Miss?
Yes.
Vodka.
Ice?
No. Moment.
I turn toward the boy.
Drink for you?
No.
The attendant bustles up the aisle. She and her coworkers look as though they were produced in test tubes and petri plates. A laboratory beauty, perfect and undesirable. With a bow, she serves my drink. I sip it and (never able to read on planes) watch the TV screen, which now displays statistics: Altitude and Speed and Time to Destination, an appalling figure counting down by intravenous minutes. My lumbar aches. My arsehole itches. I swallow an anti-inflam, and the stats give way to an ad for the next World Cup, which Japan and Korea will cohost. Beneath a football emblazoned with world flags, a caption says:
Dream for All
2002
Programming then resumes: hidden cameras capturing the surprise and indignation of shopping mall customers pinched on the backside by actors posed as mannequins, and camera-laden tourists squirted by fountain cherubs. The boy watches briefly, and unvoiced laughter shakes his frame, but soon he goes back to his book. Reading like an infantryman on a long, wet march. Leaning slightly toward him now, I try (the light is dim) to read my mother tongue translated into his.
However many directors and higher officials of all sorts came and went, he was always seen in the same place, in the same position, at the very same duty, precisely the same copying clerk . . .
Do you know, I interrupt him, that Dostoevsky said: All Russian literature descends from Gogol’s Overcoat?
Yes, he says, I’ve heard that. Then continues reading.
. . . in it, in that copying, he found a varied and agreeable world of his own . . .
What takes you to Russia?
Using his thumb, he holds his place, and says, I have a friend there. He used to live in Seoul. Got a job in Moscow. If it had been Berlin, he shrugs, then I’d be going there.
And your book would be Goethe?
Probably, yes.
Movement, then. Not place.
Anyplace. Except for Seoul.
You don’t like it?
I do not.
Why do you stay?
Money.
Canada—
Canada. I drove a cab in Canada.
Economy is so bad?
I knew PhDs on minimum wage. Landscaping, data clerks. Thousands of us over here, teaching pidgin English.
I try to interject, but the words now tumble out of him.
The first year I worked at a dinky private institute. Hagwons, they call them. Taught kids this high. Teacher, game! Teacher, game! Hanging off my pants leg. Thought a university would be different, dignified. So I came back. Salary. Free time. But what is there to do? The few Korean profs I know are overweening, idle. And the expats, lost. You meet the odd diamond. But the rest feel like redundancies. Plastic bags blown about by global economic winds. I see them at bars and pubs, entertaining newbies with the same recycled stories. Give me half the nights I’ve spent in kitschy neon dance clubs, drinking toxic beer. Sixty-dollar cab rides. Ten-dollar coffees. Bridges and whole apartment buildings—a shopping mall—collapse, and Koreans keep on blathering this Asian Tiger crap. Pointing at you. Laughing. A man at a urinal once tried to piss on me—sorry, I’ve . . .
It’s all right.
Way too far.
I understand.
He holds up his little book as though it were redemption, and he starts to read again. I would like to slap the back of his head. Wake up, spoiled fool. At the same time, I am fond of him. Stay with me, in my flat. There are many books. We can read aloud. In your language and mine. The nights are very, very long, and there is much to learn.
Where, he says, surprising me, do you live in Russia? Moscow?
Yes, but I’m going to Petersburg now. Where my mother lives.
That’s nice, he says.
No. I’m afraid she has cancer.
The world falls between us like a severed head.
He says, I am sorry.
She is very old. Will you pardon me?
Of course.
Long minutes pass in the cramped toilet. I smell of mouldy goat cheese, and the lighted mirror vivifies my bogeyman visage. Young man, I was as fair as you. As fair as you, and tall. Mama, do you remember? I am Nikolai, your third.
Animal Cruelty
Slow down, she said.
Fuck we goin, anyway.
She said, Warsaw Caves?
I said, No.
Well. You make a suggestion.
Why are we always doin this? Every fuckin weekend.
She crossed her arms and pouted, and I mimicked her.
Don’t, she said.
How you look.
Don’t.
Silent, sweaty miles passed. I threw savage looks at her pale fat calves and recessed chin. The old man had this phrase, Steak not macaroni. There was something to it. When I first met Larissa, back in winter of third year, I could run my fingertips up and down my ribs. Now I had a gut. Mushroom caps, cheese sticks, potato skins, fajitas. She loved eating out, and she always paid. In return, I played the role of boyfriend, confusing utter pointlessness with existential depth.
~
Cat World, said the sign, 10 KM.
I braked and hit the blinker.
Larissa said, Sure?
What else is there, minigolf?
We drove a straight stretch of road, farmland either side. Then right on a concession.
I said, There was this book. Glanisburgh Public Library. Think it was just Big Cats. I signed it out all the time.
How old were you?
Eight or nine. Read it back to front, over and over and over. Memorized their markings, how far they could leap. Favourite prey. Habitats. Used to trace the pictures, then practise freehand. It was the only year I got a Good in Art.
We parked in the all but empty lot. Aside from high fencing, the place looked like a hobby farm.
What do you think, Larissa said.
I shrugged. We’re here.
August had nearly ended, but it was thirty-odd degrees, a wet, heavy heat.
The clerk said, Adults?
Students, said Larissa.
We showed our cards and went through the gate. In big chain-link enclosures on our left and right, long-tailed monkeys swung with ease toward us. Their gaze black and beady. We followed a gravel path. Gibbons, lemurs, peacocks, but most of the cats had withdrawn into shade. On the far side of a grassy field, two lions lazed, gold-brown lumps. An ocelot shimmered past the dark mouth of its den. Up ahead, a mother and her boy had paused and were staring. Puma concolor.
Mumma, did it die?
No, he’s just sleeping.
Wake up, stupid cougar!
Tyler, let him be.
Wake up wake up wake up!
The animal cracked an eye. Larissa veered and pointed.
What, I said.
Leopard.
Head low, it loped toward a corner of its cage, sharply turned, and climbed a crooked tree limb. Its saggy belly flapped. Its coat was dull and matted. Now it jumped down and made the same dizzy loop. Again and again and again. Flies meanwhile buzzed around a bloody shank of meat. The cage stank of piss-and-straw.
Larissa said, I’m leaving.
Wait, I said, and followed her.
She broke into a run.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks from a proud misFit to Michael Holmes and everyone at ECW.
For critical help in critical times, thanks to Jon and Susan Davis.
Earlier versions of some stories appeared in Prairie Fire (“Lure” and “Petty Theft”), The New Quarterly (“MacInney’s Strong”), Best Canadian Stories (“The Door Opener” and “Stragglers”), Queen’s Quarterly (“Mid-F
light”), and the Galley Beggar Press Singles Series (“Dogshit Blues”). Thank you to the editors of these publications.
Thanks to Tom Leonard for allowing me to quote his poem, “Good Style.”
The Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels helped me to become a better ambassador of myself.
Thanks as well to Ryan Simpson, Jason Heroux, Stu and Susan LeBaron, Barb and Orm Mitchell, and Gary and Pauline O’Dwyer.
In memory of David Glassco, my teacher and my friend.
About the Author
Adrian Michael Kelly is the author of the novel Down Sterling Road. His short fiction has appeared three times in Best Canadian Stories and in the Journey Prize Anthology. He grew up with his father in Campbellford, ON, and currently lives in Kingston.
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Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction. Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions, and scientifically grounded superpowers — a place where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed.
At the core of Adam Marek’s much-anticipated second short story collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent’s instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, that only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens.
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Copyright
Copyright © Adrian Michael Kelly, 2018
Published in Canada by ECW Press
665 Gerrard Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2
416-694-3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Editor: Michael Holmes/a misFit book
Cover design: David A. Gee
Author photo © Melissa Howlett
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kelly, Adrian Michael, 1967–, author
The ambassador of what : stories / Adrian Michael Kelly.
A misFit book.
Issued also in electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77041-417-4 (softcover).--
Also issued as: 978-1-77305-253-3 (ePUB),
978-1-77305-254-0 (PDF)
I. Title.
PS8621.E44A812 2018 C813’.6 C2018-902549-2 C2018-902550-6
The publication of The Ambassador of What has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Government of Canada. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We also acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
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