Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  The finger plunged dramatically into the keyboard.

  18.0

  OUT-GOING

  FOR WHAT SEEMED like a very long time I stared at Petro as he sat at his desk with his eyes closed and two aluminum pie plates laced to his head, his right index finger fastened to a keyboard. Finally I whispered, “Petro?”

  His eyes remained firmly shut.

  “Petro?” I reached and jabbed him on the shoulder. I jabbed him again. His eyelids strained, quivered, and bolted wide open.

  “God Almighty!”

  “Relax, Petro. It’s me.”

  His eyes closed again, his breathing an erratic rise and fall of his chest. In the silence I heard the hum of the computer, barely distinguishable from the surf of Lake Superior on the rocks below the highway.

  “Petro, listen carefully. You are still here. You have two aluminum pie plates fastened to your head. It didn’t work. Do you hear me? The experiment did not work.”

  Petro bolted up from his chair and yanked the apparatus off his head. “I’m not deaf, Jack. You don’t have to yell at me.” He sat down again and began to fiddle with the wires, yanking open a drawer and coming out with a roll of duct tape and a small pair of scissors. Finally he turned on me, his eyes shot with blood, and wild. “I’ll tell you what, Jack, you give a man the right tools and a few basic concepts of conceptual art, one or two algorithms, and there’s nothing he can’t do. You can’t stop him. Look at what Magritte did with a paintbrush and a few tubes of paint.” He returned, entirely focused, to the task in front of him.

  “Petro,” I said, “I don’t feel very good.”

  He gave me a swift look. “You don’t look that good either. You want some blood or something? You getting low?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Blood, Jack. Blood. I got two pints in the fridge.”

  He went to the fridge and rooted around in there, yanking out several half-empty wine bottles that he laid on the floor, emerging with what looked like, and in fact was, a mason jar filled with a wine-red fluid. “It’s good blood, trust me.”

  I was about to faint and the mason jar did not help. It looked a bit crusty at the top and I couldn’t help noticing the lid was sealed with wax paper and an elastic band. There was a hair in it. “Whose blood is that?” I said weakly. “Just out of curiosity.”

  “Joey Cohen’s, a buddy of mine from out west. The novelist. I guess the film deal fell through. I told him it would. They always do. He was running a bit short of cash, he owed me a hundred and twenty bucks, so I helped him out.” Petro rummaged in the crisper of the fridge and came out with a handful of clear plastic tubing. It looked to be the same tubing used on his doomed Lake Superior trip. “It’s pretty simple, you just stick one of these ends into your arm and hold the jar above your shoulder.”

  “Pete,” I said, “what type of blood is that exactly? It makes a difference.”

  “It’s writer’s blood, Jack, top drawer, Joey Cohen, God bless him.”

  I shook my head; a general lassitude combined with overall blood loss suddenly overcame me and I sagged. “I don’t think I want any blood. I need to lie down.”

  I went to Petro’s mattress and stood by the edge of it. There was no part of it that was not deeply stained.

  My eyes fixed on a particular stain that looked like Tasmania.

  “Petro?” There was no answer.

  He was back at the table fiddling with his pie plate apparatus and going at the wires with a small pair of pliers.

  “Pete?”

  “What?”

  “Why are we doing this?”

  Absorbed in his tinkering, he looked like an ancient watchmaker in the time of watches. Petro paid me no mind.

  “Pete,” I pleaded. “Why, Petro? What have we done? What hath man wrought? And what for?”

  For a while he seemed intent on ignoring me, then he laid the device down on the table, hard. He took a slow breath. “You want to know why, Jack, I got my theories. I’ll tell you why.” He looked at me intensely, even queerly. “Home,” he said. “Home. The most problematic of discourses. Everything we do, everything. Home, Jack, the one place we ain’t. The never-ending search for where we ain’t.”

  He exhaled with force and refocused himself, without conviction, on the helmet apparatus. “Let me ask you, Jack, you ever wonder what a man is? Do you?”

  Despite the blood loss, the injured limbs, and a lifetime of male privilege, I had to admit to myself that I did. My mind was not immune to the question of what a man was. Or wasn’t.

  Petro stared at the floor for a moment. “A man is just a homeless person who has a home. Think about that.” To demonstrate the truth of this statement he dug a hand into his trouser pocket, pulled out what appeared to be the entire contents, and slapped them on the table. Particle by particle he plucked through the pile. “Here it is, Jack. Me: a folded counterfeit five-dollar bill, three pennies, a loose key that fits a lock I lost five years ago, a shoelace, a toothbrush, a Burger King coupon, a pack of Zig-Zag cigarette papers, a strange piece of rubber, two wooden matches, and a rip of a paper containing the phone number of a woman whose name I no longer remember and who wouldn’t speak to me even if I did. Home, the ten thousand busted chunks. Home, Jack, it’s all about home. Where a man plays his violin and pets the cat. That one place that is yours, where you lie next to a woman who is yours too. Even the same women if it has to be. The place where your heart is, Jack. Both ventricles.”

  I looked at my friend. He was hardly visible in the dim room. Visible or not he was right. Of course he was right. Beyond a string of artists’ garrets where I had picked half-dead mice out of the congealed bacon fat of a cast iron fry pan, grimy basement places where the fridge gave me an electric shock every time I touched the door handle, or the back seat of a borrowed car, or someone else’s sofa, or a congenial twenty-four-hour laundromat, I had no home. None whatsoever. I’d had a home once, the only one I knew. Elaine’s home, with the cookbooks and the cold-water pastry and the hamster named Quo Vadis, the cats, the kids on the carpet, the kids crawling into the bed next to us holding on to their little stuffies, and the Depeche Mode songs. It seemed so long ago. For a moment I could smell her soap on the bedsheets, her perfume, Opium. I smelled the garlic on her breath.

  “Pete, I think I’m going to faint.”

  With that I fell to the mattress.

  19.0

  I’M OUTTA HERE

  WHEN I WOKE UP I felt slightly improved. I was definitely less drowsy than before, my leg throbbed less painfully, and when I reached for the wound on my thigh I felt a ridge of scar tissue already emerging from the flesh around the door handle. I took satisfaction in this. I was hardening a little. I was beginning to congeal. At least a part of me was.

  I called out into the dark room, “Pete, thanks for letting me do that. I needed it.”

  The place was lighter than before or thicker somehow, and something smelled funny, acrid, like singed hair. It was definitely singed hair. “Pete,” I tried again, “Petro.”

  No answer. I got up and went to the window and drew the curtain open. The woodpile loomed in the shadows like the pyramids of Egypt. The axe leaned where Petro had left it.

  From beneath the windowsill came a throaty muffled noise and against my better judgment I glanced down to where the dead proto-chicken had slid from the roof and crash-landed on the pavement. The thing had deflated somewhat in the time of my nap and now resembled a lump of pale and sickly cow shit. To my horror two large turkey vultures had mounted it, and bobbed and ripped the cadaverous flesh away with drunken abandon. One of them turned its royal purple head and examined me with an intimacy that was certainly not warranted. “Jesus Christ,” I thought, and shut the curtain.

  There is nothing like the sight of a turkey vulture up close, two of them, before lunch even, ripping out the guts of some headless $6.99 chicken slab takeout thingy to force you to re-evaluate what you are doing with your life. I knocked about the room desperate
ly, one wall to the next, knowing that more than anything else in the world I needed to phone Elaine. Elaine was the only direction I knew to go. Her voice was out there for me, vibrating from the radio towers on Montreal Hill, snuggling into my ears. Her vowels were out there, waiting, her vocables and her phonemes, every one of them ready to slide down the nape of my neck. I looked around the room for a telephone. There was no telephone. There is never a telephone anymore. Time was running out, again. I needed to get a grip. I needed to touch something solid.

  Stopping before the table I tapped the space bar on Petro’s computer. I tapped it again. The screen came to in a sputter of bitter particles and singing phosphorescences. The craggy hardbitten face of Petronius Totem filled the screen. He was handsome once again in a sort of cryogenic deep-freeze fashion, serene, satisfied and asleep, although looking far too much like Siegfried in the Fritz Lang version of Nibelungen for my comfort. The skin gleamed with a type of photoshopped computerized Germanic healthiness. The eyes were shut. An annoying look of beatitude rested on that face and a dark skunk stripe of burnt and frazzled hair showed above the left ear.

  The eyes snapped open suddenly, astonished.

  “Jack,” said the dumbfounded face. “Can you hear me? Are you there?”

  “You’re garbled, but I can hear you.”

  “Can you see me?”

  “I can see your face.”

  “I can see your face too.”

  The face that I was staring at blossomed and came to life. The eyes darted from left to right. “I’m in, Jack. I’m home. Avalon, baby!” He closed the eyelids again, experimentally, blinked twice, and opened them wide. “You’re next, my friend. Fit that thing on your head, Jack, come on home. You’re going to love this. You might get a little sparky thing at first.”

  “Petro …”

  “I can see everything from here, Jack. It’s unbelievable. Are you kidding?”

  “Petro, I’m not coming.”

  “What?” The eyes focused on me.

  “I’m staying put. I’m going back to Elaine. I’m going home.”

  Petro gave me a narrow look. For a moment he was without words but not for long. “Home? To Elaine?”

  “Yes. Elaine and the kids.”

  “She’s just going to shoot you, Jack. The slightest thing can set them off. You know that. She’ll pump you full of holes.”

  “She might.”

  Petro pursed his lips and blew some air. “You’re a good man, Jack. You’re not a great man. But you’re a good man. Now look, whatever you do, you got to get out of there fast. They’re coming for me. These are some pissed off chicken-eaters, Jack. I can see them from here. They can’t get me anymore. I’m out of range. Finally. They can’t get me. They can’t even trace my digital footsteps in the computer-generated sands of stopped time or whatever. Maybe they can send me an email, or a trans-dimensional tweet, who knows? I’m plugged in to everything. Listen to me. They’ve got an underground server farm in the hydro dam at Montreal River. They’ve left already. A convoy. They’re going to come in there, shoot anything that moves, and torch the place, like they did in Libya. No witnesses, Jack. You can’t stay, I got some money stashed away, not a lot. It’s in a margarine container beside my bed. It’s everything I got, it’s yours, take it.”

  “Thanks Pete, really.”

  For a moment both of us were silent. He looked up.

  “We did the Lord’s work, Jack, me and you. We put the blues in the black. We invented a country. We fabricated its meaningful myths. We unravelled a few rainbows, didn’t we?”

  “We did, we tried. At least we tried.”

  “You’re damn right we did. I love you, Jack. Say hello to Elaine for me.” He smiled at me. “I’m outta here.”

  He threw back his great head. What was left of his lank hair flew up and settled in maestro-like fashion onto his skull. His face was radiantly awash with a sunlight that did not seem natural even for a computer screen. His chin lifted, the wattle wobbled, the lips quivered, his voice came forth in full oratorical flight, clear and musical like a trout stream of old, one that still had trout swimming in it. He began to flute in that familiar resonant voice:

  “We roared

  Unbidden

  into the greasy limelight spouting

  brazen texts of dismality

  and incomprehension. We were gentiles playing

  the Jew’s harp, we wrote the Arabic of English

  We painted Malevich’s squares

  in the unearthly twilight

  of a bingo game in Kapuskasing, Ontario

  and we asked for nothing except

  the dispassionate recollection of passionate

  emotions, a bag of good weed

  the occasional multiple orgasm

  and —”

  At that point the screen crackled and broke down into prismatic cubes and the hiss of electric snow. Petro showed indistinctly, the grainy portrait of another street criminal caught on hidden camera in the act of committing a crime, then nothing. The face came apart, dissolved, sputtered, re-stitched itself, dissolved some more, and broke into dust.

  “Goodbye, Petro,” I whispered.

  20.0

  “IS YOUR MOTHER THERE?”

  IN TOTAL I FOUND five dollars and fifty-seven cents’ worth of change in a non-hydrogenated Imperial margarine container on the floor beside the mattress. The last fruits of Petro’s artistic labours had come to this. I appreciated it to the last penny. I have always appreciated the generosity of starving artists.

  I grabbed the container along with the counterfeit five-dollar bill on the table and fled. Wounded, but bleeding less than before, I put one foot in front of the other. My right shoe squashed. My thigh throbbed. Flakes of dried blood shook loose from inside my pant leg and tickled down my leg over the new blood and dropped to the ground. Both my shoes made dismal scuffing noises on the loose pebbles.

  In front of me loomed the telephone booth with the hanging door and dangling receiver. I fell into it and popped the lid on the margarine container, and began to stuff the coins into the mouth of that dying machine. As I did I saw a fine grey moss growing on the surface of the telephone box. The future will look like that, covered in moss. Mark my words.

  One by one the coinage of Petro’s life went into that gaping slot: old copper pennies picked up from the side of the road, green with verdigris, Mexican pesos, plugged nickels, a shilling, a Toronto subway token, leftover nickels, dimes, several buttons from shirts that no longer existed. The accumulated wealth of his life went into that slot, even the quarters and the one big loonie. It was all gone. Like Petro. It was gone into a machine and would not come out. Never again.

  I punched the numbers and waited. A lone gurgle came through the receiver from some place far away. The lone gurgle was followed by the unpromising clicks and clucks of a technology that was barely alive anymore. All of that clucking and clicking gave way to a ringtone that repeated four times, like a bird call, before anything actually happened.

  “Hello?” It was Maddy. Her voice was lovely and magical and unbelievable and blossomed inside my ear.

  “Honey, it’s me, your dad.”

  “Dad?” She sounded sleepy. “Oh hi, Dad, really, I thought you were dead.”

  “No honey, I was dead but now I’m completely alive and I love you and I love Alex and I love your mother and I need to talk to her.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Battered, honey, outnumbered, but not dead.”

  “Mommy told me you were dead.”

  “She what?”

  “Mommy told me you were dead.”

  “She said that?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “No, sweetheart, she didn’t. I think what she probably said was, ‘I wish he were dead.’ There’s a difference, a crucial difference. Visual literacy is one thing but words still matter, you know that. We talked about that. She was just funning you. Let me talk to her, okay, and don’t tell her it’
s me, alright? I want it to be a nice surprise for her.”

  “But she’s sleeping. She worked a double shift.”

  “Just wake her up, dear, gently. She won’t mind. Remember, don’t say who it is.”

  There was a long pause. “Okay …” Maddy sounded doubtful. Her tiny footsteps paced off. A white noise bounced in the receiver, like bees.

  While I waited for Elaine to come to the telephone the vehicles shot out from behind the rock face. They came up in a black convoy just the way Petro said they would, like crows, spaced tight, breaking out from the west in a murder of headlights, shearing off the highway and rumbling beneath the Bite Me Bait Shop sign. Two security sports vehicles with tinted windows came first; you know the kind, those sporty corporate Ford Falcons that death squadders all over the world insist on driving. From the dust behind them emerged a monstrous truck emblazoned with the thunderbolt-clutching Leggit Fibre Optic Chicken with no head. It too swung behind the back of the motel and came to a shuddering stop there, the air brakes hissing, followed by the metallic crack of doors opening, the quick, military barks of robotic men, the crack of another door, a wooden door this time, caving inward as they kicked their way into Petro’s room. “He’s not here.” A single voice came out furious and low from behind the building, like the cry of a wolf.

  Through the phone finally I heard Elaine approaching down the hallway, at least I thought I did: the hallway that had her oil paintings hanging on the wall, and those old Styrofoam numbers. It was a false alarm. She was taking her sweet time. While she took her sweet time the chicken-eating gangster moguls kicked around behind the motel. A mosquito flew into my eye. From behind the building appeared a lone chicken assassin. I slid to my haunches, trying to hide myself behind the hanging door of the telephone booth. In a moment the goon was satisfied, turned his back, and disappeared behind the building.