The Life of Hope

by Paul Quarrington

  The Mysteries of Hope

  Hope, Ontario, 1983

  Wherein our Young Hero Finally Gets Down to It.

  I managed to get very drunk. Note I say, “I managed” as if getting drunk was somehow irk- or ugglesome. It was, of course, rather facile. In two hours I toppled from my barstool in The Willing Mind, thereby setting up Little Bernie, who delivered this old zinger: “Well, at least he knows when he’s had enough!”

  I flipped about like a fish in the bottom of a canoe, and it may have been this piscatorial activity that gave me the following idea. “Hey! I think I’ll go buy me a Hoper—a real Hoper, mind you, not one of the tourist variety—and then go fishing for—bumbumbumbum …”

  “Ol’ Mossback?” guessed Big Bernie.

  “Right first pop out of the box! Ol’ Mossback, he of the silvery eyes and tongue!”

  Teddy, the dwarf bartender, was eyeing me with suspicion. “Aren’t you a little drunk for fishing?”

  “Hey!” I shrieked. “You sounded just like Elschpett!” When one is intoxicated, “Elspeth” is quite a mouthful. I contrived to climb to my feet. “Fare thee well!” I saluted them. I was for some reason under the impression that a war was being fought outside the door. My leave-taking was courageous and beautiful; it brought a lump to my throat. I charged, full tilt and wobbly, into the streets of Hope.

  I allowed myself the following hallucination. (Some portion of my mind had gone into the Hallucination Production biz, and was constantly pitching one or another of the products to the rest of my sensibilities. We went for this one.) It was a hundred-odd years ago, and The Willing Mind was a Fourieristic phalanstery, and the road was dirt and rocks, and women floated about, naked and beautiful. Polyphilia Drinkwater drifted near, and I saw how foolish I’d been to think that she and Mona looked alike. Polly was more delicate and much fairer. Cairine McDiarmid marched by, her freckled breasts pumping like a red fire engine. Mary Carter De-la-Noy stood off to one side, and her bosom was pitching. It was awesome, Mary’s bosom-pitching was. And finally I saw Abigal Skinner, a heavy, splay-footed woman who none the less possessed certain charms, not the least of which was a rear end that was a magnificent globe, a world of flesh.

  I ran into one of the Elmer Fudd-hatted geezers that seemed to make up half of Hope’s population. He shook a gnarled, liver-spotted fist, advising me, “Keep your mind on your business.”

  Sound and sage advice, I thought. I went to Edgar’s Bait, Tackle and Taxidermy.

  “Big Guy!” said Edgar, and then he trained his evil black eyes on me. “Big Guy,” he said, “you been drinking.”

  Edgar, I recalled, was AA and therefore skilled at detecting drunkards. That, and the fact that I’d fallen on my face as soon as I entered his shop, trip-wired by invisible hobgoblins.

  “I feel lucky, Edgar! Real lucky!” My nose, I noticed, was bleeding profusely. “So I am going to purchase one HOPER, and note that I do not want one of those whatever it was you fobbed off on Benson. Furthermore, Edgar, if that’s really your name, I am willing to pay up to six dollars and eighty-three cents for the Real McCoy.”

  Edgar reached below the counter and produced a Hoper. A beauty.

  “Wow!” I exclaimed, leaping to my feet.

  “That is not a Hoper,” said Edgar, gingerly touching the gleaming treble-hook. “This is the Hoper.”

  I took it into my hands. The Hoper was lovingly carved from fine wood. It was a yellow that put the sun to shame. This Hoper didn’t remind me of either a finger or a penis; instead, it looked like something that a huge, monstrous fish would love to eat.

  “Who made this?” I demanded in a whisper.

  “Isaiah. While he was in prison.”

  “Isaiah? Why? He loved Ol’ Mossback.”

  “He thought it might come in handy someday.” Edgar stared at me intently. “I guess you could have it.”

  “Six dollars and eighty-three cents?” I offered, trying ineffectually to jam my fingers into my jeans pockets.

  Edgar waved his huge hand in my face. “It’s on the house,” he said, and then he laughed. “ ’Least, it’s on the Fourieristic Phalanstery.”

  I turned to leave, but ended up spinning a complete 360 degree circle because a) I lost control and b) I had my responsibilities as Contactee. “By the way, Jonathon Whitecrow …”

  “Who?”

  “Jonathon Whitecrow.”

  “Don’t know the name, Big Guy.”

  “Come on! The old, gay Indian? ‘Visions’ and such like?”

  Edgar moved his mountainous shoulders in bafflement.

  “Anyway, he died.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Yeppers,” I nodded. “He was a very good friend of mine. He was approximately 174 years old. The good die young.” I left Edgar’s Bait, Tackle and Taxidermy.

  I had another hallucination. George Quinton materialized in front of me on the sidewalk. I walked squarely into him, squashing my face against his lower stomach. George Quinton said, “Sowwy!” and then vanished, leaving behind a huge hole in the fabric of the universe.

  “Am I ever gunned!” I bellowed at God.

  In retrospect, I’m glad I did this. I sincerely believe that my bellow attracted God’s attention; He looked down from the clouds just in time to see me jump on a little blue moped. “Oy,” muttered God, and His mighty hand guided me safely home.

  As soon as I got back to the homestead, I realized that I was sobering up, or at least parts of me were—my great toes for example. To catch Ol’ Mossback it was necessary that I be as drunk as possible (to lower my body temperature) so I raided the liquor cabinet, discovering a bottle of tequila, my personal favorite. And then I noticed that my poor heart had become disattached from the cosmos, so I decided to listen to the “Vocalise.” I started the turntable running, bounced the needle off the opening bars, and soon the night was magical.

  “Ah, Louis,” I said, as the naked monster materialized in the picture window, “I’ve been expecting you.” I opened the door for him. He hid in the shadows of some trees, but his obscene flesh glowed. “Come on in!” I shrieked. Louis had to cling to one of the tree’s lower branches so that he wouldn’t topple over. “Louis,” I said patiently, “get on in here. It is of paramount importance that you and I discuss the mysteries of Hope.”

  “Hope?” Louis gurgled. It sounded like an air bubble, one that had escaped from the bowels of the earth. “Dat’s me!”

  “Hope,” I repeated evenly. Then it occurred to me that God hadn’t heard, that all of the lesser deities had misunderstood. “HOPE!” I screamed, silencing even the bullfrogs.

  Louis let go of the branches, and his eight-foot body pitched forward. I got out of the way just in time. Louis Hope collapsed in front of me, a white mountain of quivering fat. I was reminded of my childhood; Crayola had forever failed to include a flesh-colored crayon, even in the huge 64-pack, leaving me with three alternatives; to color people an overhealthy brown, to make them a glaring yellow, or to leave them alone, as white as the paper they existed on. Looking at Louis, I thought that God had run out of flesh (and brown and yellow) crayons.

  “First things first,” I told Louis. “Food.”

  The monster began joyously to push himself up into a sitting position. I went to the kitchen and made a chicken sandwich, putting most of a boiled chicken between two slices of bread. How the chicken came to be there is another enigma; perhaps some altruistic bird, concerned for my welfare, plucked itself, leapt into some cooking pot and subsequently into the Frigidaire. Well, the fowl didn’t die for naught; Louis Hope devoured her with much gusto.

  Meanwhile, the “Vocalise” filled my homestead. As Louis ate, I talked over the music, fitting my words into the haunting holes opened by the melody. “My wife, Louis,” I said, “that is, my wife Elspeth, Louis, is convinced that the Russians are going to blow us up. They have nuclear weaponry, Louis. We have nuclear weaponry. Everyone has fucking nuclear weaponry!! The four-year-old girl living dow
n the road has a Cruise missile in her sandbox, Louis. But the thing of it is, is …”

  Louis crossed his eyes suddenly, indicating an interest in what the thing of it was, was.

  “Listen to this music! This beautiful goddam music! This is the USSR State Orchestra, for fuck’s sake! My old buddy Rachmaninoff is a Russian! How can we—you and me, Louis baby—how can we listen to this music and believe in our heart of hearts that the Russians would do that to us?” I had a drink of tequila, one that nailed me squarely between the eyes. “Ours is an unpopular position, Louis. But we’ve heard the music.”

  I climbed to my feet (I hadn’t noticed, but somewhere along the line I’d fallen over) so that I could address a larger audience. “Take away the nuclear weaponry. The Russkies aren’t gonna attack. They’ve got their own problems. Olga is fucking some Slav on the side, Louis. Ivan is drinking too much. Everyone has enough fucking problems of their own without worrying about nuclear weaponry. So just fucking take it away. I trust you agree.”

  Louis seemed to consider it. He stared at me and came to some resolve. “Give it to Louis,” he said slowly, awkward and warped words.

  “Give what?”

  “Nookyer whapponwy.”

  “Nuclear weaponry?”

  Louis Hope nodded. “Take it ’way.” Louis gesticulated vaguely in his own direction. “Louis is big. Louis knows how to hide.”

  “Good of you to offer, Louis. But it ain’t that simple.”

  The monster was crestfallen. I thought I’d change the subject.

  “All right, Watson,” I said, “let’s put on the old ratiocination helmets and get down to brass tacks. Let us try to reconstruct the night that J. B. Hope was murdered.”

  Lunar Muscle

  Hope, Ontario, 1889

  Regarding the death of Hope we know the following: that it was brutal.

  On the back of Karl Dekeyser’s neck (which was thick, red and wrinkled) was a mole, about the size of a nickel, from which sprouted a tuft of wiry hair. Joseph Benton Hope was fascinated by this excrescence. Hope thought to construct new theory. Stupidity causes carbuncles. Joseph Hope laughed aloud, the callow burst of used air alarming all of the men.

  Karl Dekeyser turned around and said something in Dutch. Hope nodded vaguely, getting the gist. Dekeyser pointed the way then, even though everyone, including Hope, seemed to know where they were going.

  Hope recognized none of the men that served as his escort, and found it hard to believe that so many strangers could have intruded into his life. He’d considered telling them of Perfectionism, explaining how he’d simply filled Gretel’s naked corporeal being with the Holy Spirit. But in his heart, or whatever twisted organ now served in that capacity, Joseph knew it wasn’t so. He’d filled her with buckets of stuff, tiny wriggling minutiae that swam hell-bent, driven by the extremely remote possibility that yet another petty human existence could be forged. Hope didn’t begrudge the men their anger, as little as he understood it.

  Neither was Hope concerned for his own safety. If they chose to kill him (Hope assumed it was some vengeance they sought, and killing him would seem a logical one) he would simply elevate on the Planes of Experience. He would become one of Polyphilia’s spiritual hooligans. Hope almost chuckled. He would give an exhibition of Spirit Rapping, he would indeed; he would destroy the entire town of Hope, Ontario.

  They neared Look Out, too suddenly. It occurred to Joseph that the lake itself was an accomplice and had moved to meet them halfway. The moon was full that night, which meant something. Hope had complicated theories about lunar cycles, although at that moment he would have been hard pressed to say what they were. The moon’s being full simply meant something, good or ill it didn’t matter, and with that Hope decided that the moon’s being full meant nothing.

  Hope saw two men standing by the water’s edge, and he felt an emotion resembling surprise. One was the gaunt aboriginal, Whitecrow. Whitecrow was smoking a cigarette and seemed to be both impatient and at ease, like a man waiting for a train. Beside Whitecrow (and this is what had almost startled Hope, except that even base emotions were oddly mutated inside his being) was Isaiah. Isaiah, lanky and gawkish, stood in the moonlight, bathed in its light, drowning in that orb’s maudlin poetry.

  “Hello, Father,” said Isaiah, and there was something snide in his voicing of the address.

  “Isaiah,” croaked Hope, merely acknowledging the fact that the young man was present.

  “These men,” said Isaiah, “have a quarrel with you.” Isaiah laughed by sucking air through his too-long nose. Joseph wanted to slap him.

  “I take it that you do as well,” said Hope. The writing of adolescent verse and silly stories had apparently not served its purpose.

  Isaiah shrugged, his bony shoulders thrown up together but out of kilter. “I have just come to spectate.”

  “And you?” Joseph cocked an eyebrow at the Indian.

  “You know me,” said Jonathon Whitecrow, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “I find this all very interesting.”

  “Oh, do you?” Hope half expected the dwarfish Theophilius Drinkwater to pop out from behind the trees, eager to unsettle whatever muck was about. But that man had died, at the extremely advanced age of 107, as if God had delayed as long as possible before admitting the little imp to the Holy Kingdom.

  “Say you are sorry,” said Karl Dekeyser, and Joseph Hope laughed his birdlike laugh.

  “No,” Hope said, for a variety of reasons, only one of them being the fact that he wasn’t sorry at all. He watched Dekeyser’s face. All of the Germanic features hardened, set by fury. Hope wondered at this. Surely it must be uncomfortable to feel anything so strongly.

  In the middle of this rumination, Joseph Benton Hope noticed that his left ring finger had been neatly removed from its hand.

  Joseph’s reaction was outrage. Dekeyser was holding Hope’s finger in the air, partly brandishing it as a prize, partly removing it in disgust. This was precisely the sort of apelike, antediluvian behavior that Hope had sought to remove from the face of the earth. “Say you are sorry,” Dekeyser had said, to which Hope had answered, perhaps a tad hastily, “No.”

  Joseph had expected at least one more exchange; he wanted an opportunity to open his chest (an old sea chest), to haul out the Holy Books and charts, to explain. But no. Dekeyser, simple and simian, had taken a knife (Mr. Opdycke’s knife, Joseph noticed, although the fact had little import) and hacked off the anulus from the propagative hand. This didn’t hurt (blood pumped out at a sickening rate; Hope tore a piece of material from his shirttail and tied a tourniquet without thinking) but it enraged him. Hope called the men several terrible names, training his hawklike eye on the collective, and then he saw something that caused him to produce his queer laugh. Isaiah, white as the moon, had fainted, and was lying on the ground in a ragged heap. Joseph studied the man for a moment and then dismissed him.

  “Well,” said Hope, “that’s that, is it? Unless you care for another finger, or perhaps a toe?”

  Dekeyser was still marveling at the brutal sense he had caused the world to make. Hope’s prattle disturbed him. Dekeyser had to do something dramatic, and he was inspired. “This is shit!” he said of the finger. Karl walked over to the lake and held the finger above the water. “Food for fish!” he said.

  Some of the men, unable to look at Hope’s disembodied finger, turned their eyes to the water’s edge. The moon was reflected there; some of the more observant of the men noted that two moons were reflected there, round and full and side by side. And then these twin moons pushed out of the lake.

  The Fish rose up almost slowly, dancing on deliberate motions of the fluke, to a height of five feet, five feet of silver, lunar muscle. Karl Dekeyser dropped the finger, and it almost floated into the fish’s mouth, a mouth all needle and bone. Then, in a rapturous state, the Fish acrobatically presented his tail to the stars, spraying the night, and went back into Lake Look Out.

  Isaiah had come around just in
time to witness this; he promptly fainted again.

  Karl Dekeyser’s world ceased to make sense.

  The Indian, unflappable, lit another cigarette.

  Joseph Benton Hope, after a long, stunned moment, let loose with a terrible howl of anguish, and then he turned and ran away from the men. He ran, his elderly elbows and knees flapping awkwardly, toward the home of George and Martha.

  At Lake Look Out, Jonathon Whitecrow took a handful of silver water and gingerly splashed it across Isaiah’s brow. The young man woke up dreamily, aware only of the fact that his penis was inappropriately but enormously enlarged. “Where’s my father?” he asked conversationally, merely curious.

  “With your mother,” answered Whitecrow.

  Martha Quinton Hope had no truck with such niceties as suns and moons, day and night. If there was work to be done, Martha’s thinking was do it, regardless of whether there was light enough. The world was a bully, but in many ways Martha was a bigger one. So she instructed George that it was time to slaughter some animals.

  It was not, in fact, a time to slaughter animals. It was an idea she’d gotten from the moon. Martha didn’t know why she’d been gazing at the moon like some foolish, apple-cheeked schoolgirl, but she had. She’d been struck with the realization that her woman’s body was a horrible thing, designed by God to do horrible things, to bleed and to swell as if with disease. Of course, that was all behind Martha now, a thought that brought a tear to her eye. The tear, though, knew better than to try to sneak out through the dust-dry duct; it retreated sheepishly. Martha was suddenly filled with rage, which she covered by bellowing out a whimsical “La-dee-dah.” Once she’d sighed “La-dee-dah” in the chicken coop, and one of the hens had keeled over, stone dead.

  “Time to slaughter animals, George!”

  They climbed into their workclothes. They did this in each other’s company, both indifferent to the gross and muscular nudity. George wondered what they were going to kill. They owned a cow, and George hoped it wouldn’t be this old bossy, whom George secretly named “Emily.”