The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  The bell above Mirko’s door rang as people pushed in and out. Couples with plastic bags full of pita bread and olives, of hummus and dried figs. They opened the hatchbacks of their big SUVs with a push-button fob. Loaded up and pulled out onto 12th Avenue. They pulled out, and more SUVs pulled into the just-opened spots. Put on their hazard lights and rushed inside. Glen sat in his chair, holding up his papers, watching them go, not saying anything.

  ‘Most missing people end up in the same place,’ Glen said to Audrey.

  ‘Is that so?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sure, a fair number of unlucky people may just have scored bad dope behind the Cecil Hotel or run afoul of ill-intentioned predators at the 8th and 8th train platform. But taken as a sample and allowing for the proper margin of error, most missing people are on the moon. On the moon against their will.’

  Inside she could see Shelly leaning on the glass of the back cooler at the end of an aisle. Mirko Lasko reached into the cooler and pulled out an octopus. Shook it for the little girl, making the tentacles waggle. Shelly put her hands on her face and Audrey could hear her squeal through the closed door.

  ‘The moon,’ said Audrey.

  ‘The technology to get to the moon is hundreds of years old. A rocket is a diving bell and a firecracker. Plus trigonometry, and the metallurgical wherewithal to anticipate stresses from pressure and temperature changes minus an atmosphere. Greeks knew the distance to the moon within a few hundred miles centuries before Christ.’

  ‘Missing Greeks are on the moon?’

  ‘The first would-be lunar pilgrim was Averroes. He developed the science of extraterrestrial rocket travel after this insight: the blank moon was a canvas, with an audience of everyone on earth. Writing on it was strictly an engineering problem – there needed to be so many holes and they needed to be placed here and here. Everything else was just scale. He was going to use the moon surface to dispute al-Ghazali on the value of syllogism, but as far as I know never completed the journey.

  ‘Unfortunately for us though, he was not the last would-be moon man to take to this idea. Others with more malicious intentions seized on the concept.’ Glen pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his jacket. Lit one up and blew smoke up into the night. ‘There are sects with long genealogies devoted to secrets, that pass down esoteric knowledge like so many safety deposit box keys through generations. Some of these traditions keep heresies alive and some protect dead practices through indifferent and hostile times. Some schools teach Latin and some men’s clubs pass down the real dimensions of the foundation footings of Solomon’s Temple in figures transposable across ages or changing ideas of measurement. But there is an old, evil practice that dwarfs other conspiratorial ambitions.

  ‘There are men who kidnap lost individuals and send them rocket-ways to work camps on the moon, where they will drive backhoes digging trenches to carve a megalithic secret script. The slave-labour inscription of a terrible secret message that stares down at us out of the sky every night.’

  Shelly held up her little origami rose and Mirko bent forward over the cooler to examine it. Raised his glasses and nodded appreciatively.

  ‘Disfiguring the entire face of the moon would be a massive undertaking for plate tectonics and interstellar projectiles requiring geological time: attributing these works to human hands seems preposterous. But there is no task that cruelty and time can’t achieve together. The Sea of Tranquility and Crater Tycho were dug and raised by forced labour. Generations of lost individuals spirited to our geosynchronous satellite. Given pickaxes and shovels, then dynamite, then steam shovels, and worked to death inscribing designs they could not see or understand into the stone.

  ‘These messages radiate down upon us in the night, reflected by the sun’s ambiance and invading our minds like single-frame suggestions in advertising footage. We, uninitiates, do not know the secret moon language. But they allow us to know it in pieces, a word snuck into our attention here, a phrase here, until looking at the moon we unknowingly absorb its message like an unheard dog whistle. The atoms vibrate in waves: the dog hears it and so do we, even if the bones in our ears don’t vibrate properly.’

  ‘What does the moon say, Glen?’ asked Audrey Cole.

  Glen Aarpy tugged his jacket tightly around his shoulders, his cigarette held between his teeth. Rocking in his creaky chair to get more comfortable. Shuffling his boots on the folded panels of cardboard he kept underneath him on the ground, to insulate his feet a little bit from the cold concrete. ‘They take us out of the alleys when we’re alone. When we’re lost and helpless. Out of bus shelters in the night between stops. From stairwells and fire escapes. Phone booths and garages. Then,’ and he snapped his fingers loudly, ‘bang and upward.’ He blew cigarette smoke up into the sky.

  12

  DECEMBER 2009

  SUNDAY MORNING

  She grew up in Canmore, high up the Bow River, inside the first ranges of the Rocky Mountains. When her mother baked an angel food cake or a tray of cupcakes, she always adjusted the recipe, changing the baking times according to a faded pencil chart on an index card she kept taped to the inside of a cupboard door.

  ‘The altitude,’ she told Audrey. ‘They write these recipes at sea level. Things change 4,500 feet farther up in the air.’

  She remembered mornings growing up when the sky dropped down. White puffs of cloud pulled themselves down and roamed low in front of the mountains. White puffs floating past the green pine trees, their wispy edges made real by the contrast.

  Some mornings the mountains vanished altogether. The sky dropped and the town and the mountains surrounding it disappeared in white.

  Audrey looked out a window at the Crash Palace into a white Sunday morning. The sky had dropped and taken everything away. Somewhere east the sun must have risen, east of Red Deer, east of Alberta. Outside her window, a little of the light that the rising sun made found its way into the dropped sky and the snow inside it. She watched the flakes swirl in the wind one way and another. White snow to join the thick white sheath skinning Two Reel Lake, the valley around it, the stones and trees inside. She was inside the sky now. The earlier snows had been only the open mouth and teeth, inverted, widening around her. This was the interior, through and down the throat. Inside the white belly of the sky.

  §

  She pressed buttons on her phone and it didn’t say anything because the battery was dead. She sat folded over on the mattress, forearms resting on her knees, looking unfocusedly at the dead phone.

  ‘Kitten,’ she said. ‘Kitten, it’s Sunday morning and I left home Friday night and it’s still snowing.’

  Her head hurt. A full sinus-choked hurt that ran from the back of her throat outward and up. She felt her glands. She pinched the bridge of her nose. Her neck ran sore from the base of her skull down into either side, the linkages between each set of muscles strained and wrong. Where her head had snap-stopped by the Audi seat belt. Under her arms and shoulder blades where she fit improperly on the couch.

  Her nose was too clogged to tell but she knew she must stink. Woodsmoke and sleeping in the same clothes. Hard work and no baths. Her hair was thickened and tangled and stood out sideways when she ran her hands into it.

  The rack beside the cold fireplace was empty, all of the wood turned into ash and smoke. The cold now all the way inside the room, radiating from the floors and windows, out of the chimney flue, oblivious to her dead-sometime-in-the-night fire.

  Someone must have noticed all the smoke, she thought. Surely they’d see the smoke, and when they did their plow route they’d come to have a look.

  They’ll call to make sure everybody’s all right and we’ll tell them that we’ll be all right.

  She put the Dungeons & Dragons books into the fireplace and lit a fire. Muscled barbarians with longswords, floating disembodied eyes, women with black Vampirella hair in slinky dresses, holding green-and-blue flames in their hands. Caught quickly and the pages burnt and curled. She opened a can of chickpe
as and ate it watching the little fire. The books burned fast, too thin to keep a flame, curling and twisting into ashes. Smoked and went out before she could finish her cold breakfast.

  ‘Kitten,’ she called out into the empty room. ‘Here, Kitten. We’ve still got a fire here. Still got a fire. Come on out, Kitten.’

  She went upstairs and looked into rooms, remembering her tour yesterday. Found a dirty old quilt and a fuzzy Hudson’s Bay blanket. She found a balled-up University of Alberta sweater and pulled it over her head. Then she came back downstairs and tore up the other paperbacks, feeding the cheap paper into the fire. Blew at the embers to try and save a match until they caught.

  ‘The snow can’t last all day, Kitten. We’ll stay here, stay warm, wait for the weather to break.’

  She tried to remember if there was a restaurant in the village. They’d sell hot coffee in the gas station. Plastic-wrapped submarine sandwiches: egg salad, ham and Swiss. They’d let her make a phone call.

  How’d you get out here anyway without a vehicle? they’d ask. She tested answers in her head, chewing cold chickpeas.

  She picked up one of the wooden chairs. Not too heavy. She carried it up the stairs to the second floor. She lifted it onto the railing. Balanced it for a moment, then let it fall over the side. The chair fell and crashed into splinters on the hard floor.

  She turned the chair wreckage into a fire. Sat feeding the flames and watching the wood blacken and slowly turn to cherry-red coals.

  Audrey watched the fire, thinking about when she’d need to break up another chair.

  ‘Kitten, the cold is in here with us but you’ve already lived through worse, right? The cold is in our blood and it’s making me slow and stupid. But you’ve survived and so will I, right? I’m going to get confused and slow as I get colder, Kitten. That’s what happens. But we can’t make that walk in this snow. We’ll get you to Shelly and she’ll be so happy to see you. But we can’t leave yet. Not until the wind dies down. So we’ll just keep the fire burning. Right, Kitten?’

  She got on her hands and knees and looked under the couch for the little reflective eyes.

  ‘I thought I saw the Skinny Cowboy, Kitten, who is a shitty junkie who reminds me of this other shitty junkie and that got me thinking about other shitty people I’ve met and all those step-by-steps that make up life and you mostly just coast downhill in neutral not thinking about these things, Kitten, because what happens if you do? You coast downhill not thinking too much about any of it and any given time there’s enough happening out the window to keep your mind away from it all. Most of the time.

  ‘I’ll get home and I’ll tell Mom all about it. She never asked but I’ll finally tell her all about it when I get home.’

  She turned around and sat on the cold floor with her back against the couch. Reached into her pocket and took out the key. She held the front-door key of the Crash Palace in her cupped-together hands. Just an old key with a smudged-black square of masking tape on it that someone left for her in an envelope. Came to her house and gave to her mother. Came to give to her.

  ‘I know, Kitten,’ she said. ‘What did I think was going to happen?’ She put the key back into her pocket. ‘We’ll just keep the fire going until the wind stops, Kitten. Then we’ll start walking. Then we’ll get you home to Shelly, Kitten.’

  §

  She went upstairs then to the fifth floor, down the other hall to the bedroom. Opened the door and stood in the doorway, leaning on the jamb. A big room, much bigger than the little rooms on the third and fourth floors. Big windows looking out westward across the valley. On a clear day up here you could see the easternmost tips of the Rockies poking up above the pine-covered ridges of the high foothills. Today they were inside the white belly of the sky though. Just white snow blowing across the frozen white lake top.

  There was just an old king-sized bed frame and a couple of wooden chairs. Everything else – even the mattress – gone. No dresser, no mattress, no bedsheets. No lamp, no clothes, no books on the bookshelf, no bookshelf. No flowerpots, with no dried-up little stick remains of the plants she’d brought up from around the building over the six months she’d lived here. She turned around and closed the door.

  She brought down all the paper from Alex’s office. Mostly it was loose in cardboard filing boxes. She burned all the paper in the fireplace.

  At first she read while she burned. Receipts for liquor, groceries. Case of vodka, six 750 millilitre bottles at $18.99 per. Six 700 millilitre bottles of blended Scotch at $24.99 per. Twelve cases of twenty-four beer bottles. Invoices for boxes of soda syrup and invoices for the bottled gas to blend and deliver it. Lemons, limes, oranges. Four-inch straws, eight-inch straws, square napkins, kraft paper napkins. Contractor bills for painting, dropped-ceiling installation, plumbing.

  Audrey sat there with paper in either hand. It was just boring. She hadn’t expected that it would all just be boring.

  She opened a box and it was full of little notepads. She knew right away: the exact size and shape. She took one out and opened it. A little graph-paper notepad. Each page the same five columns: a date; initials; a column of letters – C, H, CM, MDMA; then a quantity in grams or milligrams; and then a dollar amount. Anywhere from twenty to a few hundred dollars for each item. All crammed in the same tight, messy pencil printing.

  There were dozens of little graph-paper notebooks, all the same. The earliest date she found was in 2001 and the latest she could find was for 2007.

  She looked for names. But they weren’t that stupid. No names, not Alex’s name, not Gurt’s name. Certainly not any name that might have been the Skinny Cowboy’s. Just quantities, grams and milligrams.

  She stopped reading and just fed the notepads into the fire. She burned all the notepads and then started burning all the other paper, staff schedules, band-booking calendars, pages of phone numbers, lists of email addresses. The paper crumpled and burned quickly and the thin ash it made blew up the flue and piled in the hearth.

  Her fire smoked up the chimney, and outside the smoke disappeared into the snow.

  ‘Kitten,’ she said into the empty room. ‘Kitten, it’s all boring and it must have always been boring and everything it turned into is boring and I’m dying of hypothermia a long way from my daughter. My daughter doesn’t know where I am, Kitten.’

  The kitten wasn’t around and Audrey cried for a few minutes, sitting on the cold floor. She cried softly sitting there, sniffling, and felt the cold climb up into her legs and feet. Then she hauled her tired body up off the ground and stood in front of the fire that was already dying down.

  She dropped another chair from the top floor.

  13

  DECEMBER 2005

  She found him on the stairs in the morning. Rodney lay face down on the stairs with his wrist under his forehead, his other hand reached up and hung on the lip of the next step. She came down the stairs and saw him below her just around the last landing. Audrey put her hand on his neck and he was cold. She stood and wrapped her hands around her shoulders. Her chest surged with the need to do quick, sudden things, to run and yell and move as quickly as she could, and her mind tamped these feelings down and she sat down and tried to catch her breath. She checked his neck again to make sure she was right and she was. Clammy and cold. His skin felt dense, the blood behind it already thick and stiff.

  His wrist under his skull maybe to protect it from the stone, if he had fallen, or maybe she thought it looked more like he’d lowered himself, lowered and carefully arranged himself for what little comfort there was to be had on the cold stone steps when he knew he couldn’t climb any more of them.

  ‘Rodney, you did a lot of hard things in your life, and staying alive should have been the least of them,’ she said to him.

  Koop found her on the steps, sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees. He put his box of juice bottles down and touched Rodney’s neck in the same place she had.

  ‘How long?’ he asked her.

 
‘Me, probably ten minutes. But him, I don’t know. How long does it take to get cold like that?’

  Koop sat down on the step beside her. He pulled a package of cigarettes out of his chest pocket and tapped the bottom with two tight fingers to pop one free. He lit a match. Blew a thick cloud of blue smoke into the white morning air. The match burned down to his fingertips and out, and he held it pinched while he smoked. ‘It’ll get loud. Loud and complicated. Right away. Really loud and really complicated.’

  Audrey nodded. ‘I know. I wanted a bit of time before that started.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Koop. He was stretched on the steps under the first landing, not far from the main floor, and people came down the stairs in the morning as they woke and found Audrey and Koop. Koop stood and directed people, moving most of them down the stairs, taking the elbows or shoulders of people who wanted to stand and stare or who asked questions or displayed emotions, moved them down the steps and away, before they could perform a question or put their hands in their hair. He prevented a crowd from forming on the landing as best he could. Hector Highwater sat down on the step beside Audrey, and Wrists leaned against the wall, looking anywhere but at people’s faces – out the window or up into the ceiling – and everyone smoked and the air thickened with cigarettes, a cloud that hung in the crowd and got in eyes and throats.

  Alex Main came downstairs and sat cross-legged beside Rodney. Put his hand in the same place on the throat. Two fingers like Koop used to pop his cigarettes out of the packet.

  Koop moved the crowd away except for some allowed-to-be-there people, and this allowed-to-be-there group grew until they blocked the landing, and people coming down stopped on the stairs above them, backed up like traffic behind an accident on a bridge.

  ‘We have to call the police.’

  ‘Oh, man.’

  ‘Get an ambulance up here.’

  ‘Now hold on.’

  ‘The fuck? Hold on, Alex.’