Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  By that time, Dougal had started getting high. I had started not getting high, myself, some time before, and we seemed to be heading in opposite directions, that way.

  I don’t know how he discovered it, the thing with televisions. The old-fashioned kind, with the big glass picture tube. There’s an electron gun at the base of that tube, and a powerful electromagnet. Sometimes I’ve wondered if he didn’t see something about Michael Persinger’s God Helmet, maybe on the Discovery Channel, and tried sitting with his discarnate head directly behind a television. Because that was how he was doing it. Getting high.

  It made him less interesting company. Still likeable, but not as sharp. Less observant. Less funny. Muted. I don’t remember what we talked about, that last time, other than Ferrara’s movie, and Christopher Walken. I saw my wife wave to me, from in front of the Ridge. Said goodnight.

  I lost track of him, after that, and didn’t find him at the next Folk Festival, where I’d always seen him before. I kept expecting to run into him, after that, and didn’t.

  In his absence, which at first didn’t seem like it would be permanent, I started seeing Kits differently. I’d remember something he’d told me he’d seen happen there, or notice something that had changed since I’d last seen him. I wondered about his body, the accountant who lived in Burnaby and was a tax consultant. (I’d helped him find that out. Yellow Pages.)

  I sat in a Greek breakfast place on West Broadway one September afternoon and watched the towers of the World Trade Center collapse, over and over, on a flat-screen television he couldn’t have gotten high with, and wondered what he would have made of whatever that was that I was watching.

  I got an email from Dougal, on the eve of what we didn’t yet know would be Obama’s election. I was in Paris, with my daughter, about to return to Vancouver.

  It was quite long, a single paragraph, all lower case, no commas. I read it, went out to dinner with friends, came back, read it again. Then, evidently, I managed to accidentally erase it from the Telus Webmail server. Election excitement took over, the flight back, then when I remembered it, looked for it, it was gone. The address forgotten. Some utterly unfamiliar domain abbreviation.

  He said he was “down in Klong Toey” (he didn’t use caps but I googled it) which he described as “this Bangkok superslum” and that he thought I “would really dig it” there. He said he and his “gf” were there “on business,” but that they lived in Okinawa. Okinawans, he said (I’m not quoting, and this is all from memory), occupied something like the niche in Japanese culture that Cajuns occupy in American culture. Sexy, into magic, musical, foreign without actually being foreign.

  He said that she was “typing for him,” but didn’t explain further.

  He never mentioned his girlfriend’s name. Described her as “a shaman.” A female Okinawan shaman, twenty-seven years old, whom he’d met three years before, late one hot June afternoon at Kits Beach, under those big old trees where the beach curves off down toward the West End.

  He’d been “doing way too much television” by then, he said, and was really feeling like shit, and to make himself feel worse had gone down to walk, disembodied, through sun-warmed flesh and the abundant evidence of the action of pheromones.

  I imagine him, from what he wrote, walking toward Kits Pool, into the shade of those trees, and as he walks becoming aware of what he at first assumes is a time-mirage, that same shiver, and this around a small figure seated alone on a bench. Strange that anyone would have a whole bench to herself, that time of day, that kind of weather, and as he draws closer, he sees, without knowing it at first, that she sees him. Sees nothing else, in fact, this skinny, acne-scarred, cat-faced girl or woman, of deeply indeterminate age, in flip-flops, cut-off jeans and a black Hello Kitty tank top with white bra straps showing. She smiles, then, and something about her teeth terrifies him for an instant. But then she briskly removes her very large, very black sunglasses, and in her eyes he sees, simultaneously, the gathering darkness of thousands of miles of Pacific thunderheads and an utterly carnal desire.

  Mine, she says, triumphantly, in no human language.

  And he finds himself, shortly, in the back bedroom of a bed and breakfast in Kits Point, being introduced to the ins and outs of one particular kind of Okinawan shamanism, one centred around congress with discarnate entities.

  Within days, they are on a flight to Narita. Many things being possible to the adept. Most particularly to one who has now, finally, at the end of a very long search, found her familiar.

  He didn’t do television any more, he said. Life was interesting. He liked Okinawa, but also they travelled. And what had I thought about Johnny Mnemonic, he asked? I hadn’t been able to see it with him when it was released, and he’d missed it at the Hollywood. He’d recently seen it on DVD, he said, and thought it had its moments.

  BUFFY CRAM

  LARGE GARBAGE

  THEY’LL COME AT night, the papers warned. They’ll come hauling carts of empty wine bottles, all racket and ruckus, their skin the colour of city, the smog rubbed right in. They’ll have no hygiene, no fixed addresses, no shoes or toothbrushes. Some will have no teeth. They’ll come with their sores and their fleas and their nineteenth-century coughs, hacking and spitting, scratching and bleeding right into our gardens and backyard gazebos. Like disease they’ll come, fast and unforgiving.

  “A new breed of homeless. A sign of the new economic reality,” the experts claimed, although it meant little to us at the time. We knew they were overeducated, unemployed, and migrating, east to west, across the country; we’d heard rumours of how they set up at the edges of wealthy neighbourhoods, living off the fat of the land, hosting late-night salons in other people’s living rooms, but we all had our own economic realities to contend with. Some of us had even been forced to lay off the help.

  At some point we of Cherry Lane stopped reading the stories. Sure, we fit the profile: a pocket of stately homes just at the edge of downtown, but our city was the westernmost in the country, set apart from the mainland by a two-hour stretch of ocean. We knew the last mainland city had been overrun, but we never believed they would find their way here, to our island, our city, our Cherry Lane. After all, we convinced ourselves, how would they afford the ferry fees?

  My wife, my daughter, and I were seated in the formal dining room when they arrived. Ever since we’d let Lucinda go, my wife had been doing the cooking and she liked to separate our carbs from our proteins so that night it was all carbs: linguine with some sort of seed sprinkled on top and a side of delicate purple potatoes.

  “Would this be a fingerling potato?” I asked mere seconds before they appeared outside our window.

  At first there were only two. He wore a tattered tuxedo and pushed a cart filled, not with empty bottles, but with books. She was wearing mermaid-green taffeta, pearls and heels. The shoes were shaped like playground slides and not quite her size, so she weaved and wobbled like a child playing dress-up. There was a certain aura about them—not the mix of sex and decay I’d expected, but something almost noble, as if they’d been plucked from another time. They were both wearing pink sun-halos. Even the sunset had been recruited for this, their arrival scene.

  My fingerling tumbled to my plate, scattering seeds everywhere. My wife nodded to my daughter, me, and we rose, moving to the window to watch the newcomers zigzag from the mouth of one driveway to the next, opening our recycling bins, the sturdy kind with wheels and lids. Creak-slap went those flip-top lids. Then the frenzied sifting—paper against paper against plastic.

  “It’s happening,” my daughter said, the small envelope of her lips quivering, a certain mosquito pitch rising in her voice.

  It was all too much for my wife—who swooned beautifully, allowing me to steady her. Then I remembered the boxes I’d stacked in front of our garage the day before, once I saw the Gregorys had put theirs out, each one marked CHARITY in Lucinda’s thick black writing.

  “What about the Large Garbage?”
I asked my wife, tightlipped so she wouldn’t see me tremble.

  For some reason we, the residents of Cherry Lane, had taken to calling the third week of September Large Garbage Week when we could just as easily have called it the Annual Charity Drive.

  “I don’t know why you insisted on putting that junk out so early,” my wife said.

  “Because the Gregorys did,” I replied. “And the Felixes.”

  “The Gregorys did because they left for Flor-i-da today,” she said. “And the Felixes did because you did.” When she was smarter than me in a particular matter she enunciated very clearly.

  The three of us leaned towards the window then, holding our breath, but it was too late. The strangers were tearing at boxes, emptying them of clothing, holiday placemats and old bed sheets. We looked at the tangle of high chairs, dismantled bunk beds, retro skis and tennis rackets stacked up in front of our neighbours’ garages, all the things we unearthed from basements and attics each September to prove our charity to ourselves and to each other. One man’s treasure and all that.

  “Constantine,” the woman called out from alongside our house, voice like a pencil scribble. “This one’s a veritable jackpot.”

  “Constantine?” my wife said.

  “Veritable?” I said.

  But by then Constantine had discovered Mrs. Felix’s box of books. “Proust!” he shouted, fanning the yellow pages. “Pinky, come see!”

  “Pinky?” my daughter laughed. “More like Skanky.”

  “Enough!” my wife commanded.

  “What did we even put out there this year?” my daughter whined. “Anything of mine?” Her voice had risen to a whinny. “Mom, you can’t just let them—”

  “Why not?” I said. “Charity is charity.”

  “But I don’t want to see it,” Jennifer said.

  My wife turned down the blind. I turned up the chandelier and we guided our Jennifer back to the table.

  “Never you mind,” I said, putting my hand atop my daughter’s, a wink for my wife. “Now, what can you tell me about the tenth grade?”

  “Eleventh,” she corrected, and although my error made them both momentarily glum, they soon recovered themselves.

  While my daughter talked about her newest elective, Money Management, and the horrors of a certain partner named Hez, we could hear them outside, hooting and clattering, hauling boxes down driveways.

  “Your grandfather made his fortune in money management,” my wife was telling Jennifer, “. . . foreclosures, refinancing, loss mitigation. . .” and Jennifer was practically gurgling with excitement.

  I tried to follow their conversation, but I was elsewhere. I was stabbing and twisting up bite-sized nests of linguine, trying to recall my own Proust days. My Balzac and Sartre and Camus days in the Department of Comparative Literature, before Kathy and the School of Business. Before the MBA. I was arranging those pasta nests side by side on my plate because the appetite had gone right out of me, or rather, it had shifted farther down to become something that had very little to do with food. The truth is, I couldn’t quite recall what was in those boxes. In my race to keep up with the Gregorys, I hadn’t even opened them.

  I sat back in my chair, one hand fogging up my glass of Merlot, gripping the edge of my mahogany table, trying to take comfort in the largest room of my—our—large, large home. Antique cabinets, upholstered chairs, cut crystal: everything so finely crafted. Everything so sturdy, and yet I couldn’t help but see myself as the most tender inside part of that life: me as mincemeat, as mollusc, as morsel.

  In the morning charity was strewn across our lawns. Clothing hung from gutters and tree branches. Old magazines and once-loved toys cluttered the sidewalks. I was standing underneath the “TWO HOURS MAX AT ALL TIMES” sign untucking parking tickets from my windshield wiper—one of the disadvantages of living so close to the city—and taking in the damage when I heard a chattering from under our hydrangea. I crept closer. It was tuxedo man, Constantine, reading—no, reciting—something to Pinky beneath a canopy of flowers. For a moment I envisioned them curled just so under a bridge in a large mainland city, inhaling exhaust fumes, scavenging for fish in diseased rivers, munching on gristly berries by the sides of highways. I felt a sudden kick of pride for having provided a downtrodden man with a flowering bush to sleep beneath—after all, it was my bush he’d chosen—and for a moment I longed for true charity, something beyond Large Garbage once a year. I imagined bringing this man into my home, giving him a shower and a shave, perhaps an old suit, perhaps a rudimentary lesson in entrepreneurship. Or if he wasn’t interested in that, at least a proper fishing rod, some bait and tackle.

  But this entire line of thought came to its snarled end when I noticed the woman was wearing something long, white and glittery, something familiar and poofy and then it hit me: this skank was wearing my wife’s cotillion gown. I could see it then. How, in my zeal to best the Gregorys, I’d not only grabbed the boxes marked CHARITY, but also those marked KEEPSAKES.

  “Hey,” I shouted, coming across the flowerbed at them. And I kept on, “Hey-hey. Hey. Hey,” until I was close enough to reach out and grab her. That’s when I realized I didn’t actually want to touch her.

  The man stood and faced me. Now he was reading to me from the open book: “Étonnants voyageurs. Quelles nobles histoires.” French: I flinched. I could barely tell one word from another these days . . .

  “Nous lisons dans vos yeux profonds comme les mers,” he continued. There I was, the enraged landowner, standing inside his orbit of stench and he could care less.

  “Montrez-nous les écrins de vos riches mémoires . . .”

  It was impossible not to hear it all as personal insult. I didn’t want to recall my leisurely undergraduate days, reading Baude-laire beneath trees. Nor did I want to understand what this meant: that I had also mistaken my own box of keepsakes for Large Garbage.

  Something was rustling in the man’s pants just then and I looked down to find he was scratching and rearranging himself down there. He was bouncing his meat at me. My gaze jolted back up to his face. Then his hand, the same one he’d used to scratch himself, was coming towards me. I could see his crumbling yellow nails, the grime built up in the creases of his palms. For a moment it seemed he would make some apologetic gesture but then he opened his filthy crack of a mouth and said: “Would you happen to have any spare change?”

  “No. No-no. No. No. No change. Sorry,” I stuttered. I was a small angry man, a man of small anger. “This is our—my property and I command you to get off,” I hollered. “Go-go. Please go.”

  He didn’t run as I had hoped but turned to offer his hand to Pinky.

  She looked at the stack of parking tickets pinched in my hand and said, “You shouldn’t park in front of your house anymore.”

  She was right, but ever since Kathy had given Jennifer a BMW (and my spot in the garage) for her sixteenth birthday, I’d had no choice.

  “What was it the Marquis de Sade said?” She was wiggling into her heels. “Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.” She stepped out from behind the hydrangea then, dainty as a debutante.

  Constantine smiled. “Or, ‘Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud,’” and then he looked at me just long enough to break the social contract. “You, sir, are you a miserable little creature?”

  My mouth flapped: open, closed.

  He threw his head back, laughing, and then they walked—no, sauntered—down my driveway. I didn’t chase after them. I was stunned, speechless. And I was late. Again. As always.

  I slammed into the car and headed for work, the previous night’s parking tickets piled on top of all the others on the passenger seat beside me.

  At the Department of Revenue I was hardly in the office door before man-faced Rhanda was on me.

  “You’re late,” she said, and I couldn’t help but notice in that particular light she really did have something like stubble. She was keeping
pace with me down the hall, yapping and handing me memos. “The Schmidt case is being pushed ahead. Dan wants all the forms by noon. But he wants to talk to you first. ASAP. As soon as you’re done with—” then she looked at her clipboard—“Hez? Yes, Hez. She’s waiting for you.”

  “Hez?”

  “Hez. Your daughter’s friend?”

  “Deal with this, would you?” I said, handing Rhanda my dirty travel mug.

  It seemed Hez was there to talk to me about money management while my Jennifer was somewhere across town talking to Hez’s father about the same thing. It seemed it was a competition of sorts. So I explained my position to her, then about taxation policy and departmental divisions and the various meetings I attended in any given week, but it wasn’t good enough, somehow.

  “Wait,” she said. “So you don’t manage any actual money?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” I said. “I’m more of an overseer really.”

  She waved her hand around. “So this is all just files and stuff? There’s no actual money here? This office is more about paper pushing?”

  “Well Hez, I suppose it is,” I said and then I gave her the number of my brother-in-law, a banker, before showing her out.

  I stopped by Dan’s office.

  He squashed his blunt finger up against the Schmidt file, a couple of eighty-year-old artists who had managed to evade property tax for more decades than I’d been alive. “Might I inquire when you were planning on dealing with them?” he did, indeed, inquire.

  My tongue was fat and lazy in my mouth.

  “Even the sweet and the old have to pay their taxes, Henry,” he said, “but that’s not what I really wanted to talk to you about.” He pulled out another file, one I’d never seen before. “What I really wanted to talk to you about is this parking ticket situation.”

  “Are you aware,” he asked, “that you received a summons to go to court several weeks ago?”

  I was not aware.

  “Are you aware of how bad this makes us look? Jesus, Henry, if you’d come to me at any point, any point before now, we could have dealt with this reasonably. Like adults.”