The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  They walked six blocks further east, leaving Chinatown behind, and the busy intersections where he usually worked. He didn’t speak to her. When he met someone he knew, he bowed and sounded guttural syllables, and Greek, and liquids that reminded her of Tolkien, telling them things she didn’t understand. One of them offered him money, a handful of sticky-looking coins fresh from the bottle exchange. Jasmine’s prophet accepted the fealty and laid his hands on either side of the man’s face, and they stood for a moment forehead to forehead.

  “She never told me your name,” Anthea said, when they had done.

  She hoped he would lie.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Jasmine called me Menander.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can call me Menander.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked on. There were fewer people on the street when they turned off the main strip toward residential houses built on the slope down to the inlet. These streets were quiet and dirty. There were chesterfields on front porches and long grass full of garbage. She saw an old grocery cart. She saw a building with “condemned” spray-painted on the pressboard that covered the windows and doors.

  Menander pointed at that building and said, “They went in there, you know, last month. The basement was full of KFC buckets. The buckets were full of shit. No water, right. Got shut off. They just bought KFC and then shit in the buckets.”

  They left the street and turned right down a broken cement walk, then up wooden steps that gave under her weight.

  “Is Jasmine here?” she asked, but could not believe it. Jasmine, for all her bohemianism, did not like grubbiness. She would have swept the steps. She would have removed the fast food wrappers.

  “No,” said Menander.

  “Then why are we here?” He opened the door for her, and she stepped through it into the close, dark air of the house.

  When her eyes adjusted, she saw blankets and flags over all the windows. There was an old mattress on the floor, and sleeping bags. There were lumps that were probably people. There were the paper-bagged remains of fast food meals: KFC, McDs, DQ. Menander climbed the stairs to their left. She stepped over the fallen banister to follow him.

  This had once been a nice place, she thought as she climbed. Once it was owned by a nice young couple, just starting out after the First World War. Once it had cost them four thousand dollars. They kept the grass short and the trim painted. They invited neighbours around for lemonade on the front porch, when it was hot in July and August.

  Menander paused at the top of the stairs.

  “I want to know where Jasmine is,” she said. “I want to know.” It would be nice again, these squats washed away as real estate prices rose in a slow, eastbound wave. Not for young couples starting out, though, or those with modest aspirations. They wouldn’t be able to afford it.

  He walked away from her into one of the rooms that faced the street. She saw incense ash on the windowsill. A crucifix, Tibetan prayer flags, a bunch of dead flowers, Ganesh, a pack of Tarot cards, a black-beaded rosary with a clasp like a necklace. Despite the incense, there was an animal edge to the air: the smell of squirrels in the attic, rats or mice. Pigeons moaning in the eaves. Unwashed bodies. There were books on the floor, too, an old futon stippled with damp, a sleeping bag, two backpacks spilling their contents.

  He was very close to her. So close that she felt his breath on her forehead, a moist current of tobacco ash in the sweetish-sick smelling room. He turned away to light a stick of incense. Patchouli. They faced one another again.

  Anthea looked at his bottom lip. He wet it with a tiny flicker of his tongue. She thought, If he was another sort of man, and this was another sort of situation, I would think he was going to kiss me.

  “I don’t know where Jasmine is,” he said. “Not now.”

  “Okay. You were the last to see her.”

  “No. I wasn’t. I don’t know where she is. I just know that she’s gone away.” With his right thumb he traced a sigil in the air between them. “But there’s more to it than that. We can tell you things.”

  Then he leaned into her and kissed her forehead. Then he kissed her cheek. Then he took her wrists in his hands and held them and kissed her mouth. She gently unwound his fingers and hit him across his left ear. It was a while since she’d hit anyone, and she was surprised how much it hurt, but then she hit him again. That time she struck his arm when he blocked her hand, but she shoved him away and lunged for the statue of Ganesh, which turned out to be plastic, but by then she didn’t care. She threw it at his face. She followed that with the crucifix, then the rosary and the dead flowers, then the Tarot cards. After that she looked around for anything that would break his nose, or crush the perfect cheekbone beneath his left eye. It was not until she ran out of things to throw that she considered how profoundly stupid she had been. It was as stupid as following him to a squat when no one knew where she had gone.

  Menander, however, did not seem much bothered. He rubbed his cheek and sat down on the futon, where the plastic Ganesh lay, upside down. He reached into one of the backpacks beside him for a pack of smokes and lit one.

  “Your problem,” he said, as he dragged on it and blew smoke toward her across the room, “is your shitty attitude. You don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing, and you go raise the dead and then think you can walk away from them. Jasmine knew you guys had to make amends.”

  He offered her the pack of cigarettes. Her hands were in fists, even though her right knuckles ached. She would hit him again if he came any closer.

  “Parach lo leukma. Do you know what Parach means?”

  She said nothing.

  “If you don’t know,” he said, “you can’t ever know. It’s not the kind of thing you find in a dictionary. Some people hear it and they follow it because they remember the truth. We call them Those Who Are. But there are other people who won’t ever understand.”

  “Those Who Aren’t?” Anthea asked, and wanted to laugh. He didn’t say anything for another moment.

  “Funny shit. You’re going to run away from here. That won’t make any difference. But that’s okay, it’s all going to hit the fan pretty soon.

  Jas knew that. Teotwawki. If you are on the plains, head for the hills. Let them which be in the city flee into the mountains. She knew it couldn’t last.”

  He was right. Jas always knew.

  “If you were as smart as you think you are, you’d come with me to Mrs. Layton’s. Sell what you own. Hand over all that money you know you don’t deserve. Make amends and hope you’ll be forgiven before it all happens.” Then he said “Parach” and she fled the room, down the broken stairs to the front door, and across the broken pavement to the sidewalk. From there, she ran along littered streets where grass grew in all the cracks, and dandelions, and Queen Anne’s lace, and the rats and the squirrels nested and the pigeons in the attics and the leaves were not swept away from the pavement, and the roofs sagged and then fell in and they might as well spray-paint “condemned” across the whole city and walk out, into the mountains beyond.

  At home she crouched on the floor with all her papers, her candle stubs, her teacups and wineglasses, and the dead thing in the attic. She cradled her right hand, with its swollen knuckles. After a long while, her knees on the hardwood ached, and then she lay down and felt the base of her spine against the floor as well, the bones of her skull, her shoulder blades, her elbows, her heels.

  The phone rang three times. She didn’t answer. All spring and summer her voicemail had filled up with calls she rarely answered: Colm, Brynn, Max, friends from out of town, from high school, cousins, the sound of a room full of cold callers. And someone else, who didn’t seem to be in a room full of cold callers, but who left no messages. Different numbers on caller display: different payphones, but the same silence.

  In the late spring and early summer she had been pretty sure it was Jasmine. Jasmine being difficult, requiring—as she had always done— that Anthea know without bei
ng told. She was tired of it. She wouldn’t do it again, not even if Jasmine came back and got a proper job and finished her degree and cared about the things Anthea did, and dated a not-crazy not-gnostic-street-priest kind of guy.

  Then, one evening in June, the phone rang six times in a row from the same number. Anthea resolved that the next time she would pick up. She thought about what she’d say, perhaps just what? Max said he answered the phone like that because it put people off immediately.

  She sat on the floor beside the phone with a glass of wine. She watched it. After fifteen minutes it rang again. She let it go twice.

  “What?”

  One breath exhaled.

  “What?” There was a sound like a mouth opening. Then all she heard was traffic, somewhere loud and open near a highway.

  “Jasmine. Is that you?” She knew her voice had squeaked sharply on the name, but after that she couldn’t remember what she said, only that she had been angry. Before she lifted the phone her head was full of all the awful things she felt: no words, only the intensity of her emotion. She was happy, now, for the chance to make Jasmine’s head ring with all the things she had done wrong, all her vapid pursuit of fictional gnosis, all her little cruelties and pretensions.

  In the end, that rage and pleasure was all Anthea could remember, and she hated the memory of her own anger more than she ever hated anything Jasmine had done wrong. Four months later and she accepted that her last living encounter with Jasmine witnessed her own small, venal heart.

  When she finished saying whatever it was she said, she thought a truck passed close by the phone’s mouthpiece. When it had faded, there was again a small noise like a mouth opening and closing, then the fumbled click of the receiver hung up and then a crackle and the line sounding empty. It was not enough, though; she wanted to say more, and she wanted Jasmine to answer, to explain herself, to say something that made sense, and that meant she was listening. She found the number on caller display, but when she dialled, it rang and rang, and no one answered. She dialled again, then again. She wrote down the number and waited half an hour, and rang again.

  No one ever answered it. No one ever would. But because she was the sort of person who kept things, she tucked the Post-it into the back of a desk drawer, where it could be lost among other scraps of paper, but remain.

  Lying on the floor with all her bones settled into the scarred hardwood, she thought of the drawer and of the bits of paper among which she had lost the number. She sat up and crawled over to the desk, and pulled the whole thing out, and emptied it onto the floor with everything else, and began sorting: there were phone numbers on napkins she had never called; the birthday card her grandfather Max gave her when she turned twelve; the letter confirming that she had a job at the Institute; messages from boys she no longer spoke to; Hazel’s will and suicide note. At the bottom, under candy wrappers and recipes, there was a pink Post-it with one of her hairs stuck to the back. When she touched it she felt sure, and straightened the creases and turned it over.

  She dialled the number, and as she did, something took shape in her mind, a vision of the Glass Castle with the payphone outside the main office. If there was a way to dial Jasmine’s ghost, it might have been on that bit of pink paper with her hair stuck to the back. The line it opened would reach back to the Glass Castle on an evening in the spring before.

  She listened to the ring of the payphone, and imagined she heard its echo, across the parking lot and out to the highway, and then careening into the woods and fields until it was lost in the green.

  Mrs. Layton was wrong when she told Anthea to make amends, feed the hungry ghosts and put them to rest. You can telephone the dead, she thought, and you can tell them how sorry you are, and how much you miss them, but they don’t have to answer.

  XHAAIDLAGHA GWAAYAAI

  Max said Hazel should go, after supper one night. He was sitting by the stove. He was almost asleep. The boot he had been polishing hung in his hand for a moment, before he set it carefully on the newspapers he had spread in front of his chair. She hated watching him spread the newspapers, the old-lady way he did it, and thinking it pleased her because it saved the floor. She also hated watching him clean her shoes as he did twice a week, caking the polish all over, then carefully buffing it, always so slow and laborious. She told him that her father used to use a match and got them just as glossy and that was faster, but he shook his head. He sat in his undershirt, with his suspenders down. His huge, grease-stained hand picked up the next boot and turned it over and over as he spoke. He said, “Alright, Hazel, why don’t you go and stay with your mother for a bit?” And she hadn’t said anything either, though he said it as though it was part of a conversation they were having. She hadn’t said anything, hadn’t complained. She had been doing dishes, and when he spoke, she stopped with her hands wrist-deep in the cooling grey dishwater, not liking to look at him, or at his hands with each graze black-stained, though he scrubbed them before he came in the door, and the stubby nails he cut with his pocket knife. Or the callouses, though she liked them scratching her back at night.

  It was hard to believe that the Gwaii was only a few days from home. She did not like the darkness of the islands; it made her uneasy. The little cottages around the base, all tarpaper shacks with no running water, looked like old cabbage lumps in the wet, and it was twilight all the time. The new baby was heavy on her, seven months along, and her daughter Ada pinched and silent in a way that Hazel hated, so she wished Ada would stamp her feet and shout for what she wanted. She worried that she did not like her own child and that she wouldn’t be the mother her own mother had been. She did not tell Max these things.

  She learned to cook for him when he came off shift, mostly from their ground beef ration and potatoes. In the first month she was lavish with the beef, and ran through their week’s allotment in three days, so they lived on hash and the corned beef and sardines his mother sent them sometimes. Her mother sent useless things: once papery cambric handkerchiefs with a cursive “H” in large, machined stitches, another time leg makeup and a black pencil for the seam. Hazel had tins and tins of salmon but didn’t know what to do with it, and when she joked about that with one of the girls on her road, the girl told her she had a good recipe and wrote it out:

  Salmon & Corn a la Pesce

  1 can corn, the medium sized one (not the big one)

  1 can of salmon about the same size as the corn can

  ½ Onion chopped

  some salt

  Have your oven draft on for at least ten minutes before you cook it. Butter up your pirex dish and mix the corn and salmon up with the onion and salt. Stir stir stir! Put this is in the dish and put it in a hot oven AFTER you’ve turned off the draft. Bake for about half an hour but make sure onions are done because they will taste aweful! I just remembered that you should add milk if it isn’t sloppy enough (at the beginning not when it’s out of the oven silly) Yummy yum yum!

  That was the first time that Max said she made a fine supper and sounded like he meant it. Her biscuits had been good that day, and he had banged on the table with his fist and said that was a fine supper, and she had laughed.

  Hazel wrote cheery letters to her mother about life on the base, about how she felt like a gypsy, and how strong and kind and good Max was. And how she had heard stories from the local Indian women, and she was thinking of joining their tribe and writing about it, like Pauline Johnson, only more modern. How clever and quiet and good Ada was. Only the bit about Max was true, and while she knew objectively that he was a good man, sometimes she hated his forbearance. She wanted to fly at him, provoke him to slammed doors and strict orders, anything preferable to that flimsy kindness, which seemed like no asset against the steady rain and the damp, hunched little cabins.

  She went visiting sometimes, so Ada could play with other children and she could drink someone else’s tea. Ada—such a quiet, dark little girl!—did not resist these visits, but did not seem to enjoy them. She played polit
ely with other children, though her eyes always seemed turned on Hazel. She went where she was sent, came when she was called, was vigilant to all her mother’s wishes. She shared her rag doll when commanded to do so. Hazel hoped the next one would be different, would be sunny and get angry and stomp his feet with none of Ada’s or Max’s quiet, enduring consideration.

  Other women’s cabins could be almost pretty, though some of the girls were a bit tacky and wore overalls and men’s blue jeans when they worked in their tiny gardens or chatted and smoked on the corner. Lots of them went out in curlers with scarves over their heads. None of them were from her neighbourhood. She supposed the girls she’d grown up with would be officers’ wives anyway. Well, maybe Max would be an officer someday. Then she’d have bridge parties, and she’d have a girl in, maybe, to do the scrubbing so the floor would be nice when people came by. She hated scrubbing the floor, didn’t think it was right when she was so big, and it was so hard to get down or get back up again.

  Other women’s cabins had red and white checked curtains and ragged bunches of daisies in chipped creamers. One woman—the one who gave her the salmon recipe—papered her kitchen in striped butcher paper. She bragged about how she got it for so cheap from the grocer in town, which of course was important, but it wasn’t nice to brag about not having money for real paper. Hazel wrote home about it, making it funny, especially about her bragging. She didn’t say that the kitchen looked pretty and warm and the paper covered all the raw boards. She didn’t say that Mrs. Pesce’s house was neat as a pin and there were always sweet-smelling leaves of yarrow or tansy, or bright rosehips from the wasteland in November, on the kitchen table beside the lamp.

  She learned to wash clothes in lukewarm water and hard soap that cracked her hands. She learned to bake bread, though for the first months it was spongy and fallen in the middle and hard around the edges. She learned to mend Ada’s clothes with coarse white stitches and sew buttons on Max’s uniform. She learned to depend on his kindness, and remember how shocking it had been, when they first met, that reservoir of stillness she had found, and how she had longed to sit with him for hours, just him and his quiet. She had not, however, learned to acknowledge it.