Since when are Tonight Show guests left unattended? The story is that Viva sent her publicist out for a fish taquito and then choked to death on a misdirected swallow of Ensure. But where were the Conan O’Brien people? Why the absence of other guests in the green room? It bears mentioning that the head of Molecular Biologists Without Borders had been slated to be on that night and had been bumped at the eleventh hour for Viva.
If her, then why not me? That’s what I couldn’t stop asking myself.
It’s all about the cougar now. Its yellow eyes. Its liquid haunches. Its propensity to be there even when it’s not. My platoon is preoccupied with peripheral vision. I appear to have a rebellion on my hands. The rebels are rebelling. They keep the fire going day and night, undeterred by my admonishments that we could be found out. I believe rangers are now patrolling these lands.
The cougar is afraid of fire, they insist. This “fact” is no doubt a vestigial memory from Walt Disney’s Jungle Book or an episode of Kratts’ Creatures. But a mountain lion is not a tiger despite their shared DNA, just as a goat is not a yak no matter how similar their milk may taste (ibid.).
Did The Kevster really see the beast? This would not be the first time he has lied with such conviction.
No, Sam could not have a gun. But neither was it a dream.
We are now camped right outside the TRIUMF facility, obscured by a screen of trees. I would send someone for reconnaissance, but even Dodge refuses to leave the circle around the campfire, not out of fear in his case, I imagine, but out of a sense of fraternal duty. He’s gone commando, one of Sam’s scarves wrapped around his waist like a sarong. You might think this look would compromise his ability to gain the trust of the others, but they have begun to listen to Dodge with a puppy-like intentness. Even The Kevster. My own sense of authority has begun to seep from me like pus from a weeping wound.14 We have had no Pronouncements for days, no sense of striving. It is as if they are willing to throw away the chance for future happiness in exchange for a false sense of security in the moment.
The cyclotron is thrumming in the near distance. It’s like the murmuring of a large crowd before the speaker comes on, the swell of anticipation. But is it even possible to hear the sound from so far underneath the earth? Or is it simply vibrating the very ground we occupy? I find I can’t distinguish it from the motor of my own heart.
The fire-walking cannot be put off any longer. The charcoal briquettes I have hauled from campsite to campsite, without complaint, form a narrow path that extends over at least three metres. A little fire starter splashed here and there and a few clicks of my butane BBQ lighter and it will soon be glowing with red-hot embers, the air rippled with the rising heat. Although I have been planning this for a long time, I have never practised. Fire-walking is not a thing to be achieved in private, if it is to be achieved at all.
A small dog darts into our clearing, chases its tail, and barks. Its owner hails it from the distance: “Toto! Toto!” And just as quickly it is gone, but not before Pudding turns from where she is arranging pine cones into categories based on her mysterious aesthetic criteria and extends a hand towards the dog. Pudding extends a hand! It takes me a moment or two to collect myself.
With my boots and socks off and my pants rolled up, I am dismayed by my stubbled white legs and neglected toenails. Surprised as well, as if these sad specimens belong to some other woman. Sam glances at me in that way she has of looking without seeming to look. Well, feast away, young lady. Someday all this will be yours!
There are those who would choose to tell you that our skin is a poor conductor of heat, as are coals covered with ash, and that therefore walking across them is no different from quickly pressing your fingers to a loaf of banana bread baking in the oven in order to test for doneness.15 I prefer to undertake this, my first fire-walk ever, with the same spirit of humility that motivates the young girls on the island of Bali to traverse fire unaided but for their belief in benevolent gods.16 17 18
All these years of talking like a winner. At last I will be a winner.
I look over at The Kevster, his face strangled. “Would Duh-ad walk through fire for you?” I point at Sam, who is braiding Cinders’s hair, Cinders between her knees, head lowered, not looking at me, and ask Dodge, “Would she walk through fire for you?”
He doesn’t answer, just sits down in his makeshift sarong and pulls off his sneakers and then his socks, flinging them aside. His feet are long and smooth like his father’s. Jesus feet. There are small tufts of hair on what he used to call his foot knuckles.
Dodge steps towards the smouldering coals, and for a moment I fear I have made a terrible mistake. His arms held out from his sides, like a small boy pretending to fly, he strides quickly. The fringe on the scarf curls against the heat. Sam and the children suck in their breath, all except Pudding, who scans the sky, perhaps reading something in the contrail of the jet that passed overhead minutes ago, forever ago now—bound for Tokyo or Hong Kong or Sydney. Dodge makes it to the end and lurches onto the forest floor as if stepping off a fast-moving escalator. He hasn’t uttered a sound.
“That’s love, Dodge,” I say, clapping my hands in a weak approximation of girlish glee, that’s how giddy I feel. “That’s faith.” Relieved that we have arrived at this. Finally. I almost salute him. In fact, I quell the urge to crush him in my arms in an enormous hug, something I haven’t done for a long time.
“No, mother.” He practically ejects the words as if they’re spent bullets. “That’s science.”
I have no time to process this because Cinders is screaming. Pudding holds a briquette in her hand, no pain on her face, but there is the smell of burning flesh. The Kevster is the one who pries it from her fingers while Sam hurtles to retrieve the firstaid kit. I find myself unable to move, fixated on the scrim of heat rising off the briquettes and wondering if I should still try to walk through fire.
When Dodge was born he had more hair than he does now. What a thing to remember. But I do remember. I can recall each of their births with a startling clarity; the exquisitely searing pain infused with jaw-clenching joy. Now Pudding is keening. The first sound she has ever made.
Pushing Sam and Dodge aside, I reach for my daughter.
I wake to the shrill cry of a bald eagle. How could I have slept so soundly, like a dead woman? The last thing I remember is holding Pudding’s bandaged hand to my breast and closing my eyes while the others either wept or whispered around me. And beneath us the eternal come-hither thrum of the cyclotron.
But even the cyclotron is silent this morning. The campfire doused. Camp broken. Is that how they put it? Or struck? The camp has been struck, that is a fact, as if by a smart bomb. There is no Pudding, no Cinders, no Felix, no Kevster, no Sam.
Dodge has taken them all away. Is this weakness or responsibility?
There are things I could do. I could stride through the forest in a shambolic rage, uprooting hemlocks and sharpening my teeth on towering cedars, bearing down on small animals. I could stalk that cougar, mount it and ride it back into the city, gather my followers and march on the towers of the faithless, with burning coals in the pouches of my cheeks, spitting fire.
But who am I without my platoon, without my flesh and blood?
The punchline of a joke?
A woman walking across burning coals to get to the other side.
1 I hesitate to indict pharmaceutical concerns, as prescriptions for citalopram, my birth control pill, Alesse, as well as my Ventolin inhaler have kept me afloat for more years than I care to tally. I have always held that the existence (and acceptance) of “grey areas” makes us more human, although this is a point of view that is best kept to yourself if you are going to succeed as a motivational speaker in Amerika.
2 To paraphrase the great Amerikan songwriter Hal David.
3 Dodge adopted this Briticism after reading the Harry Potter series several years back (the characters he identified most closely with were Fred and George Weasley). Whether this
is an affectation versus a general affection for the term is impossible to say. This is Dodge, after all.
4 There is also an application called positron emission tomography. (I prefer the more anthropomorphic PET, as, apparently, do the researchers themselves.) PET allows for a true scan of a living human brain at work. A scientific euphemism for “mind reading”?
5 I am not averse to a little borrowing here and there from the classics of literature. Browning is a particular favourite. As for Aesop, what is there not to love?
6 It is an ugly world out there for the truth-seekers and soothsayers among us. For those with the instinct for conciliation, punishment comes swift and hard, as we have so sadly witnessed.
7 Including his third wife.
8 Wednesdays and Fridays at 1 p.m. Prior booking recommended.
9 I plan to include this line in my next book, with permission, of course.
10 You may ask, whatever happened to Bernie Taupin? In 2006 he won a Golden Globe for his song “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” for the film Brokeback Mountain. In early 2012 he collaborated once again with Elton John to write the song commemorating HRH Prince Charles’s long overdue ascension to the British throne, “Midnight in the Kingdom.” Bernie Taupin has been married four times and is the proud owner of a bucking bull used in professional competition in Amerika. If pressed, I will admit to still carrying a small flame for him.
11 My arduous journey from pessimist to optimist is described in detail in My Emotional Fatwa.
12 I greatly admire the great Amerikan singer-songwriter Neil Young but have often wondered whether it would hurt him to try doing something with his hair.
13 According to Viva, whimsy itself is neutral. The user is the determinant of whether it has a “creative” or “destructive” charge.
14 It is not that I seek to liken myself to Christ on the cross but at times the looks I get from Dodge are as piercing as the point of St. Longinus’s lance.
15 Other scientific detractors cite the Leidenfrost effect (as musical as it sounds, it’s a dispiriting explanation of the phenomenon of fire-walking). In effect, just as drops of water dance about on a hot skillet because of the protective layer of vapour formed by evaporation, a fire-walker’s inevitably sweaty feet help create a similar protective layer.
16 In 2002, twenty Australian Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet managers had to be treated for burns caused by fire-walking. I ask you, is the Leidenfrost effect substantially different Down Under, or is it that they were insufficiently motivated in mind and spirit?
17 My colleague Tolly Burkan has called fire-walking a metaphor and contends that if you can master it, you can also muster the courage to demand a raise. With all due respect, this diminishes all of us, does it not?
18 Some useful advice from Tony Robbins: Visualize walking the coals while chanting, “Cool moss, cool moss, cool moss.”
MISTER KAKAMI
The man who is in charge of ruining Patrick Kakami’s life prowls the halls of Vancouver’s Telefilm office in search of personnel.
Across the street in Victory Square, rats the size of Whiskas-fed house cats patrol the base of the war memorial for abandoned pizza crusts and dropped panini fillings. In the garbage-strewn alley below the funding agency’s boardroom window, a seventeen-year-old heroin addict is in the final throes of an overdose, telescoping pupils in bruised eyes like some wide-eyed child in a velvet painting by a direct descendant of Bosch.
Inside, the workstations are alive with screen savers and nothing else—undulating seaweed, someone’s diaper-clad toddler, Bart Simpson on a skateboard flipping the bird. Syd Gross leafs through a bulging manila file folder labelled FUBAR, thinking, I’ll say.
Syd hates these trips to the West Coast. You can’t get a decent veal sandwich and just yesterday he met a woman who lived on a houseboat in False Creek who gave her two Abyssinian kittens bimonthly fish-oil enemas. Guys walked around downtown carrying waterproof briefcases and wearing flip-flops. How could you do business with these people when their hair-tufted toes were showing? It was like negotiating with hobbits. One of the teamsters on the Vancouver segment of the Rain Dog shoot, a soft, fiftyish man in an April Wine 4-Ever! T-shirt and Teva sandals whose job it was to drive in the honey wagon each day and then sit there for twelve hours doing absolutely sweet fuck all (for $37.46 an hour), kept telling anyone within earshot, “I came back from Hollyhock feelin g spiritually replenished.” Get a real job, Syd thought. Get a pair of real shoes.
From a cubicle in the far corner of the large open-air office, Syd hears the kind of gulping for breath children engage in when words fail them. He finds a man around his own age, mid-forties, sporting shocking sideburns and Tweety Bird suspenders, sitting on the ground crying, hunched over a mound of photocopied scripts, a clutch of forms strewn around him. The man looks up at Syd. “I spent the whole night at Kinko’s”—he pauses, striving to get his voice under control— “and I still missed the phase-three script-development funding deadline.” Syd makes a clucking sound with his tongue.
Because the thing about Sydney Gross is this. His name, his manner, his voice, his deep regard for the bottom line and affinity for darkened rooms redolent of the smell of Golden Topping® may have predestined him to become a producer of moving pictures, but somewhere along his ribbon of DNA there’s a den-mother gene programmed to respond to sorrow. This is the reason he continues to champion Patrick Kakami, not because the guy is on top of his game, but because Syd can sense he’s unravelling. And this is the reason Syd lowers himself onto the faux-distressed concrete floor, in his $475 (plus GST) “sport” slacks from Harry Rosen, and allows this weeping man, this complete stranger, to lay his head on his shoulder as he gives the man a one-armed hug.
Above them, a vulcanized-rubber wide-mouth bass mounted on the wall begins to move its tail and sing, in a deep, Barry White–type voice: “Take me to the river, / Drop me in the water …”
Syd’s cellphone jangles in his breast pocket, the Chariots of Fire ring tone more cloying than triumphant.
“What do you mean he’s disappeared?” Syd hears himself squawking, his shirt front damp with another man’s tears. He hates the squawk. But there’s nothing to be done for it— it makes guest appearances when he’s over-agitated, like acid reflux. “There’s no transport off the island till Sunday. He can’t just disappear.”
The rubber fish, oblivious to the drama on either end of the phone, continues to sing. Something about oceans. Something about love.
“Mr. Kakami? Mr. Kakami!” The first AD, a wraithlike woman from South Africa who always used the honorific and looked like a Brontë scholar, floated into Patrick’s field of vision. They were four scenes behind and it wasn’t even noon. Patrick summoned his trademark look of benign concern and huddled over her rain-pocked copy of the shooting script, randomly scratching out shots that, a few weeks ago, he would’ve sacrificed his right testicle to keep. She was clearly relieved, yet continued to look at him as if he were a man who kept his first wife in the attic. What he was, in fact, was a man struggling to remember why he was here in this island rainforest, surrounded by all this slurry of activity, in the first place.
Because. Because the low hum of his parents’ voices, whenever he had drifted off to sleep in the back seat of the car on the way home from the movie theatre, was the greatest soundtrack ever made. Because, once upon a time, Jessica Lange’s face had been the closest thing to looking straight into the sun and not going blind. Because his mother had always cheered at the end of that scene in The Sound of Music where the nuns stole the distributor cap from the Nazis’ car. Because, at eight, he’d developed a heart condition (sluggish flow through left ventricle) and his mother, afraid he’d die in his sleep, let him stay awake many nights in the long weeks leading up to the operation (experimental at the time, routine today), his head in her lap as the blue light of late-night movies on the oldies channel flickered over them (how his mother had adored Ernest Borgnine in Marty and Sidney Poit
ier in Lilies of the Field—again, those nuns!) but don’t tell your father, her unexpectedly cool finger to his lips.
Because his own childhood had once seemed endless— something he’s thought about a great deal ever since overhearing that story on the ferry, perhaps apocryphal, about the nameless toddler who’d speed-dialed 911 on his father’s cellphone, obliviously, and even gleefully, ending his childhood as he knew it.
Because he had once been a child who was unconditionally loved and cherished, Patrick Kakami had been in a hurry to grow up and make what amounted to the world’s most perfect movie—the cinematic equivalent of a mother’s breath in a son’s ear at three-thirty in the morning.
A moving picture so sublime the intended viewer’s heart would fold in on itself in an origami of joy.
And now? Now Patrick was going through the motions— wind up the little art-house director and watch him make a film! How had he ended up making films and not movies, when it was good old-fashioned flicks, middlebrow and sentimental, excluding only those who didn’t believe in magic, that he so loved? When had he turned from snub-nosed, red-headed Paddy K. into “artfully stubble-headed auteur Patrick Kakami”? (“Thirty Canadians Under Thirty to Watch!” Maclean’s, January 9, 2006—he’d snuck in under the wire.) And his biggest challenge now was not to let on that he was just going through the motions but to proceed as if it all still did matter.
Look at those kids. The various PAs and gang grips milled around the craft service table—sodden, chilled, full of themselves and non-medicated bison jerky, mentally jerking off to dreams of making a film-fest splash at Sundance, Slamdance, or even Slamdunk, or hanging around the Croissette, aging French movie actresses clutching them briefly to their Dior-scented cheeks while Atom Egoyan raised two fingers in salute and the buzz on the trade-show floor grew deafening. That was why they wanted to make movies—or rather, films—not for the pleasure of the audience or because they had known love.
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