Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  On either side of me black walls of solitude loomed directly up to the sky while the pink feldspar oozed out of the granite like some sickening preview of the future. Every charred black peak was crowned with a bogus inukshuk just waiting to tumble through the windshield of some unsuspecting car. If I see another bogus inukshuk, I thought, I’m going to puke.

  I drove on, arcing westbound around the lake. In front stretched the road, the space out there in front of the windshield, the thin grey ribbon of highway. Through the vent the air smelled fragrant with the odour of burnt car fuel and the occasional gash of manure. The gravelly shoulders shone with cigarette butts and empty, flattened cigarette packs skidding in the wake of each passing vehicle. Beyond that the edge of the bush, rife with blueberries. A roadside place zipped across the windshield on the north side: Leggit’s Chicken and Digital Diner (We Never Close). This was followed by Gus Foucault’s Desconstructed Small Engines under which someone had written We Never Open. Neither of those establishments felt like an appropriate place to stop the car, to breathe the air and urinate and do whatever.

  Several kilometres beyond that I came upon what was, or used to be, the Bite Me Bait Shop Emporium: a combination gas station, grocery store, bait shop, restaurant, dance hall, video store, motel, and dew worm outlet, all of which were long bankrupt and now in shambles. I pulled into the parking lot and went inside to get the job done.

  A depressed, stone-faced woman stood behind a glass counter looking at me with her arms folded. Her hair was poorly cut and she wore a generic female garment that I believe is called a frock or a smock. It felt to me that she had waited her entire life for a customer, and now that she had one, had no idea what to do with me.

  “The bathroom is for paying customers only. You have to buy something if you want to use it.” She looked down to her feet, shyly, as if these words were not the ones she wanted to come out of her mouth. She changed her tone. “Please, buddy, buy something, I’ve got kids. I gotta feed my kids. They can’t eat that new chicken stuff. They’re allergic.”

  That didn’t surprise me in the least. I had once tried a free handout of a Leggit Homestyle Digital Chicken Lozenge and had spat the thing right out. It didn’t even taste like chicken. It tasted more like bubble gum without the bubble. I looked at her. “You have any weed? Real weed? Not that government stuff.”

  “Yes, I’ve got weed.”

  More for her sake than mine I bought four grams of certified Vancouver-grown Canadian marijuana along with a poisonous jumbo takeout coffee and was permitted to wander through a mangy buffet hall to the bathroom. The entire place had been built in anticipation of Northern good times that never came and had no intention of coming now; a burnished dance floor rotted away like an old whiskey barrel with no indication of ever being danced on, a decorative musket hung on the wall with no indication of ever having shot anyone.

  I entered the men’s bathroom and at once caught a view of myself in the mirror. My God. There I was. Me. I had aged suddenly, enormously even, far more than was necessary. Even my nose had aged. Suddenly my nose was no longer equine or noble or Romanesque or even Greco-Romanesque. It was square! It loomed in front of me like a vast ruin. No longer was my nose enveloped in the glamour of a man’s mighty looks. It was just a vestibule for snot. How had that happened? I felt a strong urge to wipe the thing from the glass with the back of my fist, but resisted. The years and the miles were putting the lie to the invincibility of my handsomeness. Where were they now, all those pale and commanding nights when I walked hand in hand with a slender beauty toward the swimming pool, my nose reflecting the glint of the pearly moon, my nose penetrating the night like some great ship piloted by Odysseus? I was getting old is what it was. I was about to enter the terrifying country of the no-longer-young, and after that I would enter the more terrifying country of the no-longer-even-remotely-young. My erections would point south instead of north; my swift and final passage would be over and I would sink like a junkie into the narcosis of artistic irresponsibility. I would sell out. I would permit my work to be published in the types of magazines that people read in their doctor’s office, and I would start watching television at night and reading genre novels, or magic realism for God’s sake, and then I would croak.

  Quickly I turned from the mirror. A condom machine was bolted to the wall but showed no indication of having had any quarters pushed into it in the last three decades. The dented surface was plastered with faded colour illustrations of scary-looking seventies-style beauty queens, all of them sporting eyelashes the size of bat wings, enormous hair, skinny legs, pastel-coloured party dresses and appeared to be in the process of doing the Watusi or something equally unfortunate. A silver banner across the surface read candidly: “Stimulate her itch with Protex Condoms.”

  Hmm.

  Underneath that someone in the throes of their own virginal superiority had inscribed in a neat hand: “Why don’t you just try abstinence instead?”

  And above that bit of Christian modesty, inscribed high enough so that it could not be erased, I saw the first, the only, indication that I was on the right track, on any track at all. There it was, the universal, uncopyrighted symbol that had stood in for the artist known as Petronius Totem: the familiar semi-erect penis that resembled a nose framed by two testicular-looking eyeballs and, very loosely, approximating the letters PT.

  He had stood here, my friend, the once magnificent self-described ectoplasmic spasmodical, had stood right here, on this very spot, with his well-used tool suspended over the urinal the way mine was. In my mind I saw him chanting one of the lesser poems of Gregory Corso, looking up, reading the bold and eager graffiti of the frightened virgin multitude:

  “Why don’t you just try abstinence instead?”

  A smile stretches across Petro’s face. He squeezes his last paltry drops of piss into the urinal of mankind, and then the magic marker emerges from a pocket.

  He tugs off the cap. In a broad careless hand he writes, “Because Abstinence is Fucked, Asshole.” It was Totemesque in its clarity. Tautologically perfect graffiti.

  I threw a handful of rust water on my face and exited the bathroom relieved and hopeful. The woman stood where I had left her. It seemed that her hair had greyed somewhat since then and that even the most meagre of her dreams had expired. There had been beauty there once; it still clung to her in some frightened way. From behind a shut door came the clamorous squalor of television and what I took to be the stifled presence of children who were helplessly infected by video, and starved for decent food and literature.

  “I’m looking for him.”

  “Who?” She winced.

  “Petro. Petronius Totem. The Busted Chunks guy.”

  She shook her head. “Nobody comes here anymore.”

  “He was here. He smoked your weed. He enlarged your mind. He slept with you, he told funny stories to your kids, and then he took off.”

  “Nobody comes here anymore.” She looked away before suddenly, desperately looking up at me. “You hear that? Do you hear it?”

  At first blush I heard nothing. The distant hissing sound of Superior. The wash of enormous transport trucks on the Trans-Canada loaded with toxic fertilizer or transporting deadbeat students and convicted pot smokers to the Leggit Penitentiaries in British Columbia.

  “The birds? You hear the birds?”

  “I don’t hear any birds.”

  “You used to hear birds.” She was whispering. “The geese, they came down the Michipicoten out of James Bay and they flew along the shore out there. The cormorants, the mergansers, even the eagles. You could hear their wings. They don’t come down anymore. Just that. You hear that?”

  Overhead came a low continuous whooshing sound, like a highway filled with traffic.

  “It’s wind,” I said.

  “It’s chicken, is what it is. Don’t fool yourself. They’re up to something. They got all of it up there. You ever seen a flying chicken cacciatore?” She stared at me strangely. “
At night. They come at night.”

  I shook my head. In truth I had never seen a flying chicken cacciatore. I heard rumours of a prototype Peking duck that made its way from a laboratory in Montreal and crash-landed in the outfield of a Little League baseball game in Moncton, New Brunswick, but outside of that and the half-baked crow-thingy that had crash-landed in Elaine’s living room, I remained entirely ignorant. Montesquieu, yes. Chamfort, of course, even Malraux if I had to, but when it came to the digital fibre optic airborne food industry I was a Luddite.

  “Where is he?” I said, firmly. “He’s a friend of mine. I want to see him, that’s all. I just want to see him.”

  There were tears in her eyes. Finally she blurted, “He’s dead. Don’t you understand? He’s dead. He was killed in a head-on out there on the highway.” She pointed. “Like the rest of them. They get the good ones every time.”

  I looked at her carefully. “That’s not true.”

  I’d heard such a rumour before about Petro. Elaine had directed a newspaper clipping my way. A modest item buried in the back pages behind the moral panics, the welfare moms, and childhood obesity. There had been a head-on alright. A woman was in a wheelchair because of it. Somehow, it had not been Petro’s fault. For once in his life the liquor bottle rolling around on the floor of the car was rolling around on the floor of someone else’s car. For once in his life he was neither dead nor guilty. Nor was he, in fact, Petronius Totem. The article made no mention that Mr. Peter W. Tidecaster was once the ectoplasmic spasmodical Kaffeine of Kanada known as Petronius Totem: author of Ten Thousand Busted Chunks. He was just a guy involved in an accident, period, with no fixed address and no fixed occupation. No mention was made of his injuries. A Leggit Fibre Optic Food truck was involved somehow. According to the newspaper the police wished to contact the driver.

  “He’s not dead,” I explained. “He’s just in disfavour.”

  She began to shiver. “I’m so hungry, mister. That chicken stuff don’t stop here anymore, only at the chain stores. Even when it does, we can’t eat it. It doesn’t even taste like chicken. The bank took my daughter’s crib away. We’re eating pemmican around here, left over from the fur trade.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a worse-for-wear Leggit Power Bar, with the wrapper still on it. Road food. She took it without enthusiasm. “Their food sucks,” I said. “They cook it on the Internet.”

  She nodded distractedly. “Sometimes he comes here. We talk. Of everything. Even love. It’s not what you think. He reads to my kids. He chops wood. He comes. He goes. What a mind,” she said passionately. “He’s on the threshold of accomplishing remarkable things. He will change the way we live. Everything. The foundations of what we call life. The human genome? The terminator seed? Drone technology? The Internet of Things? He’s putting all that stuff up for grabs. Everything. He’s going to stop them.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Somebody has to stop them.” She made a gesture with her chin. “He’s going to end the suffering. Someone has to end the suffering.”

  She seemed to be speaking to herself and looked up, startled to find me there. Then she pointed west, then made another gesture pointing east. “He’s on the wind. Wherever the chicken doesn’t go, that’s where he is. That’s where you’ll find him. On the four strong winds.”

  A loud whooshing noise swept over the roof, and we ducked together. She began to whimper. “It’s the global economy, they’re buying up human DNA codes and slapping patents on them. They’re breeding edible implants. I’m not kidding. We’re all going to die.”

  In a moment the sky was clear, soundless. My mind was clear too. I knew what was required of me. For once in my life I understood what was required of me.

  “My wife,” I said desperately, “I need to talk to my wife. Do you have a phone?”

  “Out front, outside. The old kind, a pay phone. Sometimes it works. You have to put money in it. There’s this little slot, you put money in it. Honest.”

  I nodded to her and left the dark hall. I knew of such phones.

  There it was; the ancient device gleamed in the sun as I pushed the contents of my pocket into the slot and dialed. My heart pounded. After a few moments I heard the ring as it raced across the granite and found its way into Elaine’s cozy house two thousand kilometres away.

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t hang up,” I cried as she hung up. “It’s Jack, and I love you!”

  9.0

  FURTHER FIASCOS OF PETRONIUS TOTEM: ROAD BOOK/BOOK ROAD

  A FOG ROSE off Lake Superior, clouding the highway and drifting upstream along the brown surface of the Pukaskwa River. The river ran on instinct: the car ran on instinct too, the instinct to go somewhere, or to drift. My foot pushed instinctively to the accelerator and I drifted at high speed. Beneath me a river of memory and sorrow rolled to the estuary, and was swallowed. The mighty Pukaskwa River where Joe Pukaskwa, in a fit of starvation, broke down and ate his wife, Sarah, and tossed her burnt bones into this tragic brown water.

  Sooner or later every man eats his wife, devours her so entirely that there is nothing left but a little grease and barbecue sauce on his fingers. He stands in his kitchen, like I did, or on the banks of the Pukaskwa River, like Joe did, flecks of his former spouse stuck to his face like cookie crumbs. A Post-it Note curls from the fridge explaining the many ways in which he is an asshole. He reads the note. He gives a self-conscious half-satisfied burp, tosses his scrapings into the compost bin, but the truth is his relationship with his wife will never be the same again and he knows it. There will be heartburn and things worse than that. He knows it.

  I knew it.

  It was over. Consumed. The lying-knees-up-in-motel-rooms-watching-The Petrified Forest days of our love were over. The great and generous God of Love had plopped Elaine in my path and I had gorged on the feast of that woman. I had gobbled her toes and sucked her breasts, and swallowed her earlobes and ejaculated into her shoes and done just about everything that a man does to a woman with his teeth and his mind and whatever else he has on hand to do things to her with. She had even taken a few hungry nibbles herself, but it looked now like the feast was over. It was being replaced with a few digital chicken bones, a side of synthetic coleslaw, and the distant fading sound of a half-stifled burp.

  “Petro,” I moaned out loud. “What have you done … What have I done?”

  Petro. He was nowhere. Like me. Like both of us: lost in the ancient rock of the Canadian Shield, waiting for the final memory of our existence to be forgotten ….

  EVEN BEFORE THE FALLOUT from Kamp Kan Lit had cooled, Petronius was deep into his next fiasco. Road Book/Book Road, as he called it, had been conceived from the beginning, with my help, as the greatest, most ambitious, and surely the most poorly organized multimedia event in the history of art. It was a project that encompassed a nation. It was, in his words, “an Anti-Monument for an Alien Society,” and it began with Petronius firing off a strategically sent email in an attempt to hire, for no pay, sixteen thousand students or otherwise foolish people:

  Wanted: Art Warriors needed to infuse blood into terminally ill patient. Must be willing to compose free-verse in boiling sun while standing on shoulders of the Trans-Canada Highway, fighting off bears, engaging in drug and sexual practices of choice. Opportunity to live off the land, meet alienated, disenfranchised young people, engage in semi-legal art terrorism, and get tasered by the Mounties. Don’t just read the Book of Life, write the fucker. Guaranteed no pay.

  His scheme was to convince sixteen thousand Canadians to take up positions on the Trans-Canada Highway at half kilometre intervals from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Tofino, British Columbia. Each of them would be required to hold up a single sign printed with a phrase or sentence from a manuscript titled Road Book/Book Road. Theoretically the driver/reader who started out in Water Street, St. John’s, Newfoundland, and proceeded west across the country could read Road Book/Book Road, from start to finish, savouring t
he last sentence on the outskirts of Tofino, British Columbia, after having driven the entire length of the country.

  On the surface — “the asphalt level,” Petro called it — Road Book/Book Road resembled the typical family dynasty novel complete with alcoholism, incest, and the anguished young son forced to become a brain surgeon by a cruel and ambitious father. In the end he escapes this fate with the help of a selfless hardworking mother etc., and manages to shed the demeaning scrubs of a brain surgeon and land a job as head dishwasher in a Thunder Bay burger joint where he writes concrete poetry in his spare time. The story spanned three generations and followed several characters down the road of their lives. The driver/reader could actually turn down a different highway corresponding to his or her interest in a particular character; if you became intrigued by Morty Coehlo, the haunted, cigarillo-smoking, guitar-strumming Buddhist womanizer from Montreal who gets infected with the HIV virus while engaging in a blood-brother bond with a four-hundred-pound singing hermaphrodite from Branch, Newfoundland, you would take the southbound turnoff at Highway 400 and follow him, sign by sign, into a parking lot of an AIDS hospice off Jarvis Street in downtown Toronto. There beneath the flowering chestnut trees, you would, in theory at least, be presented with a free coffee and a doughnut by an eager volunteer holding up a sign.