by Shilo Jones
* * *
We drive east along the Fraser River until we hit the sagging belly of New Westminster, the sun languid through high cloud, mountains visible down a broad swath of low-running river, lacking depth in the evening light. Mist shrouds waterlogged alder rooted in the tidal mud between cinderblock warehouses and motorcycle chop shops, shipping facilities and plumbing supply stores. The air smells of vehicle exhaust, an ocean mingling with sluggish river water, the Mighty Fraser now placated by the valley bottom, sucked into our agriculture, poisoned with manure and nitrogen fertilizer, threaded though countless dead-end channels along the delta, beavers and blackberry scrub and the roar of international jetliners lance-like and wilful, and as I drive the stranger named Caltrop to an unknown destination I watch a tugboat captain wearing bright orange caulk boots and a yellow rain slicker hop across a log boom, the logs rolling and bobbing beneath his feet, his movements practised and serene, a single misstep shy of death, a startled cry—easily mistaken for a gull’s shriek—before the logs close over his head. The sight strikes me as hopelessly anachronistic, black and white. We still do that here? I thought it was all about flipping real estate?
Caltrop directs me to a row of warehouses built close to the water. The parking lot ends at a rotting wooden fence being taken over by blackberry brambles. Stacked car parts rust in a welding shop loading bay, leaking streaks of red-orange across the pavement, a mangled front bumper, a car door with a shattered window, an old axle, tufts of fur, bits of bone and broken teeth. Beside the welding shop is a small manufacturing company named FireSpot, its logo a circle with flames hovering above a forest. Caltrop tells me to park in front of the unit closest to the river, tells me to bring my backpack inside. The sign above the door is faded and peeling, says Ace Office Repair.
Caltrop flicks the lights on. The warehouse is divided in half by a plywood wall about twelve feet high. The front is crammed full of office relics—hulking photocopiers and giant fax machines, printers and office telephones from the eighties—everything covered in dust, archaeological testimony to nothing at all. Wire cutters, needle-nosed pliers, and less obvious tools hang above a workbench piled high with ripped-open office equipment.
“No one pays to get this shit fixed anymore,” I say.
Caltrop says yeah, that’s the point, no one comes by, then leads me through a side door that opens facing the river. I follow him down a muddy path, across a sketchy platform of roped-together pallets to an eighteen-foot gillnetter. A peeling red stripe wraps around the boat’s name: The Yegg. We scramble on board, me limping and awkward, Caltrop sure-footed. The deck’s slick with dew. A net is spooled onto a reel at aft. The river’s silent and broad and deceptively slow at the surface, but there are currents that can drag a man deep, spit him out ten kilometres downstream. The grinding habitual groan of commuter traffic crossing the Pattullo Bridge settles onto us from above. A blue heron, severe and reedy, scrutinizes us from the opposite shore. I duck into a gloomy cabin crammed with torn maps, yellowed paperbacks, navigation equipment, ratty army-surplus blankets, dirty plates, and stained coffee mugs. It smells of dead fish and rotting clothes, of hard work and uncertain outcomes.
Caltrop tells me to wait, lifts a bench seat cushion to reveal a storage cabinet, hauls out a cylindrical object about the size of a guitar case wrapped in a wool blanket. I tell him I need to leave. He nods, says sure, leave, I won’t stop you. I give it serious consideration, think about Ryan out there alone, decide to let my curiosity get the better of me. Caltrop slips the blanket off, raps his knuckles on a black plastic cylinder, says this is a monovault munitions burial tube with a gamma-seal lid. The tube’s sticky with river mud.
“Waterproof polymer,” Caltrop says quietly. “Completely corrosion resistant.”
“I know what it is.”
“Far as I’m concerned, what happened in the woods isn’t a question of right or wrong,” Caltrop says, wiping mud from the munitions case. “It’s a question of necessity. Like a single life, necessity ebbs and flows. Anyone ever tell you you’re needed, Mark?” Caltrop pauses for me to answer. When I don’t he says, “On the tactical front, you and I differ. But on long-term, strategic aims—”
“You’re mistaking me for someone else. I came to hear fish stories.”
“The Hague prosecutes state war criminals for crimes against humanity. But there’s not a court in the land that can touch the men we hunt. Shadow kings. Living above the law and accumulating beyond reason. Until now. Until you.”
“You still fish with this boat? Must be pretty cool, out on the river.”
“Alien comes down to earth and asks what this place is all about. We say, well, that guy has a yacht moored inside his yacht. And half that continent’s starving.”
“Ever caught a sturgeon? Heard they put up a helluva fight.”
“How do you think of yourself?”
I glance through a grimy window. Out there real people are living their lives and a guilty man lies cut open. “I am the thing itself. Without idea or image, theory or ideology. Just an object in motion. Existing before the conscious mind. That’s how I’m beginning to think of myself. One day I hope to stop thinking entirely. Thought removes us from our true selves.”
Caltrop pops the exterior lid off the munitions tube, reveals another tube protecting the innermost chamber. He lifts a steel toggle and twists, undoing a latch. The seal loosens with a hiss. “I’m curious about your selection process. Your criteria.”
“I’m not wanting for choice.”
“Exactly. How do you narrow it down?”
“Gut feeling. A bit of research. That might be changing.”
“It’s early yet. You’re experimenting.”
“I hope it’s still early.”
Caltrop reaches inside the munitions tube, carefully retrieves a firearm wrapped in an airtight, resealable storage bag that looks like an oversized Ziploc. Revealing this weapon feels sacred, the gillnetter rocking almost imperceptibly, river water whispering against the boat hull, the storage bag crinkling in Caltrop’s hands, and in that moment Caltrop reminds me of a priest at altar, lifting a silver aspergillum in blessing. Murder is always an act of faith.
Caltrop sets the rifle on the bench, asks if I recognize it.
“A C14 Timberwolf Medium Range Sniper Weapon System. Manufactured by the Canadian company PGW Defence Technologies Inc. A civilian precision sport rifle modified for military use. Chambered for the Lapua Magnum .338. Effective anti-personnel to twelve hundred metres. A real sweet weapon, sir.”
“How ’bout you pick her up? There. How she feel?”
“Honest.”
Caltrop retrieves a box of cartridges from the burial tube. “Men and women working alone. Isolated. Atomized. This is the future for a long time to come. Organizations attract too much attention. Consider what the word gang does to a jury, or the word cell. Dehumanizes everyone involved. Removes all credibility. Drug gang. Terrorist cell. A prosecutor says those words in a courtroom and they can convict an egg salad sandwich. The culture is terrified of people uniting. Lone wolves are easier to discredit. The narrative is more flexible. Loners can be vilified, ridiculed. Made to appear insane.”
“Being alone is insane.”
“You don’t have to be alone. If you accept what I have to say.”
Caltrop tells me about a man named Bo Xi. About how Vincent Peele met Bo Xi when he ran an ESL school in Shanghai. About the sources of money flowing from Bo Xi though Marigold Group to Vincent Peele, then on to my brother and me. I hear about soldiers in Central Africa paid to guard illegal diamond mines staffed by villager-slaves, many of them children. A strategic civil war planned to further Bo Xi’s interests in the region. Long sleeve short sleeve. Oil and coal operations in Mongolia that displaced entire villages. Private military contractors rappelling out of Black Hawks to assassinate Tibetan political leaders. Caltrop tells me a lot of things, and I listen real close, and the Timberwolf feels like the first promise I was m
eant to keep.
Carl “Blitzo” Reed
Starring in my own performance piece. Last hurrah. Don’t wait up. Rough cotton breechcloth’s riding something fierce, making me snippy. Balancing in a partially inflated red rubber dinghy on the shore of the Fraser River. Misty blue-white light, spectral. Two crows harassing an eagle. Foot perched on the dinghy’s gunnel, fists on hips, head held high, imperious colonial coxswain shrieking orders at my slack-ass crew. Anyone who says they knew me is a liar, a wraith feeding on the life force of the living. Biter, groupie, hater.
Keep your leaky aura to your goddamned self.
Hock a loogie, watch it float downstream, try and think of something highfalutin’ to say, conscious of posterity, embellished accomplishments, rising into the canon by being shot out of one, rising from the grave, fucking vampires again, eerie hauntings, peasant myths, psychic feedings, malign awakenings, inner circles, why is the future already full of ghosts, post-humans carrying the cosmic colonial torch, territorializing solar systems because it worked out so well last time? Buy me a sunny fiefdom, fire up the generator, duct-tape a VR headset to my face, rename myself NEXT. Hoping it always goes up? Hasn’t quite been my experience. Bit afraid now, shivering in the cold coming off the river, pathetic carbon-based creature, balls shrunk inside my belly, testes seeking warmth, involuntary response, life in a nutshell.
Ugly undercurrents and eddies of sadness.
Star waves from behind the camera, zooms in, pinpoints false starts and forgotten ideas. If I could do it all again? Nah, let the artilects have it. Can I get a happy ending over here? Or maybe just an ending? But for now Blitzo’s got the last laugh, dude’s been around, sending this toxic rational-national mess upriver, back where it came from, straight to the source.
Cleaning house? But nobody invited me in—
The under-inflated dinghy swirls and rolls, nearly pitches me into the drink. A bit premature? Forget Sir Simon Fraser’s waaay-too-square buttoned-down overcoat in the old painting; I’m costumed in raw-boned-on-the-road voyageur Captain Fraser vintage attire: torn and shit-stained breeches, crusty leather leggings, itchy flannel shirt, knee-length Melton-cloth Hudson Bay capote closed with a sexy lavender sash I’m using to wipe the blood from my eyes. All topped with a wide-brimmed felt hat stolen off the weirdly undecaying corpse of a former crew member. Nobility, adventure, exploration! A half-eaten sockeye thrashes in the bottom of the dinghy, sheds silver scales, leaves me conflating vague memories of the Monk, Nazis, Tesla, and Simon Fraser into a lurking river cryptid that’s pining to transform fins into legs, ooze on shore, don a hazmat suit, infect the population with a positive attitude and productive work ethic. Take a final celebratory hit off a roach, remember I’m like ninety-nine per cent water anyway, fondle my sash, decide to improvise, point to the river, shout: “Upon the mercy of this Stygian tide!”
Scattered applause from the audience.
The guy seriously said that during his voyage. Or wrote that he did.
Anchored the dinghy to Holdout, could be a bad call. My piggy-muffin scrambles up the muddy bank, digs his hooves in, fights against the current, thrashes through alder and blackberry, cusses me out because he’s pissed I dragged him from the financial district, says I could’ve taken pills, slumped into the hot tub like a normal rich loser, done us all a favour, says I always have to make everything about me.
“You’re looking especially porky,” I tell him. “Big as a fuckin’ grizzly, in fact.”
The pig leers at me, pats his monstrously swollen belly, waves a futures contract, says he was down on Howe Street feasting on the pork belly market, says he was afraid the wee piglets were gonna grow up and compete with him, says he feels like a rock python that swallowed a pregnant goat; he won’t have to eat for years or at least a few minutes—
Gonna miss that gosh-darned pig. The problem with suicide is death becomes another errand. Letters unwritten. Goodbyes unspoken. Wills unsigned. I’ve spent the past eighteen months trying to decide how to address Michael in my final words. Dearest Michael? Michael my love? Michael my one and truly? Finally smeared on some lipstick and sealed the blank page with a kiss. Michael’s not with us this evening, I was afraid he’d interrupt or intervene, talk some sense like a carping, overly cerebral ninny. He can join my channel. I’m broadcasting my spirit wanderings on YouTube. I feel a force tugging at me from beneath the deepening current, sinking sinking sleeper, some kind of psychic magnet or paranormal awakening that makes me hanker to channel Sylvia Plath? Holdout belches, the gust splinters saplings, kicks up waves, nearly knocks off my hat, drives me farther from shore and Holdout wants to know if he can have my High Vitality Points Tesla, says he wants to cruise Kits Beach in August, claims he looks better in it than me—
“Initiate launch sequence!”
Holdout squeals, says I’m finally writing secrets in the web, slips free of the rope anchoring the dinghy, hops onto a director’s chair, dons his favourite pair of shades, the ones framed in critically endangered black-rhino bone while the current snatches and waves spill over the dinghy, soak through my maybe sustainable and culturally authentic Gastown tourist trap moccasins. No time for second thoughts: grab the oar (really a pawnshop Stratocaster in hot pink), adjust my hat, yell bon voyage, psyched for a heroic journey played bass-ackwards, monumental undertaking of undiscovery, empire in rewind, decline, leave the vast unknown alone. Sink the Stratocaster into the current, try to stay standing while attempting to paddle the deflating dinghy backwards and upstream. Listen for a groovy soundtrack, feeling like hunter and hunted. Are the rapids murmuring Lhta koh?
Star’s hands are clasped in front of her breasts like a love-lost Disney chick. She sings she lives only to see me reborn, optimistic, eternally young, doesn’t get that all I want is my life, simply ceased.
Dinghy’s taking on some seriously frigid water. Past the point of no return. Stuff a pot brownie in my mouth, mumble: paddle, paddle, ever ho! Just made that up, seems to fit. Ever ho! Trying to paddle the dinghy backwards but gripped by roiling current, plunging and pitching, whipped downstream, digging the oar-guitar in, whooping and hollering, singing For freedom, homes and loved ones dear/Firmly stood and nobly died…trying to be rid of the lines but they’re forever inside me, undying and undead.
Holdout’s bellowing tyrannical decrees, being indelicate, sowing discord among the sophisticates, threatening to swim out and eat me, saying I broke or never lived up to my promise. Lost in a familiar land. Are those icy claws emerging from beneath the surface? Or the patriot cryptid’s exo-teeth? The dinghy heaves right, I overcorrect left and dig it: airborne, stretched sideways over the rushing water, gripping the busted pink Stratocaster, felt hat flying, trying to swallow the last bite of brownie, seagulls, mist, cottonwood trees and then I’m immersed, released, the water pulling me down, Fraser drowning in the Fraser, autoerotic? Gotta be really into yourself. What cannot be cured must be endured. The vaudeville hook snags my neck. Lights dim. I can’t tell where I end and the world begins, and Michael is this perfection? Someone says you’re everywhere, Carl, everywhere at once, and there is plenty of time, much too long, to remember.
Mark Ward
Spend a while holed up in the condo, feeling shit about not going to look for Ryan, doing my damnedest to pretend the soldier named Caltrop is a disjointed drug-fiction and there’s not a TIMBERWOLF rifle sitting on the kitchen counter. My brother calls and leaves a message, his third, says I better fucking answer. I ignore him, eat a few sour candies, fail to do my exercises, brush my teeth twice.
Decide I need to be outside. Get dressed, walk toward Stanley Park. It’s not a bad evening, people out, umbrellas folded, a shiny post-winter vibe. I buy a smokey, load it with Dijon and sauerkraut, eat and watch other people do the same, weekend shoppers, urbanites, and folks come in from the ’burbs, trying to feel the connect that can come with communal eating, but there’s only calories, condiments, and ground-up animals, and what I want is to introduce myself to a s
tranger, say hi I’m Mark Ward and the stranger will be like hey dude and we’ll shake hands, conversation will come easy and the next thing is we’re lifelong besties. But what happens is I struggle to swallow the last bite of smokey, walk to the seawall, stare at the Pacific.
It’s an ocean, all right. Water, waves. Yellow sulphur piled fifty feet high in the shipyards across the inlet. Is everyone giving me veiled looks and a wide berth? Can they tell what I’m thinking? And even worse is knowing I’m feeling edgy and hyper-vigilant but unable to do anything about it, and the goddamn ocean gets in my head, asks why can’t I name a single living poet. Why can’t I name a single living scientist. Why don’t I know a single word in any Indigenous language.