The Book of Stanley

by Todd Babiak

  “You’re fine, Alok. Whatever’s comfortable.”

  A bank of dark clouds had eased in from the north and west. The hem of the storm was uneven, drooping with moisture. It would miss the valley, but a mini-rainbow had formed below and behind it. Alok pointed. “Proof God exists,” he said.

  Frieda sighed. “It’s proof that moisture refracts light, actually. I know these are bewildering times, Alok, but can we please try to keep the moronic comments to a minimum?”

  “Over 98 percent of the world believes in a sort of God. Are you saying all those billions of people are morons?” Alok pulled a few blades of grass and tossed them into the air, apparently to judge the speed and direction of the wind. “In 1889, an American woman called Mary Schäffer arrived in the Rockies. I’ve read that she and her then husband were naturalists and do-gooders, interested in photography and writing–the late-Victorian upper-middle-class stuff. I’ve read that she was just an adventurous sort of girl. But I’ve also read that she was called to Banff on that first trip, and that claim is backed up by her own writings.”

  A bright yellow warbler settled on the branch of a birch tree, above Alok. He nodded at the bird knowingly, as though it too had been called.

  “Her dreams, in Philadelphia, were suddenly disturbed. During her childhood and early adulthood, she was a devout Christian. By the time she arrived in Banff, it’s clear that Mary was looking for something else. Proof of something. And, by all accounts, she found it.”

  Stanley and Frieda waited. Alok merely smiled and took a deep breath in through his nose.

  “Two sisters from Hydesville, New York, developed a way to talk to the dead in 1848. They were basically the first spiritualists. The movement spread quickly, and Philadelphia is not far from Hydesville. Anyway, by the time Mary Schäffer arrived in Banff, she was dabbling in spiritualism. This is my theory, and it’s a good one. She settled in the Rockies, some time later, as the secret leader of a growing movement of spiritualism, and a devotee of the natural world.”

  “I, for one, would like to see the source material for this theory,” said Frieda.

  With great effort, Alok rolled on to his stomach and pushed himself up to his knees. “Frieda, please. I know our past is lousy with…complications. But I want to help Stanley, and you, understand this. I’m sorry about the way I acted in the 1980s. But really, my friends, I was younger then and stupider and afraid to die, I must say. I thought that by sleeping with several women, and even a few men, I might–”

  Frieda put her hands up. “Okay. Thank you. You’re forgiven, as long as you never say anything like that again.”

  “Agreed.”

  Stanley was pleased. It was an odd truce, but a truce nonetheless. “Mary Schäffer.”

  “This is my theory: botany was a cover. Mary was called to Banff or, specifically, Lake Minnewanka near Banff. She pulled together a group of native elders, spiritualists, and disaffected religious strivers, and they discovered something.” A group of students passed, and Alok waited until they were gone before he continued. “In the language of the Stoney Indians, Minnewanka means ‘water of the spirits.’ It was haunted, you see. By ‘fish people.’ Do you follow?”

  “Nope,” said Frieda.

  “Minnewanka was settled in paleolithic times. People lived there when Agassiz, the inland sea, was still draining into the Hudson Bay. Of almost anywhere in North America, it’s the oldest in terms of settlement and legend. Ask any Stoney today. But why? Why there? The climate is severe and you can’t grow anything. Why would nine thousand years’ worth of First Nations people, and then Mary Schäffer and her band of spiritualists, be drawn to Banff?”

  Frieda shrugged. “Real estate has always been real estate. It’s pretty there.”

  “I have a hypothesis, and it concerns Stanley.” Alok seemed to savour the silence, and their anticipation, for a moment. “It’s said Mary Schäffer and the other spiritualists believed native legends about something extraordinary happening in Minnewanka. In Banff.”

  “Oh, all this makes terrific sense. You want Stanley to go to Banff because some loons in the nineteenth century liked the place.”

  Alok lifted his finger again. “We North Americans are atheists, tolerant agnostics, and blind zealots. The moderates among us are drunk with our own selfishness. We’re the walking dead! I can smell it, and so can those magpies. The magpies are waiting for us, and the continent, to die. And you, you, Stanley Moss, have been called to remedy the problem. In Banff.”

  “What problem?”

  “The problem.”

  “I’m really not convinced that Banff is the key to the problem.” Frieda sniffed. “Why not…Washington? Ottawa?”

  Stanley took a deep breath and lay back on the grass, looked up at the blue of the sky. If he was supposed to do something extraordinary, shouldn’t he know why the sky was blue?

  “It’s not just spiritual, either.” Alok’s voice had risen. “Banff is a vortex of meaning, social and political.”

  Frieda leaned over and repeated, flatly, to her husband, “Vortex of meaning.”

  “When the railwaymen discovered the hot springs, they wanted to own it.” With some grunting and a whispered cuss word, Alok stood up. He appealed to the bough of a large cedar and, presumably, the heavens. “So did others. Individuals, you see. The matter went to the courts. In another country, the United States for example, the most powerful individual would have won the right to, in effect, own Banff. But this is Canada. The federal government stepped in to resolve the dispute and made it into a national park. Made it public. You see? Like it or not, this act helped create the Canadian spirit more than anything else in the nineteenth century. Banff is Canada, and Canada is dying. If Canada dies, the whole world dies.”

  Stanley watched the university students, summer session kids, throwing Frisbees and reading in the sun. Usually sitting out in the heat made him perspire, especially in the lower back, buttocks, and forehead. Today, he was dry. Wholly comfortable. He was nearly overwhelmed by a desire to tell Frieda and Alok that he could beat world records in competitive swimming.

  His wife coughed, and coughed again. Stanley reached over and tapped her on the back, though he knew from experience that it accomplished nothing.

  Despite receiving a number of self-help books as birthday gifts from people who figured he was too uptight, Stanley was not the sort of person who could stop sweating the small stuff. Worry and fear and beauty and civility lived in the cracks between the small stuff, and this was everything to Stanley. He was a florist.

  The scent of French fries dipped in both vinegar and ketchup filled the air. A skateboarder rumbled on the sidewalk, listening to music on headphones. The magpies yelped. In the distant campus bar, a punk band rehearsed for a concert. A hot-air balloon floated overhead, advertising for a realtor.

  By this time tomorrow, Stanley knew, they would be in the Rocky Mountains.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Maha Rasad tiptoed out of the change room and peeked from behind a sprawling potted palm tree to see that the hot tub remained empty. She hurried across the cold floor and stepped into the water.

  The hot tub in the Chalet Du Bois was really a warm tub. And the water smelled faintly of her father’s undershirts. She discovered a button near the palm tree that might heat and agitate the water, and reached out of the tub to push it. Maha was half out of the water when a large man in a grey sweatsuit walked into the room. There was an ape on the front of his shirt, dressed in fatigues and aiming a hockey stick as though it were a gun: “Saskatoon Soldiers.” She returned to her seat in the tub.

  “What’s up?”

  Maha said nothing.

  “You work here?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “Oh, good. I sneaked in the back. This is my third time and no one’s caught me yet.” The man knocked on the imitation cedar wall and placed a backpack on the floor. Instead of going into the men’s change room, he simply pulled off his sneakers and socks an
d sweatshirt. Maha turned her back and the man laughed. “My trunks are already on. When a guy sneaks into hot tubs, he’s gotta be agile, ready to roll.”

  The man pressed the button next to the palm tree and the room rumbled. Maha moved toward a jet so she might obscure the white bikini she had bought at the snowboarding shop. It was the least revealing bathing suit she could find in Banff but it remained far too revealing. The most profound shame was in cartoon letters on her behind: “DAMN.”

  “I hope it’s warm in there. My upper back’s on fire.” He stepped into the water and looked down at his chest, covered in uneven patches of dark brown hair. “Right up until I was twenty-two I was completely bald, chest-wise. Then this stuff whupped in and turned me into Chuck Norris. You ever see Return of the Dragon, the Bruce Lee film?”

  Maha looked out the steamed window, at the shadows of cars and trucks and pedestrians on Banff Avenue. She thought briefly of the figure in her bank account, and of delivering those job application forms she had collected. In Montreal, her path had seemed so clear. Coming to Banff was not inspired by desperation or whimsy but divine obligation. Now that she was here, enduring a chest hair confession, Maha speculated about the Lord’s sense of humour.

  “I was married then. Maybe my follicles figured, well, he doesn’t have to attract any more ladies. Then, all of a sudden, divorce.”

  If she’d been wearing a one-piece bathing suit, Maha might have taken this opportunity to escape. But she worried the man might see “DAMN” on her behind and make unfair assumptions. No, Maha would wait him out, like a French citadel surrounded by drunk Italian soldiers.

  “Guess what I ate for breakfast this morning.”

  Maha closed her eyes and wished herself into the hotel room, in front of a home decorating show that involved confident homosexuals from the United Kingdom. When she opened her eyes, the man in the hot tub was smiling. He was missing a couple of teeth, and a tattoo on his arm proclaimed his love for someone named Layla.

  “All right, I’ll go ahead and tell you. Chicken soup from a pouch with wieners chopped in. It was wicked. My mom used to make me that. With wieners! Really took me back.”

  In Montreal the rule on the metro, in the mall, down Crescent Street when the Bostonians were visiting in the summer, was to pretend you were a ghost. Eventually, they would turn their gaze elsewhere.

  “Where you from?”

  Maha said nothing.

  “You know English?” The man tilted his head appraisingly. “No, no, no. Let me guess–Pakistan. Afghanistan? Iran. Sri Lanka. Egypt. Kuwait. The Congo. What else is over there? Iraq! Iraq? No. Syria. Wrong direction? India.”

  “Canada,” Maha said, finally. She had a strong urge to pull a few branches off the palm tree and whip him. “Montreal, actually.”

  “Oooh. Your English is excellent.”

  “English is my first language.”

  The man crossed his arms. “Isn’t that terrific. You learn something new every day. So. You here with your family?”

  Maha recognized it was time to be silent again.

  “You want a peanut butter cup? They had this two-for-one deal at a gas station on the way here, so I got six cups. You in?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  He pulled himself up onto the edge of the hot tub, so only his legs dangled in the water. First he poked at his small beer belly and then he sighed and slouched. “That pretty much decides it. I’m shaving my chest. Chuck Norris did it, eventually, to succeed in Hollywood. Everyone still respects him.”

  What to do? Maha wanted to tell this man, who was actually in rather fine shape, and not significantly hairy compared to her father and uncles and cousins, that he should stop talking and fidgeting. Maha wanted to slip into the detergent-smelling sheets of her king-sized bed and nap. Maha was here to meet the man who is a god, not to spend time in a lukewarm, smelly pool of water with a redneck. Perhaps all this was a bad dream. Perhaps she was sick. She had definitely missed the deadline to apply for a decent space in Cegep.

  “How about this.” The man straightened his posture. “How about you and me go out for burgers tonight.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t eat burgers?”

  Maha furrowed her brow.

  “You know why I came here, to Banff?”

  Again, Maha furrowed. She also looked at her fingernails.

  “Let me back up a little. You familiar with a guy called Rainier Maria Rilke? I know he has Maria in his name but he’s a dude. You know him?”

  “No.”

  “He writes kickass poems and, I think, letters to people. Anyway, check this out: ‘ornamental clouds compose an evening love song.’ I memorized it, from a book in the library. ‘You must change your life.’ You know?”

  The water was not warm enough. A chill had eased its way into Maha.

  “I read that on the door of a shitter and decided, all right, I get it. So I stopped drinking rye, for starters, and quit the team. Here I am, if you can believe it. Just today I realized the lines are from a poem about a statue.”

  Maha understood she would have to get out of the water and hide in the women’s change room.

  “I like your bathing suit, by the way. The name’s Kal. I’m from Thunder Bay, originally. I used to play pro hockey but now I wash dishes at Far East Square.”

  Maha took a deep breath and stepped up out of the hot tub. She tiptoed through the cool air toward the change room, waiting for it.

  “Damn!” said Kal.

  TWENTY-TWO

  A gentleman in his fifties, with acne scars and a $1,600 black suit, stood up from the conference table at the Banff Springs Hotel and rubbed his hands together. In the silence before he spoke, Tanya Gervais wondered where the gentleman had found the money for his Armani suit. She knew it was Armani because Brian had two of them, and because this gentleman had flashed the label inside his jacket. But Brian was a chief financial officer, not a Canadian independent television producer.

  “All right, close your eyes,” said the producer, whose name was Seth. One of Seth’s two partners, a tiny woman Tanya recognized from a similar meeting in 2003, motioned at her from the other side of the table: Really, close your eyes. Please.

  Tanya closed her eyes.

  For the next few minutes, Seth described a forest of cedar and Douglas fir, raindrops on leaves, wild ferns and lichen. Skunk cabbage. Totem poles everywhere. All to locate a dramatic series set in the eighteenth century, just as James Cook and other white sailors began arriving on Vancouver Island. It would be a comedy, about the wacky travails of aboriginal peoples.

  “You know,” said Seth, “the hunting, the gathering, the totem pole building, the eating of dogs. Can you see the humour in this? Not that we’ll shy away from tough, edgy issues like incest. But most importantly, it’s about joy. Laughter, Tanya. Mother Earth, etcetera. What I want to get across to you is these people are real storytellers, and what we don’t do enough of, as producers, is tell their stories. We’ll focus on a young girl, a Pocahontas type. She’ll have an interior monologue and address the camera from time to time, you know, in that exasperated tone of a teenage girl. She can speak with an accent, or not, depending. All the usual pressures of being a teenage girl, plus being aboriginal, plus all these white guys all over the place? The grants’ll write themselves.”

  It seemed to Tanya that Canadian film and television had already done a more than ample job exploring incest. And why Pocahontas? In some ways it was the ultimate male fantasy, to arrive among the natives and pluck a sexy teenager out of the group for sex and “education,” but in another more important way it made her want to throw up.

  Tanya opened her eyes. “Sorry. I have to pass.”

  The three producers, Seth and his partners, shared a quick glance. In less than five seconds, Seth was leaning forward and rubbing his hands together again, ready for pitch number two. “Close your eyes,” he said. “This one is gonna kill you.”

  “I’ll listen to one more
, if it’s quick, but I’m not closing my eyes again.”

  “Yeah, but–”

  “Sorry. Clock is ticking. The eyes stay open.”

  Seth looked wounded, but he recovered quickly.

  “There’s a young lawyer, a defence attorney. She’s cute, not beautiful. Birdy, sorta. Nervous about things, but in a quasi-sexy way. Asian, we’re thinking. The series is set in Calgary.”

  Tanya stood up. “Thank you.”

  “Winnipeg? Halifax? It doesn’t matter where we set it.”

  “I have another appointment in a few minutes, unfortunately, and–”

  “Toronto! It’s set in Toronto!”

  Tanya shook hands with Seth’s fellow producers. Instead of admitting defeat, Seth, steward of the country’s national self-image, placed his hands together in prayer and blocked the door.

  “We both know how the game’s played, Tanya. You have to spend money and we need to develop something. Anything. It’s a match made in heaven.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “What don’t you like about the ideas?”

  Tanya had been doing this too long, in their position and hers, to respond to his question with any degree of candour. This was her seventh such meeting in two days, and each one of the pitches she had heard was appallingly derivative and sad and, well, Canadian. A loser sandwich covered in loser gravy garnished with fried loser, all in the context of multiculturalism.

  “Let me out.”

  “Not until you answer the question.” Seth reached up and dabbed his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. “This is our livelihood.”

  “Get out of my way or I’ll kick your nuts.”

  “Please,” said the tiny woman, in a voice so desperate and tired Tanya wanted to turn around and crush every bone in her body with a hug. “Please.”

  “Try the CBC.”

  Seth moved away from the door as though he had been pelted with machine-gun fire. He whispered, as Tanya started out, “We’re human beings, you know.”