Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  “Where’s the carbon haze?” asks the smart-mouth.

  “Is that really the town?” asks the other one. “Where are the coils?”

  “Looking like wagon wheels buried by the Titans of old,” I say.

  “What?” asks Chad.

  “No need for filtration,” I slur. Instead of sleeping I should’ve been swallowing water pills. “The Federals know, they know if word got out about a location this habitable, a million people would ruin it by the weekend. I’ve seen pockets like this east and west—this is where the old famous people wind up. Remember how at Hope they wanted the exact time we’d be back? To debrief us! Insist we forget! Pin us to our pyjamas.” I run a fingertip down the glass. “In the Laurentians, you know, Miriam’s mom and dad and I were high every day for a year.”

  “This is a rental,” Chad reminds me. “Somebody just wrote that down.”

  “I’m too dehydrated. I was like this when I found Alanis Morissette and thought her cat was singing ‘Hand in My Pocket’ at the top of its lungs.”

  Then I sit back, helpless, my mouth hanging open.

  “He foiled,” the smart-mouth whispers. “He foiled for the nine hundredth time.”

  “Can we bring the windows down now?” asks Carla.

  “We sure can,” says Chad.

  UNCLE CHAD

  At the Hydrogen Camp we feed him a bagel, some of their local-grown coffee and a banana right off the tree. Cuban’s leaning over the counter trying to explain to the owner how the cash register works, but when I give him the banana he shuffles after me to the car. Maybe he’s speculating how a year in the Laurentians might’ve been improved by bananas off the tree. I put an ice cube in his coffee to cool it as his jaws work over the bagel. The girls are whirling sticks down the hill towards the water far below—the lake looks bigger than when I was a kid.

  “This is no good,” rasps Cuban. “I need to re-hydrate!”

  “Get all that in you and I’ll buy you some gel.”

  “Show this to the guy and ask. She probably doesn’t use her public name or her secret name, and I never got the address. Don’t think she has one.”

  It’s a picture of a slender woman with dark brown hair, the bangs nearly in her eyes—like Yukon’s, really.

  “I thought the rock star was supposed to be eighty.”

  “So tell him the hair’s turned white. Or maybe she’s bald!”

  He clutches the banana to his cheek and laughs.

  I buy the gel-tubes and the owner goes back to polishing his nozzles. The shop vacuum follows me around like it thinks I’m leaking fluid.

  “I wonder if you can help me—we came to meet this woman but don’t know where she lives exactly. You know her? It’s an old picture apparently.”

  “Huh,” he says. “Leslie! Doesn’t look any different, either. Say, you got the papers to be asking after her?”

  “My friend does.”

  “That’s okay. Come to the window here—don’t mind him, he’s like that with everybody. His bag needs changing. See the road above those houses? That keeps going into those trees and up and up. You’ll see her sooner or later.”

  “What’s the house number?”

  “Lives in a bus up there. Gardens under the tarps. You work for her broadcaster?”

  “No—I mean, we’re sanctioned, just not in that way. My friend’s an ethnomusicologist.”

  “That’s okay. You come up Highway 3 from the coast?”

  “We did.”

  My fingers dip into my shirt pocket for the travel licences.

  “You lose anybody during the bad week?” he asks.

  “Did I—? Oh. Yeah.” My fingers come out. “Those are my nieces outside. They’re about all I have left.”

  I don’t get the knot in my gut like I used to. It’s just information now, like telling somebody which boat I ride to work. The owner lines up his nozzles on the counter.

  “I was down there too,” he says.“I lost my four kids and Audrey. I came up here—you remember how long ago that was? I can.”

  “Fourteen years,” I say.

  “Look at this.” He pulls his wallet out of his back pocket and flips it open on the counter, fishes out a slip of grey paper. “A year after I came up here I found this.”

  He moves his thumb down the slip. A lot of names.

  “Shopping list,” he finally says, “for Christmas. I looked at it and realized every person on it had passed away. I’d cared enough about each one of them to pick them out a Christmas gift. You remember what month that was?”

  Outside the window Yukon piggy-backs Carla. They stagger around the parking lot, hair in their eyes, skinny elbows everywhere. My whole family.

  “The wall broke in September,” I say.

  “Exactly—three months before Christmas. See? I was organized. Now you look around this place and it looks like hell. Bobby, come away from there!”

  The vacuum slinks behind the counter.

  YUKON

  Carla is a wad with the dogs so Uncle Chad wants her to go mild and let them sniff her fingers. It is not pants to watch her cry so I wander into this sort of meadow with a drop and the lake a mile below that. Dear NOTES section. Oldy disappeared inside this Greyhound bus buried up to its axles. I will sidle up. Nine out of ten he is not even a QUICK-SOTIC ethnomusicologist and came up here for a tug-job from a robot houseplant-waterer with a housecoat tied around its head. If they were sperm whales they would know I was here but the kitchen window is open a crack and here is a folding chair

  DR. CUBAN

  While the dogs outside bark at Chad and the girls, I set up microphones on either end of the bus so that Leslie Feist can walk around if she wants to, though she claims she’s not too mobile. The green lights come on. She reads the verification and lets it waft onto the coffee table while I describe what I’ve written so far, then before I can ask her to recite the alphabet so I’ll know the talker’s working she puts her feet up on the couch and starts in. She has wonderful teeth for her age.

  “You won’t get an argument from me—I had so many American friends, great American friends, who I assume are dead now. Do you want lemonade? No? That’s the crazy thing, isn’t it, just when we cut off our imports we—and I really am sorry your friends can’t come in but yours is the only name on the certificate and there are Equanimity people up here all the time just in case I’ve fallen out of a tree and broken my hip. ‘Ethnomusicologist.’ That must make me as old as Sara Carter.”

  “Don’t worry about them,” I tell her. “Pressed for time as it is. I thought you finished at two—thinking of your stream in Eastern time.”

  “So, what do we miss without live shows? Oh, daddy. First off, in my situation it might be a mistake to live on a bus. I look past the steering wheel and imagine I’m on my way somewhere. I only lived at gigs, that was real. People brought their bodies there, now we’re all a thousand miles apart. Maybe that plays into whatever thesis you’re working on.”

  “Certainly it does.”

  “But, see, when your career’s going well the touring wears you out, and you meet so many people that three or four are bound to be assholes, they just are, and part of me loves it that I’ve finally been settled so long in one place, but in hindsight, being famous, I mean, if I was famous—”

  “Certainly you were.”

  “But then I’m biased as far as the before-and-after, because to be famous and then have it snatched away, I can only remember it as the greatest part of my life. I can’t imagine a better life than what I had. You write a song while you’re playing ping-pong with your drummer and six months later, five years later, people are singing the chorus louder than you can sing it yourself. Imagine you write this book, and six months later people are screaming out the introduction at the top of their lungs.”

  “That’s difficult to imagine.”

  “It’s amazing my name’s going to be in it. To be a person who exists—look at me, I’m misty! Don’t put that in, ‘She got wee
py just at the thought.’ Okay. I’m fine. How much more do you want? I start streaming in five minutes and after that I go to bed.”

  “Let’s discuss that. Three times a week you stream for two hours, so obviously going secret has not diminished your capacity to make music or to reach people.”

  She stretches, squeezes her eyes shut, and for a moment I’m not sure she’s heard.

  “I’m not sure if I reach anyone,” she mutters, “but as long as the broadcaster pays me, I assume there are three or four listening. The opiate of the masses, that’s why the government funds us, and if pap’s what they want, well, half the time that’s what I give them. But, okay, for your question, I think that not knowing who a song is by, and for it to be illegal to try to find out, I think then the song loses a facet of its narrative.”

  “Now, do you imagine that any listeners recognize your public ID as you, and if so might they achieve any catharsis from that? Keep in mind, I’m trying to compare the experience of a live show with that of a streaming feed.”

  “Um. I run songs through the filters but there might be one every hour where I turn those off, just to mix it up, and if there’s anybody listening from the old days the voice might be strangely familiar. Or they might assume it’s some big hairy guy running his voice through a Feist filter! Shit, I have to start tuning.”

  “I’d like to talk briefly about the events of seventeen years ago, when the prime minister shut down the border and blocked transmissions out of the U.S. on every present and future frequency so that—”

  “Was that seventeen years ago?”

  “At that time, did you feel it was an appropriate culmination of your career when you were the second artist in all of Canada to be removed to a safe house on Prime Minister Mitchell’s order?”

  “Do you mean was I flattered to be flown up to Fort Chip-ewyan with a bag tied over my head, waiting for the bullet in my neck? Of course, yeah. Exactly like when a dreamy boy has a crush on—wait, did you say I was the second one seized?”

  “Did you not know that? They didn’t sequester artists based on their feed traffic, either, Mitchell just listed his favourites on a napkin—Belinda Flutter, Rock Hard Cocks, Junior Spirit, it went right across the board.”

  “So who was number one?”

  “Neil Young. Luckily for them he was in Toronto. And yes, I asked him the same question and yes, he gave me an earful.”

  “Holy God, you talked to him? How old is he?”

  “He is 109. Hasn’t changed a hair in forty years.”

  “I used to think women didn’t go deaf unless they wanted to. Does that even sound like the same note? These strings buzz like freakin’ honeybees and I only get new ones when I—hey, did you happen to bring guitar strings?”

  “I’m sorry. I was told to bring green beans and a humidifier.”

  “I can’t believe you brought beans! Are they modified?”

  She sets the guitar down and reads the back of the bag of green beans. I count fifteen tambourines on the wall. Now she’s looking at my abstract.

  “But what about the argument,” she asks, “that we’d reached a point where only assholes and serial killers were famous?”

  “Well, that was the America model, yes. My aim is to collect evidence to demonstrate that Canadians were harder working and generally more civic-minded when they at least had you and Sam Roberts and the Barenaked Ladies to emulate. Of course with those examples I date myself by fifty years.”

  “But how do you quantify civic-mindedness? If you try to make a point with Equanimity they’ll want numbers, that’s been my experience. And if you ask me there’ve been more variables than constants in the last seventeen years, between the floods and this heat and the bor—”

  “Whether or not my findings are encouraging, the ministry will be happy to have them. They strive constantly to improve public perception, and—”

  “Don’t fuck with me!” She jerks up, white hair like a bursting dandelion. “Look at our head of state!”

  I’ve been talking into my chest, I realize, folded up in the armchair in the compliant academic pose I’ve aped for so long it’s become my default posture. I straighten up like I’m back on the rail before that last drop into Turkmenistan.

  “You refer to the head in a jar,” I say.

  She gazes out the wall of windows. From my angle I can’t see what she sees, but the dogs have stopped barking. She collects her cane from the arm of the sofa and makes her way up to the work table behind the driver’s seat. She punches switches. A console like an old-time jukebox lights up.

  “I go live in twenty seconds. You can’t be in here while I broadcast but it’s been nice meeting you, and I hope my tale of woe helps make your point with whoever it is—the cat with cybernetic thumbs.”

  I don’t argue, though Choclair and Buck 65 both insisted that a talking rhesus monkey dictates policy. As I get up I’m so stiff that I might need a cane of my own.

  “I can quantify anything,” I say. “I’ll have you back in arenas in six months.”

  “If they rebuild them.” She slips on a pair of headphones resplendent in duct tape. “Stay for the first song. I’ll turn a blind eye.”

  She presses a driver-emergency button above her head and a voice booms from the speaker beside the kitchen sink.

  “This has been Gm3b. I’ve enjoyed the broadcast to you today!” It sounds like a four-year-old girl. “Now here’s zrbztz21!”

  Feist clears her throat and, like a boxing announcer, pulls a microphone down from the ceiling. I have to grab the back of the folding chair. This is something I have no right to see. This is a live performance. This is something I’d given up any hope of ever seeing, and even if I’m unable to present my arguments to Equanimity due to my litany of legal shortcomings, even if no future eighteen year olds are ever able to have their lives changed as mine was when I saw The Tragically Hip perform “Grace, Too,” which then resonated through my brain even as I shook the chute loose and did a dive-roll into Turkmenistan, even if it’s a silent jail for me after this, it will be worth it. She holds a pedal down with her cane and grips that microphone. I might retch.

  “Head in a jar,” she says.

  It loops out of the speaker and, presumably, into the world. For four repetitions it’s clearly her, but then she taps away at the console so that it’s a man with a Newfie accent, then a youngish-sounding Japanese boy, then she ups the tempo and for the next dozen times it’s an old man, it might even be me though I could never talk that fast, then she repeats the whole series but adjusts the pitch so each phrase goes higher at the end.

  “Head in a jar? Head in a jar? Head in a jar? Head in a jar? Head in a jar?”

  YUKON

  My public name will be I-5, I hope, and I will call all of this THE BEST WEEK because I have found the last famous person on Earth or in Canada, we have no way to know which one, and she has always been my favourite. 3:00 on Saturdays. The girls from the pigsty come down the hill to hear zrbztz21 and we make brownies and drink lemon gin and say IF I TOLD YOU RIGHT NOW I WAS ZRBZTZ21 WOULD YOU SCREAM? My thumbs are going so fast they will burst and IF we had talker software my thumbs would NOT BURST!

  WHY ARE YOU GIGGLING? Carla types from across the seat

  I do not write her back. I see now as YOU dear reader see that there are SEND/SEND ALL options at the top and after all the hours in the wincing car it is perfect I see this NOW when I finally have something to SAY to the 195 016 users—who are they all? you may wonder. We are not so far from the border so it may be an Olympian network. And unwince that it is unmonitored when I finally have something to SAY.

  COO! COO! SECRET FAMOUS ROCKSTAR PERSON NEWS!

  Oldy Oldster is typing on his folder up front but whatever he is going to say he is too slow! Carla holds her hands up and mouths what? without saying it

  ROCKSTAR ZRBZTZ21 WHO IS JUST SO PANTS, SO LOATHING IN REALITY IS CALLED LESLIE FEIST AND LIVES IN A BUS IN A TOWN CALLED SUMMERLAND ON THE HILL IN C
ANADA. THERE ARE NOT EVEN COILS! YOU TAKE HWY 3 AT FIRST WE ARE 50 KMS FROM THE OLYMPIAN BORDER. DID YOU HEAR HEAD IN A JAR? ZRBZTZ21 IS CALLED LESLIE FEIST

  Then my thumb creeps the wheel back and forth between SEND and SEND ALL until I finally hit SEND ALL to get it over with.

  WHAT DID HE JUST SAY? Carla types, because Uncle Chad just told us he is going to drive down 97 but not too close to the border before we turn onto 3

  BOTH FINE NUMBERS I write.

  And he says if we can find a motel we will sleep in Princeton and go fishing in the morning and he will teach us to tie flies if there is a fly store in Princeton. It is still bright afternoon outside but I might sleep now, dear reader

  “Now I remember that song!” Carla says out loud and she sings, “This is not the end my frie-end, this is not-the-end”

  “And then the moog comes in!” yells Oldy

  All of a sudden my phone plays the song from the pelican show even tho Carla has been singing, not typing, it says

  RESPONSE FROM LADY GLORYHOLE. OKAY?

  Which is too stupid to be a public ID or a real name, it is really a wad somewhere pretending to be an Olympian so for fun I hit OKAY and the message says

  EXPECT LIBERATION

  Which makes my stomach feel like the wash behind a ferry. I turn off the phone.

  The girls from the pigsty said that when the Olympians liberated Rachel McAdams from her nursing home and flew their sleds home from Timmins to the Floating City of Buffalo they killed 4000 random people on the way. Girls from the pigsty say that but who knows?

  Carla hums until she puts her head back and cracks her knuckles which is what she always does before she goes to sleep. Dear reader