The Paradise Engine
Page 1
THE
PARADISE
ENGINE
THE
PARADISE
ENGINE
A NOVEL BY
REBECCA
CAMPBELL
COPYRIGHT © REBECCA CAMPBELL 2013
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a license must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Campbell, Rebecca, 1975-
The paradise engine / Rebecca Campbell.
ISBN 978-1-927063-25-5
I. Title.
PS8605.A5483P37 2013 C813’.6 C2012-906595-1
Also issued in electronic format.
Editor for the Board: Anne Nothof
Cover and interior design: Justine Ma
Author Photo: Jill Promoli
NeWest Press acknowledges the financial support of the Alberta Multimedia Development Fund and the Edmonton Arts Council for our publishing program. We further acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
Printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 14 13
No. 201, 8540 109 Street, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6
t. 780.432.9427 w. newestpress.com
FOR MY PARENTS
"
I feed too much on the
inward sources; I live too
much with the dead. My
mind is something like
the ghost of an ancient,
wandering about the
world and trying mentally
to construct it as it used
to be, in spite of ruin and
confusing changes.
GEORGE ELIOT
MIDDLEMARCH
Contents
PART ONE: BLUEPRINTS FOR SURVIVING THE COMING DARK TIMES
A GHOST STORY
LIKE HARRY HOUDINI
ESCAPE ROUTES
ON THE BRIXTON CIRCUIT
PRODUCED BY THE ACTION OF LIGHT
MARA O’MARIO
THE KILGOURS OF THE WEST: TEMPLE THEATRE INSTALLATION TEXT (DRAFT ONE)
TERTIARY ARCANA
APOPHENIA
THE AQUARIAN CENTRE
THE PLACE OF THE STONES
WAKE THE DEAD
AUGURIES
A GENTLEMAN AND A PROPHET
CLIVE
A STROH VIOLIN FOR MRS. KILGOUR
MRS. LAYTON AT HOME
PART TWO: THE PARADISE ENGINE
THE CROSSING
INVENTORIES AND ASSESSMENTS
ABOUT THE HOUSE ON THE POINT
FROM THE ARCHIVE OF SIMON REID, PROPHET
WORDCOUNTS
TIME PASSES FOR LIAM
CLEOPATRA’S NIGHTMARE
SWEET SINGER OF SWEET SONGS
LAST THINGS
MRS. LAYTON AND THE EGG
INHERITORS
THE TEMPLE
PART THREE: THE CITY OF THE END OF THINGS
NO PLACE FOR SISSIES
O SUPERMAN
AWAKE
MORE TIME PASSES FOR LIAM
AND LET THE REST OF THE WORLD GO BY
DEAD THINGS
NIGHTSHADE SOCIETY
REMITTANCE GIRL
THE KILGOURS OF THE WEST: TEMPLE THEATRE INSTALLATION CAPTIONS. FINAL DRAFT
NOBODY GETS OVER ANYTHING
XHAAIDLAGHA GWAAYAAI
THOSE WHO AREN’T
THE END
AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART ONE
BLUEPRINTS
FOR
SURVIVING
THE
COMING
DARK TIMES
PART ONE
A GHOST STORY
The first ghost appeared at the end of August, when Jasmine had already been gone for months. That was too bad because she was the only person Anthea knew who would recognize a ghost when she saw one, or know what to do about it.
Anthea didn’t know a ghost when she saw one, though she was the one haunted. She also didn’t know what had happened to Jasmine, but whatever it was, it was probably over. She knew only this: Jasmine was last seen just northwest of the city, on a highway that curled uphill along the coast and the mountains. She was last seen early in June, in the company of a bearded Caucasian male apprx. 30 yrs of age, who carried an army surplus backpack and was otherwise without distinguishing characteristics. Anthea could determine, then, that Jasmine was last seen facing southeast, hitching northwest along a highway that grew pineapple weed on its shoulders. Pineapple weed smelled like chamomile tea when it bruised, as it would do under Jas’s runners when she stood for long stretches, one thin arm reaching out into the traffic and the other propped on her hip. Given how hot June had been, Anthea also knew Jasmine was kneecapped by heat waves that rose from the highway, so she seemed to float above the asphalt. To the drivers who did not pick them up, they might have been a mirage, or ghosts from the early ’70s.
Jasmine would have enjoyed being mistaken for a ghost, especially one that smelled of chamomile. She and the man walked northwest all day. Sometimes where the shoulder was narrow, she slithered halfway down the ditch and he’d turn around to help her to her feet. They were still walking when the sky turned purple and rusty orange over the mountains. Jas’s arms crossed over her chest. She shivered with dehydration and the sun-ache in her temples, the tight wrinkle of a burn on her nose and forehead. After that night no one saw anything, and so Anthea is unable to determine how much longer they walked north and west. This little film plays out in her head sometimes, unresolved.
That was months before the haunting, though, which had its start very early on a Sunday morning at the end of August. Anthea was asleep when it began, and she mistook the first visitation for a dream. In the dream a dark-haired man told her something very important she should not forget in a voice that had the texture of a shellac 78 on an old turntable. She listened politely to the man for a long time, unable to grasp his words though she felt their urgency. Just as she began to understand what the man wanted her to know, the squirrels in the attic started fighting, as they often did in the early morning. Half-awake and still listening to the distorted voice in her dream, she sat up and hit the angled wall above her head, and then stood and thumped the ceiling with the heel of her hand.
By the time Anthea was fully awake—still hitting the plaster, the squirrels still fighting overhead—the phone was ringing and she forgot even that she should not forget the antiqued voice of her dream, and so the second supernatural event of Anthea’s life passed her without remark. She picked up the phone beside the bed, but no one was there.
She lay down again, and found herself thinking of the same thing she’d been thinking about when she went to sleep: that he’d been seen again, the bearded Caucasian male apprx. 30 yrs of age had returned from his pilgrimage up the highway. That was all she knew, so far. She wondered where he’d been spotted, if it was by the wall with the mural that says “Jesus Saves.” That was the first place she’d seen him; Jasmine had taken her there and told her it was his corner. He’d looked a lot like the Jesus in the mural. He stood outside the recyclers where they lined up with returns, and he talked about tithing,
standing at the exit like that, and some of them dropped toonies in his palm in return for a blessing or a little laying-on-of-hands. Once Jasmine had told Anthea, as though she was the first to realize it, that the poor and lowdown are always the first to recognize the truth. That’s why you look for spiritual revolution in neighbourhoods where nice people lock their car doors as they drive.
Lying on her bed, listening to the squirrels, she wished she’d been the one to see his return. In the last month she had often watched the sidewalks for a Caucasian male apprx. 30 yrs of age with no distinguishing characteristics. This particular indistinguishable male would be pastiching reiki and biofield manipulation and exorcism on morning commuters, if he could make them stop long enough. If they just avoided him, he’d do it covertly, waving his hands over them as they passed, adjusting their auras and leaving—Anthea imagined—fingerprints. He was the sort of man who always had dirty hands.
The first full day of Anthea’s haunting was a Monday. That morning she was late leaving her apartment, which was bad because on Mondays there were always meetings. While she waited at the bus stop, a woman walked toward her, first on the sidewalk, then in the gutter, then on the sidewalk again. When she reached Anthea, the woman stopped and smiled in that carefully conventional way women have when they’re wasted in the early morning and don’t want anyone to know.
“Hello, honey.”
“Hello.”
Under her arm she held a torn plastic bag full of socks. “See?” the woman said. “I found these. They were just over on that bench, hey. You want a pair?”
“Thank you,” Anthea said. “That’s very kind.” The woman pulled two bright new socks out of her bag.
“Yeah-yeah. I saw you standing there and I said to myself, I’ll give you a pair cause you’re waiting for a bus like I do when I don’t have a car. You look after yourself, hey? And don’t spend all your money on crack!” The woman laughed nice and loud.
Anthea laughed too and took the socks. “Thank you,” she said, and the woman nodded and walked away. Anthea wanted to say something more, to warn the woman, or tell her to be careful, but by then she was already down the sidewalk, then the gutter, then the pavement, carrying the rest of the socks under her arm.
On the bus Anthea took a window seat and watched for a Caucasian male, apprx. 30 yrs of age. There were lots standing on street corners, some were barefoot, some in worn denim with long hair. She was halfway to campus and worried about making her meeting when the express stopped at an intersection and there he was, crossing in front of the bus. He was attended by a blonde woman—not Jasmine, though for a moment Anthea’s stomach tightened. He carried no backpack, but a drum hung over his left hip. His hair was longer, blonder at the tips, the curls more luxuriant than they had been in the spring. He was shirtless and barefoot. She pressed the button on the bar beside her once, then twice, then went to the door.
“Please could you let me out here?” she asked. “Just here?”
The bus driver said nothing.
“Please!” she said. “It’s a red!”
As she said it the light turned to green. The bus was in the intersection. “Please!” she said.
“Ma’am,” said the bus driver, “this is an express!”
Anthea walked away from the door, down the crowded aisle and up the steps to the back window. She looked toward the street he had crossed, attended by another of his blonde sylphs. The window was dirty. What she could see of the intersection was hidden by construction, by other cars, by the slope of the street down which they drove.
She was nearly late for the meeting. She ran from the campus bus loop across dead, summery grass toward her building and then around to the back. Her entrance was on the damp side, half-buried in the earth down a cement walkway surrounded by juniper. She slipped in the door and ran down the half-basement corridor with the low ceiling, the one that smelled of synthetic carpeting and, when it rained, of MSG and powdered chicken soup from one of the tiny break rooms. She ran toward the Kilgour Institute along corridors that opened on tiny rooms a little bit like what you’d see in an industrial henhouse, and through the walls Anthea heard voices and footsteps.
The Kilgour Institute was an unusually well-funded local historical society devoted to the preservation of the Kilgour Legacy, and with it the city’s recent past. It occupied a suite of offices on the main floor and a number of storage rooms in the basement and sub-basement of a secondary library. They shared the building with poorer faculties and satellites of the university: two doors down from the room in which she worked the Department of Gnostic Antiquities had its main reading room, and on the other side were the offices for the university’s Arkham Studies Journal.
At the far end of her run the door to a conference room stood open. She was breathing a little heavily as she approached it, and when she reached it everyone was seated, with one chair remaining in the far corner, where the table was nearly jammed up against the wall.
Brynn shuffled in her chair. Anthea guessed that the meeting had begun a few minutes before, and it continued around her as she squeezed into the back corner. She tried not to look over Dr. Blake’s head to the long window just below the ceiling. The needles of an ornamental juniper pressed against the glass, with a sliver of blue sky among its branches.
“Miss Brooke,” said Dr. Blake.
“Dr. Blake,” said Anthea.
“How are you? We heard you all the way down the hall. You were moving pretty fast.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“We’re just talking about the proposal from the Temple Theatre folks.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t need a minute? Catch your breath?”
“No, I’m good. I’m good.”
Dr. Blake turned back to the meeting. Anthea didn’t look at the juniper, or the copper-coloured needles piled against the glass, the dead ones from last year. Instead, breathing as quietly as she could, she slipped a file out of her bag and folded her hands in her lap. These meetings were compulsory and monthly for the remaining staff of the Kilgour Institute: Blake, and Brynn, who had been a Canadian History postdoc, and a few stalled grad students. And Anthea.
Anthea was a fresh and average History M.A. from the department on the opposite side of the concourse; she was also somewhere near the sub-basement in the university’s hierarchy, even at the brutalist end of campus. She had been hired the year before to work on the Institute’s new digital initiative, which would see the entire contents of the archive catalogued and made searchable to the public. She had been assigned to the domestic papers, and was happy to find she liked Mrs. Kilgour’s cookbooks and household accounts, mostly because she enjoyed thinking about food. Before the First World War they liked things boiled hard and long, then sieved. She wondered sometimes if they all had bad teeth, since they puréed even nice things like strawberries and baby spinach and black beans. She also wondered why they didn’t mind people touching their food, because often the recipes called for a kitchen maid to shove overcooked carrots through a sieve with her fingertips. That probably explained the attention Mrs. Kilgour paid to her maidservants’ hygiene, and the ledger dedicated to random inspections of fingernails and handkerchiefs. The best part of the whole thing was that Anthea’s work at the Kilgour Institute required no analysis, only the management of detail, so she could enjoy without frustration the mysteries of watercress, Calves-foot Jelly, White Soup, Roman Punch. She understood the phrases “cut nicely” and “fast oven,” and knew the price of candied ginger in 1910.
But while she’d been thinking about candied ginger, which was delicious, the meeting carried on. The slight film of sweat raised by her cross-campus sprint cooled beneath her clothes. She shivered. She wondered how she smelled.
Brynn was talking. “—a really exceptional opportunity, but I worry about our mandate. What do the by-laws say about outreach in the case of—”
“—be right, yes,” Blake said some time later, “yes, but I think if yo
u look at the original constitution, the Temple project—”
They were still talking about the Temple. It was okay then. She was on the database, not the Temple or the Biography. As she waited, she thought about Jas’s Prophet and his attendant blonde. Above her head the juniper pressed against the glass.
One of those Ph.D. candidates—Kostantina?—said, “charitable work was well documented in the early—”
“—true or not. And I think we can at least do some initial survey work in our own archives. Speaking of which. Anthea, how are those cookbooks?”
“Yeah. Okay,” said Anthea. She looked away from the juniper. She pulled a stack of paper out of her bag and set it on the table. “So,” she said, “I know it’s late, but here’s what I’ve got for 1900–1920. There’re a couple of spreadsheets, yeah, but I stuck in some scans of her menus, too. You know. If you’re interested. For the website.”
“Menus?” That was Brynn.
Anthea flipped to the appendix and read, “Formal, family, summer, luncheon, winter, breakfast, garden party, tea.” She flipped the page and took another breath, “dinner, picnic, buffet, supper, spring.”
“Oh,” said Brynn.
“Autumn, wartime, ball.”
Blake looked at the file on the table, though he did not open it.
“Children’s party, peace. That’s in chronological order,” she said.
Blake said, “You’ve been really thorough. That’s going to be some database.” He reached for her nice little précis of the Kilgour Kitchen Archive, 1900–1920, and added it to his pile of buff folders. “But have you started on the scrapbooks? I think we talked about the scrapbooks last month.”
“Oh. Yeah. Totally,” Anthea said. “Scrapbooks. Next month I’ll totally have something for you.”
Brynn looked like she wanted to talk some more, but then the other three were wriggling out from around the table and toward the beige metal door that always made Anthea think of bunkers. People chatted and picked up their coffee cups and Kostantina said, “Drinks later?” and then they were gone.