Idea in Stone

by Hamish Macdonald

  He bought some coffee cake and ate it as he walked the rest of the way home, tearing off sticky chunks, licking his fingers after each one he put in his mouth. Sunday was living up to its name, and it was early enough that most of the snow was unblemished, except for that along the road, which looked like cola slush drink from a convenience store. He thought he might like one of those, but they were impossible to find in the winter. He crumpled the paper bag from the bakery, having finished his cake, and sneaked it into a garbage can in the laneway of a small brick house. He ran along the sidewalk then slid a long distance—the sun’s warmth made the snow heavy and wet, ideal for sliding. He reached up to jostle a tree-branch, then ducked away as heavy clumps of snow fell behind him.

  This was good enough, all this. He thought about David’s offer, but put it out of his mind. Not today. Plans seemed too hard. He knew there was something else he was supposed to be working on, but it eluded him.

  The smell of coffee greeted him as he opened the front door. Cerise’s presence wasn’t an altogether bad thing. It had cost him the car, but there were other concessions around the house that made life easier.

  “Hi, Cerise,” said Stefan, filling a cup from the coffee maker urn. The beans were sure to have been picked by a well-paid group of revolutionary farmers, he figured, but he didn’t care about that as long as it tasted good. His mother tried for years to foist chicory on him, whose flavour he could only describe as “not coffee”.

  “Hi, Stef,” said Cerise, looking up from a thick weekend paper (Delonia’s recycling efforts were strained to their limits by Cerise’s international newspaper fetish.) “Oh,” she said, “you might want to watch out for your mo—”

  “Hello, Stefan,” said Delonia, entering the kitchen. “Could I speak with you in the study?”

  This is not good, he thought. That invitation had always been an ominous one. Surely he was too old to get in trouble. Confused, he followed her through to the back room and sat in a deep, padded wingback chair next to a wall lined with books. The look of the room suggested they might be legal texts, but they were Delonia’s music and human potential collection, ranging from joyful sex to the history of folk music to finding one’s spirit pet.

  Delonia sat on the corner of the desk, looming above him, her broad mouth pursed. She started to speak, but stopped herself. She smiled at him with her large teeth, giving him her strange disappointed smile, which he’d seen only a few times. She breathed deeply, then spoke. “I spoke with Doug Hendry on Friday,” she said. Stefan’s face was a blank. “From the Canada Council.”

  Stefan’s insides deflated. He wrapped his hands together. They were cold.

  “He told me he’d seen your name on an application, and made the connection that you were my son. The project had been approved already, and he wanted to congratulate me. He said he didn’t know my son was a First Nations playwright. I told him that I didn’t, either.”

  “Mom, I didn’t actually—”

  “I know, Helen did. I’ve already spoken to her about it, after I set Doug straight. I’m disappointed in her, so disappointed, after all our years of working together. I can’t even express how shocked and appalled I am at you. I don’t know which one of you is more to blame for this scheme, but it’s over now. I told Doug what I knew, and they cancelled your funding.”

  Stefan’s hands were freezing now, but his face burned with embarrassment and anger. There was no way out of Delonia’s accusations. Even though he hadn’t done the paperwork, he had a good idea how Helen was going to doctor it. He felt angry at her himself, for claiming he was the playwright. His father wrote it. It was his father’s play.

  Dad.

  He’d forgotten about the play, but worse, he’d forgotten about his father.

  “I’m sorry,” said Stefan, standing. “This got out of hand, and we did things the wrong way.”

  “You’re telling me! What’s so important that you had to lie like this? Why didn’t you come to me? What’s going on here?”

  “Well, nothing now,” he said, “thanks very much.”

  “Stefan, you know I would have helped you. I’ve already told Helen that I’d fund this project, whatever it is. She said she had to talk to you about it, but you’d probably say no.”

  “Damned right I’d say no!”

  “I don’t understand. I’m trying to help you.”

  “You have a very strange notion of help, Mom.”

  “I have high personal standards, and I’d hoped you had them, too. If it got out that you’d lied to get a Canada Council grant application, how would that make us look? People have different standards for you when you’re a public figure, and everything you do has to be consistent and virtuous.”

  “You are so full of it,” spat Stefan. “Your career is based on a lie. You’re supposed to be this wholesome native figure, but you haven’t set foot on a reservation in decades—your Métis blood is so diluted it’s clear—and you’re shacked up with a dyke, but you’ve never had her on one of your family hours. So don’t give me that about virtue. Besides, you’re the famous one, not me.”

  He left the room, fuming at her, yet nauseated with humiliation that his mother had righteously ruined his plans and made a fool of him. More than ever, he wanted to get out of the range of her influence.

  I can still run away, he thought. All was not lost. He had the play, a polished final version of it. How he and Helen could face each other again, he wasn’t sure. But he had the play. Why did we even apply for a grant? he wondered. Because we needed the money. But in these sleepwalking months, he’d bankrolled a lot of cash, and by the time they opened the show he’d have more than enough.

  Stefan pulled down the attic stairs and climbed up. He tugged on a chain, lighting a single bulb. His father wasn’t here. He’d left Stefan when Stefan forgot about him. The original copy of the play was still up here, though, sitting in a stationery box on a milking stool. He picked the box up, sat down, and opened it. Empire of Nothing, said the cover page. A play by Robert Mackechnie.

  Stefan started to read.

  ~

  “Hello,” said Stefan to the woman sitting at a desk in the vestibule of the church. Her hair was trimmed to a faint fuzz, her clothes a shiny black material, with a high, pearlescent white collar rising almost to her chin.

  “Hello,” she said, beaming euphorically at him. Her name-tag read “Hello, my name is Jana.”

  “I’m looking for Brother James.”

  “Oh, he’s conducting a small service right now. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  He didn’t want to make dangerous assumptions about the Matholics’ gender roles—perhaps she was James’s superior. Besides, he figured she could do any of what James did on his last visit. “Yeah, why not?” he said. “I came in here a while back, and I sent a letter to my father.”

  The woman cocked her head and smiled. “And how did that go for you?” she asked in a flat tone. Perhaps spending too much time with the dead makes you crazy, Stefan thought. His limited experience seemed to reinforce the idea. Or maybe it was the math they used in their rituals, he considered. Math had that effect on him, too. “Were you satisfied with the response?” she chirped.

  “I don’t know if ‘satisfied’ is the word,” he replied, “but it certainly had an impact.” He pulled the play from his satchel along with a covering letter to his father. “I wanted to send him this.” He dropped the thick stack of papers on the table.

  “Oh,” she said. He imagined cartoon dollar signs flashing in her eyes, but her expression hadn’t changed. He figured they probably didn’t get many repeat customers, and he aimed to haggle over the price of sending so many papers. “It’s just that there’s a service on,” she said, squinting.

  “It’s really important,” he said.

  “It always is,” she replied, annoyed traces of her previous, real-world personality leaking into her tone. “Never quite so important when they’re alive, though, is it?” she asked under
her breath as she rooted through a box for a name-tag and a marker.

  Stefan took the name-tag. “I’m sorry? He died when I was nine years old.”

  Jana recomposed herself, standing. “Ah. Oh. My apologies.” Stefan guessed from her flub that she was a junior here, not able yet to keep the beatific demeanour from slipping.

  She opened the big inner doors to the chapel. Stefan took a sticker from a banana in his pocket and stuck it to the name-tag so it read “Hello, my name is Reduced for Quick Sale”. He followed Jana into the chapel. In a far corner, he saw James standing in front of a small group of people who sat in pews. Around the room hung sparkly banners full of symbols Stefan vaguely remembered from school. How trigonometry might be a doorway to the infinite was beyond him.

  Jana led him to an alcove at the back of the chapel. James looked up from his small congregation, annoyed at the disturbance. He was about to return his attention to his listeners when he recognised Stefan. He pulled his robes up slightly and walked quickly toward them. Jana had already moved into the alcove, and Stefan, feeling unnerved, rushed after her.

  Jana opened a wooden frame with tiny wires strung across its surface and placed Stefan’s covering letter to his father into one side, then sprinkled it with blue and gold flecked powder. Into the other side she placed a piece of the odd paper he’d written on the last time he was here, then closed the frame and put it into a device on top of a small pillar, like the one James had used.

  “You’re back,” said James, reaching them.

  “Yes,” said Stefan, turning back to Jana to see the letter go.

  “Jana, wait a moment before you do that,” said James, but her face was illuminated by the bright flash from the device. Stefan felt the heat as James crossed to the podium, but it was too late. The copy-sheet of the letter was gone. James dropped the frame as he pulled it out, burning his hands. He scrambled on the floor for the original letter as it drifted out and curled. Stefan, not sure why, grabbed his play from Jana and tried to get to his letter before James could reach it.

  James looked up from the floor. “What was in that letter you sent? The first one?”

  “Nothing,” said Stefan, “it was just a letter to my father. So’s that. Give it back!”

  Someone moved to Stefan’s right, and he turned to see who it was. No one was there. Stefan turned back to James, who had his letter.

  “What’s in those pages?” demanded the cleric.

  “Nothing!” said Stefan, backing away toward the door.

  “I need to know what you’ve been sending across,” insisted James, closing in. Stefan turned and burst through the doors, running through the vestibule. Again, he saw something at the edge of his vision, but he kept moving, pushing through the outer doors. On the stairs, someone shoved him and he fell, rolling, clutching the pages of the play. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looking up toward the door to see a figure in a black woollen cloak, wearing a hat with a large flat circle of a brim. James opened the door behind the figure. “Come inside,” he said to the man, “you shouldn’t be out here.” He held the door open further, and the figure walked inside. James pulled it shut behind them.

  Stefan sat in the snow, pulling together the loose pages of the play. They have my letter, he thought. He considered his options and decided to let them keep it. He wasn’t going back in. His forehead throbbed. He put a hand to it, which came back wet with what looked like chocolate sauce under the sodium lights outside the church. He stood and headed for the nearest hospital, happy that, unlike gunshot wounds, stitches didn’t need an explanation, because he didn’t have one.

  Seven

  Casting Doubts

  “So what do you do for a living?” asked the hairdresser.

  “Well, for the past several years I’ve been doing voice-over work on The Green Brigade,” said Stefan. She showed no signs of recognition. He continued, “But I’ve recently started doing theatre production.” He liked the sound of that.

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” she replied, not actually sounding interested, or like she knew what he meant. He was disappointed: he wanted to talk about the play. He needed to tell a stranger about his plans, because he still hadn’t told anyone close to him. He’d told David, his agent, to turn down the lucrative job in Los Angeles. If he could resist that, he figured, there was nothing that would stop him. But he was sure his friends would be hurt when he told them he was leaving. Sure, he thought, that’s it. It’s the guys you’re worried about telling. It’s not that you’re scared of telling Mom, is it? She knew about the play. But she didn’t know where it came from or where it was taking him.

  The hairdresser indecisively air-snipped around his head, then focused on a patch near his forehead and dove in. Her scissors caught on something, a small blue thread—the last of the stitches left over from his fall outside the Matholic church several weeks ago.

  “Ew,” said the hairdresser, pulling back.

  “Ow,” said Stefan, following her movement with his head.

  “Ew!” she said more forcefully, trying to tug her scissors free.

  “Ow!” shouted Stefan, up out of his chair now, following her like a marionette.

  She dropped the scissors, forcing Stefan to lean over so they would swing away from his face. He waddled about, clutching the air in front of him until he found the counter. He worked his way up that using the mirror to guide him, then carefully plucked the scissors free. He turned them around and snipped the blue thread from his forehead, then handed it to the hairdresser. “I think this is what you wanted,” he said. She winced.

  He proceeded to the cashier, where he paid. Normally he’d haggle for a reduction in price—he’d yet to find a hairdresser or barber who didn’t hurt him somehow—but he had an important meeting this afternoon.

  ~

  Helen pushed the small joystick on her wheelchair forward and her chair drove into the wall beside the elevator door. She pulled it back, and reversed into the wall behind her. She pushed it forward at an angle, and the chair arced forward, bumping into the wall beside the elevator. She sighed and rubbed her forehead. The machine did this when the battery ran low. But no, she thought, I had to buy the fancy one.

  She felt someone pull on the chair’s handles. “I can get it,” she insisted. The person kept pulling her back from the wall. She rammed her joystick, spinning the chair to face whoever it was. “I said I can get—Oh, hello.”

  “Hello,” said Stefan. “Long time no see.”

  A moment passed in which either of them could have felt embarrassed for what had gone before, being caught out by Delonia. But they’d started a friendship, and a pilot light of affection remained lit. They smiled, then laughed, Stefan’s a sigh-laugh, Helen’s a familiar stretched-balloon sound.

  “Stefan, I’m so sorry that the show got canned.”

  “The funding got canned. The show’s still happening.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  “You bet!” she said. She led him—in an awkward course that required his pulling her from the wall several times—to a conference room.

  He dug through his knapsack and took out some papers, which he spread in front of her. “Here’s a breakdown and the budget I’ve come up with,” he said. “I think I’ve saved up enough to make this happen. And I’m going to keep working right up until we leave.”

  She scanned the pages. “This all looks pretty good. I can see a few things we need to add, but I think we can work with this.”

  “Oh we can, can we?” he said with a smirk.

  “If you’ll have me back.”

  “Helen, I’d be an idiot not to. Thank you.”

  “No, thank you, Stefan, for not giving up.” She went back to the pages. “So. There are just a few things missing here. There’s no director.”

  “Yes there is.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “I want to direct.”

  “Stefan,
God wants to direct. Do you really think—?” She stopped and scrutinised his face. “Yes, actually, I think that’s a good idea. You grew up around this stuff, and no one has your particular, um, insight into the author. You’re going to need one hell of a stage manager, though. More of a production manager-slash-assistant director, to fill in the blanks for you. And I know who that should be.”

  “Whatever you say, Helen.”

  “Exactly. You keep saying that.”

  ~

  “How’s this?” asked Stefan, handing a scribbled draft of a casting notice across the bistro table to Helen. She took the page. He looked at his empty hand. It was shaking. He steadied it around the cup in front of him. He’d been drinking too much coffee during these regular meetings of theirs. He wondered if he might start vibrating so much that others wouldn’t be able to see him. I’ll be the Ultraviolet Man, he thought. Then he shook his head and pushed the cup away.

  “You might want to change this bit,” said Helen. “It sounds like he dies.”

  “But Seth does die in the third act.”

  “Yes, the character Seth dies, but this makes it sound like the actor dies. Actor’s Equity tends to frown on snuff theatre.”

  “Oh,” said Stefan.

  A bell rang as someone opened the bistro door. Stefan looked up, and found himself transfixed, trying to figure out the sex of the person who’d walked in. He or she put down a large portfolio case, then took off a raincoat and hat and hung them on the coat-rack just inside the door, then ran large fingers through the close-cropped hair on the top of his or her head. Each finger of one hand was home to a large ring like those given to winning athletes. Each ear was adorned with small gold hoops from the lobe to the top of the ear. The person looked toward Stefan, who shot his eyes down to his papers, sure he’d been caught staring. The figure picked up the portfolio case and walked over to their table.