On the Up

by Shilo Jones

  I laugh, say nope, not those, I can’t get enough of the fast-food ones with the watery see-through plum sauce.

  Beckett grabs his stomach. “Yuck, contaminated with—”

  “Let’s move on,” Vincent says, grimacing. “Another Flowroom idea! Whenever something is beyond awesome, totally next-level, we say…that is so Sumi! You guys in? Is that so Sumi or what?”

  All three of us agree it’s so Sumi. I take a sip of coffee, think about calling Meeta, setting a date for that family dinner she’s always harping on about.

  Vincent holds up his phone. “Elodie? Do you mind? Can I…just…a photo with Sumi? For our feed? A year after the Olympics and we’re still celebrating. That’s how Vancouver parties. The fun city! Our enthusiasm is like…endless.”

  Elodie lifts the stuffed animal to her face. Tries to smile. Red lipstick’s smeared across her front tooth. Beckett tells her. She uses Sumi’s cape to wipe it off. Vincent takes the photo. Takes another sip of his half-finished smoothie, spends a few seconds posting, then shouts, “So Sumi!”

  “So Sumi!” everyone shouts back.

  “Go family team!” Vincent says, beaming, looking completely impressed with everything. Checks his watch, mutters about a lunch meeting, says we’ll have to hurry, asks Elodie for the dollar amount, gross, of the properties she closed last week. Elodie smiles for the first time all morning, and after the meeting Vincent congratulates Beckett on dropping out of film school, shouts So Sumi! while doing an awful white-boy hip-hop dance. Beckett leaps up to join him. I’m leaving when Vincent grabs my arm, not hard but not gentle, asks if I want to go skimboarding when the weather gets warm and I tell him yes, absolutely, and I don’t mean it at all, but I do, a little, because it sounds fun?

  Vincent tells me I look happy, asks if I’m happy and I think for a second and say yes again, absolutely, but what I’m thinking is whoever said money can’t buy happiness wasn’t born broke. Vincent says what a score you are, Jasminder, a total keeper.

  Carl “Blitzo” Reed

  Hot tub party at a house that looks suspiciously like my own. Coral’s going on about how little five million will get you in this town, in houses or drugs I can’t tell. Larry’s nodding, sleepy, threading his sasquatch-like shoulder hair into Coral’s dreadlocks. I’m surreptitiously sticking the hot tub jet against my bare arse. Mist blocks the view over the ocean. Someone mentions fecal counts. I do a mental check of my bowels, realize they’re talking English Bay.

  “She’s slipped under,” Coral says in a voice like she’s speaking through a wall of glass.

  “Haven’t we all,” Larry says, ever the prankster.

  “Sweet way to murder a Monday, Blitz. You got some life.”

  Half life? Second life? I try to say something quippy, give up, try to determine if it’s day or night, give up, blame it on my kaleidoscopic Oakleys, ask when the surprise solstice eco-party is?

  Right now, someone whispers in my ear, inspiring a collusive smile. From behind, someone else asks has Blitzo ever been to the Orgasmatron. I’m momentarily taken aback by the realization there are several hundred strangers in my architecturally award-winning home.

  “This house…recycles itself,” I manage. “Negative carbon footprint, net positive energy. Where’s my cellphone? House is on the Internet of Things, gives impromptu lectures about how the government subsidizes me to own it. Has a promising career as a techno-futurist huckster. Says we are forever in its debt.”

  “Huckster?” I take a look, drawn by the stoner drawl. It’s the Whistler liftee I picked up hitchhiking on the Upper Levels. Cute blond highlights, vaguely Australian by association, hasn’t been around long, needs to see the world, expand horizons. “Like hucking a fat five-four? And also, do you have any Yop? Red-berry flavour?”

  “Supposedly. You want to rock this jet with me?”

  “These walls can talk,” Larry warns.

  I wriggle against the jet, find a comfy spot, ask if anyone else cherishes a time when the world was mute and dumb. Realize I’m clutching a tiny object, smaller than a pencil eraser. Lift it an inch from my face. Fuck is this? Some sort of ball bearing? Can I snort it? Coral asks if I found her hash.

  At the mention of a controlled substance the sinister ball bearing sprouts iridescent wings and a tiny camera-eye. Nano-bot, death from above, Jesus wood sprites! I toss the spy-bot in the air. It fires up, whirrr, emits a self-replicating exhaust cloud and whoa now there’s a few dozen swirling overhead—

  Holdout, sensing my distress, snaps at the nano death cloud like a pitbull chomping papillons. Crunches down, says he told me not to trust that backstabber Zenski. “And it’s called the Integratron,” Holdout corrects, firing a jealous glare at my strapping young snowboarder. “Not Orgasmatron.”

  “Whatevs, brah. You been?”

  “Architect revealed the inner workings of the structure,” I say, too strident, reopening the conversation about my house, afraid I’m being ignored, losing touch. “Note the fanciful duct-work exposed on the exterior walls? It’s like…wearing your intestines draped on your dinner jacket.”

  “I landed that cab seven-two bolts, digs me?” Blond Highlights brags to Holdout, who shrugs, says he’s tired of the bipedal bias in contemporary athletics, says it doesn’t count cuz it was only on the trampoline, which makes Blond Highlights drop his half-smoked blunt in the hot tub and wander off. Holdout dives in, emerges chewing the blunt, says he doesn’t hate Mondays, he hates capitalism.

  A familiar reedy-needly voice: “Are you going to properly attribute that?”

  “Pumpkin Girl?” I lift my Oakleys. “You followed me home?”

  Pumpkin Girl waves, naked and side-ponytailed astride a plastic merry-go-round lion I vaguely remember commanding Holdout to thieve from the PNE. Holdout acts out, head-butts the lion, sends Pumpkin Girl scattering, makes me doubt the whole free-range parenting thing.

  “My light in you, recognizes, the light in you, and gives gratitude, for you,” Coral mumbles, nibbling on Larry’s ear.

  Pumpkin Girl dusts herself off, steals an orange emergency blanket from a Scientologist passed out on my lawn, wraps it around her waist, says she’s bailing, asks who wants to see Chip Wilson’s house, it’s way more steeze.

  Gets my neighbourly ire up. “Chip’s house? Steeze? How so?”

  “I heard he lines his formal-wear closet with stretched baby-seal bladders. Says he likes the smell of them desiccating into his Armani. Says it reminds him of his first Bikram lesson.”

  Larry says that does sound sleaze.

  Holdout scratches his chin. “Uh, Pumpkin Girl? Can I tag along? Sounds like a guy I should eat.”

  “Not a chance, porky,” Pumpkin Girl yells over her shoulder.

  “She was nice enough,” Larry says, “but I never saw her smile.”

  Something submerged in the frothing hot tub tickles my big toe. “They do that to kids nowadays. Lop the laughter foreskin off at birth. Supposed to keep things cleaner. A real shame.” Watching my house with a wary eye, feeling it outsmart me, wishing it were yesterday so this would all be over.

  “Is that in Joshua Tree? The Integratron?” Coral wants to know. She’s an okay kid, curious, needs to put the time in. Larry explains about sound baths, polygonal structures, astral travel. Takes all of a minute.

  Coral slips Larry’s finger in her mouth.

  “I miss Kalalau,” Holdout says after devouring Pumpkin Girl’s plastic lion and washing it down with a puddle of spilled vodka-yerba mate. “Incredible foraging.”

  A radical reversal! Pain in my sinuses! Sycophants! Cascadia apologists! The ritual of resistance? Things have taken a corporatist turn. Remember: they tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. I avoid synthetics, men with sharpened teeth, hothouse my own hovercraft. Extraordinary measures. Seems to work thus far. Bet your ass my safe room is fully stocked. The best parts of me are embalmed beneath the Hotel Nacional. At night my medulla oblongata strolls the Malecón, searching for viable inve
stment property and wooing sea bass with smuggled greenbacks—

  “Integratron! I helped fund such an enterprise,” I shout, marshalling forces for a conversational flèche, slumping into the water to be nearer whatever softness is interested in my thigh. “Coral’s right. It was Joshua Tree, by the way, Southern California, where it landed.” Firm, declarative, not wanting to be upstaged, feeling a bit dickish, lording over my peons. “We built it on Cortez. Not a single nail. All wooden pegs. Nails rust, fuck up auras, magnetic fields, think of a spiked tree. Used a stolen csis prototype space-slingshot attached to twin arbutus trees to send it into orbit. Slingshot made of tanned moose guts and braided Red Ensigns. Swapped the ensigns for black flags, cranked the fucker back with an early Unimog. This was decades before the A-bomb, or something. Calcs were rudimentary. Pioneering work, really. We were aiming for Tikal.”

  “Electromagnetic plasma?” Coral asks.

  “Resonant frequencies,” I tell her, thinking about my Tesla, the strange story of the Nugget, Caltrop stringing those goons up, my many years in prison, Michael calling me an idealist, slave to perfection, how what goes around, recharged cellular structure, maybe this isn’t my first time casing the block, forever stylized, make me something less—

  “Immutable law of attraction,” Larry says, passing me a golden dinner plate heaped with offerings. “I had breakfast with Ted Kaczynski. Told me he saw your neat-o polygonal sphere zipping overhead. Heard it sing in ultra wideband. Told me it made him dream of heartwood.”

  I nod, sagely I gather. “That makes sense, in terms of trajectory and so forth. Thermodynamics. Gravity waves. Heavy shit. Not to be toyed with. What’d Ted eat?”

  “Bratwurst and eggs smothered in maple syrup.”

  “Niiice…”

  Two men materialize, young bodies painted in red ochre, feathers and turquoise draped around their necks. One settles beside me, runs his toes through the foam, asks about the connection between Aztecs and aliens.

  “Mayans,” I correct, wishing the sky would stop falling. “They’re still alive, you know. Is that war paint?”

  “I’m against war,” the painted boy says.

  I look around, try and spot the blood-slick sacrificial altar, or at the very least, an overgrown pyramid to the sky. Quetzalcoatl is my muse, I almost say, but a previous vow keeps me silent. I want to pray for rain. Dance around a spark-spitting fire and sing the rain from the sky. I want to know less, but still believe I’m in the middle of things.

  “Are you a cop?” Coral asks one of the boys, triggering a run for the hills and an attempt to consume scattered pills before confiscation and inevitable resale. Holdout, as usual, gets more than his fair share.

  The painted boy rubs his nipples, repeats he’s against war.

  Coral begins to cry.

  Larry strides verbally forth, says the painted boy needs to cultivate a more positive attitude, decide what he’s for. I object, say it’s unfair to tell the boy what kind of attitude to cultivate. It exposes a domineering impulse.

  “I feel you,” Larry says, retiring. He’s an old friend, knows when to say when. With us in Bute. A trucker-saint. He should get more screen time.

  “Who’s the pretty mermaid?” someone says, impostering in my voice.

  Larry pats Holdout’s head. “I guess what I asked Ted was, nothing goes up forever, and have we peaked? And if we’ve peaked, we wouldn’t know it, uh, until it’s too late?”

  “What’d Ted say?”

  “Thought I was talking ballistic apogee. Got a little worked up. Had syrup in his beard.”

  I giggle, swat at the water. “Stop tickling. It almost hurts. Overdeveloped erogenous zones.”

  The painted boys are apparently comfortable enough to slip into the hot tub. One of them reaches into the froth, grabs something that looks like a waterlogged muskrat. Star’s face emerges from the foam, water goddess. A painted boy hauls her onto the patio, presses his lips to hers, repeats, crunches on her chest, repeats. She’s motionless so long I think about her serving me eggs Florentine at Naam; then she spits an arc of water, a mermaid fountain, and begins gasping, calling my name.

  My phone rings. Wife! I yelp, drop the phone in the tub, scalded by the possibility of Heather’s voice, hungry for closure or tofurky.

  “Gangster,” one of the painted boys mumbles, pretend-shooting me with a Tommy gun.

  “Things can only get better from here,” I tell Larry, who looks doubtful. “Can’t you feel it? Second by second. Just being alive makes us better. We don’t even have to try.”

  “What do you believe in?” Coral asks the painted boys.

  “Everything!”

  Impeccable reasoning, says no one at all.

  “But I wasn’t even alive in the sixties,” Coral says as a painted boy’s lips meet mine. A nice kid, that Coral, if a mote wearisome, heavily invested in her alienation. Practise forgiveness. Awaken. Rise up? The ochre-painted boy whispers he’s an old spirit speaking in the voice of all that is lost. Larry mutters about a continuum, contactees, a space convention beneath the scalding desert sun, a man who dynamited himself to death in a cave carved inside a sacred stone. Painted Boy slides onto my lap and I feel young indeed.

  Mark Ward

  Standing on a suburban street in North Van, in a newish development called Raven Woods. The rain’s been demoted to an irritating mist that drifts down from the mountains and up from the ocean. We’re above the Dollarton Highway, only a stone’s throw from the water, but since we’re hemmed in by McMansions there’s no view. A few development signs, a rezoning application with an architectural rendering of the affected area, unerring black lines and empty white space, wiping the territory clean, remapping it, something about selling or being sold.

  Clint tromps off the sidewalk and into an overgrown lot bordering a chunk of forest. I follow, pushing through rain-soaked brush while cedar branches dump frigid water down the back of my neck, imagining all the unseemly shit that must’ve gone down in these woods over the years, and how creeping through a forest behind my brother reminds me of playing war games on Vedder Mountain when we were kids, shooting BBS at each other, heads wrapped in black T-shirts, pretending to be ninjas, clueless, and of course not much has changed.

  Difference is now the enemy has a face. Craig Williams. The target. A strike package assembled. Sometimes you do things, make a decision, knowing it’s right but without knowing why. Like me returning to Vancouver. Pay off my brother, sure. But now I got a handle on what’s driving me. It lives right here, in this deserted lot, its accumulated nighttime terrors, bad first dates and broken noses, tarp shelters, overdoses—

  Clint breaks out of the forest onto a rocky knoll. Looks like a cross between a black bear and a gold-rush pioneer, snorting, licking rain from his lips, madman gleam in his eye, an explorer smashing through the unknown by sheer force of will, greedy and cutthroat. Easy to put a man like my brother down. Ignore him. Undercut him. Crass, crude, ignorant. A relic. A shame. Truth is in another day and age he’d be leading a crew into the wilds and the soft-skinned aristocrats would be paying him to do it, secretly plotting to have him killed when he returns. Same as now. Easy to fear a man like Clint, a guy who doesn’t ask all polite to be let inside but smashes down the door. I push through a stand of huckleberry, thinking there’s got to be a way to save him.

  Clint stomps on the ground. “Right here everything changes, Marky,” he shouts, using his heel to dig a trough in the mud. “This dirt is freedom.”

  Squint in his direction, fumble a smoke from a soaked pack, didn’t know we were going fucking trekking, wish I’d popped another Oxy. Clint’s upped his rhetorical game in the past few years, hanging out with worse company. It’s dangerous to underestimate my brother; there’s a difference between stupid and uneducated. Rain drips off my nose and ruins the first smoke, then my lighter gets wet. Clint hands me his lighter, butane with a linear blue flame. We move under a good-sized cedar that does nothing to shelter us from the
mist.

  “Welcome to Solstice Homes,” my brother says.

  “Go big or go home. Or both?”

  Spent last night naked, cold, high, lying on a strip of sand on the backside of Stanley Park, the biggest rock I could lift on my chest, crushing my lungs, waves coming in, tide rising, trying to see the stars but not the Reed daughter. So, a normal Sunday night?

  Clint’s eyes narrow. “This is something to take serious.”

  “That North Van job when I flew in? That was Peele’s doing?”

  Clint doesn’t answer.

  After a while I say, “I like it. What’d the old man say?”

  “You don’t got land, you don’t got shit.”

  Bow my head to shield my smoke while I take a drag. I do like it. But not for the reasons Clint does. I’m thinking mental Molotov, psychological insurrection. I like it because this hillside’s going to be bulldozed, old-growth forest chopped down, wildlife scattered and starved, roads and homes put in, shiny condo towers with luxury penthouses, daycares for kiddies whose moms and pops work sixty-hour weeks plus commute, designed-injury-free playgrounds, a woodsy community centre, an outdoor pavilion for summer performances, folk singers twanging about togetherness, the environment, ridiculous horseshit about how if we try really hard we can make it all work out, everyone feeling good about themselves, aren’t we great, aren’t we all that, and in the centre of it all, in the very guts of these people’s lives there’s gonna be a sickness, a corruption, the blood of that real estate lawyer, the sound of his wife’s screams, all the dirt this kind of operation attracts, blood money pouring in from all corners of the globe, sex slavery, international dope and gun running, human trafficking, investment fraud, labour and resource exploitation, proxy dictatorships, and maybe it’ll be felt, in the quiet moments of the day, a passing doubt marring a self-righteous surface shine, a tickle in the throat or base of the neck, a sudden fear over muesli and yogurt on another wet Wednesday morning.