Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  Alistair continued. “No, like, you’re all letting the Man construct your desires, prob’ly tells you when to come for God’s sake—”

  Dawn Cherry smashed a staple into the wood and threw down the stapler. “You want a neat package, that it? Enlighten me, then.”

  “Wo.” Fatty chewed a drumstick.

  “Your language sickens me.” Frump, with camera, at the side of the stage.

  “Shut up,” Dawn Cherry said. Then she turned suddenly to Frump. “Hey, you’re the asinine bastard who wrote the ‘Flaky Fringe Feminism’ article for Alberta Watch. Who invited you?”

  “Free country, ma’am.”

  Alistair seemed to have lost his concentration. He was tapping a foot, gazing out over the guests.

  “There’s a woman in a ballet costume over there,” he said. “Right next to a guy dressed like a . . . witch?”

  Dawn Cherry turned.

  “And a fool or jester, some such thing,” Alistair continued. “A skeleton, Captain Canuck with a flag for a cape.”

  “A couple of Gypsies,” said Fatty.

  “Not Gypsies.” Dawn Cherry sighed.

  “Some creepy boy in a top hat and red military jacket,” Lor added. “Or . . . where’d he go?”

  “And a sheik,” Alistair said. “And, fuck me, Darth Vader. A huge Orson Wellesian Darth Vader.”

  Dawn Cherry frowned. “Excuse me a minute while I find out what’s going on.”

  Lor sat down on a pile of gym mats, already tired, and watched the cabaret unravel. The party was cleaving to three distinct groups, all Caucasian—uptight banker types sipping martinis, a rag of bumblebee kids on skateboards, an untidy herd of young Lethbridge rednecks. He was especially drawn to the rednecks, clotted around the drink table. There was more Spandex and hockey hair and tight jeans there than one usually saw in a lifetime.

  “Play some fuckin’ AC/DC!” a tall, acne-fed dude in unlaced high-tops yelled at the unfortunate DJ, who was spinning mainly Rough Trade, Bruce Cockburn, and some pretentious college fare called Moxy something.

  “Feminism, my ass,” Lor heard Alistair mutter.

  Light flashed. Frump, taking a picture of the witch and the skeleton, mumbling about satanic feminism.

  The martinis were history over by the rednecks, who sucked back regulation glassfuls for a while, then hijacked and passed around whole bottles of vermouth and gin while the bankers stared in horror.

  “Beer-tinis!” Acne Boy hollered, draining a Molson from two feet into a martini glass. Meanwhile, the janitor was chasing skateboards and mixing threats with highly detailed descriptions of floor-waxing procedures, while the Englishwoman took her silver cane to Rusty, who was, Lor noticed, lit to the gills on a smuggled bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  Behind Rusty, Captain Canuck and the Skeleton wrestled the camera away from Frump, and were about to smash it when Darth Vader, chortling loudly, convinced them to give it back.

  “Break it,” Darth said. “No. Give it back. Let the little man have his toy. Go home.”

  That voice, Lor thought. I know that voice, that French accent.

  “It’s a bunch of people who thought this was a masquerade party.” Dawn Cherry, back from fact-finding. “No harm done.” She gazed out over the gym. “Man, Rusty is stinko.”

  “He’s whoozled up the tonsils,” Alistair said. “Maybe he can actually play this way.”

  Lor lit a smoke. He saw Fatty bounce the tinfoil ball off Rusty’s head, then off the snowy head of the Englishwoman, who reached up to scratch.

  “This is nonsense,” Pixie said, re-checking a rack of digital effects, frowning at the party. “Who invited these—damn!”

  He tripped over Fatty’s guitar case and just about bonked the rack over, then huffed off, looking for the twins.

  Lor scanned the case. Bulky, scuffed, with broken clips. But full of flies? One clip seemed to jiggle. What the hell? Lor raised himself for a closer look. The lid popped up and slammed back down. Lor dropped the smoke on his lap, brushed it, ashes spitting.

  He got up and walked to the steps. “Alistair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When are we on? I need to get out of here.”

  Alistair shook his head. “A while, ’migo. Enjoy the fucking par-tee. Sit with me.”

  They sat on the steps, sober, and watched everyone else get roaring drunk. Rusty, pie-eyed on Jack. Fatty, singing “Chestnuts Roasting in My Ass.” Rednecks, now mixing it with suits and social butterflies, all of them flushed and wobbling, old lady cracking her stick over young drunk heads. Skeletons, Gypsies, witches, all flashed by Frump’s camera. Lor noticed Mucciaroni tickling Chan over by the snacks, sipping from a bottle of impossibly red liqueur. And behind them, glowering and sluicing a supercan of Lethbridge Pilsner, Shemp, the Kresge’s manager.

  “Everybody’s here,” Lor said.

  Alistair quivered perceptibly. “Some kind of decidedly un-harmonic convergence going down, bro, can feel it in my bones, some culmination, y’know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “S’all adding up here, like, mathematics, quadratic equations, exponents . . . a butterfly effect.”

  “A what?”

  “Butterfly effect. Chaos theory, man, small initial conditions giving rise to catastrophic and unpredictable results, butterfly causing a hurricane. Like a movie that films itself right off its own screen.”

  Lor sighed. “What’s the butterfly here?”

  Al turned on the step, face pinched, eyes squinty. “Franklin, shithead, what’d you think? Franklin’s the butterfly and he’s whipped up, like, a force-ten shitstorm.”

  Darth Vader rumbled by with a casket of wine, reeking of garlic. Fatty followed on a hijacked skateboard.

  “Wo,” Fatty said, teetering, holding his nose. “Garth Vadic.”

  He turned to grin at Lor and Alistair, crashed into Darth’s ample back and fell to the floor. The skateboard zipped through Darth’s legs and took out a card table decked with Cheetos and popcorn balls, flipping up to ping-pong off heads and bottles.

  “You’re giving him too much credit,” Lor said.

  “Franklin?” Alistair said. “Fuck, no.”

  “I suppose we’re on a ten-year cycle or something, doomed to repeat ourselves?”

  Alistair sniffed the air, glanced left, then right. “It’s Franklin’s unfinished business,” he whispered. “His ghost is here, ’migo, lurking somewhere, we should have never gone to that witch-fucked museum all those years ago, shit. I have made one big motherfucking mistake. . . .”

  “That’s flaky, bro. You can’t see a ghost.”

  “Ergo?”

  “There are no ghosts.”

  “I need a joint.”

  “Hey.” Fatty, onstage, holding his back. “One of you guys crack my spine for me?”

  “Got a joint?” Al said.

  Fatty grinned.

  Behind him the guitar-case lid popped up, then down.

  † † †

  They sat in a backstage room hung with a bare bulb.

  “Come on, punks,” Fatty said. “Let’s do some.”

  He pulled out his tinfoil ball and unwrapped it. Inside was a clot of bright, ice-like chunks, glinting blue and green highlights.

  “Oh. God.” Lor coughed.

  The chunks were translucent, self-lit.

  “Where did you get those?” Lor demanded.

  “You!”

  Lor remembered—the Crystal Room, the haze, the tinfoil. The bellboy’s glass jar in the hotel room.

  “We’ll smoke it,” Fatty said.

  Alistair shook his head. “How do you know what it is, fool? That shit could be toilet cleaner for all you know.”

  “It’s angel dust,” said Fatty.

  “Not on your life,” Lor said. “Not crystal either. Look at it.”

  “It’s some kind of psychedelic,” said Fatty. “Come on, we’ll smoke it and see.”

  “Forget it.” Lor pulled out a cigarette. “I do not do ps
ychedelics anymore. Not even pumpkin-pie spice.”

  Alistair leaned forward and grabbed a chunk from Fatty’s palm. “Let me see.” He rolled it between fingers, snorted.

  “That’s a hunk of crystal meth, wonderboy—glass, Kmart cocaine, clan-lab Kraft Dinner, the cheapest shit on the streets next to banana peels and old vinyl albums. You want to be sucking the glass dick, tweaking up the tits, going psychotic? We already lost a friend that way.”

  “Og.” Lor nodded.

  “So what?” said Fatty.

  “So what?” Alistair glared. “That shit in your hand is a redneck diversion, son. Make your hair twitch and your heart race, but utterly devoid of the vision, man, ever heard of the vision?”

  “Least I got one.”

  Alistair rubbed the chunk with a thumb. “Who cooked this stuff anyway? It’s cold like ice.”

  Lor felt something dig into his appendix. “Give me that.”

  He grabbed the chunk and held it to the light, watched highlights spark against the naked bulb.

  “It’s not meth, Al.”

  “Ha!” said Fatty.

  “Never seen anything like this,” Lor said.

  Except in the bellboy’s glass jar.

  “So what is it, junkie?” Alistair said.

  Lor shrugged, offered the chunk to Fatty.

  “Come on,” said Fatty. “I’m making a tinfoil pipe.”

  Alistair and Lor shook their heads.

  “Scared?” Fatty said.

  Lor laughed. “I’ve sucked back more drugs than you’ll ever see, Fats.”

  “Yeah, when you were young. Now you’re old. Just turn thirty or something?”

  Lor coughed on the cigarette.

  “You guys are granny punks,” Fatty pressed. “You guys are the Man’s tight little boys.”

  “Fuck off,” Alistair said.

  “You’re just like a university professor. You’re a yuppie-hippie, you’re a suburban—”

  “Enough!” Alistair said.

  “You guys are fucked. You’re fakes.”

  “S’that right?” Alistair tapped a finger against his lap.

  “Oh yeah. You’ve been sucked right back into the Man’s hoity-toity world.”

  “Enough,” Alistair said.

  “You’re like old rock stars, living in your small ice world of—”

  “All right.” Alistair’s voice was low, threatening.

  “You gonna take it?” Fatty said.

  “Give me the fucking crystals, wonderboy. Lor?”

  Lor shook his head.

  “Come on!” Fatty said, voice pitched in the stratosphere.

  Alistair tapped a chunk with his ring, broke it up into powder. “It doesn’t matter. Just a little caffeine to stimulate the adrenals.”

  Lor slipstreamed smoke out his nose.

  “Come on, Lor,” said Alistair. “We’ll dust the kid’s shit into a cigarette, mash the whole thing in my pipe. Can’t let spider monkey here have the last laugh.”

  “Old rock stars, wo.”

  “We are not old!” Lor yelled.

  Alistair muttered to himself, face hidden beneath brim.

  Lor paused.

  “One hoot,” he said. “That’s it.”

  † † †

  Lor’s limbs are hot. His heart is cold. His extremities start to melt and flow. “Why. Am. I. So. High.”

  Smell of glass and crushed raspberries, fading around the edges to prickled whiffs of blue and green.

  “The less you smoke.” Fatty’s words are bubbles, bursting in tinkles against the smell of glass. “The higher you get.”

  Said the bellboy.

  “Homeopathic drugs.” Alistair is the floating blue cartoon. His words silver smoke and glitter. “I smoke too much.”

  Lor looks up, mouth wide. A blizzard howls inside the lightbulb—strange, because it is always autumn inside glass. The universe is in the bulb, and the moon. The moon is made of ice, molten core exploding, seams of fire running clear to the surface to freeze and blow away. The moon’s fiery heart is unravelling to snow.

  “Oh?” Blue cartoon scarecrow, floating against the bulb.

  So hot.

  So cold.

  Lor inhales Fatty’s bubbles, coughs a spiculed rainbow.

  So big inside the lightbulb, so much space, fire, snow, so much darkness coiled at the filament. Lor stares at white light, clears his head. Concentrate, just psychedelic, I know this, I’ve been here. . . .

  The door opens, the lightbulb chuckles.

  “Christ’s name?” Dawn Cherry. “You guys are onstage in two minutes.”

  “Oh.” Lor stares at his rainbow, tries to will it away. “Oh. Shit.”

  † † †

  Concentrate. Lor held the magpie guitar firmly and waited for Fatty’s count-in. The neck flopped in his hands, but he willed it back.

  Flash.

  One-two-three-four—they kicked into “Lust for Life,” cycling at two beats per minute, thick as chocolate. It’s normal speed, Lor thought, they can all hear it at normal speed. Concentrate.

  Flash.

  Alistair stretched to seven feet, still the floaty cartoon playing bass. Where was his harp? Behind Al, the stage flowed out in waves from beneath the drum kit, gently droning, rolling, foaming. Fatty’s guitar case popped its lid. Lor missed a chord change.

  Flash.

  That damned Frump, taking pictures from the side of the stage. Lor glared at the spy, watching plump fingers elongate on the camera. Flash, flash, flash.

  Fatty’s guitar case washed up against Lor’s calves. The lid popped up and down.

  “Chord change!” Alistair, yelling from the bottom of the sea, blue rill from his lips.

  “Oh. . . .” Lor willed the neck back to solid wood. He heard banjo chords plink from the monitor, too loud, neck slippery as a fish dipped in Vaseline. Been here before, he thought. No magic, just chemistry—wonky transmission of dopamine neurons, junk binding to opiate receptors. But why could he think so clearly?

  “I can’t stand here!” Alistair yelling inside his ear. “Exact spot where Franklin went crazy, I can’t stand here! You stand here!”

  The tempo scrambled. Fatty raced up over a hundred-fifty beats per minute, thwacking the snare, drum-sounds turning silver and bright metallic blue, crashing into the rill from Alistair’s mouth, spray shooting at the rapids.

  What the hell song was this?

  Then red sounds, fiery threads splicing blues and silvers. A violin.

  A violin?

  Darth Vader, at centre stage, flogging the ZETA five-string like Paganini on steroids, hunched over, crushing that baby fiddle, stomping and sawing in a cloud of resin-dust, catgut flaying from the bow’s tip. The ZETA was triggering some kind of demented xylophone sample, layered with backward horn sections and clots of feedback, black noise from the devil’s own heaven.

  The monster was a virtuoso. He loomed over the crowd, hunched under his big black cape. He marched up and down the stage, rattling the boards, riding higher and higher on the fingerboard. His intonation perfect. His tone otherworldy. He wedged up against an amp and rocked it back and forth with his bowing arm, faster, now faster, some unthinkable brew of Locrian and Phrygian scales, skipping strings, slurring, smearing, sliding, and what wicked pact could account for this, what late-night exchange with Mephistopheles in what darkening theatre?

  Sounds melted, the smell of blue steam hitting burnt silver. The thrashing hoedown breached an impossible tempo, the unravelling point, notes and beats breaking their bonds and orbits.

  They were knee-deep now into meandering free jazz, anti-punk, then a medley of standards. Lor stared out over the audience. At the very back, standing very still, was that boy dressed in a top hat and red jacket.

  “We’ve never played this shit before!” Alistair screamed, hair white with resin.

  Fatty cut the engines, and they drifted into Stéphane Grappelli, JeanLuc Ponty—Lor had never heard any of it before, colours he’d
never seen, but he was playing them. Then a stew of Hendrix, Beatles, even a few riffs lifted from Van Halen, what the hell.

  “House of Pain!” Lor yelled.

  Then his monitor died, along with some of the lights. Pixie was onstage, steaming, bundle of ripped cord in his hand.

  “You bastard,” Pixie said to Darth. “That’s our violin.”

  “Oh. That so?” Darth released a great gust of garlic from behind the black mask. “It’s mine. My brother-in-law’s. Yours. Go home.”

  “Jerk.” A twin wrenched the ZETA away, one string popping, others unwinding audibly, MIDIed horns and feedback zinging down the octaves. Darth chortled, bat-winging his cape.

  “Off the stage,” Pixie said. “Enough shit.”

  “Fuck you,” said the blue cartoon, stomping like a sandpiper. Fatty responded with an accelerating snare roll, spitting blues and silvers now pocked with zinc and lemon pixels. Rusty continued to play in perfect time. He was wasted, in the groove.

  “Off!” Pixie said.

  The cartoon punched him right in the face. Pixie stumbled backward, twirled once, and hit the stage with a neon-purple clump. Darth burst into guffaws, bellowing garlic and resin, just as the twin smashed the ZETA over Alistair’s head. Speakers coughed an exploding MIDI symphony.

  “Look what you made me do.” The twin looked about to cry, staring at the mangled fiddle in her hand.

  “Let me set you up with the right amp,” Alistair said, heaving his guitar neck-first through the speaker of a Marshall cabinet. The Marshall rocked back and forth, crackling, then tipped and slammed into the stage floor inches from Rusty, who played on. Fatty, flushed as a devil, rolled the bass drum at the amp and tossed a cymbal after it.

  “Wo!”

  “Stop,” Lor cried. But they were already in mid-brawl, pops and snaps and punches all amplified through the P.A. system and doctored with delay and reverb over at the mixing board. Lor glared at Ballooni, who just continued mixing. Ballooni grinned and shrugged. “What the hell,” he mouthed.

  “Alistair!” Lor was suddenly cold straight, head clear and pounding. “You’re already in violation of—”

  Alistair looked at him, eyes wide and bloodshot.

  “Too late, ’migo, too late. It’s happening all over again, Franklin’s ghost, all over again, ten years, too late. Save yourself.” he threw a splintered mandolin out into the audience, where Acne Boy and a clump of skaters leaped for it like boys at a wedding’s garter-toss.