“The funny thing is,” I tried again, “I think these people may have something to offer. I think, when you find these clues I’ve mentioned, you might also encounter parts of yourself, long-forgotten parts: books you always meant to read, little notes you scribbled to yourself years ago. You might ask yourself, ‘Who was I before all of this?’ and ‘When did that end and this begin?’ You might reassess, I mean really reassess, and change your priorities. And you might start to wonder, ‘Who’s really free, us or them?’”
“Where’s Kathy?” Mrs. Park asked.
“She’ll be home any minute,” I said.
“Why are you dressed like that?” one of the teenagers asked. Snicker, snicker went the rest.
“Well, I’m locked out and I haven’t had a chance to—”
“You’re locked out?” someone asked.
“Of your own house?” said someone else.
“What exactly is going on with you, Henry?”
“Hold on now. Hold on just a minute.” I was that movie actor from It’s a Wonderful Life, over-earnest, trying to control the angry mob. “I gathered you here to tell you about—”
“How long have you been living in the backyard, Henry?” someone interrupted.
“Wait,”—it was one of the teenagers—“didn’t I see you sharing a sandwich with one of them yesterday?”
“You’re getting this all wrong. This isn’t about me. This is about our community and our way of life—”
Just then the back door opened. It was Kathy, home from work, and she was ushering the neighbours in the door. Like a funeral procession, each family stopped and whispered their apologies before entering my house. I brought up the back of the line. I whispered an apology too even though I wasn’t sorry for anything, not really.
“You stay here,” she said, her palm open on my chest. “I need some time.” Her eyes travelled up and down my body, taking in my outfit. “Jesus, Henry,” she said and then shut the door on me. I heard the twist of the lock.
An hour later the neighbours filed out—one bright goodbye after another. I could hear them out front, but I didn’t go around. I waited by the back door until the sky grew dark from the east and the mosquitoes rose from the ravine. I waited for Kathy Buffy Cram 263 until the bedroom lights came on and moths clunked against the windows.
“Jennifer,” I called up in a loud whisper, but she must’ve already been asleep.
I moved to the other window. “Kathy? Kathy?”
Finally a Kathy-shaped shadow came to the window, her triangle of hair, her small sad shoulders. My wife.
“Honey, I understand you’re mad at me, but could you spare a little change? Just a little?”
But she just as quickly moved away.
The next morning there were only two sandwiches—no peanut butter, just marmalade—and water instead of milk. I tried to remember the previous day’s joy but I was dirty and hungry and the tiny hairs of my beard were curling back on me.
I was working on a poem, something to move Kathy to forgiveness, when I heard the bright chirp of teenage-talk coming from the yard next door—not the Gregory side, but the other side.
I moved to the fence. I heard something about Jennifer first, some new boy she was dating. He was way better than her, they said; she was totally lucky. That’s my Jennifer, I thought, dating up! Then their talk turned to me. Kathy was divorcing me, they said. I had lost my mind and my job and my wife all in one week.
I considered bribing them for entrance to their house. I could’ve finagled a shower and a shave, probably, maybe even one of their dad’s suits. I could’ve headed downtown, talked to Dan, and apologized to Rhanda, begged for my job and fit right back into my old life, but I didn’t. Instead I poked my head over the fence.
“Excuse me,” I said. “When you say Jennifer’s boyfriend is better, do you mean from a wealthier family or just more popular?”
They were frozen on the spot, baring their braces at me.
“Listen,” I said, “I won’t tell your parents you’re skipping school if you give me some change. Just enough for a hamburger. And a coffee.”
When Jennifer and Kathy got home later that evening, I was ready. I gave them a moment to get settled, to turn on some lights. Then I stood in the gazebo and yelled to the house. First, an invitation: “My daughter and my wife, my love and my life, please listen to what I have written. Please let me in my home. Please don’t leave me out here alone.” I saw their heads in the window and then I began to recite in my best approximation of French: “La lune, la lune . . .”
It rained that night, so I was forced to sleep in the shed between the lawnmower and the weed whacker. I could hear the hybrids in the distance. They were chanting something sounding like heave-ho, or hobo, or let’s go. I read until I slept. I cried until my face was plastered to the pages of my father’s diary.
I ate the last sandwich in the early morning, looking back at my house from the middle of the yard. This time it was only butter, stale bread, no drink. I knew what the next day would bring. I didn’t want to be there to see it.
I looked at the building that had contained my life for so many years. Brick and mortar, wood and glass. I thought of my life inside those walls: a kind of mushroom sleep, happiness like a heavy lid. I tried to remember my wife as soft, the contours of her body, but all I could think about were bones, sinew, digestion, respiration—the materials and mechanisms that held her together. I noticed a place where the shingles had lifted off above the sunroom and it was as if I could see the future. There would be a leak in that spot soon. At night my wife and daughter would lay their cheeks in someone else’s hair grease and dream of money and acquisition and accomplishment. Other people would read their books and sleep in their beds and Kathy and Jennifer would be forced to buy zit zappers and special creams to cure their mysteriously oily cheeks. They would buy air fresheners to cover the strange goat smells they sometimes found and they would straighten their bookshelves again and again, never knowing what went on while they were away because only a few ever do. Only a few are brave enough to admit that we’re all living off each other, one way or another.
Meanwhile, I am moving south with Pinky and Constantine and the rest of the hybrids. We enter people’s homes and, while the others deplete the food and drink the wine and lather on expensive shampoos, I find a patch of sunlight to curl up in with a good woman—Pinky, or the redhead, or the brunette—and she is wearing my father’s sweater, and spooning me, wrapping me up in my father’s brown sleeves, tugging me down, and my eyelids are filling with fire colours and I am drifting into dreams, dreams large enough to haunt the hollow rooms of another man’s home, dreams of poetry and of history, of freedom and of motion. It is the future and I am right where I belong, dreaming troubadour dreams older than me.
PAUL CARLUCCI
THIS MORNING ALL NIGHT
THESE DAYS, OLD Jamie White takes his rum and rod to Utmost Perch at four in the morning. He starts his day in the kitchen, where he occupies a lone shaft of light, some dimming beam offered by a stubborn star. He kisses Betty, his woken wife, kettle steam wetting her cheeks as she pours tea into a Thermos from which he seldom sips. He tips his hat to Jimmy, their son, a bulb of boy planted on the couch, that rumbling snore soon to furrow the pillows of Light Side College. Jamie likes the snoring how he likes the tea, but these days he makes a show of appreciating both. Things, he’s learned, have a tendency to fade.
The constant night of Dark Corner is thickest in the morning, and that used to be all the advantage Jamie needed. There are fewer stars in the early hours, and so the mammoth skyliners aren’t yet netting, if indeed they’re out at all. At least, that was once the strategy. Things change.
Utmost Perch is a steep, rocky column about fifteen minutes from Jamie’s front door. The Rambling Hills roll from the house up to its base, and there the Perch climbs skyward, stands tall like a monolithic utility pole from times prehistoric, those forgotten days of myth and mayhem when g
iants used to pluck the stars from the fabric of night with their hard, naked hands. They took only what they needed, Jamie’s father used to yarn, and they were always sure to send a belch back into space, where heat and gas would provide anew.
There’s something about poverty that encourages mythology. Jamie can appreciate that.
“Giants made the stars, m’son,” the old man would slur, his breath thick with rum and smoke. “And giants want us to keep that sky well stocked.”
Climbing the Hills to Utmost Perch, the tea Thermos forgotten on the front stoop and the snoring lost to the black of morning, Jamie quaffs his rum with one hand and twirls his nova rod with the other. He carries a rucksack full of bat jerky, gas-retarding gloves, and industrial, ultraviolet goggles. Also in the bag is his brand-new, cast-a-minute power reel.
The reel brings shame. His father would certainly sneer at it. But the old man is long gone, and, besides, he wouldn’t understand what it means to cast off the Perch nowadays.
This particular star-stock used to be the most abundant of Dark Corner’s once-bountiful sky. They used to call it The Broken Dozen, as if some astral housewife had overturned a batch of luminous eggs while baking bread. It lit up the whole valley back then. The Rambling Hills were like a disco dance floor, light glittering off the dew-drenched grass, and Jamie, unburdened by notions of age and oblivion, or the tyranny of depletion, would tumble across the undulating plain that unravelled from the edge of Spruce Grove. These days, he can’t even see the forest, not even on the brightest of nights.
Back then, from way up the Perch, they could see Betty’s home a mile or so into the grove. Jamie would spy as she washed clothes in a ten-gallon bucket while his father trawled the sky. Thoughts of the past always bring a tear to Betty’s steam-soaked cheeks when she thinks of her quaint little home, the whole thing sucked up into that absolute night, nothing left of it but a well-lit memory.
The old days haunt Jamie, too. Catching stars was so easy back then. His dad would flick out a line, trawl around a few minutes, and in no time they’d be climbing down the Perch with a bag full of light.
These days, it takes hours for Jamie’s line to even reach the star-bed. The darkness is heavy, defiant. Flashlights do nothing against it, and a creeping, dull roar, emanating from somewhere deep within, is the only sign of life or movement it allows. Jamie drinks between casts, his mind hobbled so as not to wonder towards the future. Giants may have made the stars, he sometimes thinks, eyes glued to an approaching skyliner, but it’s giants, too, that steal them all away. And yet, knowing the score does nothing for his conscience: the rod still brings shame.
It’s a sharp, cold morning, and Jamie is already drunk at the foot of the Perch. A fierce belt of rum, and he tallies this morning’s offer. Skyliners are out in force, the moratorium of past months lifted because of fierce lobbying. They give off more glow than the stock itself, and Jamie has a hard time spotting his pool. He clips the nova rod to his rucksack and ascends the Perch, his calloused hands easily finding smooth, worn finger-holds.
Once ascended, Jamie finds the stump his father used to sit on. It was a throne back then; now it’s just a haggard lump of wood. He digs mournfully in his rucksack, finds a piece of salty bat jerky, and, chewing on it, pulls out his goggles and gloves. He heaves a great sigh, one of those timeless, collective expulsions that travel around like electric current in search of some beleaguered conductor.
Time to provide, he thinks, his spirits quasi-optimistic from the excess of drink.
Noon, now, and old Jamie White has just one star in his rucksack. The skyliners head off into the black, fading from sight like phantoms after a kill. The rum is gone, and anxiety grows in its absence. He descends the Perch with knots in his guts. He traverses Rambling Hills with a tremor on his lips. One star in his bag, barely more in the sky.
He’s been walking ten minutes, and, still, he can’t see his house. The night grows hard around him, and he’s standing on his stoop before he sees the front door. He grabbles clumsily for the tea Thermos, finds it and takes a swig in the hopes of masking his breath, then dumps the rest into the dark. He doesn’t even hear it hit the ground.
He opens the door and holds out the bag, illuminating the kitchen table, where Betty sits drinking tea. He smiles, although she can’t see; that morning’s light beam is gone, its source likely netted by one of the skyliners, and the bag of light in Jamie’s hand bleaches him out.
As for the source of the light beam, that faraway sun, it’ll be served at one of Toronto’s star bars. A waiter will hover over a table, the star in a fancy plate held up high, sand from far-flung beaches sprinkled around it. Wealthy young city folk, forward-thinking and upward-moving, will marvel over its beauty, will dine on its Platonian light, all the while trading statistics on rural abandonment in 2050.
Quickly—for this part, the employment of the payload, is always performed in haste—Jamie digs out his gloves and removes the star. The energy harness is mounted beside the coat rack, exactly where his father installed it decades ago. Jamie slides the star into the harness, and everything changes.
In the blink of an eye, the kitchen is awash in light. Jamie looks to Betty, sees the pupils dilate in her auburn eyes. A smile plays at her lips, coaxing the same from his. A film of promise settles over life in the beaten old house.
Jimmy, eyes bleary and salt-encrusted, strides into the kitchen with a stack of Light Side College program books tucked under his arm. Mother and father greet him warmly, pulling out a chair at the table, clearing space for the shaggy young man and his books.
“Good catch, Dad?” Jimmy asks, his thin lips twisted by a barely suppressed yawn.
“The best of the recent,” Jamie lies.
Betty pours tea. Whether in times of worry or times of hope, times of family or times alone, tea, Betty feels, is an ever-necessary lubricant. “Pick all your courses, hon?” she asks.
“Yep. Just copying down the program codes now,” he says. “I’ll be sending them by post tomorrow, one week ahead of deadline.”
Jamie reaches for one of the books and opens it randomly. This page is titled Urban Design in Postmodern Societies. Jimmy’s quick, impatient hand marked the page with a check, and Jamie wonders why. Uncomfortable, he recalls the yawning gulf of darkness between the stump atop the Perch and the star-stock way out in the sky. Not all things are so completely out of his reach, he hopes. “What kind of designing will you do, son?”
“Urban design in postmodern societies, Dad,” Jimmy says, his stubby fingers turning pages. “You’d like it, I bet.”
Jamie is about to probe further, but the phone, restored to life by the star, begins to ring. Jamie shrinks from the sound. Never one for socializing via technology, he associates phones with bad news. It’s Betty who moves for it, brushing a strand of shiny, blonde hair behind her ear as she lifts the receiver.
It’s for Jimmy. He scrapes the legs of his chair off the warped, wooden floor, smiles briefly at his mother, and takes the phone from her. He faces the wall while he talks, grunting agreeably here and there. All smiles, he hangs up and wheels around.
“They’ve invited me down for next week,” he gushes. “Orientation!”
Betty gets up from the table and envelops her son in an ambiguous hug. Jamie also gets up, slipping past the human entanglement of love and fear, and makes his way into the den. Standing next to a sagging bookshelf, he turns on the radio, causing the lights in the house to flicker.
He sighs, listens: “. . . appears to be only one star left. Despite pressure from lobbyists, who insist skywatchers are drastically underestimating what they, lobbyists, consider a self-replenishing stock, Minister Grady has reinstated the moratorium, saying it may be necessary to enforce it for decades.”
Jamie turns the radio off and checks his pulse. He takes a number of deep breaths and heads to the kitchen after achieving a measure of calm. Inside, he finds mother and son still clinging to one another. Closer inspection shows onl
y mother clinging, while son’s eyes appear preoccupied, no doubt cataloguing a list of Light Side expectations.
Arms out and hands clasping, Jamie joins the desperation. His heart beats off Jimmy’s broad shoulders. The boy’s wild brown hair smells like pillowcases. Jamie suffers Betty’s tiny hand pressed worriedly against the small of his back. Blinking back tears, he nudges her reassuringly with his elbow. Nobody says a word, and Jimmy gently struggles free of the embrace.
One star. One star, and the dark is casual tonight, not at all heavy, instead gathering at its core, stoking up to assume completely the land over which it’s been yearning for years to consume. One tiny star, and it twinkles unaffected by its solitude, ignorant of its colossal importance, innocent of its status, prized and pricey.
Outfitted with goggles and gloves, nova rod cast, Jamie slouches on the crest of Utmost Perch. Behind him, the stump is overturned, uprooted in a fit of drunken helplessness. He sees them, the skyliners. They are pirated, he knows, by outlaws on corporate payrolls. And they aren’t far off. They push forward through the black, their sights set on Jamie’s final catch.
His face grim and set, Jamie jerks his line, trying to force a snag. He clips the star once, sends it slowly travelling from its station. Cursing himself, he wheels in his line, now thankful for the cast-a-minute reel, and hurls it out again, begging the giants for an accurate cast.
The skyliners are alerted to his presence by the star’s movement. A spotlight blasts him, and he knows these industrial rapists have a stockpile, knows they wastefully fuel their ships’ instruments with stars caught during past excursions. Fearful of remaining in the light, he ducks behind the stump, careful not to loose his line.
And then he feels it. A current zaps down his line, travels through his rod and into his hands. Were it not for his gloves, he would surely be unconscious. Jolted instead by panic, he reels in the star, is mesmerized, as always, by the soft, white streak of its movement through space. But that beauty gives way instantly to terror: the star’s wake is lit only by skyliners, and that light is piffling, bound to lose against the omnipotence of night.
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