at the pixilated female on the screen. Petro budged his keyboard, causing the screen to flick and redraw itself. He began talking.
“Somewhere out there, there exists a woman.
A woman you have seen but did not know.”
He was beginning to speak in iambic pentameter again, and I wanted to put a stop to it before it got out of hand. “Petro, you’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
“The iambic pentameter thing.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “It is a gift the gods they gave me good. What can I say? This woman you have seen but did not know, Jack, neither in the Biblical sense or in the girl-next-door sense, you have never seen her naked, have you? How do you live with that knowledge? You don’t, right? No man can live with that knowledge. Or maybe you have seen her naked in the bath, the shower, on the carpet, or on her ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page or on the six o’clock news, but you have never seen her naked in a catalpa tree. Or on a surfboard. Or in a tree house for that matter. Are you following me?”
“No.”
“Watch this.”
The screen blossomed into a tree, a fine tree-like photogenic image of a tree, and in that tree a tree house. Between the planks of the tree house a swell of women milled about like beauty contestants, several of them waving.
“Third from the left,” said Petro. “Look closely. She look familiar? Go back, way back.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Exactly. Melanie Slazenger. The Melanie Slazenger, owner of the stretchy white shorts. Remember those shorts, Jack. Those shorts were indelible. Completely indelible. They put those shorts in the museum of stretchy white shorts. I’m not kidding, your first love, Jack, my first love. First love of every boy in Westdale Public School for a half decade. There she is, age forty-four. In the prime meridianhood of her beauty. In other words, a babe. A mature babe given to lushness, lounging around in a tree house. They’ve got tetrabytes of this stuff.”
“Petro,” I stared at the screen. “She might be a mature babe given to lushness, but she’s dead. She died in a car accident in the Caledon Hills when she was seventeen. Remember? She was coming home from the prom with that gangster boyfriend.”
“Yeah, well, alive, dead, who knows. The image lives on, Jack. The image doesn’t care if you’re alive or not. What’s death anymore anyway? We’ve got the Internet. The whole de
ath thing has been outsourced. Foreigners mostly.”
“She’s dead.”
“Dead, shmead, Jack, there she is flying an ultra-lite over the San Bernardino mountains in spandex athletic wear. There is no end to this. RAF, Jack. Remote access functionality. It’s straight out of game theory.”
“Where’d you get this?”
Petro laughed coldly and swivelled to me. “It’s what they call proprietary. You know where it comes from.” He paused. “There are things about the catering business that you don’t want to know. Digital food? Virtual fried chicken balls. Blu-ray chicken popcorn. Interactive pad thai. It all sounds good at first, doesn’t it? Online cuisine. All you do is type in your password and a forty-dollar wireless device connects you to something else and bingo, you got a dinner, thirty seconds later, there it is: digital chicken au gratin in your microwave, or flying in from control central. It’s not that simple. It’s all a front. Don’t you get it? It’s a front for skin. Porn, Jack. I’ll tell you about the fast-food industry. It’s crossed over; global fast-food pornography. It’s all a front. The whole field is swarming with black operatives. Nasty boys. Biometrics, retinal scans, chickens without heads, disgraced Mounties, digital fingerprinting. Insider trading. Search Engine Marketing. Family-based malware. Sooner or later everyone orders chicken, Jack, and even if they don’t. Digital airborne tofu? Burritos that fly. Gluten-free Gmail. Compulsory online dating? You bet. We’re not talking some hare-brained scheme here. Those flyers in the mailbox? All you have to do is touch them. Biometrics.”
The screen shone like a black sun and Petro stared at it, tapping away, clicking, directing a flow of fleshy parts across the charged static-y surface. Faces too. Some of them familiar to me.
“You stole this software. You stole it from Leggit Industries. That’s why you left Vancouver in a hurry. That’s why they want to kill you. That’s why they want to kill me.”