by Todd Babiak
The light turned green and the pickup truck in front of her paused momentarily. Again, Tanya honked. She despised slothful, inattentive drivers. Finally, the pickup accelerated and Tanya deked left to get around it. The road opened up. All she had to do was get past the pickup truck and move into the right lane without clipping the smelly pothole crew. Darryl Lantz talked on. But the pickup didn’t slow down. The truck kept pace with her so she had to cut back in behind it. She cussed quietly, and the Jetta driver hainked at her again.
Tanya waited to accelerate, just long enough to flip the Jetta driver the bird. She flipped it, hoping the driver could see through the wet windows, and slammed on the brakes as a rectangular slab of concrete, half the size of the Hummer, smashed into the pavement ten feet in front of her. Tanya screeched to a stop not two inches from the slab, which had burrowed into the pavement like the unexploded bombs of Second World War movies. Above the Hummer, the claws of a crane swaying back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, next to a burgeoning condominium.
“Tanya? Are you there? What was that?”
It had been so loud and so unexpected and so massive and so heavy that Tanya forgot she was on the phone with Darryl Lantz and the lawyers. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.” She said this by reflex because nothing was supposed to bother the vice-president, marketing and development, of the hottest new entertainment and lifestyle brand in Canada. A crowd of curious pedestrians gathered in the rain to stare at the slab of concrete. It was aged and uneven, veined with rebar.
“Good.”
Darryl Lantz continued, but Tanya had lost the ability to process what he was saying about the British reality television concept they were trying to import. She could hear him over the increasing buzz around the slab but the words were not properly linked. Already, she could hear sirens. “There’s a concern here, Tanya, that tempting husbands to cheat on their wives with former girlfriends will create some rather complex legal challenges. There’s a sinister quality to this concept and I love it, love it unreservedly. But Canadians are becoming more litigious, as you know, inspired by their American cousins. We’re wondering how your contacts in London got around this.”
There was an answer to this question, of course. Somewhere. The grey of concrete slab that would have killed her if she had not paused to make an obscene gesture at the driver of a Jetta met the grey of the sky and the grey of the Hummer’s interior. Was that how death worked? One instant, everything, and the next, nothing? Maybe it was an outlook formed by a career in the entertainment business, but Tanya had always envisioned her life as an epic. The churchy lower-middle-class upbringing, the idiosyncratic education, the ugly relationships, the rise to power. Once she reached a plateau of sorts at Leap, she would adopt a child and hire a nanny from the developing world to care for it. By forty-five, she would take over from Darryl Lantz, or head up a similar company, her own company. In New York. The first magazine profiles and unauthorized biographies would appear as she eased into her fifties.
The randomness and chaos of the world had always seemed a colourful backdrop for the meticulous strategizing of Tanya’s adult life. Real estate prices confirmed that the appearance of randomness and chaos were desirable. Tanya wanted to spend her middle years in New York, the capital of randomness and chaos, because her success, the elegance of her success, would look and feel most artful there. But how many concrete slabs were out in the world, in New York and London and Paris, ready to fall on her Hummer?
“Tanya?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear me?”
Did she hear him?
Darryl Lantz chuckled, but it was clear he didn’t find anything funny. “I’ll repeat.”
Even though the climate-control mechanism contended it was twenty-two degrees Celsius in the H2, Tanya was freezing. There was a jaggedness, a moist blackness about her. She attempted to connect the feeling to others in her past–influenza? food poisoning? bladder infection?–but all she discovered was a series of nightmares from her childhood. The earth, or a facsimile, covered in ash and dark angles, Tanya standing utterly alone and abandoned in a clearing. When she tries to reach some of this world, to touch or even understand it, the edges stretch out to infinity.
In sessions with her therapist, years ago, she recalled this recurring nightmare. The therapist, Dr. Huston, said it was one of the most common dreams among career-minded people living in the west end of Vancouver and, indeed, in all major cities in the developed world. Tanya had rejected her evolutionary and social impulses to find a mate at a young age, reproduce, and purchase a minivan. Dr. Huston leaned forward over the linked fingers on his lap. He said something that ended with “the realization that we are alone.”
But Tanya never felt alone. Not alone alone, in the way Ebenezer Scrooge was alone. Tanya was unencumbered, free, available, prepared for anything. Anything except the concrete slab that crushes fabulously successful people in the middle of a rainy afternoon on East Hastings Street. Now she repeated his diagnosis aloud, into the receiver of her cellphone. “The realization that we are alone.”
“Tanya?”
“Yes?”
Darryl Lantz did not chuckle. “Tanya, can you hear me? We can hear you. I’m in the office with a couple of the lawyers.”
Workers from the condo development were on the street now, in their hard hats, screaming at one another. Several men and women under open umbrellas spoke into cellphones. More sirens, getting closer. Tanya turned off the phone.
It wasn’t aloneness she feared but the instantaneous unravelling of her dreams and desires, her idea of herself, her plans. The unwriting of those magazine profiles and unauthorized biographies. For all the tepid religion in her formative years, she believed only in Tanya Gervais. But when a concrete slab can fall from the sky and crush you in an instant, in a thonk of crushed yellow metal and a malfunctioning alarm–whoop whoop–why believe in Tanya Gervais? Of all that is available to the believer today, the buffet of men and women and icons, past and present, why her? What did Tanya Gervais mean, anyway? Where was she going? What was she doing?
Tanya tried to do that thing she did on the day her parents kicked her out of the house for smoking marijuana: push it aside, file it away, use it as fuel. But she couldn’t put the Hummer in park, let alone open the window for the bearded man in a hard hat and blue overalls, screaming in the rain. “Are you okay?” said the man in the hard hat. “Miss? Missus?”
FOURTEEN
Two years ago, in her previous position, Tanya Gervais was production manager on a documentary shoot about the health care system in Costa Rica. On a break one day, bored with the heat in downtown San José, she went for a hike in the hills behind her hotel and saw the most beautiful thing in the world: a blue morpho butterfly. The colour of its wings reached through her chest cavity and fluttered there. And for the first time in her adult life, Tanya was moved to tears.
Luckily, there was no one around.
No words in her vocabulary–lustrous, translucent, iridescent–came close to describing that blue. She continued along on her hike, obsessed with discovering why such a colour should exist. What evolutionary advantage? On the airplane back to Vancouver, she wondered how a woman might make money off the blue morpho. Was there a market in the U.S. for such a thing? No matter how hard she tried, Tanya could not find a way to reduce the butterfly to a commodity, to sell her experience on the well-worn trail behind the hotel in San José.
Now, Tanya attempted to package her near-death experience on East Hastings. Perhaps it was the sort of thing others might relate to, if she were able to reproduce the slab and its psychological value. Its purity. The new quality of her aloneness that the slab illuminated. When the police and fire trucks arrived, the large and gentle men helped her shut off the Hummer, gave her a cup of substandard coffee, put a blanket over her shoulders, and asked her a number of questions about the slab. Tanya could hardly remember what she said, though she did take a photograph of the s
lab with her phone. The slab had not crushed her, but it had crushed something. A presence had become an absence.
An hour or so later, she delivered the package to the PNE without informing the client that she had come, thereby negating the value of making the trip herself instead of calling a courier. After several failed attempts to speak with her on the cellphone, Darryl Lantz finally advised her, in a stern voice-mail message, to go home, get her shit together, and contact him about the British import in the morning.
Tanya parked the Hummer in the garage under her west-end condominium. She marvelled at the separation between the chemical smell of her garage and the peachy freshness of her building’s elevator. Normally Tanya worried that a crack addict would break into the garage and vandalize the Hummer, but today she found herself wondering about the infomercial industry. Maybe she could write a slim volume, produce a set of six compact discs, and sell them on late-night television.
In her 1,400-square-foot condominium, she sat on the couch and watched night fall over the mists of English Bay. Tanya checked her messages. Three from Brian. Brian, the chief financial officer of Leap and her current boyfriend. Brian had heard, from Darryl Lantz, that she had been acting strangely.
Tanya took a bath with a notepad, in case any ideas about packaging and branding the slab came to her. To her displeasure, she cried in the bathtub and accomplished nothing. Instead of Shania or Céline or any of her other mentors, Tanya listened to a satellite radio special on Mahler. Though he had been dead since 1911, Gustav Mahler seemed to understand, with absolute precision, the way she felt in the echo of the slab. She put on a black dress and sat at her dining-room table, staring at the notepad. Blue of the blue morpho. Slab of the slab. No ideas came to her, yet the slab did not allow her to concentrate on the British co-production about cheating spouses, or Brian, or anything else related to Canada’s newest and hottest entertainment and lifestyle brand.
When Brian knocked, he was twenty minutes late. The flowers, pale-pink peonies and some baby’s breath, looked and smelled fresh enough. Brian, a tall man with a deep voice who wore a lot of aftershave from Paris, kissed her on the lips with his eyes closed.
“You look stunning.”
“I know.”
“What happened today?”
“Nothing major.”
In his car, a Lexus, Brian described his day. He so often felt like the only one in the company who truly understood the relationship between revenues, expenditures, and profits. In the restaurant, Wild Rice on Pender, not far from the strip of East Hastings where the concrete slab had nearly killed her, Brian whispered that maybe, just maybe, Leap would not survive three years without a takeover by a larger media player. Usually, Brian and Tanya exchanged stories and opinions like fencing opponents, each waiting for a millisecond of silence to strike. Both wanted to be in the position of Darryl Lantz one day, visionary and captain of the digital revolution, and in conversation together they often competed for the right of succession. But tonight, Tanya had nothing to counter Brian’s contention that Leap was doomed. She cared neither for the future of Leap nor for the bearing of her own career in the entertainment and lifestyle media.
The restaurant was designed, like so many in the city, in the spirit of Asian minimalism–the cherrywood and stainless-steel accents of western opulence. All around them, fellow Vancouverites whispered and laughed in offensively. After two glasses of wine, and an uninterrupted monologue concerning his majesty, Brian leaned forward and placed his hand on hers. Did the appetizers not agree with her stomach?
Their seats for the touring National Ballet production of Swan Lake were in the third row, centre right. Tanya had difficulty paying attention until the corps de ballet. The sight of all those beauties in white tutus, their youth and their innocence, their perfection, their immortality in the context of falling slabs of concrete, brought Tanya to tears again. She tried to fight it by biting the insides of her cheeks and performing Kegel exercises. Tanya closed her eyes, to wipe them without ruining her makeup, and pictured herself in Banff. She was leaving in less than twenty-four hours for the television festival. There, she would have meetings with desperate fools she had known far, far too long. Perhaps the fatigue and frustration, in concert with the high-threadcount sheets on her hotel bed, would cure her.
At the intermission, her eyes a mess of black mud, Tanya rushed to the ladies’ room. In front of the mirror, surrounded by rich women and their talk of everything that did not matter, Tanya felt nauseous. So nauseous she threw up in the sink. The women gasped, one screamed, and they all backed away. When Tanya stood upright from the regurgitated grilled rare ahi tuna and kabocha and butternut squash pot-stickers, she looked at her reflection and did not recognize the vice-president, marketing and development, of Canada’s newest and hottest entertainment and lifestyle brand.
For the first time in many years, Tanya wanted her mom. But her mom, unlike the ghost of Gustav Mahler on the radio, would not recognize or appreciate her.
Without fixing her eyes or even wiping her face, Tanya walked on to Hamilton Street without her coat. She hailed a cab and, in the back seat, prepared herself for the implications of unemployment. Drugs, institutions, dry hair, chanting, incontinence.
Instead of sleeping that night, Tanya searched the Internet for a possible treatment. But she did not find it. The next morning, she packed her bag for Banff and arrived at the office before 7:00. She stared at the eighty-three new e-mails in bold on her computer screen. Outside, near the floatplane terminals, workers smashed giant support beams into the beach for something about the Winter Olympics. Carol, the executive assistant to Darryl Lantz, phoned at 8:30 to request a 9:00 in his office. Her employees arrived, the shiny young women of marketing and development, with their bleached teeth and black pinstriped suits from Winners.
Winners.
They chattered in their usual manner, joined their teammates in the oval of cubicles, and fell eerily silent. Tanya’s phone call with Darryl Lantz and the lawyers had already become office mythology. The realization that we are alone. Her senior manager passed the office and peeked in as though Tanya were a zoo animal masturbating.
“How are you?”
“Fuck off.”
Her senior manager, who knew she would soon be the next vice-president, marketing and development, tilted her head in mock sympathy. “Lovely. Let me know if I can help with anything?”
At 8:55, Tanya stood up from her desk. She passed Carol and the office of Darryl Lantz and hit the call button for the elevator.
FIFTEEN
Stanley Moss sat in the open lounge of the Edmonton International Airport, looking down at a cup of Tim Hortons coffee. He had asked for black but the teenage girl at the counter had poured some sort of mock-dairy product into it, giving his coffee the consistency of spoiled butter. A discarded newspaper next to him featured a columnist analyzing the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta: too progressive or too conservative? The ruined coffee and the trite column conspired against his good mood. He looked up from the paper to see Alok Chandra standing in front of him in an orange patterned muumuu and white turban, arms outstretched. “Brother-in-law.”
Released from his embrace, Stanley walked around Alok, looking for his bags. Alok had grown tremendously fat and smelled of sandalwood. The last time Stanley had seen him, in 1989, he’d worn business suits with ironed handkerchiefs and the occasional flower in his lapel. “Luggage?”
Alok winked and tapped the shoulder strap of his backpack. “This is it. I learned in my treks through rural Asia never to bring anything more than a small bag.”
“This isn’t rural Asia.”
Alok started toward the revolving doors. “We hear in Toronto that everyone’s rich and arrogant here now. Is that true? I definitely feel an energy I don’t recognize.”
“In the airport?” Even though Stanley could suddenly lift heavy things, toss teenagers, break swimming records, and occasionally read minds, he remained skeptical ab
out Alok’s ability to feel an energy. Twenty-two years ago, Alok had still been married to Stanley’s sister Kitty. Alok had been a practising psychiatrist then. One afternoon, he’d suffered a hernia in a bowling alley and, upon recovery, in the afterglow of painkillers, received an epiphany. Alok decided he had been called to quit his practice and move to Toronto, where he was obliged to open a New Age bookstore and Reiki centre. He was also obliged to engage in ritual group sex, thereby ending his official status as Stanley’s brother-in-law.
In the Oldsmobile, on the stretch of Queen Elizabeth II Highway that linked Edmonton with its airport, Alok opened his window. “Smells the same.”
“Like what?”
“Grass maybe? Dust? The Platonic form of dryness?” Alok reached over and squeezed Stanley’s shoulder. “When the phone rang and I saw your name and number on the call display I thought, ‘Here we go, Stanley Moss is calling to bring me home.’”
“Wow.”
Alok nodded. “I’ve become quite good at predicting the future.” Though he was in his late sixties and obese, there remained a youthfulness about him. He applauded, hollered “Canola!” into the wind, and closed the window. “I love you, Stan. Always have.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“Well, I’m really thrilled to be here. I don’t know why I’m here, because you’re the mysterious gentleman you always were. On the airplane I had a dream that you were going to present me with proof that I’d committed a murder. I’m sure my dream interpretation book would have a lot to say about that, but I didn’t pack it. I pack light. When’s the last time we actually spoke? Kitty’s funeral? Oh look! A tractor!”
Sure enough, a tractor moved down a field to the west of the highway, in silhouette. The long, orange dusk of summer in the prairies had begun.