The Journey Prize Stories 32

by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)

  On the drive to work a woman on the radio is talking about birth rates as the cornfields whish and whisper. Eileen doesn’t know this or need to, but I drive the long way to work because I like to drive through the cornfields. What I like about them is the sameness: corn and corn and corn and it makes you think that something is stable, stable and alive and endless, or about as close as you can get. If Eileen was in the car she’d say, “As high as an elephant’s eye in July.” Then she’d probably say her thing about ethanol. How the nitrogen fertilizer comes from ammonia, which comes from natural gas. How the petrochemical fertilizer is necessary to grow super huge varieties of hybrid corn products that mostly turn into livestock feed but also a significant portion turns into ethanol. Ethanol that is then used as a biofuel supplement to gasoline so what it is is this whole huge cycle of petroleum running subterranean through modern biological life.

  On the radio they’re saying how first it was the birds and then it was the reserve and now they’re getting worried. Now they’re seeing plant workers, especially the women, producing only female children. No official studies on the area because Health Canada won’t fund them, but the anecdotal evidence is mounting and mounting and the whole community knows it’s in their bodies, in their intimate organs, zinging through their spit and blood and lymph nodes.

  “Hey,” Suzy says, slurring chew-spit into her Coke can. “What do you call a Mexican woman with seven kids?” I try to shrug away the punch line, but Sal gives his big-lipped smirk and asks what. “Consuelo,” Suzy says, her mouth a snarl of glee. She puts her hand down between her knees and mimes a pendulum.

  I smile in a way that I guess is not convincing because Suzy says, “What’s the matter Jerr-Bear?” I tell her it’s not funny.

  “Fuck you it isn’t.”

  “Think I’ll do my geographics.”

  “You do that,” Suzy says, turning back to Sal. “Can’t leave you here with Pockets all shift.” “Pockets” being what Suzy calls me in her kinder moments, when she doesn’t feel like calling me “Smartass” or “Thesaurus” or “Mama’s boy.” Something to do with I guess putting my hands in my coverall pockets too much.

  I walk away while Sal starts saying something about Donaldson or Bautista and Suzy makes her usual joke about me and the Maglite.

  Before she got sick, Eileen used to work in research, and on slow days that is most days I used to think up toward her. I’d look up toward the shiny glass windows of the research building and think of Eileen working on the other side. Mostly what they do up there is ergonomic self-assessments and loss prevention self-assessments but sometimes they do cutting and cracking. A lot of what they do is sit up there staring at glove matrices and gauges and screens, but I’d always picture Eileen with her hands in the biosafety cabinet. I’d picture her in goggles and full face mask and fire-retardant suit, reaching through the little window to mix the catalyst in and then watching the crude react in the microscope. Because when Eileen was working she loved precision and she loved getting it right but most of all she loved watching the oil split and change and mutate. Say what you want about oil but the way Eileen described it she always made it seem beautiful: dense and thick, a million different shades of black. She used to say how the strange thing with the oil is that if you trace it back far enough you see that it’s life, that all this hydrocarbon used to be vegetables and minerals and zooplankton. Organisms that got caught down there in some cavern where they’ve been stewing for five hundred million years. How strange it is to look out at this petroleum Xanadu and think that all the unseen sludge running through it was life, once—that it was all compost, all along.

  In 2003 there was a blackout all across Ontario and the northeastern United States. A blackout caused by a software bug and what happened was people could see the stars again from cities. In dense urban areas the Milky Way was suddenly visible again, streaming through the unplugged vast. What also happened was babies, nine months later a horde of blackout babies, the hospitals overwhelmed with newborns because what else do you do when the power goes down. But if you lived in Sarnia what you would remember is the plants. It was nighttime when the power went out and what happened was an emergency shutdown of all systems, meaning all the tail gas burning at once. So every flare from all sixty-two refineries began shooting off together, a tail gas Disneyland shimmering through the river-limned night.

  The day shift crawls along. QC QC QC. The highlight is a funny-sounding line we fix by increasing the backpressure. Delivery trucks roll in and out. The pigeons coo and shit and garble in their roosts in the stacks. Freighters park at the dock and pump the tanks full of bitumen—the oil moving, as always, in secret, shrouded behind cylindrical veils of carbon steel. Engineers cruise through tapping iPads, printing the readings from Suzy’s board. Swarms of contractors pass by. I stick a cold water bottle in each pocket, which is nice for ten minutes then means I’m carrying piss-warm water around the unit. I do my geographic checks, walk around the tower turning the odd valve when Suzy radios, watch the river rush and kick by the great hulls of the freighters. I think about leaping onto the back of one of those freighters, letting it drag me down the St. Clair and into Erie just to feel the lick of breeze on neck.

  Time sags and sags and yawns. By 10 a.m. I can feel the sun howling off the concrete, rising up vengeful and gummy. Doesn’t matter that there’s a heat warning, you’ve still got to wear your coveralls and your steel toes and your hardhat, the sweat gooing up the insides of your arms, licking the backs of your knees. The heat warning means we take “precautions.” It means coolers full of Nestle water sweating beside the board. It means we walk slowly around the unit. As slow as we can possibly move but the slow walking becomes its own challenge because the work’s still got to get done.

  The river gets me through the shift: the curl and cool of it, its great improbable blue. The cosmic-bright blue that’s supposedly caused by the zebra mussels the government put all over Ontario to make the water blue and pretty but if Eileen were here she’d say her thing about the algae. How she learned in first-year bio that what the zebra mussels do is eat all the particles from the lake, allowing room for algae to grow beyond their boundaries and leading to massive poisonous algae blooms in Lake Huron and Lake Erie. So you think you’re fixing something, but really there’s no fixing and how fitting that one way or another the river’s livid blue is both beautiful and polluted, toxic and sublime.

  “Heard about those bodies?” Sal asks, thumbing through his phone as I pass by the board. I ask what bodies and he says the ones in Toronto. “Like a half dozen of them, some kind of landscaper-murderer stashing bodies in planters all over the city.”

  I kill the shift as usual: walk around wiggling the flashlight thinking about the different spots in the river and diving into them with my mind. Thinking about what might be sleeping down there—maybe a pike or a smelt or a rainbow trout nestled among the algae and the old glass Coke bottles. Sometimes I think my way across the bridge, over to Port Huron. Wonder if there’s an operator over there doing the same thing, thinking back across the river toward me.

  I drive home the long way, which means cornfields and wind turbines in the distance as the sky steeps orange pekoe. In the rear-view a flare shoots up from the plants. Getting closer, I pass through a gauntlet of turbines, feeling them more than I see them. Carbon filament sentries. Once, I passed an enormous truck carrying a wind turbine blade and at first I thought it was a whale. It reminded me of videos I’d seen of Korean authorities transporting a sperm whale bloated with methane, belching its guts across the tarmac. The truck had a convoy and a bunch of orange WIDE LOAD signs and I passed it slowly, partly because of the danger and partly because there was a pulse to it, something drawing me in. The great sleek curve of the blade, its unreal whiteness.

  Eileen’s still up, vaping in her chair by the window. “Sorry,” she says, spinning her chair to look at me. “Couldn’t sleep.” I tell he
r she can vape in the kitchen or wherever she likes but she looks at me with her stoned slanting smile and tells me it’s not that. Says how she’s been looking out into the yard a lot and when she does it she thinks about the teenagers. She looks at me like she wants me to ask for details. I don’t, but she continues anyway. Rehearses how those kids in the seventies got trapped in the abandoned fallout shelter. “You know, the yards were so long because the properties used to be cottages and the old shelter was overgrown and the teens were skipping school and smoking up and the excavator came through and started to fill it in and no one realized the teens were missing until days later. The only explanation was that they were scared, so scared of getting caught that they stayed quiet, let it happen, hoped it would pass.”

  “You don’t believe all that do you?”

  Eileen shrugs, still staring out the window. “No. Maybe. I just like the story.”

  I ask how’s the pain today and she says manageable. Turns her face toward me but doesn’t meet my eyes. I ask her out of ten and she says you know I hate that. She asks is something wrong and I tell her no. “Something you’re not telling me about?” I don’t respond and she doesn’t push it.

  We watch the original Total Recall and when we get to the part with the three-breasted woman Eileen asks if I find that strange or sexy and I tell her neither, or both. Eventually Eileen drifts off but when I stand up she lurches awake. She asks where I’m going and I say just downstairs to read the new Deadpool unless she wants the bedside lamp on. She says no, asks when I’m coming to bed. I tell her soon and she says cuddle me when you get here. “Don’t just lie there,” she says. “Hold me.” I tell her yes, of course, and head down to the sweet dank sogg of the basement.

  Mum listens with tender quiet as I tell her about my day—about Suzy, about the pigeons, about the construction. Mum is gentle and sweet, her gold incisor catching light from the bare pull-string bulb. Eventually I check my phone and see that it’s pushing eleven and I should probably head upstairs if I want my six to seven hours. I give Mum a goodnight kiss and tell her to get some rest and then I notice something strange in the floor, stoop down to inspect.

  A hand-shaped imprint in the foundation floor.

  Mum looks on, her face a void, as I toe that dark patch with my basement-blackened sock and find that it’s wet, sodden. The hole’s a bit sandy and when I get closer I smell it. Muskeg. Raw Lambton skunk.

  I prod a little deeper and become a stranger, become someone who would stick a curious thumb into such a cavity. The oil comes out gooey and black and smelling sharp, a little sulphurous.

  I dream of bodies, the ones buried in planters in Toronto. The ones I’d heard about on the radio—this killer targeting gay men in Toronto and the more planters they dug up the more bodies they found. In the dream the bodies aren’t skeletons, not yet. They’re in the active decay stage: their organs starting to liquify, the soft tissue browning and breaking down while the hair, teeth, and bone remain intact. I see them crawling up from planters all across the city. Not vengeful or anything. Just digging, rising, trying to get back.

  “Would you have liked to become an engineer?” We’re in the bug tent sipping iced tea and listening to a sweet chorus of loaders and bulldozers, the air heady with the lilt of tar.

  “I am one. A chemical engineer.” I can see Eileen wanting to laugh and fighting it. Not like I’ve got any delusions about my four-year Lambton College diploma, but technically it is a credential in chemical engineering.

  “Maybe an urban planner,” Eileen says. “Have you heard about all this stuff they’re doing in cities now? Condos with elevators big enough for cars. Cute little electric cars that you’ll bring right up to your apartment with you.”

  “Sounds more like an Eileen thing.”

  A bird lands in the armpit of the oak. A pocket-sized blackbird with a slash of red on its wing. The one I love but can never remember its name.

  Eileen sips her tea and says yeah I’m probably right but it’s just she can tell the hours are getting to me. The hours and the nights and the overtime. She reminds me how I told her, once, that it’s like a sickness, the overtime. “You could do whatever you want,” she says. “You could be so much.”

  The worst part is she always means it and the worst part is it’s not true. Not true because Mum worked part-time and Dad died so young that there was no money for me to do anything but CPET. I don’t tell her because she already knows about the comics store, about how maybe I could write one on the side and I already have the character—BioMe, the scientist turned mutant tree-man after attempting to splice photosynthesis into the human genome.

  “You’re so creative, you could be so much. Like your comics store idea. And remember that musical you wrote in high school, Hydrocarbonia?” She chuckles. “There was that three-eyed coyote and the plant worker Village People chorus?”

  “I think it was basically a Simpsons rip-off. Mr. Hunter went with Guys and Dolls.”

  “Still. You’re a poet at heart.”

  “The bard of bitumen.”

  “What I mean is I love you but sometimes I feel like all you do is work and all I do is sleep and we never see each other and I just wish we had something else, something more.”

  A quick haze of stupidity in which I contemplate telling her about Mum.

  Then I see a seagull in the distance, watch as it catches a thermal and rides high and higher, an albatross floating through the glazed crantini sky.

  “One more shift,” I tell her. “Then four off.”

  She doesn’t need to roll her eyes. “Look,” she says, pointing up at the oak. “A red-winged blackbird.”

  On the drive to work they’re saying about the fish. Saying about the drinking water downstream, in Windsor and Michigan. Saying about the tritium spilling into Lake Huron. You think Chernobyl and you think Blinky the three-eyed fish, but what you don’t think is an hour north or so, where Bruce Power leaks barrels of radioactive tritium into Lake Huron. They’re saying how significant quantities of antidepressants have been found in fish brains in the Great Lakes.

  I drive past the rusting drums and have to stop for a moment because there are some protesters forming a drum circle. They’re holding signs that read “STOP LINE 9” and chanting about stolen Native land and of course they’re right but I don’t smile or stop or acknowledge them. Just park and walk through security, a new sting in the awful.

  Ways people deal with constant low-level dread: the myth that the wind blows the fumes south, toward Aamjiwnaang, toward Corunna, toward Walpole. That the airborne toxicity lands ten kilometres to the south. That the people who live north of the plants won’t get sick or at least not as sick. As if wind could really dilute the impact of living beside a cluster of sixty-two petrochemical refineries that never sleep, could change the fact that you live in a city where Pearl Harbor–style sirens sound their test alarm every Monday at 12:30 to remind you that leaks could happen at any moment. There’s a joke around Streamline, a joke that is not a joke: the retirement package is great if you make it to fifty-five. Which is not inaccurate in my family seeing as Dad went at fifty-two and Mum followed at fifty-six and they said the lung cancer had nothing to do with the plants and the brain cancer had nothing to do with Mum’s daily swims from the bridge to Canatara Beach. The strange pride among people who work the plants: A spending your oil salary on Hummers and motorcycles and vacations to Cuban beaches with plastic cups kind of pride. A live rich live hard kind of pride. The yippee ki-yay of knowing that Sarnia is the leukemia capital of Canada and the brain cancer capital of Canada and the air pollution capital of Canada but also knowing that oil is what you know and what your parents knew and all your family’s in Lambton County so what else are you going to do but stay.

  We’re putting on our face masks and backpacks while Don the safety protocol officer explains for the hundredth time about the new model of self-contain
ed breathing apparatus and the new standard-issue Kevlar gloves. Telling us once again that personal safety is paramount even though all of us know that what operators are here for is to control situations.

  I’m sitting there watching sailboats tack their way across the lake while Don goes on about the hydrogen sulfide incident that happened two years ago. Incident meaning leak. Telling us again how the thing about hydrogen sulfide is that you can’t see it, so you can’t actually see or smell when it’s on fire. Two years ago when a vehicle melted in the loading dock. An invisible sulfide fire came through and before the operators could shut it down the truck in the loading bay just melted. The tires evaporated and the air hissed out of them and the whole truck sank to the floor, a puddle of melted paint on the concrete and nothing left of the truck but a gleaming skeleton of carbon steel.

  We used to swim in the lake at night, just the two of us. Dad was usually home watching the Blue Jays so me and Mum would drive up to a secret little beach in the north and we’d swim out into the middle of the river where the lights from Port Huron gleamed and wiggled in the darkness. Sometimes it would rain and the rain would make the water warmer than the air. I’d seen a water snake at the beach once and I always imagined them down there among our legs. Though Mum had assured me they were non-venomous, I saw them sharp-toothed and cunning, biding their time. Sometimes Mum would dip down below the water, her head disappearing for what seemed an impossibly long time, and I don’t know how she found me but she’d wrangle her arms around both my legs and pin me for a moment while I kicked and bucked and then we’d both come up gasping and squealing and giggling in the black water, a gelatin dazzle of refinery lights.