The Silver Age

by Nicholson Gunn

  He was on the verge of telling her off. He could leave Jenny Wynne and her callous, shallow world behind right now. He could leave it behind for good, never looking back. For a few moments, he imagined what his life would be like without her. Returning to a peaceful, monkish existence, he would live and breathe photography for its own sake, giving his nights over entirely to the cozy pleasures of the darkroom. He would move forward again, as both an artist and a person – it was due time. But something was holding him back, some obscure feeling that it was not the time to let go just yet. And then there was this: she had bothered to lie to him about Angela Song, which meant that she cared enough to bother with a lie. She wasn’t finished with him.

  Their waiter approached, ducking down beneath a leafy branch.

  “Everything okay here?” he asked.

  “Yes, wonderful,” said Jenny Wynne, with a shake of her blonde mane.

  “Can I get you guys another round?”

  “I should be going,” Stephan said, uncertain.

  “No, please don’t, Steph. Stay with me for a little while. We can have a glass of wine, gaze out on the passing scene.”

  “I really shouldn’t,” he said. “Work to do.”

  He began to rise.

  “But it’s still early. We shouldn’t let this sun go to waste. The summer won’t be here forever.”

  The waiter, her trusty wingman, smiled down at him. “The lady speaks truth,” he said.

  Stephan hesitated.

  Wake up and smell the guano

  by Jenny Wynne

  Bock, bock.

  Yes, I’m referring to you, my fine, feathered friends, to all of us in fact. To wit: people in this pleasant city on a lake, we like to think of ourselves as hip and cutting edge, cool and canny. But the fact is, we can be a bunch of chickens, sometimes. Latte-sipping, Gucci-wearing, Vespa-riding cluckers.

  Brawk!

  In my darker moments, I sometimes think that all people around here care about is fitting in and being safely on trend – provided of course that the trend isn’t too radical or scary. Which is all well and good, I suppose, but it’s also the opposite of how you make great culture. Let the record show that you make great culture by taking real chances, by putting yourself out there, by cutting against the grain. Just ask Kerouac or Picasso, Nico or Gertrude Stein. (Okay, they’re all dead, but if they ever come back as zombies they will totally back me up on this one.)

  Ask Steve Jobs, then, or those two Australian dudes who put on puppet shows with their wieners.

  It’s worth noting that this sorry state of affairs isn’t solely the creation of the current generation. We’ve always had a culture of fear – or should I say a fear of culture – round these parts. I suppose it started with the first European settlers. The cool ones, the ones with the cash, connections and confidence, either stayed at home in the mother country with their frock coats and port wine, or they went to the good ole USA, the promised land, and became railway millionaires and swaggering Texas oilmen.

  The poor cousins, meanwhile, came up here, north of the 49th parallel. And when they did, they had to play it safe – the woods were dark and deep, after all, and if somebody was acting “different,” or thinking outside the box, it was probably just an early symptom of a nasty case of rickets.

  And so our predecessors played it safe. They named their cities London and York, their rivers Don and Humber. They looked to London – the real, original London – for their marching orders, and when the Empire went all wobbly, they turned for a fresh source of cues to our neighbours to the south.

  I suppose some of you will think I’m being contrary. After all, there are plenty of oddballs round these parts. Many of you have no doubt spotted that fellow in the Santa hat who of late has been showing up at events, jumping on stage and shouting “tada!” in a loud voice, as if he were the main act everyone had been waiting for. (Zanta, I believe he goes by.) And of course I’m as fond of cultural trends from abroad as the next gal.

  Some among you will say I’m just grumpy because my recent collection of columns ($22.95, from Stoddard and Quork) received a handful of negative reviews. That I was stung by the fact that a scribe in this very newspaper said the only good thing about it was the author photo on the inside back cover. Ouch.

  But this isn’t about me, not this time. I know I’m not a great artiste, and never will be. There, I said it. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if a few more of our local creative types – besides Zanta, god bless him – went out on a limb from time to time? Wouldn’t it be nice if a few more of us followed our batshit crazy, kinky, bizarre, nerdy, freakish obsessions to their logical, or illogical, conclusions? I for one think that it would, and that it just might help us to become the kind of city we’ve always wished we were, but have known deep down we weren’t, not yet.

  Cockadoodledoo!

  Chapter 7

  They saw each other off and on. They were not a couple in any robust sense of the word: she had continued to make it clear she wasn’t interested in an actual relationship. But he liked to think that he meant something to her, and every time she provided him with some small piece of evidence to support the notion that he did – a smile, a languid hand caressing his back – he savoured it. Even so, it seemed unlikely that Jenny Wynne’s dalliance with Angela Song was an isolated case. Presumably, there were others, perhaps many others. He preferred not to think about it too much.

  She had made him genuinely happy in the beginning, he was certain of it. But the rush he felt when he was with her now was that of an addict getting a fix. Rather than pleasure, let alone happiness, he felt only dull relief in her presence. From time to time, Pete would ask him how it was going with his new lady friend. It was “great,” then “pretty well,” then merely a shake of his head. There was nothing to tell, nothing of substance, anyway, and after a while Pete took the hint and stopped asking.

  Time passed: days, weeks, months. The summer shaded into fall, which was normally his favourite time of the year – the low-key beauty of yellow leaves leaking oil in streetside puddles – but that fall the details of her dating life began to flutter down all around him. The local media community was small, and the gossip of the day reached all ears. In addition to Ms. Song, she had been linked (for starters) to a corporate securities lawyer of east-Indian descent; an advertising executive known for his custom shirts and dove-grey Porsche Boxster; a bearded furniture designer originally hailing from Newfoundland who specialized in building high-end furniture out of reclaimed driftwood; and the daughter of a well-known plastic surgeon whose looks, and breasts, were far too perfect to be genuine.

  Jenny Wynne’s system was as follows. On a rotating schedule, each of her acolytes would be granted his or her five minutes in the spotlight. Whenever a newcomer was added to the harem the others would be cast aside, languishing for weeks in purgatory. But eventually rehabilitation would arrive – in some cases, at least. They were like members of an exclusive (although not actually all that exclusive) club. Maybe one day they’d make it official. They could have their own platinum rewards cards, redeemable for spa treatments, complementary magazine subscriptions, or sample packets of fair-trade coffee.

  Then, in the winter of 2003, the world shifted. The talk of a new war in the Middle East, which had been a steady background hum in the media throughout the fall, reached a new pitch. Returning to the city after a Christmas holiday spent with his family in the suburbs, Stephan hunkered down in front of the television in his apartment to watch the drama unfold. Yellowcake uranium, weapons of mass destruction, UN debates. George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Donald Rumsfeld, Hans Blix. It all felt like a charade, a fantasy constructed of lies and propaganda, and literally everyone Stephan spoke to about it thought the same thing. Nobody he knew believed a word, and yet on it went. Theirs weren’t the opinions that mattered.

  On February 15th, he went downtown to photograph the day’s protest for one of the local alternative weeklies, alongside a young female report
er he hadn’t worked with before. The local turnout was modest by international standards, but to Stephan it was an impressive spectacle. The crowd was peaceful and low-key, with senior citizens, mothers pushing strollers, and people from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds in the mix, everyone bundled up in colourful parkas, thick scarves, woollen hats. When they passed in front of the U.S. consulate, he was struck by the bulk of the barriers and blast walls, which had fully colonized the public sidewalks around the building. A handful of counter-protestors stood at the edge of the security perimeter, holding in their mittened hands tiny American flags that sagged in the freezing February air.

  In the wake of the assignment, he began hanging out with the reporter. He’d felt something at the protest, some new sense of emotional connection, and he wondered if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of a path forward. The reporter was openly political and, of course, resolutely anti-war, an activist who’d been pepper sprayed at the Battle of Seattle while still a student, and Stephan was attracted by her passion. They found themselves talking through their views on the war over late-night dinners at Vietnamese restaurants on Spadina, speculating between spoonfuls of pho on whether they might be able to find their way to the Middle East as journalists.

  At the beginning of the invasion, which commenced with a literal bang right on prime-time schedule, she came over to to his apartment to watch the “shock and awe” display on TV. Several times in the course of the following weeks, she stayed the night, much to Gamblor’s annoyance and Stephan’s surprised gratitude. But as the ground war unfolded, something went slack. The American forces were making relentless, clockwork progress towards Baghdad, greeted along the way by cheering Iraqis. It was to be a quick, clean war after all – all of the experts were now saying so – and in any case the Canadian Prime Minister had elected to keep the country out of the conflict, more or less. The winter’s protests now seemed to have been an end in themselves; they’d helped keep the country out of the war, sure, but it was just all a side-show. The Americans would depose Saddam Hussein and install a quasi-democratic government. Life in the Middle East would go on, better than before, or at least no worse.

  By the time George W. Bush gave his Mission Accomplished speech – on May Day, which the reporter took as an intentional snub to the left, as it surely was – she had grown jaded. The half-serious discussions they’d had about teaming up to cover the conflict had long since petered out, and their brief romance, sparked by the emotions unleashed in the lead-up to the war, died a natural death amid the denouement of those emotions.

  * * * * *

  One day near the end of June, Stephan travelled out to the city’s west end to pick up a new lens from a professional photography outlet he frequented. The place was known for its extensive inventory and reasonable prices, but it was located in a hard-to-reach area far from downtown. For the carless, it was only accessible via a long subway and multi-transfer bus ride. On the way out he’d passed the time reading and hadn’t paid much attention to the landscape, but on the return trip he found himself taking an interest as the bus passed through a nameless, run-down district of ramshackle houses, abandoned storefronts and rusted railway spurs. It was a sad, forlorn place, and new territory for him.

  The bus lurched over a railway crossing and moved into an industrial zone of abandoned factories and dilapidated warehouses. It was obvious that no new development had taken place here in a long time, in stark contrast to downtown. There, all the major industrial areas were already being transformed – turned into trendy condo developments and office suites catering to production companies, design studios and internet pornography start-ups. No doubt some developer, a new round of studio lofts a gleam in her eye, would soon happen on this place. Perhaps she already had, and was in the process of lining up permits and financing, while her team of architects determined the optimal ratio of exposed brick to stainless steel in each condo unit. You never knew.

  An elderly man in dusty blue canvas coveralls pulled the chime and stood up to get off. (God only knew what business he, or anyone else, for that matter, had in this place.) In response to his signal, the bus pulled up to the cracked curb, brakes hissing, and Stephan – on a sudden hunch – at the last moment jumped to his feet and darted out the door behind him.

  As the bus pulled away, the man saw him and gave him a little salute.

  “Beautiful day,” he said, all smiles. “Reminds me somehow of when I was a boy.”

  Stephan wanted to ask him what he was up to out here in the middle of nowhere, but he didn’t quite know how to raise the subject, so instead he just nodded and gestured vaguely at the sky.

  “Gorgeous,” he offered.

  The man took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. “Fancy a smoke?”

  For some reason Stephan wanted to say yes, even though he hadn’t had a cigarette since the day he first set eyes on Jenny Wynne, at Helmut’s studio.

  “I guess I’m okay for now,” he said.

  “Well, suit yourself,” the man said, not seeming to mind. He placed a cigarette between his lips and lit up, taking a couple of deep drags to get it going, beaming the whole time. “Hope your business out here goes well,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Stephan replied, wanting to ask what that business might consist of, but the man was already ambling off, puffing away like mad on his cigarette. He coughed a couple of times, hawked up some phlegm, spat, and forged on, receding into the distance.

  Stephan took a minute to get his bearings. Checking his camera, he was pleased to see that it held almost a full roll of film. He figured that he could look around, take a few shots, and then hop on a bus back to civilization, having satisfied the whim that had brought him here. He set out walking. Following a concrete lane that led off the main road, he soon came upon a cluster of old-looking warehouses and factory-type buildings. It was hard to imagine what had once been made here: washing machines, whiskey bottles, artillery shells – who knew? Whatever it had been, the buildings’ facades, with their carved window frames, concrete mock columns and stone front steps, suggested that business had been good back in the day.

  He started to shoot, in a casual way at first, not thinking too much about what he was trying to accomplish. Moving deeper into the complex, he recorded whatever caught his eye – broken windows, bits of ancient garbage, weeds taller than he was. An old water tower stood on the edge of an empty parking lot, its iron exterior livid with rust, its conical roof beginning to crumple in on itself like a drooping dunce cap. It was a hot day. He imagined that the brick chimneys and smoke stacks that rose here and there above the rooftops were belching pure, invisible heat, although they probably hadn’t been active in decades. His stomach growled, reminding him that he had missed lunch, after a breakfast of buttered toast. He kept shooting.

  He sensed that he was onto something, the way a prospector might feel after stumbling onto a forest stream the bed of which was studded with gold nuggets. Eventually, though, he began to tire. Sitting down on a low stack of discarded packing skids, he took a few sips of bottled water and ate the remnants of an energy bar he’d managed to dig up from the bottom of his knapsack. He glanced up at the sky, which over the last half hour or so had grown suddenly menacing. From a photography standpoint, that wasn’t such a bad thing. There was still plenty of ambient light around, and the texture of the clouds lent an eerie intensity to the landscape. But now it was starting to rain, cool water droplets needling here and there into his skin. It was time to leave – assuming he could find his way back to the bus stop.

  He was packing his things into his knapsack when, happening to glance up for a moment, he noticed a nearby alleyway formed by a narrow gap between two of the buildings. It blended so seamlessly with the surrounding brick that he had previously overlooked it, but now he was intrigued. He strode over to have check it out, stepped through the initial opening. The alley was narrow enough that he had to turn his upper body slighly to avoid brushing his arms agains the walls on either s
ide. Gravel crunched beneath his feet as he walked. He had glimpsed something metallic beyond the far end of the alleyway, and been drawn to it.

  When the alley opened out again, after twenty feet or so, he found himself in a large courtyard, at the centre of which stood a huge old wheel, some sort of steam turbine, a massive piston still attached. It appeared to be the last remnant of an old factory that had been dismantled around it. Maybe it had once powered an entire enterprise, one that employed hundreds of workers, generating thousands of geegaws and millions of dollars. But gradually the operation had grown obsolete, and when its time had come the dynamo at the heart of it was too heavy to be worth moving, and so had been left behind with the weeds and parched grass. He snapped away furiously, not caring as a distant rumble of thunder echoed the rumblings of his stomach.

  That night, after a quick bite of dinner, he went down to the lab to see what he had gotten. He was confident that he was onto something, that the images would be special. The feeling manifested itself as a tingling in his stomach, a little like the sensation he’d had as a teenager after jumping off the bridge over Sixteen Mile Creek for the first time.

  As soon as he arrived at the lab, he developed the film of the day’s shooting. Out at the light table in the lounge, he reviewed it under a magnifying glass, tense with anticipation. As he inspected the frames, he could feel the little hairs on the back of his neck beginning to rise. The shots were good. No, they were excellent. He had captured the feel of the place, he sensed, its starkness and faded grandeur. Taking another look, he found himself thinking of the great 20th century American photographer Walker Evans’ famous black-and-white images of abandoned Louisiana plantation houses. That was a good sign. True, it was only he, himself, making the comparison. But he’d been doing photography long enough that he wasn’t promiscuous when it came to enthusiasm.