by Todd Babiak
She felt sorry for the development executives of Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. They would never find what she had found, among the half-talents of their indigenous film and television industries. Soon, they would not look nearly so shiny in garden attire and unnecessary sunglasses. The tanning-bed tans and dental surgeries and eyelifts and bottles of wine would fail them, and the executives would be replaced by younger and perhaps even deader versions of themselves.
“Please come tomorrow night,” she said. “It’s an experience you’ll never forget. In fact, if I were you, I’d order cameras and reporters to arrive here as soon as possible. If you don’t get your own footage of this, you’ll be paying for it.”
Cynicism erupted like a puff of smoke from a tired volcano. Johnson Quayle couldn’t quite convince himself that Tanya Gervais actually believed in something other than money and advancement. “What’s this really about, cookie? You can tell us.”
Tanya took one final sip of her wine, just to wet her lips and remember. “All I can tell you is I’ve seen something unusual and amazing here in Banff, and if you’ll join us tomorrow night you’ll see it too.”
As she walked around the table and out of the little wine bar, Tanya knew she had hooked her colleagues. They would arrive as a group tomorrow night, tipsy, making sarcastic comments all the way up to the Banff Centre. But like everyone else in the theatre, they would secretly hope she was telling the truth.
FORTY-TWO
A giant bouquet sat in the corner of the green room, next to a five-page outline of the evening’s activities and unsolicited “speaking points” from Tanya. Stanley could not name the flowers in the bouquet, so he attempted to classify them according to scent. The yellow ones were the sweetest, while the white flowers had a hint of spice to them. Five red flowers–he guessed roses–made him feel sad. Two or three of them, as far as he could tell, had no smell at all.
Stanley had forgotten the names of flowers but he had not forgotten this feeling. The empty ache in his chest, cold hands, fear of loneliness. Once, long ago, Stanley had entered into an affair with a customer. The woman was not discreet, and when Stanley realized it was a mistake and tried to end it she wrote a horrifyingly descriptive letter to Frieda. They separated for eight months, during which time Stanley felt this, and yearned for the only substance that erased it–equal parts blended Scotch and water.
The speaking points reminded Stanley of late-night television advertisements for self-actualization techniques. Instead of memorizing them, he stared at himself in the mirror and inspected his wrinkles. Muffled by the concrete walls, the symphonic music reminded him of the prelude to magic shows at the Calgary Stampede. He stared at the flowers and willed them to reveal themselves. When they refused, taunting him with their namelessness, he tossed them in the garbage. Then he regretted it and pulled them back out. The vase was broken so he propped the flowers, one by one, on the back of a chair against the wall. There was a knock on the door and Frieda entered the green room.
“The theatre is full.” She removed her jacket and hung it on the back of the door, revealing a pair of blue slacks and a white shirt. Stanley tried to commit this image of her to memory, as she leaned against the dressing-room table. Though he could not read his wife’s thoughts, Stanley knew why she was here and how this would end.
Frieda examined the outline and speaking points, and shook her head. Her voice was fragile. “They want you to cure five or six cancers? Cause a mini-thunderstorm?”
“They provided suggestions.”
“Have you tried creating a thunderstorm?”
Stanley wanted to say something cheery, even ironic, to bind them against Tanya and the rigidity of her marketing and communications plan. But he had already made his choice in this, and so had Frieda. It threatened to exhaust them, as husband and wife. All he could come up with was, “I don’t think I can do it.”
“I don’t think I can do it either, Stanley.”
He sat in a black leather chair in the corner of the room, and placed his fingertips on his temples. In the 1970s, Stanley had suffered from migraines, and this was the only remedy he knew. He wanted to direct their conversation away from what they had already discussed, endlessly, in their hotel room and on long, searching walks along the river. “I talked to some ghost-people, or something.”
“Lovely.” Frieda sat on the arm of the black chair and ran her fingernails lightly along Stanley’s scalp, something he loved. “It can’t be that easy, can it? Create a thunderstorm? It seems to me spiritual truth, if there is such a thing, takes time. Study. Even militancy. You can’t just…I know I can’t just…”
Stanley said what he had to say. “I need you.”
“No, you don’t. You did once and someday you might again. I hope you do, desperately.”
“Frieda, don’t do this.”
She turned away from him.
“Frieda, please.”
“I’m already packed. The car is full of gas.”
“Wait one more day.”
She smiled. “You don’t want me to wait another day, or even another hour. If you’re convinced this is what you want to do, I’ll only be a nuisance to you.”
“You’ll never be a nuisance, Frieda. I–”
“I want my retired florist back.”
“He was dying.”
Her sob was almost imperceptible. “At least he was mine, and I knew him.” She took her jacket off the hook and slipped into it. Then Stanley stood up and they kissed, awkwardly, and held one another. The sound of their clothes rustling together was uncommonly loud to him. With all his focus, Stanley tried to change her mind. Into his neck, she said, “When this disease leaves you, come back to me.”
“Just tonight. Let me show you what I can do.”
“I don’t have to watch you do something special. I don’t need to see anything to know something spectacular attends you. I’ve known that for forty years.”
“The ghost-people today. They said I’m a demon.”
“There are no demons, Stanley, or ghost-people, or gods. Men don’t jump off the sides of mountains and survive. Cancer is incurable, and thunderstorms are caused by unstable air masses, not preachers in grey suits.” Frieda rubbed the moisture from her eyes and buttoned her jacket. “I love you.” Frieda walked out of the green room and closed the door very softly behind her.
FORTY-THREE
The Calgary lawyer had sent documents to the bank, and the bank had agreed to give Kal an advance on his coming settlement with the insurance company. The insurance company had been keen to dispense with the Far East Square matter quickly, and the lawyer had advised that a more lucrative settlement would take five years or longer.
Kal thought it would make him happy, but it confused him, if anything, to have more than a thousand dollars in his chequing account. He walked out of the bank and leaned against a tree in a mini-park surrounded by new construction, and stared at the small vinyl book where his new account balance had been typed by a computer. Mountain peaks were obscured by low afternoon cloud, and the air was still.
On his way to the Chalet Du Bois, to pick up Maha, Kal made two stops. At the Hudson’s Bay Company, he bought a black Italian suit. The woman behind the counter clipped up his cuffs, in lieu of tailoring, so he could wear it that evening. The man at the flower shop was bored so he spent far too long arranging a bouquet for Kal that was “bound to make any woman fall at your feet in bliss.”
He passed a mirror in the display window of a jewellery store and barely recognized himself. If not for the yellowing bruises on his face, Kal would have been an entirely respectable young man. He thanked Stanley aloud for his good fortune and a passing couple laughed at him.
Maha was not ready to go when he knocked at her door, so Kal leaned against the wood-grain wallpaper in the hotel hallway. A bit of his blood had stained the lightest corners of patterned carpet outside Maha’s room. He could hear her hair dryer inside.
The flowers he held
were wrapped in shiny brown paper. Kal picked at the tape and opened the top flap so he could admire and smell them. How had these flowers come to be here in this mountain town, where so few of them could grow? Why did flowers exist, and how had they come to represent love? Like architecture, locomotion, the postal system, and the design of the universe, the complexity and the business of flowers left him spellbound.
Maha opened the door. Kal tried to say good evening to Maha and close the unwieldy paper flap. Neither worked out. He knuckled the head off a gerbera daisy and said, “Piss,” as it fell to the carpet not far from his bloodstain.
Maha picked up the stemless daisy. She wore a short white dress, somewhat nurse-like, with a belt around the waist. When she stood up again, with the daisy, she pulled the dress down. “Too racy, you think?”
Kal had a commanding desire to drop to his knees and kiss Maha’s legs and pronounce her the prettiest girl in Banff. “Not at all,” he said, and passed the now-closed bouquet to her.
“Please, come in.”
Maha’s perfume filled her suite. Inside, she peeled the paper away and gasped at the flowers. “Sorry about knocking that one’s head off,” Kal said. “And cussing. I’m working on it.”
“You were a hockey player for a long time.”
“‘Piss’ is a nice one, when you stack it up against the others.”
Maha sniffed the flowers. “No one’s ever bought me a bouquet.”
“That seems wrong.”
“What should I do with them?”
Kal went through the glasses in the room, but they were all too short. He poured out a small bottle of mini-bar white wine and filled it with water. Maha stuffed the flowers inside and arranged them.
Then, for a long time, they stood in a crackling silence. Kal felt a wave of gas coming on and fought hard to keep it bottled up. He failed, however, and coughed to mask the sound of its release.
“You have a cold?”
“No. I swallowed something wrong.”
“You ate already?”
“No. It was gum.”
“Why did you swallow your gum?”
Kal didn’t like where this line of questioning was headed, so he picked up Maha’s copy of The Testament. It was only eleven pages long because Tanya had argued that no one could read anything longer than eleven pages these days, ruined as humans were by visual media. When this thing caught on, they would hire a professional writer and expand–put in some pictures. The disciples had “worked together” on The Testament over the past couple of days, but none of Kal’s suggestions had made it to the final draft. “I read this last night,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Don’t you think they should have used words like ‘thou’ and ‘thine’ and whatnot to make it sound more Bible-y?”
“Absolutely not. That would have been a huge mistake.”
“Yeah,” said Kal. “A totally huge mistake.”
It had been surprisingly easy to ask Maha out for a pre-show dinner. The beating by Gamal had conferred a sort of respectability upon him. When they were writing The Testament with the others, in Tanya’s hotel room and at the Rose & Crown, Maha had been the least likely to ignore his suggestions. She had seemed genuinely impressed by his piano-playing.
So far, there was a cloak of innocence over their relationship. As a professional hockey player, he had learned a thing or two about the ladies. Whenever a woman had wanted to leave the nightclub, in Providence or Hamilton, and go have sex in the hotel room he always shared with Gordon Yang, Kal had known it. Maha wasn’t dishing any of those signals, yet.
Over dinner at Magpie & Stump, Kal outlined his hockey career. As he told Maha about hockey, which was all he had really known since he was six years old, it began to sound to Kal as if he were talking about someone else. Some other Kal McIntyre from Thunder Bay, Ontario. Maha listened carefully and asked questions, especially about Layla.
“She was an amazing accident,” said Kal.
“Do you get to see her much?”
“Almost never. She’s hardly mine any more. Hopefully when she’s a teenager and can make her own decisions, she’ll want to see me. I figure I’ll pay for her tuition, start a trust account with this insurance money. Don’t know if I can afford living expenses, though. What if she wants to go to school in Toronto or Vancouver or something?”
Maha smiled and they had another one of those silences. They thought separate thoughts, obviously about each other, and the mystery of Maha was so uncontaminated Kal wanted to ask if she would like to buy a plot of land with him in Saskatchewan and become soybean farmers.
They walked up Caribou Street and Kal purposely hit her arm with his, to warm Maha up for some possible hand-holding. She told him about growing up Muslim, which sounded quite enthralling to Kal, much more exotic than growing up Catholic.
“So did you ever know any crazy Muslims? With the jihad and everything?”
By the look on Maha’s face, Kal knew these were not intelligent questions to ask. Hand-holding, suddenly, seemed a remote possibility. They passed a large house with an historical plaque in front. Kal wished they were walking up Tunnel Mountain, so he too could jump off. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Maha led them up a set of wooden stairs leading to the Banff Centre. They passed a visual arts studio, where two women in paint-splattered smocks smoked cigarettes on the deck. Kal was too chastened to say anything else, even about a subject as unrelated to suicide bombings as smocks. Where did people buy smocks, anyway? Then, as they approached the glass facade of the Eric Harvie Theatre, Kal went over the stupid questions he had asked Maha and decided they really weren’t so bad. It wasn’t easy to be a Muslim, sure, but it wasn’t easy to understand Muslims, either. He wasn’t in charge of putting things on the news. As they entered the red lobby by separate doors, Kal chose not to let defensiveness overtake him.
“Can I take your coat, mademoiselle?” he said.
Though it was obvious that Maha was still troubled by the jihad business, she granted him that pleasure and they walked among the audience, many of whom were dressed very casually, in fleece jackets and pants with many pockets. In his new suit, Kal was careful to say “Excuse me” and to thank the staff excessively.
Their seats for “A Night of Mystery and Grand Amazement” were in the back. Since Kal and Maha weren’t involved in the production, their job was to watch and listen to the audience–take notes. They sat down and pulled out their dollar-store notepads. Fleece jackets and pants with many pockets, a sense of puzzlement, a variety of European and Asian languages, few children, more than half senior citizens. The music was at a decent volume and, to Kal, seemed mysterious and grandly amazing. While they waited for the curtain to rise on their religion, Kal sent silent messages to Maha.
I’m your man. I’m your guy. Not as stupid as I sometimes seem.
FORTY-FOUR
The curtain rose from the stage, and television cameras swivelled behind the last row of seats. A new fear gripped Maha. If Tanya was right about the media and the way these stories spread, her parents would see this.
Her parents and, more importantly, their community would regard Stanley as the embodiment of blasphemy. An abomination. Maha could have sex with a Québécois, in view of fifteen others. She could drop out of school or abandon her family without a word. These were shames from which the family could recover. But abusing the Prophet was something she could not do. The Prophet was the seal; no others were to come. If Gamal wanted to talk, he could make things very difficult for Maha’s family in Montreal.
The previous night, perusing the Koran for possibly the last time, she realized there was no way to explain the Lord. The Lord seemed to remember nothing about his time in the desert with Mohammed, all those years ago. Maha herself had said the words, as a child: There is no god but Allah Almighty, Who is One (and only One) and there is no associate with Him; and I testify that Mohammed (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) is His Messenger.
&nb
sp; Maha pulled her sweater around her shoulders. Kal reached around to help her. “Are you cold?”
“Sort of.”
“I could warm you.” Kal put his arm around her, tentatively. “I’ll never say anything else about jihad, I promise, and–”
“Stop, Kal, please.”
“Right, great, super.” He removed his arm, and fondled his notepad.
The lights in the theatre went off suddenly, and orchestral music began to play. It sounded like the final scene in an old action movie. Over the music, just faintly, Maha could hear the click of Tanya’s shoes on the wooden stage. In the darkness, Maha had to fight off the images of her parents. She said, aloud, “I had not considered how dangerous this is.”
“Why dangerous?”
A spotlight found Tanya, at the front of the stage, and the volume of the music decreased. She paused for a moment, and opened her arms to the audience. Tanya welcomed everyone and said, slyly, that if anyone had a heart condition, they should leave now. There was sporadic laughter, and someone asked to be given “a fricken break.”
Tanya ignored them and launched into Kal’s story, his journey from professional hockey player to concert-level pianist. Kal as the species in microcosm.
“I don’t know about concert level,” Kal whispered. “Do you think I’m concert level? I’ve never seen a proper piano concert. And microcosm. Can you–?”
“Shh.”
While Kal was talking in her ear, Maha had missed some of what Tanya was saying.
“…you read the news. It’s no secret to many of you that the land is dying.” Tanya wore a headset microphone, and she walked from one end of the stage to the other, arms in motion. She spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable, pausing for effect. For Maha, she was a spring, ready at each moment to unfurl violently and bounce around the room. Tanya crouched and said, quietly, as though the audience were a bosom friend, “Please, for the next hour or so, try to forget what you know. The land is dying. May I present its saviour.”