Wandering the Earth: A Selected Stories Sampler

by Michael Bryson

  I went from Winnipeg south to Texas. A patch of bad luck was all I thought I had. I’d done some ranching in the past, when I was feeling down. It had a way of setting me right. But this time I suffered three snake bites in two days.

  “You gotta go now,” my friend Billy said. He owned the ranch and could recognize a curse.

  I wasn’t convinced.

  I kept to the southern route. I signed onto a freighter crew in Panama. I’d once sailed with Blackbeard. Felt at home in the ocean swells. But three days at sea and I turned a dozen shades of green. The US Navy picked me up and threw me in quarantine. The doctors thought I had the Ebola virus, bird flu or a previously unrecorded water bug. My conditions cleared on the way to Florida. The doctors wanted me locked away but my lawyers disagreed. I promised to report to the nearest hospital if I as much as sneezed.

  I got a job in New Orleans bar. It was Mardi Gras weeknights and the Super Bowl on weekends. I bought a used saxophone and jammed with a quartet every night until three. Damn, that bird, I thought one night as I hit a high note. Crow, you don’t know what you’re missing. A week later the city was under six feet of water and I evacuated to a refugee camp in Georgia. It was here — so late, so late — that I started to get a clue.

  “You’re cursed,” said the woman beside me in the breakfast line.

  “Excuse me?”

  A wrinkled mass of ebony skin waved a bony finger at me. “You heard me.”

  “Yes, I did, my sister,” I said.

  “And you know what I’m talking about.”

  Damn, that bird. Cursed, I am. Cursed to wander the earth.

  He’s on the blue planet. Trapped. He starts walking. His wings hurt. He’ll never fly again, he’s sure of it. He stops beside a pool of water. He drink, his first. He walks into the water. He doesn’t float. He walks out of the water. Okay he’ll fly again. He’s hungry now. And something else: Lonely. He doesn’t know it yet. He’s never known another being. He’s never felt incomplete. In the beginning was Crow and the void, and the void was with Crow and the void was Crow. Now there’s Crow and the blue planet, Crow and water, Crow and sky. Suddenly: Crow and the first woman. She swims through the water. She sees him on the shore and smiles. Smiles! Crow jumps ten feet in the air! Flaps his wings! He’s flying!

  Since the void split all the women Crow has loved have been echoes of the first. She had no name. If you’re tempted to name her, call her Eve. Mother of Life. Sustainer of Dreams. Down through the millennia Crow kept looking for another like her. Cleopatra came close. So did Napoleon’s Josephine. Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, Marilyn Monroe weren’t far off. Mary Magdalene had many approximate talents, as did Mae West. Crow once said that Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina had tempted him with passions he’d thought he’d lost in the shadows of early time. I knew what he was referring to — the days of his lovenest with Eve. Lover of Eternity. Mistress of the Four Corners of the Universe.

  When I remembered Crow’s curse I knew what I had to do. Find Rachel. Wander the earth. The first thing I did was make a deal with Raven. Raven was no friend of Crow. I found Raven at the Banff Springs Hotel.

  “Raven, I need help.”

  “Where have you been? Everyone’s talking about you.”

  “Wandering the earth,” I said. I couldn’t lie.

  “Ha, ha.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  Raven laughed again. His sense of humour was even stranger than Crow’s.

  “Be serious for a minute,” I said.

  “I know what you want. Everyone knows.”

  “What?”

  “A little sunshine. A little paradise.”

  “I need to find Rachel.”

  Raven nodded. “I’m all over it.” He knew exactly where she was.

  I thought Tahiti. Bali. California. Somewhere hot, with lots of sun.

  She wasn’t where I expected.

  She was in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories.

  I stared at Raven. “Where?”

  “North.”

  “Where?”

  “Far.”

  The blue planet goes around and around. Around the sun. Around the solar system. Around its axis. Crow goes around the blue planet. He sits atop a rhinoceros on the African plain. Not such a bad little planet, he thinks. He hears drums beating. He starts to dance.

  “We must wait until Crow’s out of town,” I said to Raven. “We’ll need room to operate.”

  “Count on it.”

  He told me Crow sat on a wire above Rachel’s house. He swung in the wind and waited for her to come outside. Day after day.

  “I’ve never seen him like this,” Raven said.

  “How hard can it be?”

  “Hard.”

  I didn’t want Crow to know I was coming, to think his curse had worked. I didn’t want him to know I’d ever been there. I wanted him to think Rachel dumped him by choice. That would be my trick on Crow. That he thought Rachel’s love silenced on its own.

  “We need a plan,” I said.

  “I know,” said Raven.

  We were on the hotel patio, looking over the lake. Blue mountains all around us, jagged, tossed with rocks like crumbs on a cake. Behind me someone spoke German. Someone Japanese. Earlier I’d seen two girls in tennis shorts and now I heard them giggling, scolding a child who talked of avalanches.

  “I’ll be back in half an hour,” Raven said. “Meet me in your room.”

  I ordered a martini. Shaken, not stirred.

  The waitress didn’t smile. She said, “I get that a lot.”

  “You do?”

  “Licensed to kill, right?”

  She had long legs and a short skirt.

  I said, “Double-owe-seven.” I tried to catch her eye and wink.

  But she turned away. Quickly.

  Cursed, that was me.

  I felt myself being erased, the void returning.

  Half an hour later I opened the door to my hotel balcony. Raven flew in with a leather satchel. He had photographs, maps, a notepad full of details of Crow’s movements, when he flew east over the trees, north over the ocean, sat on the wire and swayed in the wind, waiting for Rachel.

  “Raven,” I said. “This is great!“

  Raven pointed to a sealed envelope. I picked it up.

  Raven flapped his wings, rose into the air. Said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. Same time.” He disappeared over my balcony.

  Damn birds, I thought. I didn’t understand them. I wanted Crow to love me again — but also I didn’t. I didn’t care for his love and I was hungry for it. I wanted the curse lifted. I wanted to start over. I wanted the perfect emptiness of the void. I opened the envelope. It was a photograph of Rachel.

  She wasn’t what I expected.

  The more I looked at her the more she seemed to fade away. This was the one who loved Crow with a love greater than Olympus? With a love like the end of the world? With a love that shook him more than the love of the first woman?

  The photograph was of her face. A close up, slightly over-exposed. Her cheeks were full and wore scars of acne and age. Her lips were thin, chapped, her hair pulled back. Her eyes shone with the strength of grandmothers. They were black, deeper than any I’d seen. They held my attention and I knew Crow was right. She would love him forever. She was all love. For everything and everyone. Was that it? Was that the limit?

  I tried to remember what Crow had told me. What had I missed? Why had he cursed me? What did I need to bring back to him? How could I break the spell?

  I lay down on my hotel bed, fell asleep.

  Crow high, high, high, like a shooting star. Like a rocket. Crow standing on my chest, his beak on my eyelid. We never feel more complete than when we are about to be dismembered. The end. A great sunset. The deepest red. A feeling greater than love.

  The next day I was on the highw
ay east out of Banff at dawn. My opportunity was slim. Though I was cursed, I wasn’t out of luck. I was going to the place where no one could find me. Saskatchewan. The land of sky. The place in the continent that was like an ocean. To the rock that had once been a buffalo. To wait for Crow. To absolve myself of the curse. To share with him a story I knew he didn’t know.

  Then POP! The whole thing starts over again.

  I knew he would come. I had to be there when it happened. I knew what he would ask me. “Where have you been?” He would stare high into the blueness. I wouldn’t lie. “I have been abroad.”

  “Where?”

  “Wandering the earth.”

  That’s how it would start. It would go on from there.

  ###

  Six Million Million Miles

  All of a sudden Patrick was nearly forty. Yes, he’d noticed birthdays piling up. But it took his doctor to impress upon him the meaning of numbers.

  Patrick told his buddy Phil, “The doc said I should see a nutritionist, change my diet, take calcium pills for my teeth and bones. He said he needed to test my blood for LDLs and HDLs. Of course he said stop the smokes and moderate the drinking but I was expecting that.” What he wasn’t expecting: A finger up the butt.

  Phil said, “Wha?”

  “A finger up the butt — to test the colon, I think.”

  “The colon, eh? What’s that do?”

  “Don’t know. But it can kill you if it goes off.”

  “I guess so,” said Phil, who was already forty-one, though he hadn’t been in a doctor’s office in ten years and wasn’t about to go now, whatever Patrick said.

  It was three minutes past three on a Saturday afternoon in May. Phil had an ex-wife and two small children in Vancouver he hadn’t seen in five years. He had a twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend, Debbie, who lived with her parents and slept with him on Saturdays and Wednesdays. Her father was dying. Her father had been dying all of the time Phil had known her, which was going on three years. He wanted to marry her because he wanted to be married. He wanted a home again with a woman in it. But he had to wait for the old man to die. It wasn’t something he’d ever heard about, a marriage contingent upon a death.

  They were sitting on Patrick’s couch watching curling. Patrick and Phil had a business venture but it was still in the “idea phase.” That’s what Patrick told everyone who asked. “We’re still working out the details.”

  “What do people need?” Phil said one day. “That’s how you make money, by selling people what they need, what they can’t live without.”

  “Food,” Patrick said. “Heat, shelter, love.” He wasn’t sure about love.

  Phil was on a different wavelength.

  “Office supplies,” he said. “You sell a pen for a dollar that costs pennies to make. We’ll make a killing.”

  They tried to register www.officesupplies.com but it had already been taken.

  “The best laid plans of mice and ducks,” Patrick said. Phil demurred.

  “We’ll make it work.”

  Patrick wanted to find a way to make money by making art. He’d started gluing things together to create new things. Toothbrushes and staplers. Matchbooks and condoms. Playing cards and plastic figurines. He had no idea what any of it meant but he enjoyed the process. Art had no place on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs unless it fell under self-fulfillment. Patrick thought Maslow would have associated the need with the consumer, not the producer.

  Today it was the women who were curling.

  Phil said, “If you were a woman would you wear makeup to the rink?”

  “I’d wear makeup if I knew I’d be on TV.”

  “Good point.” One of the reasons Phil broke up with his wife was because she stopped shaving her legs. Okay, not true. He broke up with his wife because they fought all of the time. One of the things they fought about was her legs. Or his expectations. The subject of their fights changed depending on who you talked to. She thought Phil needed to revise his expectations and he thought she needed to shave her legs.

  Outside it rained heavily. They were waiting for JayCee to arrive. JayCee was Patrick’s ex. She taught kindergarten in the suburbs. She was forty-two, sometimes looked thirty and sometimes looked fifty. They’d met at a dinner party held by mutual friends two years ago. For past three months JayCee had found an excuse to skip out on all of their dates. She didn’t like the city, she hated the commute, she was over-worked and needed a quiet day alone. So Patrick started to call her his ex. Not that they had ever been a couple.

  “It’s a post-structuralist romance,” he told Phil, who had no idea what he was talking about.

  Patrick’s doctor told him he was good for another ten thousand miles. “But come back and see me next year.” Patrick imagined his life like a pancake. Flat, doughy. Where was the maple syrup? Where was the fruit, the whipped cream?

  Suddenly the television shook on its stand and the air filled with the sound of a large explosion.

  Patrick thought, “A bomb!“

  Phil jumped up from the couch and ran out to Patrick’s balcony.

  “Flames!“ he said, pointing two streets over. Soon they heard sirens from firetrucks. A plume of black smoke lifted into the sky.

  Patrick said, “Life is a strange and multi-glorious thing, isn’t it?”

  “One step from paradise,” Phil said.

  The rain was now like a sheet of water. They stood away from the railing of the balcony to avoid getting soaked. Patrick remembered something Phil had said to him when they’d first met: “Just do the best you can. You can’t do any better than that.” Even if his best was 2 + 2 = 3. The words had gone straight to his heart.

  The wind had picked. The flames from the explosion leaped higher. “I’m going inside,” Patrick said. There had been women once. In his twenties Patrick had played guitar, traveled the country. He spent four years on buses and trains, in vans and motels. He’d been all about motion, movement, process — with no end in sight. The arc of his life was different then. The highs overrode the lows. There had been three girlfriends in three provinces. He’d thought, “One of these women, surely, will be my wife.” But they’d each wanted him as an occasional friend. Back then he’d looked forward and seen a landing pad. The arc had been rising, pointed upwards in an optimistic spiral. But the landing pad hadn’t been forward and up; it’d been backward and down. A crash pad.

  “Illusions are made for shattering,” he’d said to JayCee, mimicking Nancy Sinatra. JayCee worked with four- and five-year-olds. She knew about hope. She knew about limits.

  “Potential is earned,” she told Patrick, who felt suddenly for her warm and loving.

  The buzzer went off.

  “She’s here,” Patrick yelled to Phil. He walked across the apartment to buzz down and let JayCee into the building. Phil came in from the balcony.

  “There’s three houses on fire down there,” he said.

  “What was that?” Patrick asked. He’d gone into the kitchen.

  “There’s three houses on fire,” Phil said.

  Patrick said, “Oh, shit. Really? Lots of fire trucks, too?”

  “Eight or ten.”

  Patrick uncorked a bottle of wine and laid two baguettes on the kitchen table. He poured himself a glass.

  “You should invite Debbie over,” he said to Phil. “We should all just stay in tonight. Stay in and talk. Give her a call. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  Phil went to get his cell phone.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “About six million million miles,” Patrick heard someone say when he opened it. JayCee stood there smiling. She gripped him and kissed him on the cheek. Beside her a man shook water off of an umbrella.

  JayCee said, “Patrick, this is Jason.”

  The man reached for Patrick’s hand and shook it.

  “What’s six million million miles?” he asked
.

  JayCee slid past him into the apartment. “A light year. The amount of distance light travels in a year.” JayCee embraced Phil and kissed him on the cheek. “Phil, this is Jason. Jason, Phil.” The two men shook hands. Patrick closed the door.

  “I’ll take some of that,” JayCee said, pointing to Patrick’s wine glass. “Some for Jason, too. Right Jason?”

  The man nodded. “That would be terrific.”

  “How far is the sun from the earth?” Patrick mumbled. “How far are we from each other?” He went to the kitchen to fetch glasses and wine.

  “Home is elsewhere,” Jason was saying when Patrick returned with the wine. Jason was telling a story about one of his co-workers, a Russian Jew who’d left the Soviet Union for Israel, then come to Canada two years later.

  “Immigration is a disaster,” Jason said.

  This was apparently the Russian man’s thoughts. His life had been torn asunder. He was raising a daughter, taking her to chess tournaments. He had a library with ten thousand Russian books. “Ten per cent of what he had in Russia.” His wife had a PhD and worked at IBM.

  “They’re desperately lonely people,” JayCee said. “Lonely but not unhappy. They have that wonderful, dark, Russian sense of humour. You know, life is bleak, but they laugh a lot. They’re terribly homesick but they would never go back. They see their situation as immeasurably better and also not good.”

  Jason had taken her over to their house. Patrick saw she was sitting next to him on the couch. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her so happy.

  “There’s a fire outside,” he said. “There was a large explosion and now there are three houses on fire. Phil and I were watching from the balcony. There’s eight firetrucks. It’s a huge disaster.”

  They all looked at him.

  JayCee asked, “Is Debbie coming?”

  Phil nodded. “In a bit.”

  Suddenly there was another large boom! They jumped up and followed Patrick to the balcony. The rain was still heavy. Water dripped on Patrick’s head from the balcony above. Where one of the burning houses once stood a blue flame shot twenty metres into the air. They could hear people screaming on the street below. Blue and red lights from emergency vehicles flashed off nearby buildings. Firemen ran back and forth, police officers strung up yellow tape and pushed back spectators clutching umbrellas.