The Book of Stanley

by Todd Babiak

  It was so peaceful in the yard and such a relief to be out of the soup of discomfort that he decided to unpack the instrument on the lawn. Stanley’s voice interrupted him just as he began to rip the tape.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Tanya jumped out of her chair and hugged Stanley and kissed him on the mouth. “Where have you been?”

  “The hospital.”

  “Will you do 60 Minutes?”

  Maha tossed her scone at Tanya’s head. The oven-warm biscuit exploded in Tanya’s ear with a puff of egg, flour, shortening, sugar, and water.

  Tanya jumped. “Who did that?”

  “Me.”

  Tanya made fists.

  “Sorry.” Maha got down on the floor to clean the mess. “Why were you at the hospital?”

  “I’m going to need more than a sorry, little miss. Do something, Stan!” Tanya picked the bits of scone from the inside of her ear and wiped the flour off her shoulder. As Maha crawled on the floor, she half expected Tanya to kick her.

  “Alok had a heart attack this afternoon.”

  Kal stopped opening his accordion box and sat back on the wooden floor with a plop. Maha dropped her crumbs.

  “We were waiting for the rest of you in the lobby of the Chalet Du Bois and several large cowboys attacked us.”

  Maha could not imagine this being possible. “How? How did they attack you?”

  “They didn’t seem too dangerous, and at the time I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I was curious about their intentions. I could have stopped them but I didn’t, and look what’s happened. It’s my fault.”

  “Is he all right?” said Maha.

  “Did you kick their effin asses?” said Kal.

  “Does the name Morley Safer mean anything to you?” said Tanya.

  Stanley removed his shoes, inspected the great room, and stopped at the information about the explorer, Mary Schäffer. “Huh,” he said. Then he said, “Huh,” again, and turned back to the group. “Luckily, there happened to be a heart specialist in from Edmonton following up on another patient. They’ve given him some clot-busting drugs.”

  “Can we go see him?” said Maha.

  “Maybe tomorrow, based on how tonight goes.”

  The B & B owner stared at Stanley with a look that was somewhere in between a smile and a frown. He offered his hand. “You must be Janet.”

  She pulled Stanley in for a quick hug. “Call me Swooping Eagle.”

  “She’s a witch.” Kal addressed himself to the accordion box again.

  “It’s her craft name,” said Tanya.

  “Swooping Eagle, can I use the telephone?”

  The Lord retired to one of the bedrooms, to phone Frieda. Maha collected the remainder of the scone and started into the kitchen. Even if Alok had not been in the hospital, the views from the kitchen window of the mountains in the summertime dusk would have been enough to make her weep. So no one would hear her, she ran cold water in the sink and splashed it on her face.

  “All right,” said Tanya, behind her. “Let’s talk.”

  Maha stood up from the sink and dabbed her eyes with a tea towel.

  Spotting the evidence of tears, Tanya took a half-step back in apparent horror. Then she ran toward Maha and held her. “I forgive you, Maha. I forgive you. I’m a good person and I forgive you.”

  Maha was keen to attempt one of the hip-tosses she had learned in elementary school judo. She was also keen to scream, and cry some more, to run into the great room, pull Kal’s shirt up, and inspect his stomach muscles. She was keen to go to the hospital to see Alok for herself. She was keen to sit in a room, alone, with the Lord, and ask him what to do, think, and feel next.

  Instead, Maha disentangled herself from Tanya and returned to the great room. She found Swooping Eagle and Kal around the coffee table. Swooping Eagle was describing the initiation rituals for her coven, including the casting of a circle. “A lot of what we do is ancient,” she said. “Some of it we just borrowed from the Freemasons.”

  “Are they witches?” said Kal.

  “Oh, no,” said Swooping Eagle. “They’re mostly old men with Buicks. One is mostly for men and the other is mostly for women. You can be a Wicca man but not a Freemason woman. Ours has more magic. And less billiards.”

  Tanya sat down on the couch behind them. “How did you get into it, Swoopy?”

  “I was called,” she said, turning to eye Tanya. “Before I joined my coven, I was in darkness.”

  Maha joined the men around the table. “I was called to the Lord. I mean, Stanley.”

  “Total darkness over here, too,” said Kal. “You must change your life. So I did.”

  “Splendid, Kal. Just splendid.” Swooping Eagle gathered the tea and scones, which had gone untouched but for the one Maha tossed, and went to the kitchen. In her absence, no one spoke. Yet a great chattering filled the house on Grizzly Street. It was as if twenty people had just entered the room.

  Maha approached the front window. Outside, the sky was purpling. The Lord returned to the great room, with an even more profound air of disappointment about him. Several hundred people were gathered on the front lawn and on neighbouring property. A CBC broadcasting van was parked in among the crowd, its doors wide open. There were tents going up on the lawn, the street, and adjacent to the cemetery. A group of men and women with two long ladders was hanging a banner between trees. “No Blasphemy In Our Backyard” it read, bookended by a couple of unevenly painted yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons.

  “I should have mentioned,” said the Lord. “I was followed.”

  FORTY-NINE

  Kal and Alok sat on a park bench outside the Mineral Springs Hospital. The sun glinted off the decorative chrome band on the accordion. A small crowd of tourists and what the media were calling “pilgrims” took digital photographs from the other side of a police line erected by the Mounties. Given the audience, Kal was too nervous to play the song he had memorized that morning, “In Every Neighbourhood in Paris.”

  “Did you know the Vatican has a squad?”

  Alok fingered the IV hookup on the back of his wrist, and rolled the tower slightly with his shoe. “I’m not surprised, really.”

  “It’s to investigate satanic crimes, mostly. But they’re here.”

  “They think we’re a satanic crime?”

  “I guess.”

  It was probably the drugs, but it seemed to Kal that Alok’s posture wasn’t what it used to be. He was also sweaty and slightly grey coloured.

  The last thing Alok needed was bad news, so Kal didn’t tell him anything else about the Squadra Anti Sette that had arrived from Rome. He didn’t tell Alok about their information meeting that morning with the Mounties, either. Footage from the night in the Eric Harvie Theatre had spread, by way of YouTube, all the way to a man called Abu Hafiza, whose online condemnation of Stanley had provoked some Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin militants. Then there were the infrastructure concerns. Banff didn’t have enough parking spots, hotel rooms, campsites, and helicopter landing pads for all the people who were arriving daily from around the world. A multi-faith coalition of fundamentalist Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, originally formed to battle same-sex marriage legislation in North America, had set up a twenty-four-hour vigil and prayer centre two houses away from the B & B on Grizzly Street.

  “I was doing some reading yesterday afternoon,” Alok said. “Confucius, when he summed up his wisdom, asked his disciples to look into their hearts and discover what caused them the most sincere pain.”

  Kal took a moment. The thought of losing Layla forever, to Elias Shymanski. The thought of Maha leaving Banff for Toronto and her fiancé. Loneliness and darkness and alcohol and hash and prostitutes, the very life he had been heading for.

  “Then Confucius asked his disciples never to inflict that pain on others. We discussed it, last night, Stan and I. It’s really good, isn’t it?”

  “Totally.”

  “A fellow’s gotta wonder.” Alok leaned bac
k on the bench and looked up. “Maybe all the great ideas are already out there, always have been. The plight of humans is to ignore and forsake them, to bury them below the impulse to consume.”

  “Nah.”

  “It’s psychotic, you know, this drive to expand and com-modify. Capitalism, which has infected the human heart, Kal, is destroying us.”

  “Come on, buddy. Cheer up.”

  In the crowd beyond the police line, a woman bared her breasts. Alok waved to her. “Thank you so much!” The cameras turned toward her and she lifted a sign, promoting a website.

  Kal reached down and produced a mournful minor-C on his accordion. “When do you get out of here?”

  “Really soon. Tomorrow, I hope.”

  “We need you, Alok, real bad. Maha and Swooping Eagle are making up some rituals for The Stan. Every religion needs some, I guess. It’s a competitive marketplace, Tanya says. People are done reading The Testament now, and you got to give them something more. Otherwise they head to the Internet or whatever, for the next big religion, or for pictures of singers not wearing any underpants. It’s the next big step in the strategic plan.”

  “There’s a strategic plan?”

  “Tanya whipped it up.”

  “You’re right, I gotta get out of here. You can’t save the land from dying with a strategic plan.”

  “Amen.”

  Two men ducked under the yellow police line and sprinted toward Kal and Alok. Kal stood up, right away, to prevent them from touching or blowing up Alok. But three Mounties tackled them on the grass several paces away. There were flashes, from the cameras, and some of the tourists and pilgrims booed the police as they led the two men toward a squad car.

  A fourth policeman asked Kal and Alok to go back inside the hospital, so Kal hugged Alok. “Let me know if you want me to sneak down here and spring your ass.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll be out of here lickety-split.”

  A good part of the crowd followed Kal through the streets and avenues, as he made his way toward the house on Grizzly Street. They melded with the larger crowd and touched him, gave him letters for Stanley, pressed Safeway bags filled with gifts for Stanley into his hands, and kissed him, and cursed him. Most just asked questions as he hurried past without making eye contact, as the Mounties had suggested. What miracles have you witnessed? What songs can you play? Will he give me powers? Is this the end of the world?

  FIFTY

  The gorgeous young man with a fresh manicure and diamond earrings stared deeply into Tanya’s pores. “It’s absolutely disgusting,” he said, in the pale-yellow light of an exhibition tent next to the house on Grizzly Street. “They wallow in their own crap, Tanya, and those pellets they eat are filled with PCBs and dioxin and–who knows?–any number of other concentrated cancers. You and I probably have tumours right now because of farmed salmon. It’s a sign, you ask me. If you can’t trust your food, you can’t trust anything.”

  Tanya was preparing to make a formal statement to the media about The Stan, and she wanted to do it outdoors, with mountains in the background, to impress and attract the pantheists. But in natural light, without special maquillage, she would end up looking like a celebrity picked up on a drunk driving charge. Tanya enjoyed the young makeup artist she had hired, and this process. For too long, as a producer and executive, she’d been on the other side of the camera. It was hot outside, but there was an air conditioner in the tent. By next Friday, she would be sitting across from the great Morley Safer. She felt like an early investor in Google.

  Until her idyll was interrupted by a voice. Kal’s voice. Kal, in conversation with reporters.

  Tanya jumped out of her chair and knocked the makeup artist into a steel support beam. Near the door of the tent, Tanya tripped over the portable air conditioner and fell on a sound mixer. She sprained her thumb and got a grass stain on the left knee of her white slacks. “Damn it!”

  “Easy, girl,” said the makeup artist.

  There was Kal, with Maha, surrounded by television and print reporters.

  “Oh, yeah, he can pretty much do anything he wants. He’s super-awesome, and not only in making people float or whatever. First and foremost, he’s about not inflicting the worst pain you can imagine on other people. And capitalism, of course, is psychotic. Anyway, Stan’s got this vibe. You always want to be around him.” Kal lifted his accordion while Tanya fought through the crowd. He played the introductory notes to “Strangers In The Night,” and before he sang the opening line, he said, “Two weeks ago, I couldn’t play any instruments at all. But now, dig it…”

  Tanya did not want Stanley to be known strictly as a musical miracle-worker, and she did not want a former professional hockey player speaking for the organization, saying, “He’s super-awesome” and “Capitalism, of course, is psychotic,” on international television. So she burst through the final skein of media and reached for Kal. Off balance, Tanya missed his shoulder and connected with his left cheek and lip, neither of which had healed. Kal cried out in pain and drove himself backward, taking two female reporters and a cameraman down with him.

  The accordion grunted.

  Screams rang out. One of the reporters crushed in the melee was hurt. A small cut opened above her eye, and some of the blood smeared on her colleague’s bare right arm. “Oh my God, oh my God,” said the woman with blood on her arm. She sprinted toward the road, leaving her microphone behind. “AIDS test!”

  Five cellphones came out like guns at the OK Corral. The various descriptions of the incident, for the emergency dispatchers, squeezed the goodwill out of Tanya’s heart.

  “There’s been an aggravated assault on Grizzly Street.”

  “Massive head trauma.”

  “Bloodbath!”

  “Le trouble schizo-affectif.”

  “Attempted murder.”

  The reporters bumped into one another trying to get a statement from Tanya, Maha, or Kal himself. To simplify the message and direct the microphones and cameras toward herself, Tanya began to call out, “Accident. Accident. Ha ha! It was a funny accident.”

  It worked. She moved backwards, toward the tent next to the house on Grizzly Street, and the reporters followed her like hyenas stalking a wounded zebra. Tanya stopped walking and forced a smile. On the other side of the reporters, Kal was tending to the woman with the cut on her forehead.

  The first question was simple. “Why did you attack Kal?”

  “I didn’t attack Kal.” Tanya laughed. “I love Kal! I was trying to pull him in to kiss him on the cheek–he’s so adorable–when I tripped on a shoe.”

  “That’s a filthy lie,” said one of the male reporters.

  “Who said that? Who said that?”

  “Why were you trying to kiss him?”

  “Like I just said, he’s adorable.”

  “So there is a sexual component to this cult?”

  “This isn’t a cult.”

  The sun went behind a cloud and Tanya saw her reflection in a camera lens. Her hair was tied back, and only one of her eyes had any mascara. Her foundation was uneven and she was not wearing lipstick. She desperately wanted to kick someone, or something, but if she did kick one of the reporters–preferably the man who had called her a filthy liar–she would need further reputation management. Tanya remembered her yoga. She found her centre and breathed and focused.

  “I worked in the media my entire career, so I understand what you’re doing here.” Tanya smiled as warmly as she could manage. “But how can you all stand before us, this beautiful afternoon, in judgment? What we are doing here is trying to build a spiritual organization unlike any other, a group of like-minded Canadians committed to saving this country, and the larger world, from itself. We want individuals to come out from behind their television sets, to stop being customers and clients of a crooked government and an even more crooked corporate infrastructure, and begin a new and authentic life. With us. With Stanley Moss and The Stan.”

  “How much d
oes it cost?”

  “What?”

  “How much does it cost to join?”

  “Nothing. We’re a collective.”

  “So you’re Communists?”

  “No.”

  “Socialists, then?”

  “We’re apolitical.”

  Several of the reporters laughed sarcastically. “An apolitical religious organization?”

  “Do you hate Jesus?”

  Tanya smiled, authentically this time. “Not at all.”

  “How do you feel about Jesus?”

  “Me, personally? I think he’s terrific.”

  “When will The Stan perform his next miracle?”

  “Soon.”

  The reporters grumbled. A young man in the front raised his hand. “What do you think of the religious leaders gathered here to denounce you as minions of the Devil?”

  Tanya could not tell the young man what she really thought of them. “Pity,” she said, addressing the camera with a valiant attempt at genuine concern. “We feel pity.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Stanley could tell, by the background noise, that Frieda was in the garden. In the summer months, she pulled up new dandelions every morning with a long screwdriver. As neighbours passed in the alley, she would rise on her knees and say hello, talk about the weather, ask about children, offer to babysit. Stanley heard a bumblebee pass by his wife, and the wind.

  “The new neighbours across the alley don’t do a damn thing about their lawn,” she said. “Dandelion seeds sail over with every gust.”

  “You could write a note, leave it in the mailbox.”

  “On Friday nights, the man of the house hosts backyard parties. Firepit and country music. You can hear him, when the windows are open, cussing away. I don’t think he’d appreciate a note.”