Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  “Come down,” Chladek yelled up from the catwalk, his words faint.

  “Not a chance in hell,” Jeremy yelled back, feeling the vodka swirling in his veins.

  Chladek turned and looked out over the water. Then back up at Jeremy. “The park,” he said, waving out into the blackness behind him, “as you will never see it.”

  When he got down, Jeremy’s gut was in turmoil, but he turned, hands gripping the railing, and the park did spread out away from him in a way he didn’t expect to see soon again. Above them, the underbelly of the Lions Gate Bridge, a sounding board that boomed with traffic. Directly below, the foaming sea, cut just now by a freighter that surged in towards a berth at the terminal. Across the water, the park. The face of the park, Jeremy thought. He had always thought that the park turned away from the city. Presented the tumult of downtown with a turned shoulder. From here, hanging in this sympathetic darkness, displaced entirely from any roadway or city vantage point, transgressing to see this sight. Here the park faced you, its expression one of knowing and familiarity.

  Chladek spread his arms in the wind that swept around them, enveloping them in its briny fragrance.

  “At one demonstration, Jeremy,” he called out, voice raised against the wind, “I remember the people in Václavské náměsti, and a little boy in front of this crowd. He is six, seven, ten, I don’t know. A little boy in a white shirt and black hair, and he plays the violin so beautifully that people are crying. A million people weep in Wenceslas Square. And I knew then that an angel has joined the fight. An angel for our Devil, I think. I wrote some more articles.”

  “And the Communists fell,” Jeremy shouted. “Your angel won.”

  “The Devil won,” Chladek shouted back, opening his eyes and grinning. “Smid was a lie.”

  A real person, just not dead. His death was a rumour spread by the Secret Police, spread to generate dissent and unrest among the students. The rumour was designed to motivate further demonstrations, to provoke riots that would justify martial law.

  Chladek pressed the bottle into Jeremy’s hands. “We’re almost done,” he said. “Drink.”

  Jeremy was now drunk enough that the alcohol was vibrating within him. His eyes felt bright and alert. His thoughts supple, strong, sharp-edged.

  And so, Chladek continued, what had begun in Stromovka had now ended like this. He learned the truth about Smid on the seventh day of a week-long period during which he slept not a single hour. He had written over 70,000 words, he guessed, none of them published by the Prague Evening. He had phoned every person he had ever known, telling them what he knew.

  Then Smid turned out to be a lie.

  “Smid the martyr is shit,” Chladek said, his eyes filling with dark rage. Then he wound up and threw the bottle out over the blackness. It hung suspended, released a tendril of remaining vodka, then glinted off downward to its faintly audible impact against a bridge stanchion and a glittering distribution of shards over the black water.

  “Night cap,” Chladek said when they reached his camp—a filthy foam mattress and a tangled pile of clothes spilling out of a yellow plastic milk crate. “You know Becherovka?”

  They sat on rocks, opposite one another. Jeremy accepted the heavy green rectangular bottle and took a sip. It smelled of cloves, tasted herbal.

  “Why?” Jeremy asked. “Why leave? Why come here?”

  After learning of Smid, Chladek went back to his apartment and slept for fourteen days. By the time he woke up, Havel was the president. The country was already changing, already forgetting.

  “Forgetting we win our freedom in a Devil’s cheat,” Chladek said. He travelled for two years, disgusted. He wrote many more unpublished stories about how it is to be swept up in the winds of history. Chased by the Devil from Stromovka and across the face of the world.

  He arrived in Vancouver on a break-bulk carrier riding empty from Hong Kong to fill up with Albertan grain. He befriended a fellow Czech named Kvetomil, who had ingratiated himself with the Filipino captain. Christmas Eve, 1991, they jumped ship at Ballantyne Pier and spent the night at the Balmoral Hotel on Hastings Street. Christmas Day, feeling greatly nostalgic, they splurged for Becherovka and went out looking for a good Christmas meal.

  “For a Czech this is a great feast, yes?” Chladek said, sipping from the green bottle. “Goose and ham and many other things.”

  At the mission on Carrall Street, the two travellers waited patiently in line. They sipped their Becherovka. Kvetomil wiped away tears at the thought of home, and they looked forward to a hot meal. Forty minutes later they were served a bologna sandwich and a box of something called Tropical Splash.

  Jeremy laughed loudly.

  “Now we are outside and Kvetomil looks like …,” Chladek widened his eyes, aping Kvetomil’s slow awakening. “ ‘Yes, Kvetomil!’ I say to him. ‘This is Christmas dinner! Happy Christmas!’ I throw my sandwich in the garbage and turn to Kvetomil and I say, ‘Fuck!’ I scream. I can think of nothing else to say. I say it over and over. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, Kvetomil.’ ”

  They finished the Becherovka walking down Alexander Street, heading no particular direction. They spent the last of their money on a six-pack of Molson Canadian that they carried in a paper bag, looking for a suitable place to sit and drink. It was late in the day. A wet darkness was falling. They walked right out of the city and into a dense forest.

  “Kvetomil says, ‘Look, we are in Alaska.’ ”

  It was raining lightly, but there the water didn’t make it to the ground. The forest was an umbrella. It was blue darkness. It was salt, pine, earth. “Look, Kvetomil,” Chladek said. “Stromovka. I have returned to the place of trees.”

  Ducks flew by. There were swans in the water. There were geese just there, sitting up on the lawn, plump on their bellies. Chladek’s head was clearing.

  “Here is Canada goose for Canadian Christmas.”

  Chladek stopped talking. He smoked silently for a few seconds.

  “Kvetomil says to me, ‘We don’t need a goose, I have my bologna sandwich still. Now you must thank me for being the smart one.’ ” Chladek smiled. “So I thank him. I think I even kiss him. And I take his sandwich, and even though the bird will not eat the bologna, he likes the bread very much.”

  They ate the goose in the forest past Prospect Point, down the embankment near the bridge.

  “Not far from here,” Chladek said, pointing.

  Kvetomil returned to the ship the following day, chastened by a night outdoors.

  Jeremy lay back in the leaves and smoked as the story wound to a close. The bridge traffic had slowed to just one car at a time, thumping overhead. In the silent stretches between cars, Chladek’s voice grew quieter and quieter. Jeremy finished his smoke and flicked it in the general direction of the sea.

  Chladek’s speech was now very faint.

  “What begins in the place of trees, now ends in the place of trees.”

  There was silence all around. Filling him and stretching away. Jeremy could feel a distinct rotation, the globe spinning under him, spinning through the blackness, not throwing him off but holding him firmly, as if he were a part of it.

  Chladek was snoring.

  Jeremy staggered to his feet and off into the blackness. It was not good to be so drunk, he remembered thinking, seconds before sprawling headlong across a root. He scraped his palm but did not bleed. He stood, swaying, and tried to listen to the forest. He imagined that he could navigate through its soundscape, that it would guide him home. And from the trees now drifted the sounds he had heard on nights before, broken up into shards and distributed through the watery air. A piece of a laugh. A fragment of a word. The upper arc of a groan wrung out during sex. Caruzo’s foot on dried arbutus leaves, crunching as he ran through the forest. The Professor rolling over inside his nylon sleeping bag. Babies crying under the bruised sky, shifting in this soil.

  “Stromovka,” he said aloud. “This place of trees.”

  He fell twi
ce more. The second time he cut open his chin and bled impressively.

  He was in a dark place, he was stumbling down a path, then off the path. Through bushes. He was in a clearing ringed with low brush. The moss was deep, his feet sank as if the earth might take him down. Consume him. He slipped again, falling to one knee. He struggled up, now covered in dirt and blood, the ground slick.

  There was a person here. A person standing quite close.

  “Chladek,” he called out. The form was still and glowed light green. It was large.

  “Caruzo,” he tried.

  Silence. It was dark. He was drunk. There was mud in his eyes.

  “Say something,” he said.

  “Something,” the form said. And it had a beautiful voice, with deep resonant tones.

  Jeremy considered the possibility that he was dreaming. He sat down on the moss.

  “Get up,” the voice said, musically, pleasantly. But it was an order.

  Jeremy got up. The form regarded him, holding something high in each hand. Something green that glowed, something like blackened chrome that winked at him.

  “Do you have any idea where you are?” The figure asked.

  “Stromovka,” Jeremy tried.

  The voice recited numbers. “North forty-nine, eighteen, thirty-two point five,” it said.

  “What …,” Jeremy began, frightened by this flat, impenetrable answer.

  “Don’t interrupt,” the voice answered. “West one hundred and twenty-three, nine, nineteen.”

  The earth sped up and centrifugal forces overwhelmed those of gravity. Jeremy felt his feet come away from the leaves and the moss as the violence of that spin broke his hold on the earth. His cheek hit the ground before he knew he was falling.

  There were a number of voices now. An argument had broken out. Somebody was crashing away into the bush, cursing, hacking at the salal with a stick or a machete.

  “Chladek?” he called.

  “Jeremy.” The word said so quietly. So close.

  “Where’s Chladek?”

  “Get up, come on,” said the Professor.

  “Where we going?”

  “Out. You’re going out.”

  His father had his arm around him now, helping him walk. “Christ, you are pissed as a newt.”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “The Devil,” Jeremy said, “visits from time to time.”

  “Ah yes,” said the Professor. His voice had been gentle.

  “Also: Stromovka.”

  There was gravel here. Then grass. Then shorter grass. Then pavement, concrete, some more grass. He fell into a hedge at one point.

  “Trout?” he called out again.

  “It’s your father, sorry.”

  “Professor?”

  “The same.”

  “Promise me something,” Jeremy said, looking up into haloed street lights.

  “What shall I promise you?” his father said to him.

  Jeremy couldn’t remember what promise he requested, if he asked for one at all. And now there was afternoon light, and looking around himself, feeling for handholds in the wet earth, he found sweat-soaked futon instead, torn cloth. His head tamped down with the dumb pain of hangover dehydration, the strain of trying to remember how he got there.

  Jeremy pulled himself painfully from the futon, made it to his knees and crawled across the carpet to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth, one stroke in, back, repeat.

  In the kitchen he drank a glass of water. Then another. Filling the third he noted the cardboard box of items he’d picked up from The Paw still sitting on a chair at the kitchen table. His Fugami lay evilly on top, its black ceramic blade across Jules’s white chef’s jacket. All of his culinary belongings in a small box. Nothing else remained.

  THREE

  LOCAL SPLENDOUR

  It took until the fall for Benny to comment on it, but eventually she did. They’d been closed since the beginning of August, ten full weeks. Mid-October she finally said something along the lines of: “What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  Jeremy said: “Reflecting.”

  Benny pulled the sheet across her chest and sat up. This date was their bi-weekly, aggressive and hungry. Jeremy thought their patterns had normalized in reverse to the convention. With other girlfriends sex had been urgent and obsessive during the early stages, and gradually become more gentle, more relaxed, ending (to date) with the discussion about: What do we really want here? The answer to which had been (to date) enduring friendship.

  Benny had inverted this process. The Canadian Tire cash advance scam now struck him as the kind of thing that enduring friends might consummate. Early sex reflected it also; there had been a pervasive gentleness, early trust. He remembered examining her skin as they lay together, running his finger up the almost invisible spider ladder of fur beneath her navel, gently feeling the silver spike through the knot of her umbilical.

  By now they were on a Saturday night and Tuesday afternoon routine, a couple of obsessive, sweating hours weekly during which they devoured one another with an intensity suggesting there was a husband on a business trip whose schedule had to be considered.

  “I called you late a couple Sunday nights ago. You were out,” she said now.

  He glanced over at her, trying to get a whiff of her intentions. “Out dancing on a Sunday?”

  “Albertini and I are picking out chairs. The Italian rep could only come Sunday.”

  “Oh yes,” he said. Benny’s new career. His head rolled back on the pillow. “What have we selected?”

  “Golden mohair with high backs from Fiori. What about the other night?”

  “Baby,” he said, “I am true to you.”

  Benny answered simply: “I don’t doubt it. So?”

  So, indeed. They both held something on the other here. She had used the spare key he’d given her and gone to his apartment that Sunday night, and several other nights since. The unmistakable Crosstown blend of patchouli and CK had been hanging in the air on a number of occasions when he got home at two or three o’clock in the morning from evenings in the park. On several of these occasions he had also found a smudge of Benny’s scent left on his pillow from the times she laid down to contemplate his whereabouts.

  If he needed any other evidence, the tiny slips of paper he had taken to wedging in the door frame had fallen out on these same nights.

  He had nothing particular to hide, and he found himself unconcerned by her intrusions. The first time it intrigued him; he hadn’t realized she had such an intimate interest in him. The second time he thought about how he held her at arm’s length and wondered if maybe the twice-weekly routine had been his passive-aggressive imposition. The third and fourth time she did it (he imagined her sniffing around, like a coyote at the edge of a squirrel path through the forest) he felt strongly drawn to her. This prowling had the effect of making him feel hunted, which made him want to be taken.

  “Maybe I was asleep,” he said, watching her eyes. Of course she would know that he hadn’t been home at all.

  “I let it ring and ring,” she lied.

  “Well,” he said, returning a purposefully lame lie, “I was in, I think.”

  It had been the Professor, Caruzo and himself that particular night, a convivial time. As had become their practice, they snared squirrels for dinner, two reds and a grey, and Jeremy roasted them, spread-eagling the gutted carcasses on Caruzo’s grill. He sent Caruzo off to gather huckleberries and dandelion greens and combined these with roasted potatoes (contributed), and they had eaten a robust and flavourful meal: roasted squirrel and potato salad with wild berries and herbs. As they ate, Jeremy found the looks on their faces like a startling memory. Cheeks red and full, smiles easily encouraged.

  One comment from Caruzo really pleased him. Caruzo had placed a hand on his stomach and said simply, “I feel good, Jay. You know, feels good.”

  That stuck with him, although beyond that nobody talked ab
out the food at all. Nobody observed that the squirrels, with their sinewy flesh spread unevenly over bony carcasses, had been perfectly roasted. That the beer marinade he’d applied during cooking had caramelized into a mahogany brown. They were just eating and talking and it was fine. When there had been an extra squirrel or two on these occasions, Jeremy began taking them home to refrigerate. He’d refined his technique in this way, experimenting later. Brown sugar and balsamic vinegar made the marinade both more astringent and yet rounder. A workable gratin Dauphinoise could be fashioned with two potatoes, some garlic and cream, a scavenged hunk of cheese and a square foot of tinfoil.

  So ran the course of Jeremy’s reflection these days.

  Benny was hugging her knees now, thinking. Finally she said: “Dante suggested the three of us go to Seasons of Local Splendour together.”

  Jeremy didn’t bother recounting the ancient Seasons of Local Splendour Snub. He was thinking instead about how fast this happy togetherness had evolved.

  The meeting he might have chosen to avoid happened several weeks before. A random Saturday night street encounter downtown. Benny was dragging Jeremy out to meet some of her friends at a dance club. This was her regular weekend scene, but his attendance had been a new idea born of a suddenly wide-open weekly schedule. He was only glad that Benny’s recreational tab of ecstasy had not yet been consumed when she spotted Dante approaching and elbowed him. Slowed her pace.

  Jeremy called out a greeting and Dante looked up sharply.

  He was wearing a black suit, accompanied by two men in tuxedos whom he did not introduce, but who skated away on patent black loafers to wait under the shelter of an awning in front of a display window full of Fendi bags. They were on the way to the opera, and Dante said only, “Me and my cousins here.” Which left it unclear whether they were blood cousins, bodyguards, part of the corporate coffee Cosa Nostra or what exactly.

  Jeremy introduced Benny, and they bantered about working for the same outfit. Dante was gracious, even threw out some obligatory polite questions about the Inferno Pender and showed signs of being impressed when Benny said she was location manager.