No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  His thoughts circling from there like they were caught in a loop or a, a— There was a term for it. Now what was that called? It was on the tip of his tongue and he searched his recollection, trying to locate where he’d come across it.

  It was in . . . A Precious Few.

  Propelling himself to his feet, he hurried to the shelf behind the desk, tracing his finger along the spines of George’s books until he came to the ninth in the row. Taking it out he flipped to Chapter 1, the first line of which read:

  He’d been walking in circles for hours, skirting the perimeter of the lake and crossing over the loose wash of gravel strewn beneath the ridge atop which resided his grandfather’s cabin, following the base of the cliff towards where the granite sloped downwards into the forest, stalking along the perimeter of its rise. And when that, in turn, led him back to the steps, skirting again the perimeter of the lake, this time in reverse, as if his feet were striving to give expression to the torment cycling through his mind: an infinitely spiralling Möbius Strip of his own devise.

  That was the term. Möbius Strip.

  It had stuck in his mind, because he’d had to look it up. And this is what he’d found in the dictionary George always kept on the table beside his reading chair:

  Möbius Strip. A topological figure, named after the German astronomer, A.F. Möbius, made by putting a 180-degree twist in a long, rectangular strip then pasting the ends together. Also Möbius Surface.

  Möbius Surface. A surface both sides of which may be completely traversed without crossing either edge: made by joining the half-twisted ends of a rectangular strip of paper or other flexible material. Also Möbius Strip.

  The definitions themselves, by default or design, providing perfect illustration of their meaning even without benefit of the sketch of a twisted figure eight that had accompanied them. Following one back to the other had called to mind the memory of his father reading George’s Fictions over and over, an hour after dinner each night in an endlessly repeating cycle as if he was compelled to do so by forces beyond his control. Or so it had seemed to Deacon when he was a child, before he himself was driven by the same impulse, finding then that George had planted the seed of that compulsion into the very fabric of his Fictions, the last line of The Stray—It would be a long walk home—and the first line of A Bad Man’s Son—He was a long way from home—themselves forming a Möbius Strip of George’s devise; a recognition that Deacon, perhaps, had only stumbled upon because, driven by circumstances beyond his control, he always started with The Stray and ended with it too.

  Having chanced upon this, in his subsequent readings he’d taken care to look for any hint as to why George would have aligned his books in such a fashion. He’d found the most promising clue, albeit a slight one, in a scene in The Unnamed when The Old Man, having just found out from his nephew that his grandson René has been killed, puts his favourite record on the ancient hand-crank Victrola his brother had bought for him years earlier. As he’s frying up the trout he’d caught that afternoon, the record begins skipping on the first line of the fourth song, repeating, There must be some way out of here, over and over again as if the Creator herself had chosen it as a conduit to impress upon him the need to finally, and perhaps terminally, lift himself from the gloom of his own endlessly repeating days.

  And so whenever Into the After led him back to A Precious Few, he’d pause there, reminded of his pa and feeling then an up-swelling of grief beyond even that which he felt while reading The Stray, coming upon its opening line without having first steeled his resolve as he did before reading the other so that it always came at him by surprise. Möbius Strip would recall the memory of his father sitting in his easy chair, a chair not so different from the one he himself sat in while reading George’s Fictions over and over so that he began to see himself as but one half of the twisted figure eight, joined forever with his father beyond the bounds of death itself as long as he kept reading, that thought sufficient incentive for him to wipe at the tears redolent upon his cheeks before returning to the open page before him. A teardrop would be splattered there too and over the years they’d accumulated in a patchwork of blotches on the page. He counted five now residing as a counterpoint to the opening line, those speaking to him now only of the futility that defined any human endeavour aspiring towards the infinite.

  Yes, everything must end, he thought, closing the book and, perhaps, paradoxically thinking that only served to lead him back to where he’d begun, which in itself was just another terminus, punctuated as it was by the word climax!

  It was enough to make his head ache.

  Returning to the chair, he forsook all efforts to make sense of it, distracting himself with the bottle, the last sip from which he’d taken in tandem with the last drag from his only remaining cigarette. He was well drunk by then. As he mashed the stub into the overflowing ashtray his hand slipped, knocking it to the floor and upending its contents onto the photocopied pages he’d discarded there. Cursing his folly, he leaned over, picked up the ashtray, and set it back on the table, gathering then the scattering of butts onto the top sheet. His head swooned as he sat up holding the piece of paper folded over in the middle. It took every ounce of his concentration to funnel the pick-up sticks game worth of butts into the ashtray. Finally, he’d achieved this and in the so doing spotted a half-smoked Cameo: one of George’s.

  Dusting off the grit smudging the cigarette’s filter, he lit the butt, blowing the first exhale at the page still in his hand to dislodge the ash clung there. When the smoke cleared, bare ass and trust once again stood out against all the other words.

  “You old dog,” he slurred, the reproach he felt the last few times he’d read the same washed away by the conviviality of his drunk.

  His eyes then settling on the last word on the page.

  “Well, you know how George’d end it,” he said, stealing another drag. “A world on fire, no doubt.”

  * * *

  Fire, then, was the last thought on his mind before he’d fallen asleep. It was also pretty near the first as the twelfth chime faded, Deacon peering at the window, trying to account for what appeared to be flecks of greyish snow powdering the glass. He could smell the faint tang of woodsmoke, probably just someone—the Quimbys perhaps—lighting a woodstove to chase away the morning chill, a thought cleaved in two by the trailing wisp of a siren that couldn’t have been anything but a fire truck moving at a fair clip along Main Street.

  Hearing that, he heaved himself to his feet. His legs hadn’t quite recovered from last night’s indulgence and their first uncertain steps towards the door had his toes catching the edge of a stack of books, toppling it into his path.

  The siren had reached its crescendo, a slight hitch in its fervour telling Deacon the fire truck must have been turning down into the valley, descending towards the strip malls on either side of the 118. Clambering over the books, he fought his way to the door. When he opened it he was met with a stiff gust. The wind blew back the hair from his cheeks and he braced himself against its bluster, his eyes wincing at the sting of what he could now see were ashes swirling like dirty snowflakes in whirls about the yard. The sky overhead was overcome with the billow of clouds: a turbulent seam of utter black coursing against the grey, frothing at the tops of the trees enclosing the yard. Not a bird in sight nor a remark of their cheerful natter. The only sign of life at all was a squirrel standing on its haunches in the middle of the lawn, its head raised heavenwards as if it too, was trying to make sense of the strange turn in the weather.

  The pressure in his bladder hastened Deacon towards the maple tree beside the barn. As he relieved himself, another siren alighted from behind: a fire truck coming down Entrance Drive, heading westward from the 11, an odd enough occurrence given that Tildon’s fire station was on Dominion, a block south of the downtown core. He was still zipping his pants as he hurried across the yard, the siren growing louder with every footfall,
urging his legs towards a run undiminished until he’d reached the traffic lights at the corner of McDonald and Main streets just in time to see the fire truck dipping down the hill into the valley. North Bay FD was decaled in shiny gold letters over its rear bumper, and Deacon hardly had a moment to ponder the significance of that before the truck carried on down the steep slope, providing him with an unobstructed view all the way to the horizon. At its fringe, a charcoaled mass was billowing smoke as if the ground had opened up and was venting its bile at the sky’s eternal mockery of its earthbound ways.

  It was how The Old Man had described the black smoke plume that had appeared on the horizon nearing the end of The Unnamed, gaping at it from the platform atop the lookout tower at the edge of his village with the same creeping dread that Deacon felt standing at the top of the hill, seeing its perfect twin fissuring the sky. In the book, two of The Old Man’s grandsons had accompanied him, young warriors who felt none of the apprehension he did seeing the sky sullied so. The blight to them was no more than a mild curiosity, the likely result of a lightning strike, a natural enough occurrence and certainly not a portent of dire things yet to come—only a foolish old man could conceive in it of that. Harkened back to their day by the idle pursuits of youth, they’d left their grandfather alone to ponder its significance, Deacon knowing just then the oppressive weight of the isolation he felt, the passers-by in cars and on foot all taking in the spectacle with mild diffidence, none allowing time for more than a fleeting glance or a selfie as they carried on through the intersection—too many things to do in the day already without fretting over something as trivial as a little smoke on the horizon—the only thing that separated Deacon from them being that they hadn’t just read what he had. Most likely, they hadn’t read any of George’s books at all and even if a few of them had, again most likely, they’d sought in their pages only a harmless diversion, an escape from the rigours of modern life. His Fictions couldn’t possibly have become for them, as they now had for Deacon, a lens through which he viewed the black plume confronting him as the end of a story he’d thought had only just begun.

  The past night’s restless musings swirling again with the gale force of a hurricane, and Dylan at its eye.

  Is this what he meant to tell you?

  Searching his addled mind then, looking for clues in his recollections of the man who’d been his only real friend and who’d treated him more like a brother, trying to reconcile the person he knew with the person who could have done this.

  It couldn’t have been him, it just couldn’t have.

  A thought that did little to dispel that familiar feeling of dread, lumped in his belly like a stone. He heard another far-off siren drawing nigh and it turned him back to the ever-present climax! imprinted in the sky, its malevolent billow consuming all thoughts now but one:

  Whose world had just been set on fire?

  20

  The quickest route to answering that question was as close as the Chronicle’s office at the far end of town, a mere ten-minute walk away. But that would have meant talking to Grover, something he was reticent to do, looking the way he did and probably smelling a whole lot worse.

  Passing the library, he turned off Main Street at Dominion, following that to the alleyway that cut behind the storefronts. He mounted the wooden stairs leading upwards from the Chronicle’s rear entrance with cautioned steps, thinking of all the times he’d smoked a joint at lunch and had tried to slip unnoticed into his apartment so that he could brush his teeth and splash a little water on his face before returning to work. The creak of the rickety wood slats beneath his feet would hardly be audible even to himself, yet there Grover would be, sticking his head out of the back door and calling up to him, “You just getting back now?” Deacon would mumble some excuse, telling him that he just had to use the bathroom, he’d only be a moment, the elderly black man shaking his head in silent reproach. And then, as Deacon slipped the key into the lock, calling up to him again: “Mind you don’t get lost on your way back down.”

  This day though, the journey up the stairs and into his apartment went uncontested. Casting his jacket atop the sheets twisted over his unmade bed, he took a direct line for the TV on the stand against the far wall. He hit the remote’s On button and when the screen flared to life, he turned the channel to 26, his preferred national news network, hedging his bets by backing towards the desk beside the bookshelf, which was where he kept his laptop. The latter would prove to be unnecessary for onscreen there appeared a petite twenty-something brunette standing on the deck of a barge and holding a microphone.

  “—o’clock this morning,” she was saying, “the province officially declared a state of emergency.”

  She was wearing a bright red jacket opening onto a white blouse, and as she spoke, her free hand waged a losing battle to keep the gusts of wind from lashing the drape of her hair about her face.

  “Municipalities as far away as Brandon, Manitoba, and Gatineau, Quebec, have pledged their assistance,” she continued, “and fire trucks have been arriving all through the morning. The high winds you can see swirling around me have greatly hampered efforts to contain the fire. Thus far, crews have concentrated their efforts on keeping Highway 118 open as it is the only overland evacuation route available to the estimated five thousand people who have been forced to flee the fire’s advance. But there are also many smaller, mostly dirt roads that connect with the highway and many of these have been rendered impassable. Ultimately, it may be the area’s vast network of lakes and rivers that provide many evacuees with the best hope for safe passage. You can see behind me—” the camera then panning right to reveal dozens of watercraft, from canoes to cabin cruisers, trailing after the barge—“a caravan of boats filled with fleeing residents. Barges like the one I am standing on now, which would normally be used to transport construction materials along these waterways, have been enlisted to transport firefighters to otherwise inaccessible locations and to assist in the evacuation. Officials are urging anyone who does not have a boat and is trapped behind the fire line to get to the nearest body of water and make yourself visible to rescuers.”

  “But where did it start?” Deacon implored as the scene shifted back to the studio. A middle-aged news anchor with the plasticized hair of a Ken doll was sitting at the desk wearing a charcoal suit and a red tie. He thanked “Melissa” and assured viewers they’d be following the story all day long. Dramatic music flared to accompany the montage leading towards a commercial break: a graphic reading Fire in Paradise set against the backdrop of footage of a water bomber dumping its load on an inferno engulfing the southern shore of Lake Mesaquakee given way to oxygen-masked firefighters advancing on a burning cottage, their hoses drawn with the resolve of soldiers marching off to war, and finally ending with a scene shot through the window of a pickup truck, the forest a seething mass of flames on either side and a fire-soaked tree crashing onto the road just ahead.

  Turning, Deacon made to reach for his laptop. There was a notebook where it would normally be and he was helpless but to scan over the four lines he’d written at the top of the open page.

  Because you escape nothing, you flee nothing, the pursuer is what is doing the running and tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.

  It was from the last book that George had recommended he read, written by none other than “Bill” of the barn’s framed quote: a thought sprung from the sleep-deprived mind of a teenage boy trying to make sense of an act of violence that had lifted the veil off his innocence, forcing him to confront the world as it truly was.

  When Deacon had come upon the line, it had spoken to him of the sleepless nights he himself had endured when he’d first come to live with George and Adele, and he’d known that it wasn’t a coincidence George had suggested he read that particular book. He’d jotted down the quote in the notepad he’d reserved for when he’d found a line or a paragra
ph in one of the books George had lent him from his library and which suggested the start of a conversation they might have the next time they met.

  He’d forgotten all about it until, sometime towards dawn on one of the restless wanderings that had punctuated his past few nights, he’d got it in mind that he should say a few words at George’s funeral. He’d sat at his desk and opened the notebook, flipping towards a fresh page and finding the quote. Coming upon it after yet another sleepless wrestle and trying to think of a few words to express all that George had come to mean to him, it had seemed like as good a place to start as any.

  He’d fled from his own omissions and regrets using George’s Fictions as the equivalent of a getaway car, there was no denying that. But as he’d sat there tapping his pen against the page, he knew there was more to it. What that was he’d never figured out, and he’d finally given up, telling himself that it’d be best to get a fresh start after he’d caught some sleep.

  And here those words again, staring at him off the page, never more in need of a refuge than he was now, the full measure of what he suspected Dylan had done playing out on the TV behind him, with worse likely yet to come, his only proof of either suspicion being a dozen photocopies, which didn’t really prove a damn thing and, the more he thought about them now, the less likely it seemed that Dylan could have possibly left them to mark the conclusion of some diabolical scheme. The mere suggestion seemed preposterous in the extreme, easily dismissed as the lunatic ramblings of a mind drunk on rye and more so on grief such that it contrived to keep George alive by projecting his fictional world onto the real when Dylan had probably just left the pages because he’d read that bit about Rain and he’d thought it’d be funny to see the look on Deacon’s face when he stumbled across what George had written.