The Book of Stanley

by Todd Babiak

  Alok smiled. “It’s moved beyond her now.”

  “When you get out of here, you can get rid of Tanya.”

  “I’m not getting out of here, Maha. You know it.”

  “Yes you are. Don’t say that.”

  “We can’t explain death away, like the great failed religions do. It’s terrifying and dark. I can see it now, in my dreams, and it’s wonderful. My death is perfect.”

  Maha looked out the window, not at the mountains or the Great Dane or the cars and trucks and pedestrians with cameras. She looked at nothing, and blew into her cold hands.

  “There isn’t a Heaven or a Paradise. It’s here. This is it. The genuine search for meaning–”

  “You’re talking about meaninglessness.”

  Alok’s forehead was now covered in sweat, and his eyes had narrowed.

  “The land isn’t dying,” he said, sleepily. “It’s coming back to life.”

  “You’re not dying.” Maha slapped his leg, to wake him. “You’ll get well again and we’ll figure all this out.”

  “We won’t figure it out, Maha. We can’t. Isn’t that beautiful?”

  There was a layer of dust on the windowsill, illuminated by the sunlight. As Alok fell asleep, Maha addressed herself to the unknowable complexity of dust on the windowsill–the anonymous skin cells of sick people. And she didn’t see what was so beautiful about it.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Overall, Stanley’s time in Svarga reminded him of his visits to New York City. Nonchalant hairy people, architectural marvels, mad conversations. Only this particular trip lacked the merry debrief in his son’s guest room with Frieda.

  Stanley had now received separate, confused visits from Maha and Kal, both of whom had expressed misgivings about Tanya. Stanley didn’t know exactly what Tanya was planning, but he was cautiously supportive of her marketing plan. A spiritual movement needed supporters. More important, and this was his job, a religion needed a comprehensive mythology and a promise; turning Canadians into sopranos wasn’t enough.

  None of the books he consulted adequately explained the in-between place he had just visited. Applying logic and reason to Svarga, figuring it out, made it seem dark and malicious. He stared at the off-white wall before him, a pen in hand, and waited.

  The Stan had to be new, a reaction to the spiritual status quo. He would consult with Alok.

  “What do you expect to accomplish?” Frieda had said, at least five times now, her voice smoked and dry on the digital line.

  For most of the afternoon, various residents of Svarga had walked past his window–aboriginals, explorers, Chinese labourers, King Edward VIII. Stanley tried not to acknowledge them. The sky, and the house, grew dark. Thunder cracked and boomed through the valley. Stanley walked out of his bedroom as the rain began to fall and, through the picture window, watched the petitioners and pilgrims and protesters rush for cover. He took the opportunity to leave the house on Grizzly Street and take a stroll.

  Stanley walked up past the Banff Centre and began climbing Tunnel Mountain in the rain. Halfway up, the storm grew nasty. The rain fell in heavy drops, from various directions, as the wind howled through the valley. Spruce bows lashed. Near the summit, a bolt of lightning flicked and the air smelled both wet and scorched.

  Typical of Alberta, the storm eased as quickly as it had come. By the time it had passed over Stanley, the town below was bathed again in mercifully warm sunlight. He sat on a flat rock on the small mountain overlooking town and watched the returning pedestrians.

  One moment Stanley was looking down at Banff, alone on his rock, and the next Darlene was with him. She sat next to Stanley in a baby-blue dress and white hat. Her legs dangled without touching the ground.

  “Did you make that storm, Mr. Moss?”

  He laughed.

  “So how does it feel to be the Lord?”

  “I’ve completely forgotten aspects of my former life. Friends’ names, my parents, the 1960s. But I feel healthy. Powerful. Clear. I feel ready to do something extraordinary. Help people. Make things better.” Stanley took in the warm, wet air. “It’s driving me a little bit crazy, I think. These people expect a lot from me, and I don’t know how to be for them. A friend? A leader? A distant miracle-worker, speaking through codes and prophecies and metaphors and thunder?”

  Darlene took her white hat off and spun it on her index finger.

  “So you don’t live down there, in Svarga?”

  “Oh no,” said Darlene.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Here and there.”

  Stanley removed his soaked sweater and wrung it out over the fine gravel in front of the rock. He looked at the girl, who had closed her eyes to face the sun. She appeared presidential. “It must be strange, being dead,” he said.

  Darlene smiled. “Strange is a good word for it.”

  “Do you know why I’m here, Darlene? What I’m here to do?”

  She did not respond.

  “Do you know?”

  “I’m sure it isn’t to float around and throw boulders, Mr. Moss.”

  “God damn it.” Stanley looked up at the blue of the sky, source of inspiration for every prophet and poet in history. He saw only sky.

  “Whoever did this to me, I’d like some hint.” Stanley addressed the blue of the sky again. “Please. What do you want me to do? Hello? Where should I start? I’m ready! Hi!”

  “Excellent strategy, Mr. Moss.”

  “I’m a florist. That must mean something, right? I think it’s the central metaphor of our time, our destination.”

  “Flower arrangement?”

  “Ecology. A new spiritual outlook, organized around ecology, could enshrine complexity, instead of simplicity. We could have rituals, even outdoor rituals, and offer religious experiences that are based in the present tense. Powerful, communal experiences instead of a strategy for easy personal and political wish-fulfillment. I don’t know if anyone really believes any more–least of all the believers.”

  Stanley wondered if Darlene understood what he was saying, or cared. She just stared at him, and blinked.

  “There’s a contradiction,” he said. “It’s fine for me to think this up. But how do you create a religion that offers little of what people recognize as religious?”

  Darlene put her hat back on and stood up from the rock. “Good luck.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She shrugged and disappeared into some alders.

  When he was a florist, Stanley had loved to be alone in his sales tents. Especially near the solstice, when dusk lasted for hours. He remembered watering the flowers, and the explosive scent at the end of a hot day. Young men and women in the strip mall parking lot, leaning against their cars and kissing. Skateboarding teenagers jumping curbs. Lost dogs. Professional drunks who installed themselves near the Safeway dumpsters after closing time to drink mickeys of vodka and eat expired bread.

  Some nights, Frieda would surprise him as he locked up and they would take an overpriced glass of wine on the terrace of the Hotel Macdonald. They would talk, or not talk, and Stanley would sit there with his wife and marvel at his luck. Stanley knew, during those divine middle-class evenings of simple, undeclared beauty, that he and Frieda had discovered and unravelled a secret.

  This, just this, Stanley thought, should be the promise of every religion.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  The Cave and Basin hot spring, on the side of a giant mountain overlooking the town, was the birthplace of Banff. Kal had read some pamphlets, to impress Maha. The first documented European to discover the misty hot springs had said, “It’s like some fantastic dream from a tale of the Arabian Nights.” Kal repeated this line to himself, as he waded in the far less dreamy chlorinated pool the hot springs had become, waiting for Maha as she changed into her bathing suit. At first, he had installed himself in a particularly egg-smelling corner to watch Maha exit the change room in her white bikini. But the mist had enchanted him, just as it had enchant
ed that railway worker in the fall of 1883, so he turned around to watch it obscure the pale spruce trees lit by floodlights.

  When a gust of wind blew off the steam and low cloud, a number of people who shared the pool seemed to recognize Kal from television and newspapers. He smiled at them and turned away, hoping they wouldn’t wade over. So many of the pilgrims spoke poor English. For once he wanted to speak to Maha, privately and intimately, not to a bunch of Italians and South Koreans.

  Tomorrow he would open for Stanley at the high school, with an accordion performance. The Stan lacked a proper hymn, so Kal thought he might put together a theme song. Sad, happy, romantic, like a sweet yet unplaceable smell you recognize from grade four. A light touch on his left shoulder interrupted the music in his head.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “The clouds.”

  Maha bobbed in the water as she looked around. Wet black hair clung to her ears and neck.

  “Don’t you think it’s out of the Arabian Nights?”

  “What?”

  “The, uh, you know. The mist?”

  “I’ve never read the Arabian Nights.”

  “You’re Arab, though, originally?”

  “My family descended from the Canaanites. Ethnically, I’m Lebanese.”

  Kal had meant to sound poetic. Now he was just uncomfortable. No matter what he did, Kal couldn’t make his feelings seem natural and right in her presence. It wasn’t even enough that he had spent $1,100 to remove his back, chest, and excessive crotch hair. It wasn’t enough that he had done thirty-six push-ups and forty-four sit-ups in the change room.

  In a desperate attempt to be alluring, Kal pretended he was too hot, hopped up on the edge of the pool, and straightened his posture to minimize any chub and maximize his pectoral muscles. He also flexed his biceps a bit, just enough so that he could still breathe and talk normally.

  “What do you think about tomorrow?”

  Maha raised her hands out of the water and performed a teeter-totter with them.

  Kal had thoughts. Instead of revealing them he said, “You are so, so awesome.”

  For a long, long time Maha didn’t respond. Then she took a breath and it seemed as though she was about to respond, negatively, but she didn’t respond. Maha stayed quiet and moved the water around in front of her as though she were performing a slow, gentle breaststroke.

  Kal wanted to tell Maha she was beyond pretty, in fact, she was the best hope for the future of the human race. The blood in her veins was sweeter than any music he could play.

  But just as Kal started to tell her all of these things–the feeling of delicious loss she conjured up in him–Maha pushed herself off and swam toward the opposite side of the pool. Once she reached it, she climbed out. The mist had already enveloped her, so Kal barely saw Maha tiptoe along the platform and into the women’s change room.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Tanya asked for the bill at Melissa’s Restaurant, and smiled one last time. The producer from 60 Minutes was a man called Francis–which Tanya had always taken to be a girl’s name. He wore a vigorously chopped sandy beard and a pressed blue shirt. When he’d arrived at the restaurant for their pre-interview dinner, Francis had been wearing a sports jacket and a patterned grey tie. A plate of chicken cordon bleu, a bottle of Okanagan white wine, and two glasses of cognac later, Francis had removed his tie, his jacket, and his wedding ring.

  “Can you answer me one final question?” he said, in a flinty New York accent. “Completely off the record?”

  “Of course, Francis.” She thought he was more of a Douglas. A Robert. His teeth and lips appeared glued by sugary cognac. “Anything.”

  “You’re exactly like those pretty girls working for hardcore Republicans, aren’t you? This is all a role. Right?” Francis leaned over the table and snarled merrily. “Not to diminish the power of what you’ve evoked here. It’s a very resonant story about contemporary Americans’ pathetic need for spiritual connection. But really,” he whispered, “you’re having us on, here, all us media dopes, aren’t you?”

  Tanya had been careful to sip her wine, and to pretend to fill her glass when she filled Francis’s. In her experience, East Coast American media people were adventurous drunks whereas West Coasters drank fizzy water and held eye contact too long.

  “If you don’t believe what’s happening here, Francis, why are you doing the story?”

  His eyes, the foundation of his smile, opened and shut slowly. This routine, Tanya saw, often worked for Francis. Francis had partaken in a number of drunk, syrupy, sleepy, and utterly awkward affairs with colleagues and interview subjects. Such affairs weren’t completely unknown to her. Francis lifted his hands from the table, as though Tanya had a gun on him. “I’ll reserve judgment. I’ll be a good journalist. But you really buy this thing?”

  “I do. I’ve seen it and felt it.”

  “What does it mean to you?”

  “Before this,” said Tanya, her eyes fixed on him, “I was completely hollow. Completely.”

  “I’m sorry I missed that. Hollowness makes a person seem trustworthy to me.” Francis took his last sip of cognac, the glass shivering slightly. An audible gulp. “Make sure you say it just like that to Safer tomorrow. Just like that.”

  Outside, on the corner of Lynx and Caribou, in an odd mist, Francis closed his eyes and moved in quite deftly, considering his condition, for a kiss. Tanya didn’t open her mouth, and made it quick. The secret, in this situation, when the story had not yet appeared, was to be noncommittal.

  “My room is massive,” he said. “Jacuzzi. The mini-bar is stacked.”

  Tanya placed her hand on Francis’s chest. “That is a lovely offer, thank you, but I have a lot of work to do before tomorrow night. I don’t imagine I’ll sleep.”

  “Another time? We leave Friday.”

  “Certainly.”

  Francis winked and, in one motion, turned and waved at the street. To hail a taxi that would not come. Tanya might have informed him that he would have to go back inside Melissa’s and call a cab, or better yet walk to the Banff Springs Hotel, but she felt a certain amount of hostility toward Francis. So she left him and walked up Caribou to Grizzly Street, weaving through the tents on the front lawn and gravel driveway.

  Swooping Eagle was in the great room, looking at the Calgary newspaper. She stood up to greet Tanya. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  The heat inside the house and the memory of Francis’s kiss made Tanya feel slightly nauseous, and she burped a soup of cognac, fish, and stomach acid. “Why?”

  “The mayor came, with some RCMP. They want you out of here.”

  Tanya didn’t have to ask why. The street out front was nearly blocked. People were milling about, with liquor, in the cemetery. But Banff probably didn’t have bylaws on the books to break crowds like these. She wondered about the persecution angle. “Did they give you a timeline?”

  “The end of the week.” Swooping Eagle rubbed her hands together. “Now, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I do have a few spells that might be relevant. That is, if Stanley doesn’t want to…”

  Tanya didn’t pay attention. She was writing the morning’s press release in her head, and imagining the spin for 60 Minutes. For the second time, they’d been evicted for their beliefs. Here in freedom-loving America.

  On the way to her room, Tanya’s desire for multi-platform communications strategizing faded. It might have been the wine, she thought, or something Francis had said. Maybe it was the reverberations of the word hollow. Either way, the gathering, the 60 Minutes interview, the mayor, Swooping Eagle’s tie-dye T-shirt with the elk on it, the prospect of finding new lodging, and press release complications all passed away. Tanya changed into her black teddy, splashed some cold water on her face, reapplied her eye makeup, and dabbed a subtle hint of perfume behind her left ear. Then she pranced down the hall to Stanley’s suite.

  She did not knock.

  Inside, Tanya closed the door behind her
and smiled. Stanley was on the bed, with a notepad and The Book of Mormon. He looked genuinely shocked to see her in a black teddy. This displeased Tanya; wasn’t he supposed to read her mind and anticipate such things?

  Stanley said nothing. The overwhelming biological and intellectual force that had led Tanya to his room had not abated, but she was more anxious than usual. “Mark Twain reviewed The Book of Mormon as a novel. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “The angel Moroni. Do you think Joseph Smith and the boys knew the Greek root moros? Of all the names they could have chosen for their…”

  “I know.”

  “…angel.”

  “I know why you’re here, Tanya.”

  Stanley said this resignedly. The timbre of his voice brought a new desire forth. Tanya now wanted to click her heels three times, close her eyes, clutch a terrier, and wake up in the Dominican Republic.

  “And I’m afraid I can’t do it.”

  She walked around the bed and sat next to him. “It’s not like you’d be betraying Frieda. This is just a transaction, really, to make sure your seed–your holy seed–continues on.” It actually caused Tanya physical pain to say the phrase your holy seed. “The son or daughter of a prophet or a God. Of a…very special, and attractive, man.”

  “I’m sorry, Tanya. I can’t.”

  “How do you know? You haven’t tried.” Tanya leaned in to kiss him and stopped when she made eye contact. His lack of interest was an insult. She stood up off the bed. The muscles in her legs grew weak and a spike of heat passed through her. At the door, she turned. “You’d better be careful this whole thing doesn’t go to your head. You’re not going to find better, no matter who you are.”

  “Tanya–”

  “This was a one-chance deal and you forfeit. You could have had it. All this.” Tanya motioned to herself in the teddy and grasped the door handle. She sought the perfect goodbye phrase, something that would cut Stanley and leave him simmering in regret all night if not longer. All that came to mind, unfortunately, was, “You snooze, you lose.”