Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  “Let’s go to a club,” Zeena said.

  “Yes,” Jules was saying. “Let’s all go to a club.”

  A good Thursday behind them. Dollars in the deposit pouch. Dante’s partnership less a foreseeable requirement now than at any time since that first phone call from Quan three months after opening. There was every reason to celebrate.

  And here I am, Jeremy mused, thinking only that the Professor would like to hear about these developments.

  “I can’t,” he said to Jules and Zeena. He called them a cab, gave the driver ten dollars to get them up into Yaletown.

  “You’re a terrible bore,” said Zeena.

  “Bye, doll,” Jules said, and she leaned out the door to peck his cheek, but Jeremy caught the back of her neck with one hand and gave her a good hard kiss. She pulled the cab door shut, looking back at him curiously. Just before they bounced out of sight at the end of the alley, they both waved out the back window. Two little white hands.

  He locked up quickly and walked up through Cross-town towards the density of downtown. The streets were shining, and the prostitutes were floating at the mouths of alleys like salmon waiting for their turn to run the rapids, tired but determined. He strode across downtown, picking up steam and speed as he sipped from a wineskin he had topped up with Sangre de Toro before leaving. He couldn’t explain his mood as he loped down through the West End, among the apartment buildings, and passed his own without a glance.

  The lagoon was black. He wasn’t sure he could even see ducks out there at all. He stood at the cherry trees, sipping from his wineskin, wondering what to do next. And then he pushed himself off between the trees, down to the path, where he started off at a trot for the far forest.

  He began by looking for the spot where they had caught their canvasback for dinner, the only way he could think of beginning to retrace his steps and find the Professor’s camp. But no single cluster of bulrushes was particularly distinguishable from any other. He tried searching for anything familiar, going first one direction and then another along paths that petered out in a few yards or wound away in the wrong direction. Above him a milky moon was trying and failing to squeeze its light down through the branches, and Jeremy stumbled pointlessly in circles and drank still more from the wineskin.

  He found one trail that looked like the right one. He followed it into the forest, counting steps, trying to imagine where the sudden turnoff had come. Imagining the point from which he had stood and heard the song sung low: With an hoste of furious fancies, / With a burning speare, and a horse of air … And when he was sure he’d found the spot, he slogged deeper into the dense brush and realized he had found … well, nothing. No tree root, no upturned boulder. No place to climb onto the back of a great fallen cedar to observe the forest lying about him, to highway through the darkness to secret places. Instead, hanging bushes pressed down onto his head and shoulders, forcing needles under the collar of his jacket and down between his sweating shoulder blades. Forced him to see his own hand in front of him now, slashing uselessly at the darkness and the salal leaves with the Sabatier.

  He froze, seeing it. He sobered. He woke up from a kind of sleep, feeling the familiar weight of it in his hand and the strong immediate sense of what a bad idea it had been to return to the kitchen, to find the magnetic knife rack without turning the lights back on, to feel it out with his hands, gently, wrap it in a tea towel and stick it in the waistband of his pants.

  “Jesus,” Jeremy said aloud. “What am I doing?”

  He stood still for many minutes. Listening to the forest. Sounds became apparent among the trees, sounds beyond the steady hiss of leaves and needles brushing one another, sounds coming through the million frictions in the canopy above. Voices. The sound of movement, of life and activity. It couldn’t be the Professor. Jeremy knew he had not accidentally stumbled so far up into the forest. Accidentally found a spot which had taken them thirty minutes of walking from the lagoon, after which he had been so disoriented he couldn’t have pointed a finger in the direction of downtown. Only the ocean had given him any bearing. That sliver of water from high on a cliff.

  There was no cliff here. He was at a low point, somewhere near the park’s epicentre. And around him rose the forest, full of life. He was at the bottom of a well of hidden activity. He pushed the knife back into his waistband, took another long drink of wine, and considered he was lost and did not care.

  There was a nurse log covered in moss and ferns lying on a low ridge that ran away to his right. He climbed along it on his hands and knees, peering ahead. And as he crawled, he saw the flicker of campfire come winking through the trees, first from his right, then his left. Voices became clearer. He could make out the peculiar feline mewl of a baby crying.

  A guitar plucked in the near distance. A metal pot scraped against a rock.

  He crawled further. At a fire through the forest ahead he identified the source of the baby’s cry, quieted now in the muffle of a heavy blanket, held in the arms of a bent figure, a woman, crouched near familiar low flames in a narrow trench. The woman rocked the child, sitting on the ground near the heat. As he watched, there was a disturbance in the brush on the far side of the fire, and two men emerged from the darkness and entered the low ring of light. One looked carefully into the darkness, his eyes passing slowly over Jeremy hidden in the blackness, while the other crouched and opened a black plastic bag. He removed items for inspection. Food, Jeremy realized. A pastry box, some apples. And then small grey shapes laid next to one another in a furry row. They were squirrels.

  The two men warmed their hands in front of the flames while the woman spoke to them in a quiet, steady tone and rocked the baby. Jeremy sat in the darkness straining to hear, far enough outside himself and any experience he had ever had to pause and consider that he was eavesdropping, peeping like a Tom, hovering like a ghost, or a god, or a conqueror in ambush.

  It wasn’t English, but an entirely unfamiliar string of sounds. Like insect sounds. Clicks and whirrs pushed from behind the tongue, hissing fricatives spilling into the still air. Popping epiglottis, singing in the blue night. An ancient-sounding tongue that mirrored the sound of cedar branches hitting one another in the wind overhead, or the sound of wave slaps on algae-ed stone, the sound of sappy softwood popping in a dying fire.

  After they were finished talking the figure holding the baby passed it, wrapped and invisible, to the younger of the two men. Then moved with the woman into the spill of darkness beyond the ring of fire, gently entwined and rolled to the ground. Jeremy could hear the crack of twigs on the forest floor, and see the two shapes briefly writhe, find their positions against one another, then steady into a shared rhythm. It took him a moment to realize what he was now watching. Not specifically intending to see anything, and now having seen and heard more than the three figures might have wished him to see. And, as if to confirm this impression, the solitary figure by the fire placed the baby in the fold of some ferns and slowly rose from his haunches. He turned from the fire so slowly that Jeremy had to watch carefully to see whether he moved at all, and when he was facing Jeremy, facing the darkness, he began to inspect the forest with studied interest.

  Jeremy backed slowly down the nurse log, careful to thread his legs through the bristling huckleberry. The baby re-commenced its crying, its slow wail spilling after him. The fresh red eyes pinched shut, feeling the night and the fern and forest around itself. Feeling the heat of the man’s chest as he turned and scooped it into his arms. Sensing me here, Jeremy thought, and joining its voice were the sounds of the forest that followed him in his retreat.

  Then the cry split into two, and he felt drunkenly certain that what he had taken for a baby had, in fact, been two babies. He climbed down off the log, and as he generously spilled wine onto the front of himself and down his neck, his thoughts spilled one onto another. He began to walk slowly, examining the forest around him with minute interest. The base of a tree here. The bend of a salal bush there. He felt the nat
ural looping of his own path through the landscape. He made large useless circles through the trees, stopping now and again to replenish the inspirational buzz in his head with a draw on the wineskin. Circling. Circling.

  “Where are you?” he said at one point, talking to the darkness, the living and the dead that it held.

  The forest finally rejected him, burped him up on the edge of the lagoon, tired and sobering up badly. His path had traversed the park from firelight to firelight, through the unmarked graveyard of the forest floor to a bench on the familiar pathway around the lagoon.

  There were half a dozen Canada geese sleeping nearby, silent in the nighttime cool. And in the dark, as the last of the wine burned itself out inside him, Jeremy pulled the Sabatier out of his waistband and balanced it in his right hand, enjoying the dull light that the blackened carbon-steel blade still seemed to shed. The secret of the knife was its hand-forged, feathered tang, which gave it legendary balance. But Jeremy wondered now if its secret was also that a father had presented it to a son on his return from afar, and that it now filled the son’s hand weightlessly like a talisman. The Professor, meanwhile, slept soundly in the blackness behind him, dry under the plastic sheeting, in need of little. His fire would be smudged out, the embers buried in wet fern. Somewhere in the forest nearby would be duck bones, slowly disappearing into the mouths of ants and beetles, into the gullets of crows and the stomach of the earth itself.

  The forest inhaled. It grew darker. The sound of voices had stopped or gone away. He sensed the subsuming presence of the park instead, the silent and perpetual riot of growth and decay going on all around him: in ponds, in the trunks of cedars, in between the nurse logs where the ivy and the foam flower spread, in the secret paths of snails and squirrels. In the other secrets held in the forest floor.

  He woke with the sun, which slanted in between the towers of the West End, prismed itself off the tall aquarium-green glass of the monolithic condominium that stood at the foot of Haro Street. He woke stretched out on a park bench.

  He started sharply, sat halfway up. “Gawd.”

  A glance at his watch revealed that it was five in the morning, but also that something was wrong with his eyes. His vision was obscured, his eyelids unreasonably sticky. He put both hands up to his face, rubbing free what seemed like a resin of some kind, a spray, a coating on his face.

  His hands came away flecked black.

  “Jesus.” He was sitting straight up now, brain tumbling, starting assessments and rejecting them. And then, continuing to rub his eyes, his face, he felt a faint throb begin across the bridge of his nose. Pain that punched through the dull ache in his head. Pain that produced a new set of red smears across his palms. His own blood. Dried and fresh.

  The flow had been opened again.

  “Oh, gawd,” Jeremy said again. And now he planted his feet on the ground and fished in his pockets for a tissue. A branch, maybe? He thought he remembered the slash of a salmonberry cane across the bridge of his nose. The irritation momentary at the time. Fleeting. And now.

  Now there was blood on his hand, on his cheek and chin. In his hair. There was new blood dripping from his nose to his chin, and from there to his shirt.

  He jogged around the lagoon, head aching, two fingers pressed to the cut. He jogged under the purple cherry trees, up the hill towards home. Past the green monolithic condominium with its million-dollar suites. Without looking at it, eyes to the pavement ahead, he remembered a story about an old woman who had lived in the walk-up co-op that had previously occupied the lot. About how the developers had been forced to buy out every aging co-op resident at exorbitant prices and how she had held out. She didn’t want the money, only to stay living on the same spot. And how in the end she had settled for a suite in the new building. She would take no cash, only a suite, which would allow her to keep a nail-hold on the land that held so much of her. A tendril of remaining connection snaking down twenty stories to the ground from her half-floor, 2,400-square-foot condo with its marble and hardwood and stainless steel kitchen. She held out. She faced down the monolith, and she remained.

  It was the bridge of the nose. A horizontal boxer’s cut. Not deep but well supplied with veins. He stood with toilet paper mashed between his eyes for a full five minutes before the blood hardened enough to hold his pulse without breaking. He found gauze and tape. He fashioned a bandage, thought about his next move for a full ten minutes. Then went to bed.

  He missed the morning service. It was a hundred dollars’ worth of coffee and Nanaimo bars, fine. It was also the first time in his life he’d not been in a kitchen at the time he was supposed to be.

  “Your father OK?” Jules asked, first question, when he phoned. A death in the family might explain why she had to let herself in, might explain no breakfast service or how it could be that Jeremy was ten minutes away from being late for lunch prep.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Um …”

  She waited.

  “I’m running behind. Something unusual. Something I promised to someone. It’s a one-time thing.”

  Of course it was fine, Jules assured him. Speaking quickly.

  He phoned in the orders. Also a first-time thing. Xiang cooperated only with much cajoling and many reminders about the long period of cash payment The Monkey’s Paw had endured. He agreed to take a credit card number, to be followed by a cheque. And so Jeremy compensated by ordering more from everybody than he needed. Salmon, thick-cut pork chops, lamb shanks.

  “How about mushrooms?” Xiang asked him. “Chanterelle, very good.”

  “Sure. Four pounds of those and some eggplant.”

  Then he went to the library. He stood outside the building for a moment, considering both the task before him and the new building itself. Vancouver had replaced its old library, and Jeremy still missed it. Certainly it had been cramped and a bit dusty, but it had also been an architectural rarity from Vancouver’s early boom days. Crisp sheets of glass opened the inside to the outside. He remembered how, from the opposite street corner, you could make out people reading, taking books off the shelves. People from around here using their library as it was meant to be used. This late-modernist gem had now been converted into a Virgin record store and a Planet Hollywood.

  The new library, meanwhile (in front of which Jeremy now stood), was built to resemble the Roman Coliseum, complete with arches and pillars in a ring around the central building. Overt unoriginality aside, Jeremy was offended more by the greasy pizza fumes. In their infinite commercial wisdom, the developers had opened the atrium outside the library to retail activity, the first, very prescient, client in which had been a pizzeria. Nothing wrong with street pizza, Chef Jeremy thought, just this particular street pizza, which went beyond fast and cheap and standardized, and was striving also for the exotic, the novelty niche. Wolfgang Puck meets the Inferno Franchising Group: pineapple, pine nuts and Chinese sausage, or spinach, blue cheese and maple syrup. A commodified splatter of culinary incoherence on a shingle. Jeremy tried meatball and green olives once and couldn’t swallow his first bite. He had to walk gingerly outside, holding this mess in his mouth, the rest of it at arm’s length in one hand. He felt like a kid who’d wet his pants, hobbling stiff-legged for the washroom. Outside he leaned over a garbage can and deposited this tapenade of ground beef and dough and pimento-stuffed manzanilla olives onto the cans and newspapers therein.

  He took a breath and went upstairs.

  “Babes in the Wood,” the librarian at the history desk said to him. “Nobody wants to know about Babes in the Wood any more.”

  The librarian was staring right at the bandage between his eyes.

  “Some people do,” Jeremy answered.

  “Well, not many people. There was a little spate of interest in the sixties.”

  He was bearded, wore thick glasses with heavy black frames and what looked like hospital greens. He used a wheelchair.

  “The sixties?”

  “Flower power and all that crap. Some o
f these hippie academic guys kind of dug the image of the little kids in the forest. Forever free.”

  “Are the bodies still in the park?” Jeremy asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “No,” the librarian said, with something like distaste. Ejecting the negative syllable and smirking at the question, shaking his head. “They were found by a city parks worker. Bodies went to autopsy.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t know the story?”

  “Not really,” Jeremy admitted.

  “It’s a quick study. Nineteen fifty-three. A city works crew is clearing bush up on Reservoir Trail in Stanley Park. They uncover two little skeletons buried in the leaves.”

  Here the librarian paused for a second and scratched his beard. Then he reached under the desk and pulled out a red cardboard Closed sign, placed it on the countertop and wheeled himself out from behind the desk. He beckoned to Jeremy and pushed himself towards the elevator.

  “Social Sciences,” he said when they were inside. “They have a file of related stuff. Research?”

  Jeremy nodded. “For a friend.”

  “Albert Tong,” the librarian said.

  “Jeremy Papier,” Jeremy said, reaching out his hand.

  “Not me. The guy who found the bodies. I’m Gil.”

  They shook.

  “So Tong finds a human skull. Bits of clothing. A little lunch box. He calls the cops, of course.”

  Here the elevator dinged their arrival at the right floor. Gil wheeled out in front of Jeremy, talking over his shoulder. “They dig around some more. They uncover the skeletons, still fully clothed. And then, buried with the skeletons, they find a shoe. A single adult shoe. Also a fur coat.”

  “The killer’s?” Jeremy said.

  Gil shrugged. “You might think so.”

  At the Social Sciences desk, Gil greeted the woman behind the counter.