The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  THE KILGOURS OF THE WEST: TEMPLE THEATRE INSTALLATION CAPTIONS. FINAL DRAFT

  CAPTION ONE On a day in February of 1921, Mrs. Leticia Kilgour stepped out of her private car in a small town called Duncan’s Crossing. In attendance on Mrs. Kilgour were her daughter, secretary, two maids, a nurse and a footman. She carried in one hand a dove-grey Dorothy bag of Italian leather, containing handkerchief, peppermints, lorgnette, and a prescribed soporific, tincture of opium, to be taken as required. Looking across the tidy station green toward the cenotaph, Mrs. Kilgour thought of her middle son, Clive, who had gone overseas in 1916. His two brothers had declined commissions because they were needed on the home front, but Clive had joined Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and set out with the finest kit Mrs. Kilgour could secure in three months.

  At the time she had enjoyed her tears, and thought about sacrifice and the wonder of motherhood and how handsome Clive was. She thought how, in pictures, there was nothing to pick between the portrait of Clive that Lyon had taken on the week before he left in a first class berth to Edmonton, and Herbert Asquith’s that was in all the papers. Mrs. Kilgour liked to think of their visible equality because she knew objectively that Herbert Asquith was a gentleman: his father was Prime Minister and he had written a book of poetry. Mrs. Kilgour was a proud mother in 1916. She hosted the Red Cross ladies once a month.

  CAPTION TWO Mrs. Kilgour performed at the Temple Theatre in 1921, and then in a series of concerts along the coast in Kilgour-owned coal towns. When Clive left in 1916, she imagined following him to Edmonton and then England. She would do it, and contribute a little to the Kilgour family military glory that was, she knew, imminent. She thought about it often, though her work for the Kilgour family legacy and for the working man’s lot compelled her to stay. In 1917, she resolved to join Clive, and early in 1918 she prepared to go. But news met her in Toronto that he was missing and presumed dead. She returned to a long illness and convalescence at Craiglockhart Castle, where all the mirrors were covered. Wreaths of yew, California cypress, and black grosgrain ribbon hung on the doors.

  CAPTION THREE Two things sped Mrs. Kilgour’s recovery: her commitment to the betterment of the working man’s lot, and her commitment to the muse. Happily, the two were related, and she was sure that the workingman’s lot would be bettered by song as often as it was by lectures on hygiene and cookery. Of course, Mrs. Kilgour preferred to teach by example, which is why she hosted those bucolic parties in the vegetable garden at Craiglockhart, so wives and miners might see what clean linen and freshly-scrubbed tabletops were like, and want them for themselves.

  In 1919, more than a year after Clive’s death, she arranged a party, and told her guests to look on the garden as a temporarily public pleasure-ground, a respite from the ugliness of the city, a reminder of finer, greener things. Her guests disappointed her. They wore straw boaters and ready-made suits and dresses from Woodward’s. She had hoped they would know better and not show up smelling of Quelques Fleurs and Florida water, but of good green things, and sun-dried linens. They sang and played on ukuleles, and some of the men got drunk from flasks they smuggled in and took a boat out on the ornamental lake.

  CAPTION FOUR The thing of it is, I’m thinking Mrs. Kilgour really didn’t care that much about the working man’s lot or his wife’s. This, for instance, is the plan for a model village built near one of their coalmines north of Duncan’s Crossing. Despite all their benevolent language, it was a company town with company stores and a company church—Presbyterian— and when the IWW moved in, there were strikebreakers. You should think about the village now: Condos in the old Admin buildings and the re-fit cottages selling for millions. The church, however, didn’t survive. It was bombed during one of the long strikes of the late teens.

  CAPTION FIVE Clive disappeared in 1918 during a Phosgene gas attack on the Allied line at Bois de l’Abbé. Carbonyl Chloride—called Phosgene in its weaponized form—does not immediately kill its victims. Once inhaled, it hydrolyzes in the lungs, turning to carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid when it encounters water. There’s oedema, then death. Men drown on dry land, coughing up water and blood.

  Those who have survived an encounter with Phosgene gas say that it smells like hay. It is hard not to think of Clive lying in his trench and breathing deeply the night air when from the fields there comes a breath of new mown hay. It would smell like home, like the fields around their country place outside Duncan’s Crossing, where he spent his summers as a child. He thinks of those summers and the gas slips between his lips and down through his throat, his sinuses. It settles in his eyes and in his mouth, along his tongue and soft palate. A little later he begins to cough.

  He was MIA-presumed-dead until the end of the war. It wasn’t until early 1921 that representatives of the Imperial War Graves Commission identified his remains, whatever that means. They removed him to a nearby military cemetery and contacted his family. When she received the telegram, Mrs. Kilgour abandoned her musical ambitions and left for France to bring Clive home. She would bury him on the grounds of Craiglockhart, beside his father. The IWGC refused her permission and he remained in the battlefield cemetery, marked only by a white stone bearing his name and dates and a maple leaf. This was unacceptable to Mrs. Kilgour, with her new family graveyard that held, as yet, only four stones: the Kilgours needed to accumulate their beloved dead if they were to make a place for themselves in western Canada’s aristocracy.

  CAPTION SIX Springtime in Picardy. Roses. Poplars. Hay fields. Mrs. Kilgour has hired two farmers and their wagon and their big, slow horses. They meet her at the gravesite and together begin digging until they unearth the narrow box in which lie the earthly remains of Clive Kilgour, her brave laddie. It’s nailed shut. She would like to open it, but she is content to hurry now. Later there will be ceremonies, and more wreaths and flowers and speeches. The night is still and safe until after they’ve loaded him onto the wagon and are making their way down the white road in the moonlight and Mrs. Kilgour sings She is standing and watching and waiting where the long white roadway lies—

  That’s when the horses bolt. Mrs. Kilgour, who is a remarkably strong woman for all her ladylike manner, hangs onto the sides of the wagon and is knocked from her seat to the floor. Clive in his box is not so lucky, and when they hit a hole in the roadbed the wagon jumps, and Clive jumps and then slides out the back, the plain box splitting as it hits the earth, still sliding with the momentum of the bolt. Clive leaps out of his box and scatters himself over the earth, and his mother sees the bare outline of his disintegration, her brave laddie now unidentified refuse on the long white roadway, receding into the moonlight as the horses drive her further and further from her son.

  CAPTION SEVEN People notice. The bones in the road, the weeping woman, the farmers shy and doubtful. Mr. Goshawk is particularly useful under these circumstances, as Mrs. Kilgour retires into her hysterical grief and refuses to speak to the representatives of the IWGC. The graveyards must be left intact, they explain. Clive will remain in France, collected from the long white road, reassembled in another narrow box, re-interred beneath the white stone with the maple leaf upon it.

  There will be no body for the Kilgour graveyard. Mrs. Kilgour will be the last buried there, and when, in later years, Craiglockhart Castle becomes a public building, the five family graves will be fenced and carefully tended, and people who come on them unexpectedly will stop to look at the elaborate headstones with their carved poppies and angels and Latin: the last, curious evidence of an obscure dynasty.

  She emailed the document to Dr. Blake on Thursday, which was only one day past the deadline, so she thought she was doing pretty well. She was surprised when he arranged a meeting for the next morning.

  The first thing she said to him was, “I know it’s a bit short. I know that.” She was excited. She was even proud.

  “It’s a bit short, yeah,” he said. Dr. Blake rubbed his forehead, then his nose. Then he closed his eyes. “Sit down
, okay? Brynn came to see me yesterday.” His voice flat and neutral. “She’s been doing some survey work on Mrs. Kilgour’s musical ambitions, especially the recordings. She’s thinking we should release them. Might generate some revenue for the Institute. You know.” That last bit trailed into silence.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked. He shrugged, opened his mouth as though to say more and then closed it again, so she went on by herself. “Okay. I know it’s short, and we need a few more pictures, but that’s not going to be difficult. I mean, now that we have a story.”

  When he spoke he stared at the little stack of papers rather than look at her. “Brynn says some stuff is missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “She says it’s hard to tell, considering the state of the room, but there are a couple of boxes on the manifest that she can’t find. I’ve heard that things are pretty bad down there.”

  “Okay. But. Yeah, my process is a bit chaotic. But the captions—”

  He spoke sharply: “Anthea, the captions aren’t what we need. I have a hard time believing you don’t know that. They’re useless and they’re inappropriate. We don’t need grave robbers.”

  “It’s relevant. It’s an important—”

  “We don’t need chemical weapons.”

  “Yeah. But. I’d love to read that in a museum.”

  “It took you less than two weeks to destroy the filing system in Rm 023. And remove half the materials. And write this. This. Thing.” He flicked the paper on his desk. “And it’s late. You’re not a student anymore. You’re actually an employee, Anthea. This is a job.”

  It was a long time before she said anything, and when she did her words were directed at the desk, as she kept her hot face away from him. “It was,” she said. “I had. There was. There was a plan. I had a plan. For things. To make the.”

  “At this point it’s out of my hands,” he said. “I mean. I mean. It’s just theft. We’ll give you an opportunity to return everything, though. Assuming you can?”

  She nodded. Then she said again, “I had a plan.”

  Blake scrunched his face. “Anthea, why did you even take the job?”

  “The thing with grave robbing. It’s interesting. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to know that about Mrs. Kilgour. It makes her so much less boring. It makes her amazing.”

  “Were you ever interested in what we do? Do you even know what we do?”

  Anthea didn’t know what to say. When she looked up at Blake, wordless, she hoped for a moment that the frustration on his face would resolve into understanding, or compassion. She wondered if she should make evident the real circumstances of her life. But then Blake was looking at her with the wrinkle of antipathy on his brow, and if he looked that way before she spoke, what would he think when she talked about suicide and curses, or dead things in the attic?

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I think you’ve already done it.”

  “I can fix them.”

  “I think,” he began, then began again. “We’d recommend that you leave. If we keep this really simple, I might be able to do a reference. I guess. But not for anything archival.”

  When he said that last thing the future went suddenly blank. A month ago she had hated the future, which appeared to her as a dull, forty-year road that terminated in a gold watch and an encyclopedic knowledge of Mrs. Kilgour’s domestic arrangements. But now the future contained nothing at all, and stretched no further than the hours it would take her to collect her things and return what she had borrowed.

  There on the desk were four sheets of paper, the work of ten days and how many hours meditating on the detritus of Rm 023. Once those sheets had seemed important, but now they were devoid of meaning despite the black marks scattered over their surfaces. Once, in the world that had a future, bits of paper like that had been important.

  She said, “Okay.” She wondered if she would miss him, or Brynn with her matronly advice, or the half-buried room the R.A.s shared. She knew she would miss campus, and the clammy air of Rm 023.

  She had liked Mrs. Kilgour. “Okay,” she said again and this time he looked at her.

  “I think you should head out, Anthea. I think that would best for everyone. I think that would be best for you, too. This was never a good fit.”

  She had always known the Institute was a bad fit for her. She had gone into it knowing, had thought of the job as expiation, a relic of a career in memoriam to Hazel’s thwarted intellectual ambitions. Despite knowing that, she was shocked to find that she was an equally bad fit for the Institute. It was some kind of misunderstanding. She wasn’t a thief, after all; she had only borrowed those things as part of her research, to find and make apparent the other order in Rm 023, to illuminate correspondences, to discover answers submerged in the room’s flotsam. When she left, Dr. Blake would look at the captions again, and he would perceive that order and recognize the work she had done, and then there would be a phone call and then the future would come into being again. It was some kind of misunderstanding. He would.

  NOBODY GETS OVER ANYTHING

  Anthea was unemployed in an apartment made unbearable by both its squalor and its smell. In the last dry week of the year—the last of September— she followed Mrs. Layton’s instructions, and filled whole days and nights with walking. She walked past the squeegee kids, the corner boys, past the missions. While she wandered, she held his image in her mind: dark blond hair, parted in the middle and winging his brow and temples. Eyes beer-bottle brown. Tan, barefoot, carrying an army surplus kitbag on one shoulder, a drum over his hip, and the Bible in his back pocket wearing a white rectangle in the denim that covered his lovely ass.

  The first afternoon of unemployment, she walked to the place with the greasy green net curtains where she and Jasmine once ate $3.99 breakfast specials, and down to the water again, and then across the throat of the peninsula to the inlet on the other side, and along the inlet to the park, and along the park’s seawall as far as the giant stone that stood knee-deep in the water. She climbed over the barrier and down the rocks to the tide line. She thought of Hazel’s story that the rock was a man who so loved his unborn son that he took his wife into the wilderness when she was nine months pregnant. Together they swam until they washed away their human scent, the salt water leaving them so pure they were no threat or disruption to the forest. The wild creatures approached them, deer and otters and squirrels. And then something huge and awful took notice, and for his piety the three were turned to stone. Hazel said the wife and son were smaller stones in the woods above the seawall, where Anthea couldn’t see them. The man, though, who lit out into the wilderness in search of inhuman purity, he was before her.

  Hazel was wrong, though, or she didn’t want to tell Anthea the truth: the man still stood in the water, but the wife and child had been dynamited when they built the seawall around the park. They were underfoot, reconfigured into fill for a bike path.

  Below her the tide was out. His feet were covered in mussels and rockweed and barnacles, with purple starfish at the water line. She picked up a rock and threw it at him. It made a flat sound when it struck. She threw another and another and another, and then climbed back onto the path and finished her circumnavigation.

  For a week Anthea spent her mornings at the lunch counter Mrs. Layton had named, sitting in one of the orange melamine booths at the back, watching the door, drinking coffee and leaving large tips to pay for her three hour occupations. She didn’t bring a book. She didn’t order food.

  She spent her afternoons walking. Sometimes she worried that this course of action would produce nothing but further pennilessness, no prospects, and Jasmine’s prophet slipped away before the weather turned, gone to ground for the autumn, or south across the border to a more hospitable climate. He might not come back to the orange melamine. She might have missed him entirely, and would wait the winter out at one of the tables, hoping for his return. She imagined there were women all over the city hoping f
or his return, though she guessed she was the only brunette.

  She was luckier than that. Afterward, she could not say which of those days it was, but when she had been sitting in her booth for an hour she looked up to see him the doorway. He was alone and barefoot.

  She joined him at the counter. “Hi,” was all she said at first.

  He looked down at her. After a moment he said, “Hey.”

  “Mrs. Layton sent me,” she said.

  “I know.” His weight shifted onto his forward foot, now so close that she looked up into his face. “Mrs. Layton is cool.”

  “She sent me because I wanted to know something. A friend of mine is missing. I think you knew her.”

  His weight shifted back again.

  “Do you know where Jasmine is?”

  The woman at the counter brought him coffee in a paper cup. He pulled change from his pocket, but she shook her head. Jasmine’s prophet bowed and said, “Namaste. Parach al mech. Mech lanoch ech Simoni Deo Sancto leukos!” Then he turned to the door.

  Anthea followed him. “Okay,” she said, “the thing of it is. The thing of it is I haven’t heard from her for a while. I haven’t heard from her and I want to talk to her. I miss her. Her mom wants to know where she is.”

  He said nothing. He walked slowly eastward along the sidewalk, drinking his coffee. She walked beside him.

  “Please,” she said. “Mrs. Layton sent me.”

  He stopped and swivelled, watching her with bright eyes, set in a face that was darkly tanned under his light hair. He was so still he might have been carved from wood, some statue uncovered in a sanctuary devoted to a god whose name has been forgotten. He was beautiful.

  “I knew Jasmine,” he said.

  “Will you tell me where she is?”

  He said nothing, but he also didn’t stop. She wanted some confirmation of his willingness to take her to Jas, or explain what had happened, but in the absence of a “no” she followed him.