Vicar had no idea what that was supposed to signify, but he could see that they were already developing Jacquie into one of their front-page characters. He couldn’t think of anything stupider than the utter drivel this tabloid published, although he had to admit that Jacquie was at least photogenic, and he was grateful for the heel of French bread covering part of his face. Never in a million years had he expected to see his photograph on a magazine cover, along with a splashy headline about Joan Collins’s torrid love affairs, presented as if she had shagged Warren Beatty just last Saturday. He was becoming aware that some people actively sought out these rags and believed their contents. Such willing gullibility frightened him. The masses might be entranced by retro glamour, yet Vicar conjured a nightmarish collage: clicking, disembodied dentures with a mid-Atlantic accent simply charmed to meet Mr. Erectile Dysfunction in the form of a puddle with a knob. Cue the John Philip Sousa.
The denial of reality via believing in this patently fake baloney seemed awfully Orwellian, and yet it was a very successful arrangement. The tabloids counted on readers believing not that their headlines were completely true, but that where there was some smoke, there was probably a little fire. The understanding made everyone happy, except the people who were the topic of conversation. Vicar supposed that for some, this nonsense gave hope, or at least a needed distraction. But he couldn’t imagine being so desperate, not even after some of his very dark days. He tried to sheer away from the topic.
Simultaneously, he was beginning to feel the effects of the cookie that Farley had given him as an offering of thanks. Farley had insisted that Vicar try one, so excited was he to be invited along to this get-together. Vicar had resisted at first. His history with this kind of stuff was iffy at best. But Farley didn’t have much of a social life, and he’d hardly believed his luck at being asked to Jacquie’s. Vicar saw Farley look at Jacquie and blush for what must have been the fourth time. So Vicar, reassured by Jacquie, who was on her home turf and in a happy mood, had ingested a tiny portion of Farley’s “Space Biscuit.”
Their entire conversation revolved around recent events. Wedding Elvis. The fight. The car accident. The funeral. The lottery. The stalkers. The heavy media coverage. Vicar wondered what might be next. Jacquie seemed less surprised about the attention than about the fact that Vicar couldn’t see what propelled it. With her own eyes, she said, she had witnessed some stuff that was difficult to explain away.
Farley, on the other hand, acted as if Vicar had always had the key to all things, and he seldom questioned events. He unceremoniously flopped down on all fours, crawled to Jacquie’s little stereo in the corner, and plugged his phone into it. Suddenly his arms and legs were thrashing around spastically as he sang about Tom Sawyer. Jacquie grimaced, no doubt wondering what other than drowning could prompt Farley to flail around like that. Vicar, on the other hand, paid Farley no mind. It was quite normal to have this kind of physical response when listening to Rush.
Vicar was unwilling to see himself as anything other than a run-of-the-mill guy and spent, he felt, a lot of his time being surprised that others couldn’t apprehend what was obvious to him. He did sometimes wish he could be more easygoing, just go with the flow, be at peace with people’s half-baked conceptions. But not, of course, if it meant swallowing the lurid claims of E-Obsession magazine.
Where the world saw magical powers in him, he saw nothing but an inexplicable change in his fortunes. Warily, he concluded that anything that meandered so randomly and mysteriously could just as easily turn back and flop. He’d suffer the slings and arrows of celebrity while he had it because next week, in a snap, he might revert to anonymous cipher, again left high and dry. At least right now, people were nice to him, and the band was doing fine. He thought about this for a second until his thoughts were interrupted by Farley singing at the top of his lungs, “The river!”
Vicar wandered into the kitchen, searching for a tin of mixed nuts, when the cookie really started to work its magic. He felt an odd surge in his body.
Pulling back the cupboard door had opened a portal to higher consciousness, or so it suddenly seemed. Staring at the snack shelf, he saw a deep-space view of a thousand or perhaps ten thousand galaxies, the image better and cleaner and sharper than any retouched deep-field shot from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Each galaxy was revolving like a top, its outer circumference rimmed by hot, glowing gases and dust. Star stuff. The kind of stuff that Carl Sagan had liked to talk about.
Vicar approached, soaring high above their plane and discovering each one to be whirling and rotating madly. He wondered, in his haze of pot cookie, how gravity held them together at that tremendous angular velocity. This footage must be sped up for the sake of brevity, he thought, hearing his own inner voice make the statement with just a little bit of reverb and echo. Flying closer now, he saw each galaxy as a constantly morphing Mandelbrot set, a digital representation of ever deeper resolution. Down he plunged into the heart of one digital galaxy, down, down.
Each galaxy was a universe of knowledge, a database, a billions-of-years-long collection of information, a spinning, starry hard drive. He found that each level of complexity revealed an older, deeper one, like a tower of champagne glasses receiving him as he poured and flowed. His fall was fast now, a rocketing downward trajectory through the very middle of the set into the centre of what he imagined was a black hole of pure mathematics.
He plunged headlong, spinning slowly the way a rifled bullet rotates, with one hand guided by a thread that seemed to run through all of this down into the midst of another galaxy. He fell like sand in an hourglass. Far beneath him, he could see yet another galaxy. Beneath that, another, and then another deeper still, each a lower branch on some kind of tree.
He couldn’t manage to grasp the mixed nuts, and he gazed at the oat and bran bars without recognition. Slowly he began to spin and rotate on the linoleum next to the sink, one hand up in the air like the spout of the little teapot. Jacquie stared at him quizzically from the couch.
Vicar’s brain reasoned that at the heart of all this, there must be a starting point, or a finish line. Or something. Surely there was something. Everything he was aware of in this world had a beginning and an end. Why would it be different out there in the vastness of the universe? How could we differ from the universe that bore us? How could a son not be like his mother? An image of his mother zipped past his mind’s eye: she was dressed in an old-fashioned bathing costume, and he was crawling toward her as she encouraged him with a singsong tone.
He plunged like a drunken Acapulco cliff diver, feeling his chest tighten, hoping his lungs and his brain would survive the fall.
As he moved downward, he saw the galaxies getting smaller, less massive, less significant, until they looked like simple thin strips, oversized, distorted pixels.
Suddenly he bounced, bottom-first, onto a soft carpet of balls. Pilates balls? Beach balls? He landed without injury and surveyed his surroundings: a huge, black, endless field of softly luminescent spheres. They spanned beyond his sight.
He spun around and saw the curvy thread that he had followed all the way down here hanging down a foot or two above the surface of balls. He grasped it and gently tugged downward, finding that it flexed easily. With both hands, he pulled until the thread touched the top of the bouncy ball beneath it. As it made contact, the ball shimmered and became a pole.
His perception changed immediately, as if the lights had just been turned on. Everything seemed different to him now.
He stared and cogitated for a moment. Why, they were not balls — they were zeroes! The descending thread had touched the zero and made it not into a pole, but into the number one! He was seeing the first piece of data; this was the very Olduvai of all information. He had just seen the original first impulse. Primeval digital. The om. The sound. The word. The voice. The big bang.
His mind flashed to the distant galaxies he’d seen at the beginning of the journey, and he knew at that mom
ent that this very first non-zero, this first iota of data, the point of origin of all subsequent ones, was also completely analogous to the first binary fission of the first cell that gave rise to earthly life. Dumbstruck, he held on to the thread now attached to the one, leaning his weight on the strand that had guided him all the way down here. He gazed upward at it.
OMG … it was a double helix.
“Farley,” he croaked. “Those are awesome cookies …”
Twenty-Six / Hospital
Frankie Hall hadn’t made her usual wine order for a couple of weeks, so Vicar decided to check in on her. As he trundled the idling Chevelle down her driveway, he noticed that the garbage cans hadn’t been brought in from the road. He parked and strolled back up the hill to fetch them. He pulled behind him the little cart the bins sat in, tucked it into the garage, and knocked on the door.
It took a while. Finally Frankie, normally cheerful and energetic, answered the door in a housecoat and slippers. She looked weak and was clearly not feeling very well.
“Oh, boy. You look like you might have the flu or something, Mrs. Hall.”
“Good gravy. I don’t know what I have, but I feel awful.”
Her voice was pitched lower than usual. Her sparkle had always shone so brightly, but it was missing now.
She was ashen and drab. Something wasn’t right. Vicar suddenly became worried.
“Can I come in out of the rain for a second?”
She coughed. “Surely, dear.”
She stood aside to let him in. Vicar grabbed the phone out of his pocket and called Poutine.
“Hey, Ross, it’s Tony.”
“Roger, I gotcha five by five. Go, Tony!” Poutine replied, like a flying ace in a Hollywood blockbuster. Clearly, he was wearing his new headset.
“Look, man, I’m up here at Mrs. Hall’s place, and she’s not feeling well. I’m going to blow off my deliveries and take her up to the doctor.”
“Uh-oh. ’Kay. That’s affirmative, Liquor Vicar. Heh, heh.” Poutine was delighted with his own comedy.
“If Jacquie can’t cover for me, maybe Farley could do the last couple.”
“Farley?” Poutine exclaimed, breaking character. “He’s bolivious to everything around him.”
Despite the worrisome situation, Vicar chortled. Farley was “bolivious” all right. If you stayed calm he was pretty good, but if you lost it around him, he’d start shaking like a dog in a thunderstorm. Vicar tried not to think about “Radar Love.”
He got Frankie dressed and loaded her into the car. The Chevelle was so loud that she couldn’t make heads or tails of his attempts at conversation. Already sick, she was badly aggravated by the sound of the car, which she called a “horrible crate.” Vicar frowned uncomfortably.
Over the rumbling, he raised his voice and repeated, “I said, we’ll see if Doc Johnston will be able to help, and if not, I’ll drive you down to the hospital.”
The car bounced noisily past a couple of kids wearing underwear over their pants. Vicar looked at them in bewilderment.
“The hospital?” Frankie coughed again. “That’s miles away. You’ll do no such thing!”
Vicar just looked at her and gave her a lopsided grin. Folks as old as Frankie Hall were pioneers here on this island, where towns like Tyee Lagoon hadn’t really existed until the 1940s. To a person of her generation, the thought of putting someone out over a cough was well beyond the pale. Then again, maybe she just preferred suffering in silence to sitting in this cacophonous car. It was probably just the flu, anyway.
Frankie’s generation was a stoic one. If you’d told her about things like mental health leave or being traumatized by workplace harassment, she’d have reacted like a dog looking at a photograph of a cat. Blank stare. Going hungry and cold like they had during the bitter winter of ’36 or losing your only child to some godforsaken battlefield — now that was trauma.
The doctor didn’t take long to direct Frankie to the hospital. She briefly resisted, but ultimately retained that old-school deference to authority. You never went against the wishes of a physician, nor anyone in uniform.
“We can call the ambulance, but I know from experience that it will take about an hour, then it’s another hour to the hospital.” That was how it was out here in the country. The nurse was sympathetic, but she couldn’t conjure miracles.
Vicar insisted that he’d get Frankie to the emergency room himself. She kept her fingers in her ears for the entire trip, except when she burst out in a rattling cough.
At the hospital, Vicar stayed with her until she was checked in and comfortable in her bed. By then, Jacquie had arrived. Frankie made a point of privately asking Jacquie to get her a few items from home, whispering confidentially and gesturing. Vicar stepped away discreetly, as if looking for something, while Jacquie listened attentively. Vicar’s heart went out to this sweet old gal. What a shame she didn’t have a daughter who could help.
“Should I call Pasquale?” he heard Jacquie ask gently.
“Oh heavens, he’s in Italy for the rest of the winter. With his granddaughter.”
“But I can send an email or call.”
“Don’t get the wrong impression. He is my gentleman friend, but that’s about it.” Frankie coughed again and covered her mouth with a fresh Kleenex.
Vicar returned to the bedside. “Do you have any family you want me to call?”
Without sentimentality, Frankie said, “Nope. I’m the last one hangin’ around. Bill died of a heart attack in ’80, and Billy was killed in 1951. He was a soldier.”
Vicar was taken aback. He hadn’t known she had a son named Billy.
“Korea?” he asked hesitantly.
“Mm-hmm,” Frankie replied. “He was only a boy. Joined the Princess Pats.”
She trailed off for a few moments as Vicar rearranged the items on her bedside table.
Then she whispered in afterthought, “He made it through Kapyong, but he died in some silly skirmish a few months later …”
Twenty-Seven / Billy
Serena had sent her minions out in the blue microbus to locate Jacquie O. The internet told Serena almost nothing about her, which displeased her greatly. Normally she could glean enough to wedge herself deeply into anyone’s life. Not so in this case. A setback, but not a showstopper. She sorted through the case that contained her many wigs and brushed them out very carefully.
This Jacquie was a bartender, she knew that. She had asked around. The idiots around here were as cooperative as children, completely devoid of caution or suspicion. She could have made them tell their entire life stories. All she’d had to do was unbutton her top and question passing men; they’d volunteered tranches of information based solely on a glimpse of her cleavage. She cornered one idiot, wearing an orange toque and Johnny Carson’s discarded Bermuda shorts, who knew Jacquie. He was obviously a friend of the Vicar. But he’d been unable to clearly spit anything out, fixated as he was on her ample cleavage, as well the torn men’s underwear she sported over her pants. Inwardly, she’d laughed as he hunched over, getting a boner. Pathetic!
Partway through their conversation, she’d realized that he was the bass player in Vicar’s group. The one with the pompoms. Most of his information was worthless, just stuttering attempts to flirt. It would have helped had he been able to smoothly complete a sentence, but still, she knew how to tease out the nuggets. He couldn’t remember exactly where Jacquie lived, because he’d been “wickedly fucked up” when he and Vicar were there. He had been doing some “bong hoots.” All the same, he seemed strangely confident about her schedule. As far as where Serena might find “her old high school friend,” he’d pointed toward a massive swath of forest on Royal Mountain. Searching all that might take days.
She checked her mobile phone again to see if Jeet had texted. Nothing yet, but she knew her target couldn’t hide for long.
Serena was confident that she could have been a secret agent. But of course, she’d also have made a brilliant race car
driver, or stunt person, or bounty hunter, or paratrooper, or so she thought.
It was amazing, how high you could set your sights when no one had ever countered your fantasies with reality. Serena was blithely unaware that though she was shrewd and cunning, she was also naive and ludicrous.
Beauty without smarts is a tragedy; beauty married to madness is a catastrophe.
---
“So what was all that about Frankie’s son?” Jacquie asked. They were on their way to Frankie Hall’s house.
“Billy Jr. She said he was a soldier in the Princess Pats. That’s infantry, so he was a ground pounder. She said he made it through Kapyong. Korea. Crazy battle,” he murmured, drifting off in thought.
Jacquie let him coast for a moment and then gently prompted him. “Crazy how?”
“A small number of Canucks held off, like, a million Chinese troops.”
“A million?”
“Well, lots.”
“So not a million, then?”
“Uh, no. It was like five thousand Chinese to seven hundred Canadians, or something. Nearly ten to one. But they held. Very few know about the battle. Crazy-brave old bastards.” Vicar’s head dipped as if he were bowing in respect for their memory.
“Wow,” was all Jacquie could say.
They used the key Frankie had given them to enter the house. There was an unwashed mug in the sink, and Vicar spied all sorts of handrails and extra equipment in the bathroom as he glided past it.
The place was old now, probably sixty years, appropriately dark for a Tudor, but it had the musty smell that went with a seaside house. The axe-hewn oak and wrought-iron fixtures made it look like an ancient castle keep. The latches clanked, heavy and dungeon-like, as he walked through the doorways, worn flagstone under his feet. It looked a little like a fortress, yet it had a very happy feel about it. Vicar instinctively loved it. He imagined the cozy dinner parties they must have thrown as he passed a small, low access-door marked with a fading Scotch-taped sign that read, Keep Out — Old Man’s Private Stock — XXX. The wine cellar, obviously. Old school. He grinned and climbed the steps to the main rooms.
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