Idea in Stone

by Hamish Macdonald

  Oh crap, he thought, peering into the darkness. A second sound started to his left. Ohcrapohcrap. Do I make noise? Do I scream? Or am I supposed to play dead? Or do they start eating you if they think you’re dead? Is it mating season? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Squinting, he searched the movement ahead. It was low to the ground. Grey. With stripes. Raccoons.

  Stefan laughed. Briefly.

  The two raccoons continued their approach, and a third entered the clearing. Stefan stamped his feet, but they didn’t respond. He yelled at them, but they weren’t bothered by that, either. The cold fear crept back into his stomach. Raccoons are big, he realised, and kind of scary, he decided.

  He went back to his supplies with a mission. “Ha!” he said, pulling out a box of flares. He struggled against shaking hands to light two of them. He’d never lit flares before. He expected them to be the pink fireworks he’d seen on the side of the highway, but these were like candles in shotgun casings. Still, they created a good amount of light.

  Stefan held the flares in his hands, then stomped about, yelling at the raccoons. It turned into a dance of sorts, and sang at the top of his lungs “Go away ra-cooooons! Get out of my caaaaaamp-siiiiiiiiite! Get! Get! Get! Get away ra-cooooooons!” To his pleasure, it was working.

  One raccoon tentatively moved forward, so Stefan shook a flare at it. He was horrified when smoky, flaming, viscous goo flew from the tube at the creature. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” he said, not caring how ridiculous it was to talk to the thing. He saw he hadn’t hit the raccoon, and that it and its partners were closing in on the campsite again. Stefan whirled about with the flares, yelling for all he was worth and climbing up onto the picnic table. Splashes of fire glowed where the flare-goo fell around him, keeping the raccoons at bay.

  Stefan felt heat on his back, and the clearing suddenly lit with a flickering yellow light. He turned around and saw the conflagration that used to be his grandfather’s tent.

  ~

  Stefan moved slightly. He lay on the picnic table, his arms crossed tight across the chest of the burnt parka-remnants he wore. His muscles ached with tension from shivering.

  He opened his eyes, suddenly awake. He had no idea what time it was in this lost part of the night. The clearing was still, and Stefan strained to pick out any sounds. A slight wind picked up, filtered through the pines. He sat up and looked around. Moonlight flickered through a curtain of leaves on the far side of the clearing. The raccoons had gone off in that direction when they finally decided there was no food to be had in the campsite. The leafy curtain parted with a puff of wind. A raccoon scurried from the opening, stood on its haunches, and gestured for Stefan to follow him.

  Stefan blinked.

  The raccoon made the gesture again, more insistently. Stefan climbed off the picnic table and followed after the animal. He brushed aside the leaf-curtain, and the brightness of the moonlight here made him temporarily blind. As his eyes adjusted, Stefan saw a man standing there, facing away from him. Around his feet was gathered a circle of raccoons. The man turned around.

  “Dad?”

  Stefan grinned, and the tears in his eyes turned the moonlight into a marquee around his vision. He wiped at his face. His father motioned to an old, polished log upended in the clearing, and Stefan sat on it, still speechless with joy. His father didn’t speak, either, but that seemed to be a limitation of however he managed to be here. Instead his smile played wide through his beard and cheeks. His eyes, big and dark like Stefan’s, wrinkled with a knowing kind of grace. Stefan had so much to say to him, so many questions based on the assumption that death had given him special insight. Or did Stefan simply expect him to have answers just because he was his father, even though he’d died when he was only a few years older than Stefan was now? What does he know of the world now? Stefan wondered. Do you know what I’m thinking? he thought while looking at the figure, but his father didn’t respond. It was as if he was waiting for Stefan to finish, to acclimatise, so he could get on with what he was here for.

  One of the raccoons shuffled toward him holding something. He held it up for Stefan, who took it, seeing that it was an old binocular photo viewer. He looked at the raccoon, who handed him a card with two pieces of film it in. Stefan put that in the viewer. He looked to his father, who pointed up. Stefan clipped the card in place and looked through the device, holding it up so the moon shone on its white celluloid backdrop and illuminated the double slides.

  He saw an old cobbled street with tall stone buildings lining its sides. They were topped with angles and arches and spires. He sighed, loving the sight of it. He knew the name of this place, which was spelled out on his bedside table at home. He knew it had some connection with his father, and now with him.

  Something jerked his hand, and he found himself squinting into whiteness. The city scene was gone. He looked accusingly at the raccoon beside him, who shrugged in its way and held out its little paws to show they were empty. He looked at the ring of raccoons around his father’s feet, who shrugged in unison, then at his father, who shrugged, not looking playful, but sad about the disappearance.

  The raccoon motioned that it wanted the picture-viewer back, so Stefan handed it over, now that it had nothing to show. The raccoon joined the others, blending into their furry mass of grey punctuated with masked faces. From their midst emerged another raccoon, this one holding a sheaf of papers, carrying them with some difficulty to Stefan. He took the papers and looked at the typewritten cover-sheet. The Empire of Nothing, it said, a play by Robert Mackechnie. Stefan looked up at his father, surprised. “I didn’t know you wrote plays,” said Stefan. His father smiled and shrugged again. He gestured for Stefan to read it.

  Stefan read a story of a man and a woman, a couple who met in war-time. Powers clashed over their heads, forces unconcerned with the lovers’ welfare—giving them a kind of anarchic freedom from things that might have kept them apart, but ultimately destroyed the world in which they wanted to live together. Stefan enjoyed it and felt it had something important to say, though he didn’t know exactly what. When he finished, he asked his father, “May I have this?” His father nodded, but the raccoon took the shuffled papers away and brought them back to the circle. Stefan didn’t understand, but all the raccoons seemed to be in co-operation with his father, their circle somehow keeping him here and giving him physical means. So he let it take the script away.

  Two more raccoons stepped forward and moved to either side of the moonlit clearing. One put a tiny paw to its ear and turned from side to side, listening. The second held a paw over its eyes and looked around. They each stepped backwards until they bumped into each other, surprised, and hugged. They became an indistinct ball of grey. Suddenly, from the fur sprang two deer, who bounded out of the clearing, sending Stefan tumbling back off his seat.

  He righted himself, amazed. One last raccoon scuttled up to him and handed him a note. Stefan read it: “They don’t call it chemistry for nothing”. The raccoon grabbed the note and ran back to the others. His father looked at him and tapped his own chest in the spot where just days before Stefan’s mother tapped him.

  All the creatures stood up on their haunches, then took a bow. Stefan, not sure what else to do, still not sure what he’d seen, clapped for the little raccoon players. His father stood tall in their midst and winked at him.

  Then the moon went out.

  ~

  Stefan opened his eyes to the dawning day. In this early light, the colours around him all looked like watercolours with a touch of white added to them. He lay on the picnic table, the burnt parka still wrapped around him, his body aching from huddling against the cold. The previous evening’s events came back to him, and he sat up, looking around the campsite for any trace of what he’d seen. He saw nothing. He climbed off the table and explored the woods around the site until he found what might have been the clearing where he saw his father. There was the log he sat on, but what had been a clearing was overgrown, so thick with brush and
small trees that he had trouble negotiating the space. He pawed through the bushes, but couldn’t find any sign of the binocular picture or his father’s script.

  He was covered with soot and filth, and reeked of smoke and bacon. He walked to the edge of the island and dipped his hands in the cold lake water. He scrubbed them, smearing the black soot around at first, then managing to clean it off somewhat. His fingernails and the wrinkles of his hands were outlined in black, but he could get rid of that when he got back to the city. He scooped water into his mouth and swished it around, then scooped some more and scrubbed at his face. When the water grew still, he looked at himself, reflected there, his face pale except for the rings of soot around his eyes. There’s my raccoon face, he thought.

  He was finished here. Time to pack up and go home.

  ~

  Thomas Jackrabbit heard a car pull away from his driveway. He opened the front door to find a large box there with an envelope sitting on top. He opened the letter:

  I know what I have to do, Grandpa. I have to follow this. Thank you so much.

  Thomas smiled. He was impressed that Stefan had managed to pack all his camping gear back into the box. Then he cocked his head, puzzled: black, sooty water was oozing from it.

  ~

  “What are you doing up there?” yelled Delonia. “Come down, we’ve still got work to do before everyone shows up.”

  “Just a minute,” hollered Stefan in reply. He unfolded the interlaced flaps of a cardboard box. It was the last thing in the attic he hadn’t dismantled. Inside, he found a smaller box labelled “Robert”. Its lid was taped shut, but Stefan picked at it and found the tape brittle and dry. While driving home from Thomas’s, he’d reflected on what he’d seen in the woods, and remembered the attic. He knew that he’d find his father’s things here. That’s what the figure meant when he agreed to let Stefan have them.

  Inside, Stefan found the stereoscopic picture-viewer, some pictures, and his father’s play, along with other memorabilia from his youth in Scotland and the early days of his musical career with Delonia. Stefan picked up a snapshot of his parents singing together in what looked like someone’s basement with a party around them, everyone in very dated clothing, Delonia wearing black-rimmed cat-eye glasses. Stefan laughed at the sight of this. His father didn’t have his beard yet then, and his smile beamed at Delonia, who smiled just as brightly back at him over the word she sang.

  Chemistry, he thought. He remembered the deer. His father and Delonia were changed by finding each other. They were in the process of becoming something, he reasoned, right up to the point his father died. Their transformation was incomplete, and she was left on her own to become something else entirely.

  I get it, he thought, the whole relationship thing. It was alchemical, a process where two things could become a third that was greater than its constituent elements. He felt sorry for his mother, having to carry on that work by herself, knowing that she didn’t have all the necessary ingredients. Her girlfriend Cerise was a science experiment.

  “Stefan, we need a hand moving the dining room table,” yelled the woman downstairs who no longer seemed quite so familiar, who had knowledge of a whole aspect of life he’d skipped. What about Ming? he asked himself. Nope, he answered, that wasn’t chemistry. Maybe home economics. Not chemistry.

  “Coming,” said Stefan, taking his father’s play and the binocular picture set, shoving everything else back in place.

  ~

  The house was brightly-lit and full of charm. It was a great home for parties, with its big rooms—the living room, dining room, and kitchen (where all the drinks were, naturally drawing a crowd), then the upstairs, where the bedrooms provided sanctuary for deep conversations, coat storage, and the odd indiscretion during the course of any given party. The guests were a who’s-who, but not from any attempt to assert it themselves. On the contrary: the famous had to go somewhere, and each other’s company was often more comfortable, as few of them felt the need to verbally genuflect over their various achievements. Of course there was a hierarchy, with the venerable actors, writers, and musicians at the top, being most culturally visible and—for whatever reason—appreciated. Stefan’s friends often told him how lucky he was, and he knew it, but not for the reasons they imagined. Fame was a vague cloud, and he’d grown up in it. It had its advantages, and definite disadvantages, too. For him the real luck of it was getting to be around people who were so good at what they did. They imagined things and brought them into being. For that—not their personalities or their elaborate possessions—Stefan regarded them as demi-gods. His mother laughed with the conductor of Cerise’s orchestra, who matched Delonia’s height and had a swept-back head of white hair. She was one of the demi-gods.

  Delonia caught Stefan’s eye, and pointed past the conductor to the young host of a television show. Stefan couldn’t deny that he found the young man attractive, with his dark hair and eyes, and that confident schoolboy smile. His friends and he had wondered if, perhaps, the host liked men. Allen heard of a party where he’d supposedly disappeared with a man for a while. But like so many rumours it turned out to be wish-projection: the host was here with his fiancée, who stood only ten feet from him, engaged in another conversation. She, of course, was lovely and utterly un-hateable. Stefan gave a strained smile to his mother and nodded. Demi-god or no, philosopher queen to his father’s king, his mother still drove him crazy.

  The doorbell rang. Stefan answered it, finding a female jazz singer there whose smoky sound he always loved. He was about to tell her how much he’d enjoyed her latest album, when she gestured behind her. “I think that woman needs help getting in,” she said, sliding past him into the party.

  Stefan looked down the tall, wide steps and nearly gasped. There in a wheelchair someone had plopped a tiny creature, vaguely feminine, with shiny black hair streaked with grey, glasses like twin television sets each projecting an eye. She held a cigarette up to her mouth, drew in, exhaled a cloud into the night air, and nodded to him. “Think I could get a hand here?” she asked, her voice a basso-helium-frog-croak. Stefan’s social graces did him the favour of intercepting a look of shock before it reached his face. He recovered himself, trying so hard to act nonchalant that he knew he was being awkward.

  “Um, sure,” he said, far too late. He walked down the steps and stood next to her chair. The motorised thing was beyond him; surely she didn’t expect him to carry that up the stairs. So he gestured toward her, reaching this way and that, not knowing how to begin lifting her.

  “Ever give a dog a bath?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Like that. Just pick me up like that.” She threw her cigarette on the lawn. “Don’t worry. Really, you can’t mess me up any worse than God did.”

  An unconscious laugh burst from Stefan’s mouth. His face flushed with social horror, until he saw the woman in the wheelchair grinning at him. “It’s okay,” she said in her odd voice, “you’re not comfortable with anything until you can laugh about it. So, there, we got that out of the way. Now pick me up.”

  “I’m Stefan,” he said, curling one arm under her and one behind her back. He lifted her, her tiny legs flopping down from the little square of her body. Her dog analogy was apt: she weighed about the same as the Labrador he once washed, but she was better about being carried.

  “I’m Helen,” she said, “Helen Jackson. You’re Delonia’s son, right?”

  “Among other things,” he said, carrying her through the front door. “Hey, I know that name. You’re one of my mother’s producers, aren’t you?”

  “You got it,” she said.

  “Um, where should I put you?”

  “Where are the drinks?” she said with even more of a croak, as if playing for comedic effect.

  “Let’s go to the kitchen, then,” he said. The soft chair in the corner was momentarily empty, and he sat Helen in it like a strange troll doll, careful to make her skirt fall nicely.

  “Thank you,�
� she said. “Do you have any bourbon?”

  Stefan nodded, giving her a one second finger. As he poured the drink, he found himself taken with this woman, her total mastery over her condition—not physically, there was nothing she could do about that, but socially, personally. He brought her the drink, handing it to her with a square napkin. He pulled a chair over from the kitchen table and sat beside her.

  “So what do you do?” asked Helen.

  “I do voice-over work for a children’s show.”

  “Oh yeah, which one?”

  “The Green Brigade. Do you know it?” Helen nodded. “I’m ‘Bloob Ox’.”

  “Really? That’s amazing. You don’t sound anything like that in real life.”

  “Well,” said Stefan with a cocky angle to his head, “that’s where the talent comes in, isn’t it?”

  “Do me,” she said.

  Oh God. Many people asked him this, and he was generally able to do it to varying degrees of success, depending on how much vocal character the person had in the first place. But with Helen it wouldn’t be fair. It was too easy. How could he produce anything close to her voice that wouldn’t sound like a mockery?

  “Go on. I’ve heard myself on tape before, I know what I sound like. I dare you. If you get it right, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Stefan swallowed, then poked his fingers underneath his jaw to loosen his tongue-muscles. “Okay,” he said, “here goes. Hi, my name’s Helen Jackson, and I’m here tonight to make you all feel very awkward.”

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, “that’s very good.” Stefan sighed. His risk paid off.

  The two of them talked for an hour, gossiping about the people around them. They talked about the state of the world, then came back around to their work in broadcasting.