Fragment 33: Mantis

The morning after, I am greeted by chamomile and vanilla bean, the faint fragrances of your hair.

Running my hand tenderly down your side, so as not to disrupt the sublime movements of your sleep, but rather just incrementally induce that involuntary twitching of your body against mine.

In the face of this personal peril, what is it that we have done?

Through the window, slightly open, sounds of a summer countryside as it slowly awakes, the gentle symphony of the lake springing to life.

Thinking back on how Peter said it, Sunday night at Balfour's, the look of distressed comprehension creeping across his face.

As the sun, newly brilliant, blazes now furiously, bathing the room in its daily ritual of renaissance, I feel you stir just so slightly.

In these moments, these seconds, before thought translates into the catharsis of action, eternity lies.

Fragment 32: Concerto in F

You know what I always loved?

It was that outward pulse, that sense of anticipation, as I would stride down those long hallways that inevitably seemed to lead to the stage, blinding lights blocking out all identity except the profiles, the cheering cacophonous and growing louder until...

Exploding out onto the platform, they are chanting "Steven...Steven...Steven"....

Sometimes fifty, sometimes a hundred, but when you got those twice a year crowds of thousands...there was nothing quite like that.

What happened? I don't really know. I just remember that when I was young my Dad took me up to shake hands with Melvin Steven after the union meeting. Melvin had on an old suit, and he looked tired, but after watching over two hundred of the guys (and in those days they were all guys) go crazy about him for nearly two hours I thought he must be some kind of star.

These guys fucking hated rock-and-roll after all, so Melvin must of had something going on.

He just looked down at me, tie a little too low, breath a little too...

"So your father tells me you are named Steven..."

Fifteen years later and he is doing election number seven. This time the atmosphere is electric.

I did the phones and organized signs. Melvin hit every house in the riding.

"Putting People First". We loved the slogan. No socialist had ever won in South County but we knew that this was our time.

It didn't happen.

Cigarette smoke swirling near ceiling fans as four a.m. rolls around and the office is empty save the three.

Melvin, Cassandra and I.

I had been tapping Cass since campaign day five. We went to the Briar's Edge, drank a few C.C shots and next thing I woke up, no idea where I was till I saw her lying there, snoring lightly...so tiny cute.

We just kept it going.

Mel looked over. Sad. Drunk.

"Its to you Steven. This is my last"

I suppose I should have felt bad for him. He was so close, but it was over.

In truth, I kind of thought that this was the time. It was mine, not for any legitimate reason maybe, but it sure felt right.

Many years later, after all was said and done, I remember that I was at some stupid fucking thing held by the Youth Socialists and they were trying to honour "my life-long commitment to the cause".

After listening to some whole list of shit I had supposedly contributed to, this one little prick got up and asked me "Mr. Lawrence, if you could teach us one thing, as young people, what brought you to this fight for social justice?"

Well, asshole, who the fuck knows? It sure seemed a lot better than shoveling dirt at some construction site.

Twelve days after I won my first nomination for parliament Cass and I got married.

I remember we were on our way down to California for the honeymoon when they called the general election.

I just turned that Mustang right-back around.

There was always next year.

Victory speech blending to caucus meetings to protests to watching as the janitors would fold up the chairs after the rallies in hockey rinks across wine country.

Ivor Wynne blustery, wind brutal on an October afternoon, and there were fifteen thousand union members ecstatic over our new government. For all the good that it did them.

The air was harsh and my voice echoed oddly but as it all wound up I looked over to Cass, eyes down...

Hotels, motels, I made Days Inn my hometown. There was no easier way to be away from...

Nineteen years and I was done.

We had long lost power.

I had hung on somehow.

The fight was gone, but what the fuck was I supposed to do? This was it. This was my job...my career...I had nothing else.

They held some banquet for me as I was on the way out. Tables too close and three hundred fifty of them from across the province. Terrible wine and lousy dry chicken or fish. Speaker after speaker telling them what a great fucking guy I was, all the shit I had done for the working-class, my devotion to my wife...

(if only they knew, kinda plump, looking at me with those high-school eyes, make-up pretentious, thick, uniform issue stockings, stuttering as she said aren't you...)

So no more limelight. What to do?

I drank. Scotch, Vodka, Rye, Wine...you fucking name it I drank it.

That subservient little fuck-face they got to replace me trotted up one morning, nine a.m. and asked me what advice a man of my stature might have...I told him I had yet to meet a girl who didn't look better from the right angle.

Eventually Cass was done. She didn't even bother to talk to me.

Empty bed and a lawyer's note.

Years blurring....

I saw Daniel, as I learned his name was, by the riverside even before I knew what he wanted to do.

He looked sixteen, though he was actually nineteen, and he had on a basketball jersey and shorts, knee deep already.

I was on one of the many walks I took to kill time and trim fat (though why, there was little left to be fit for) when I saw him wading out. We had had the rains and while clear the river was running fast.

I yelled to him.

Turning back he looks at me, and then I see the dog, twenty yards off, on some tiny island of accumulated wood pieces and junk, clinging for dear life. Nothing save front legs and snout above water.

Frantic.

"What the fuck are you doing do you want to get killed?"

Its my dog...I can't just let him die....

Daniel starts wading out. He has a trim, aquiline face, bristling muscles, brimming with health.

The brush is thick on this part of the river so I push through to grab at him.

"Look don't go out there...just call for him...what's the dog's name?"

He ventures a little further, buffeted now by unexpected waves, treading more carefully...

I was sixty-two, hardly sprightly, and I knew I could not possibly intervene.

He didn't even answer, he just kept pushing towards the dog until, about eight feet out, he was suddenly lifted off his feet, cartoon like.

His arms and legs started flailing and he kept yelling "fuck...fuck...fuck...", repeating it as a mantra, more-and-more frightened. I was running alongside but the current accelerated.

I know what you all think. You think I was gutless, that I should have at least tried, but you weren't there. You didn't live through this. There was no fucking way...I would never have even...

It was a moment, I guess five minutes past, that he just stopped...well, he stopped everything. I could still see him, his form at least, but nothing was happening.

I was running the whole time through the brush and foliage, and as we got closer to the lake I started to dread that he would simply be washed out, lost, as if not so now, but I held to these slender threads.

Eventually he drifted in. Deadwood.

I had to try for several minutes to drag him onto the bankside, face purple bloated, eyes turned back.

Pulling him, this perfect manhood, and I so worn away.

As the water gushed out of his mouth, caressing his head on my lap, slowly stroking his wet hair, the ebb of the meaningful long past.

Promise. Fortitude. Strength.

The tragedy of circumstances unforeseen. Inevitable collisions with futures preferentially denied.

Kissing the forehead of a dead man. Wishing.

As the sun started to fade, night menacing, I heard the distant crackling first as his dog approached and ran up, soaked yet energetic, to happily lick the now drying leaves from his face.

Fragment 31: Proletarian Order

It was three days after the plant closed its doors for the last time that I got in my Ford pick-up truck and pulled away from the bungalow, 6 a.m., with Martha and the kids left behind still sleeping.

I had told her nothing, but had written the note. I felt she would understand.

Boris had his little fishing shack two hours out of town in cottage country.

I remember him telling me, God knows how many times, about his grandfather picking the place up in the 1940's for this tiny fucking sum of money, like two hundred bucks or some ridiculous shit, and now he was surrounded by rich folks and million dollar lakeside palaces.

But that is the way it always is, we start it and they fuck it up.

I love the way gravel sounds under the pick-up tires, and the road to Douglas Lake was all gravel once you pull off the 410. It is a beautiful noise, so I immerse myself. With twelve hundred a month going to the house, five hundred twenty to the part-time daycare, and all the other expenses of an average life in a mid-sized city, I think I can kiss the truck goodbye. Martha's four nights a week at the KFC won't cut it much with the bank when the severance runs out.

And for me that will only be....well not all that long.

This fucking truck was my reward to myself for six years of double shifts. It'll be the first thing to go.

July. Thirty degrees and perfectly sunny. Slowing slightly for shirtless kids in shorts walking roadside, pulling in past the tacky old sign that he bought with Janice the year before she died in the accident down at the turnpike (phone ringing at 4 am, Boris frantic, telling me he needed me to come out, telling me he just couldn't identify her alone...)...Chez BOJA with two cartoonish sunbathers grasping fancy looking drinks entwined on what seemed a single deckchair.

Down the stairs past the cabin to the dock.

There, by perfect blue is Boris, staring blankly across the small lake to the other shore.

As always the fishing rod lies at his side. Meaningless, he hasn't fished in years. You can't actually fish in a small lake with sixty cottages on it and a bunch of drunk stock brokers driving loud motor boats stupid fast as some kind of cock extension.

We sit for ten fucking minutes before he says a word.

The lake placid, the joy of kids laughing, jumping from some offshore swimming dock, a skinny teenager holding her hand up, swerving to-and-fro, waterskiing.

Carefree.

Boris has this huge beard, Karl Marx big he likes to say, greying round the edges, and monster tattooed arms. Only thing he wears for summer weather is the wife-beater and one of what seems to be two pairs of all together too tight shorts (not flattering, I remember he once insisted that the guy at the union sensitivity meeting was coming on to him, but given my faith in the average gay man's sense of good taste I sincerely doubt that that wrinkled ass would have gotten a second's glance from Philip).

Boris pulls out a 100 menthol Slim and lights it, drawing smoke in deeply. Its a lady's cigarette, but when Jackson, drunk, made the mistake of pointing that out one night he found that a pool cue can, in fact, serve two functions.

-How's Martha?

Always the same shit. He knows full well Martha is fine. He talked to me yesterday. Chivalry. (Seeing me, really loaded, leaning over, touching Cynthia's leg...I'm in the can and there comes Boris saying what the fuck are you doing man, what about Martha you prick...)

How's Martha? How's Martha? Well frankly, last time I saw her she was crying at that stupid fucking "retro" breakfast table we bought in 2008. It didn't seem to matter how many times I told her, she just couldn't accept that I had no fucking clue what we were going to do...

-Were you there for the last unit?

Yeah, that's right Boris, I waited around with all those other poor fuckers, tears streaming down their faces, holding hands like it was fucking 9/11 or something, as that last fucking air conditioner rolled off the line, signing their names to the fucking thing like it was an atom bomb. You can be sure that after that management threw the little fucker straight into the garbage.

Not me, sorry, but I was already drinking, blowing that payoff, knowing that the three dollars for the Bud was a day's pay for the poor bastard working the twelve hour shift at the new facility in Shanghai. I thought those fuckers were supposed to be Communists...well, we all know that in practice the powerful find a way to fuck us all, regardless of what they deign to call themselves.

-what are you proud of...

I know what he is proud of, fourth beer open, why talk...

-I remember I walked into that plant, twenty-eight years ago and the first shift I fought so goddamn hard to keep pace. That night when I got back to the old apartment we had at the time I hurt so much that I wept like a three-year old....

Some kind of singing, distant yet unmistakeable.

-But nothing compares to when I got voted onto the committee.

Vague mint odour wafting across, one cigarette lit upon another, consummate old-school chain smoker, soon to go from Miller to Rye.

Always from Miller to Rye.

-Remember the strike in '98?

(How the fuck could I remember a strike three years before I started?)

-You know what got me...it wasn't the bosses holding out or the office types, even the secretaries crossing the line, it was when that asshole down at the coffee shop came up to the picket and told me that I was a lazy mother-fucker and that I should stop complaining and be happy I have a job.

The sound, louder than it should be, of a helicopter overhead, reminding that this all became a whole lot less rustic when they opened the airport ten minutes drive north.

-Thing was I had been going to his shop for ten fucking years, must have spent 2 dollars plus a day, 300 fucking days out of the calendar, and here was this asshole, six fucking grand plus richer because of me, and he's calling me a lazy mother-fucker.

(Boris, four years ago, college kids drunk, telling him that he could wash their office floors one day, dislocating my shoulder as he pushed past me, breaking that one arrogant asshole's nose)

-Well, after the strike I went over there, ordered a latte, and when that timid little prick brought it over, with his sad fucking that'll be $2.25 sir, I took that fucking cup of shit and tossed it right over the counter at him. I think I said "shove those two dollars a day up your ass".

He's yelling, angry loud, and the kids a little over are staring across...startled...

-Boris, c'mon man, tone down...

-Did you go to any of the rallies?

Calmer, now, leaning back, opening another pack, a bit of a breeze accentuating his immense mane of hair, he staring off to his right, avoiding eye-contact...Boris, when angry, always avoids eye-contact...doesn't even matter if he's mad at you, he can't look over.

-No, Boris, you know I didn't. I didn't see the point. We could have protested every day for the last seven months after we got the fucking news and you know that it wouldn't have made any difference at all.

Boris keeps staring away, I should have just shut up...

-Look, be as mad as you want, and I am not saying that going wasn't worthwhile, but I spent the time with the kids. A Sunday is a Sunday and the kids don't give a shit about protesting if it means that we don't play basketball in the driveway.

-You could have brought them, teach them a thing or two about the union, you know all these teenies don't care at all about what we fought for and your kids will be teenagers soon enough...and then, who knows, maybe one of those endless stream of twenty somethings doing the minimum wage thing, hating unions because the asshole manager at Wal Mart that they work for tells them to...

Why disagree with him? He's not wrong, I guess (though I am sure that like all older people his opinion of the young is about as interesting and enlightened as is the average young person's view of him), but I just hadn't cared. Deer in the headlights, fucking Stockholm Syndrome, I don't know, I just wanted to move on, I just wanted to get out of there. Maybe it hurt too much.

-I knew you never came, of course, not like I couldn't see...You know you are part right. I remember the last of the three that NDP guy came. He got up and he sounded great, going on about how if they had been in power, if the worker's had been represented in government, it would never have happened, we would all still have our jobs because they would have a "Made in Ontario" industrial strategy or some such shit. We all know its fucking nonsense though...NDP or no NDP they can move their factory anywhere they want. Small changes seem to change nothing at all.

Silence, gentle waves ripple past, that midday quiet that comes between lunch and late afternoon, where everyone retires for an hour or so...a Canadian summer siesta.

-I wonder, you know, is it really so awful if working people get a decent shake...I mean, to not have an education or office job, does it really mean that we should get some shit wage or have other poor folks get mad if they don't have a union job with union pay? There is just no solidarity at all out there anymore. Its like it is somehow my fault that other people are getting even more fucked by their bosses than I am, like they just can't see that its not me...

-I should go Boris...

I want to leave. I feel even worse than when I came...and that is actually saying something.

Boris doesn't even answer, gaze still off aside...

-You know, I only ever liked you because of baseball.

Now this is something of a shock...

-What are you talking about..

Laughing, first time in days...

-Well, we were all over at the Golden Goose, Friday night, shift's end, and they had some godawful Bob Seger rip-off band singing about all that old time fucking rock-and-roll, and there you were, alone at the bar, staring up at the T.V. totally immersed in the Blue Jay's game, even though we were having a .400 season at the time. I thought, now that is dedication. This guy sticks with things.

The sky is now absolutely clear and the sun is brutal hot, beating down, no shade. Beer, fresh from the cooler is lukewarm in moments...

-Up till then I kind of thought you were just another young asshole. But you joined the bowling league, and you were there for all the hockey games...and you were the best goddamn outfielder we ever had on the plant team...

I loved those nights, so hot, humid, lights way too bright, ridiculous bad quality play, always some jackass who took it way too seriously, drinks at the Kat's Kaboose after, Screwdrivers, Molsons, bad wine...happy in the knowledge that the weekend lay ahead...

Boris and I, winning that stupid trophy, autoworkers glaring at us, but all in good fun, Sandy calls for Springsteen and the bartender obliges...

Boris is now, five years later, very drunk already, and kicks out forward knocking the bottle of Alberta's Finest over. He seems almost dizzy and uncertain. Voice wistful...sad...

-we'll never take that fucking title again, will we?

I suppose not.

Fragment 30: Byzantium

Weird how it feels, the pulse running slowly through you, knowing that you are driving too fast.

I guess that's why I eyed him suspiciously from the backseat, realizing that he was pushing the pedal. The city oblique through mist of gentle rain and thicker early evening fog, elevated expressway a monstrosity of modernity, looking in on condo dwellers and shift workers alike until you hit the off ramp.

I am sure he wondered, deep down, why the fuck he abandoned a future as a doctor in some distant land to drive a drunk guy across the highway to Babylon in Canada.

Who knows? Frankly, who the fuck cares? All I know is that five thousand years from now, all things being equal, our empires will be gone and those we looked down on will have had the last laugh.

For a time.

It all changes, see, or at least that is what my Dad taught, for all that his bullshit was worth (not much...fucker with his belt, cigarette, knowing I was into boys, looking at me with those nasty fucking eyes...), but he did teach me that, despite appearances, it is all transitory.

Power today means fuck all tomorrow.

And what applies to societies...

Anyway at last at exit ramp, I don't need the contempt anymore, seeing that I am paying the bill and all, down, round-and-round, into deeper fog, dark to darker, until he drops me at the park behind the Flat Iron.

What he wants to say is....what he says is ..."that will be$22.25".

No please for gay folks.

I was tempted to tell him to go fuck himself, but why bother.

Out into October style brisk. God, I love that time in Toronto. Dark getting earlier ( and only children and jackasses long for daylight ), cold not yet cold, mist when not expected.

Nothing expected.

I knew that I was early but I wanted him so much I didn't care.

Travelling winding stairs to the bar, band blasting from the back declaring themselves with bad Stones' covers and tributes to groups that they will never be.

Well, what to expect, we wouldn't part with the $10 if they played a bunch of sad shit none of us had ever heard.

Would we?

This platinum blonde chick and her plump friend are staring at me soon after I sit down. Seems to always happen. Gratified to know that had I been born straight you would have been into me...or would you have...do we not always want what we cannot have?

Dawn leans over (hey, fuck you, she said that that was her name) and asks me if I would like to see why her boyfriends have always said she gushes?

Not really...but it is hard not to be curious...

Glen arrives right then, red hair, fit, looking like I knew he would, like I knew he did...

Looking like the guy I had wanted to screw every night for the last ten years, ten years to the day since we had once met.

(Glendon College, known for its French girls, and there was Glen, Pub Night, rubbing harder-and-harder against me, dance floor crowded and dense with smoke, my cock growing larger and larger until...)

"So, stranger, fancy meeting you here."

Glen has this smile, disarming, gentle. I buy him a Gin and Tonic and move ever so slightly closer to him, his breath sweet and perfumed, his upper lip beautiful, my heart beating faster, knowing that I have waited too long.

He looks so fucking fantastic naked, an Adonis, as I work my way down his magnificent chest to his glorious member, throbbing, responding to my every touch, so proud, tall and so thick. It was just...well I suppose it was delicious.

He arrived in those suits that all these boys with wives wear, too perfect, too family-man, too corporate.

Ready, as he leaned over and put his hand on me, to make that version of life just disappear.

I have never wanted to fuck and be fucked like that.

And when he came, exploding inside of me, I felt him throbbing, pulsating, pushing...

Hotel room bleak, but not us, happy in each other, happy in our embrace.

Kissing his ear, stroking him, knowing we had to part...

So Glen, will I ever, you know, see you again...

I meant it as a laugh, but no response.

I guess I fell asleep, but when I awoke he was leaning naked against the window, his curved back delightful, his profile just...just...

I went over to him, to the window, and put my arms around his waist. He turned and smiled at me, tilting his head down to my cheek. I kissed the crown of his head, running my fingers through his thick red hair.

You know I won't see you again...

Saw the plane then, lower and lower towards the island airport. I feel dizzy watching and dizzy knowing...

...and on Monday where will we all be...will I still be there...without him again will I still be there at all....

Fragment 28: Thessaloniki

We were supposed to meet at 7pm but Andrew was always late.

I got there, punctual as usual, and slid into one of the booths at the back.

Jackson's was busy, even for a Friday, and I was lucky to get a spot. Waitress, pale, skinny, unfriendly, was a composite of every girlfriend I had ever had. I should have made a pass...no one had told me to fuck off in days.

I ordered a plate of the Tandoori style wings and a Corona and watched the start of the hockey game on the big screen TV they had across the far side of the bar.

I was working on dead soldier number two and the first period was ending when he finally got there. Still in the office clothes, dark blue sports jacket, crisp white shirt with light yellow tie, pants that almost seemed freshly pressed. Remarkable how he could pull that off.

He worked a quick ten minute walk away, and I knew there was no fucking chance he had stayed late at week's end, so I had a pretty good idea that he had had a few before coming.

Usual small talk to start. Andrew never said anything important until at least the third drink.

I had met him in university. Fifteen years ago now. He had joined the same drama club I had. Took me just a couple of meetings to realize that he was after the same girl as well.

Solely at a Liberal Arts College would you read Moliere and Arthur Miller as a way to get laid.

In the end he married Klara.

I only...well, we never really talked about that.

Paul, look, things between Klara and I are finished....she asked me for a divorce....

Quiet descending as the girl came with his scotch. A young looking pseudo-cowboy with an acoustic guitar was tuning up on stage and the business women in the dressy outfits behind him suddenly laughed loudly. He looked down, eyes averted, almost as if embarrassed.

What are you going to say?

I said what we all would say. Why? Have you tried counselling? What about the kids?

It took me awhile to ask the single question of any interest at all... what happened?

Nothing...

Long pause. He smiled tentatively, knowing I didn't believe him.

Honestly Paul, nothing happened...we just...we...well, we just grew apart.

An hour or so flows past, game boring, conversation awkward and uncomfortable, a few too many pregnant pauses. Laughter over past exploits, stories recycled yet again.

Andrew smiles finally, sadly, small wrinkles the tiny blemishes to an otherwise handsome face. I always thought he had a bit of a Cary Grant gee-whiz quality. Infectious and effortless.

Do you remember our wedding Paul?

Yes, of course, I remember. I was his best man.

His folks had gone all out. Open bar, live band, late-night DJ. It was great. I danced with a cute little bride's maid until 2 a.m.

Klara had looked just too beautiful.

It was time to go.

Andrew knew it. I knew it.

We paid the bill and were walking out with the live show starting astride us.

It sounded a decent Dylan knock-off but I was tired.

Paul, was your Dad at the wedding?

My Dad...

My Dad had definitely not been at the wedding.

He died didn't he?

He had died. Two years before. The lifetime of chain smoking had finally caught up to him.

(Withered and wheezing, decrepit looking, so many tubes and a single tear falling from his left eye, fuck I knew I should never have visited him)

I don't think I ever met your Mom...

No...no you couldn't have.

We shook hands, odd for us, and then he walked off, dissolving into December dark...

I seem to think it was a Tuesday that I was newly seven and sitting on her lap.

My mother, stern and silent, gazing away from me, chastising for a minor transgression.

My father pulling up in his car. Her face so very sad.

A couple days later there was Dad, Lucky Strike in hand, holding a tea towel in Grandma's basement, telling me she was gone.

Dead.

At the house that night I knew there was something he was holding back. Everyone avoided me. All his friends whispered. I felt that there was an underlying sense of shame.

I had never seen my father cry.

We lived in a squat suburban bungalow and I slept in a small bedroom up at the front.

Mickey Mouse and Guy Lafleure posters, books of one kind or another, a small radio that I listened to to go to bed.

After Mom died I had this recurrent dream where I would wake up in my bed, calling out for my father, screaming Daddy...Daddy...

Jumping up from beneath sheets, the house would be empty, every corner vacant, no furnishings, no people, no Mom, no Dad.

I would run room-to-room, increasingly frantic, yelling more-and-more loudly, yet, somehow, understanding that there was nothing...

Nothing....

My father would always rush in, as I sat up in bed, sometimes hysterical, and he would hug me, pull me tight to his chest, almost crushing me in his ribs...

Paul... Paul...it is OK....you are OK....it is only a dream Paul...

About five years later, when I was twelve, we were driving back from Grandma's late one night. We had eaten order-in Chinese food, but as we left the sky had turned morbid dark and brooding and, when near halfway home, it had opened up in a terrible downpour.

I sat in the back of the old Cutlass Supreme as the torrents hammered harder and harder until, sideways slanting rain blurring out all visibility, my father pulled off of Dwight Ave. into the vacant parking astride the huge sidings of the soup factory.

For a few minutes we sat there, motor idling, Bonnie Tyler on the radio...

Dad...

There was no response for a moment...

Dad...when Mom died...you know...when she went...well some of my friends...well...what do you think happened to Mom?

My father sat, smoke pooling above his head, lingering in the near vacuum of the Cutlass interior.

When he spoke he never even looked back.

Your mother...you know no one knows what happens to people when they die. Some people think we come back again. Some think...some think that when you die...when your mother died...you go to heaven...they think she is there, safe, among the angels.

Bonnie Tyler faded to Willie Nelson and the loud horn of a fast passing truck split the cab of our car as the rain eased up enough that my father seemed ready to go.

That Mom is up there...safe...is that what you believe?

The empty air between us as the car pulled slowly away from the siding, advancing into the now gently rhythmic patter....

No

Fragment 27: Soren

I ran into Regine at a church function. It was a bitterly cold February Sunday and I, against all of my keener judgement, had chosen to take refuge at the post-sermon social that I had, with true devotion, avoided for many prior months like it had been some horrible medieval plague.

Now, praise be God, United Church gatherings bore, at least at the time, a decided resemblance in their intensity to the average pulse rate at the morgue.

Cumbersome concrete stairs to a room awash with the elderly, where fifty seemed sprightly, a cornucopia of cucumber and tuna fish sandwiches and gigantic carafes of very bad coffee.

Portraits of forgotten ministers and, oddly, prime ministers.

It was, however, exceptionally warm. A bulwark against the onslaught of the seemingly secular snow.

At twenty-seven, I felt certain that I was the youngest, by half, of the assemblage.

Regine, you know, had this infectious, delightful little giggle. It is hard to fully appreciate should you have never had the great pleasure to hear it.

Floating across to me, enchanting, I turned to find myself confronted by this magical girl, nineteen and beautiful, the blue dress hugging the curves of a burgeoning womanhood that was, well, magnificent.

Why the good Lord saw fit that she should find me fetching stands as a grand testament to his relish of the absurd.

Our first date a study in contrast with she so radiant almost despite herself, and I a cad, scruffy and undistinguished in my decrepit, tattered green trench coat, my hippie cords and the bizarre fading fedora that for some unknown reason I wore at the time.

Regine.

Why deny? She had a certain transcendence.

Anyway, within a month I had proposed to her, and, much to my shock, she had accepted.

Almost immediately I knew I had made a catacylsmic error and not because of her father's frantic, furious phone calls to me either.

I had led a life blissful as it was separate and disengaged.

Impervious to outside influence.

But it is not as easy as one might think to cease to be the object of someone's affection.

A charmed courtship this did not turn out to be.

Dear Ms. Olsen.

What can I say?

A part of me wanted you so very much. Just never on terms with which the either of us could have lived.

Paradox.

It all came to a head that day on the island.

Ferry docking with the mass of humanity spewing forth as we two almost wished to hang back.

Walking silent.

Other lovers on rented double bikes or afloat in giant swans.

Us, no more communication. Your eyes sad.

Making our way through the island's farm, from seven to seventy-seven this sea of people, all apart, unknowing, yet somehow entwined, somehow connected.

The proof of any lack of meaning in this parade of the mundane stemmed from its own absence.

There was no climactic fight but as you climbed into the back of the taxi, without farewells, it was clear.

I must say, though, that the photo you sent me of you, Joseph and the newborn sits on my refrigerator door.

It makes me tremble a little bit inside every single day.

Fragment 26: Seneca

First memories. Irrelevant.

Grew up middle-class.

Mom a lawyer.

Dad a prof.

We were the All-Canadian family!

Cross-country skiing on winter weekends. Summer cottage canoe escapades.

Teen years lost necking in the dark in the boatslip.

Hidden, seeming always, beneath emotions lost and found.

High School a blast of the usual shit.

I suppose being from where I was from left too many options. Too many places to go.

Well, I wanted to make a difference.

Change the world.

Went into social work.

Four years of pseudo-Marxist bullshit followed by day-upon-day of driving around the city's projects monitoring people's kids.

I was a prick, a fucker, a cunt, a faggot, a sack-of-shit, you name it. From revolutionary to fifth column for the police. From idealism to...

Well, one day Celeste's father made me an offer.

Seemed the big companies were downsizing. And the one he was high up in needed a shoulder to cry on.

Literally.

They needed some brave soul to counsel those who were to be cut and to encourage those left behind. Keep the company cohesive and all that.

It paid over double what the city did.

By then I had kids to raise, and, after all, these folks needed help.

Right?

If you don't work within the system, how can you change it?

And that is the point...

Right?

Anyway, by my second year I had supervised the effects of twelve hundred layoffs. The counseling was always the same.

The tears. Fears.

What about my family?

I don't understand, I always did what you wanted me to.

I'll change....

I'll do anything...

They never got it.

There was, no joke, absolutely fucking nothing they could have done.

The company needed to satisfy some anonymous set of invisible shareholders. Their families were, in the final analysis, of no consequence.

Peripheral to the broader vision.

Eventually, come mid-December, they flew me out to Winnipeg for another round of purges.

One hundred and twenty seven employees.

One third of the office.

A pre-Christmas Santa Claus surprise.

Most of the sessions were the usual shit, but towards the end of the second day this middle-aged guy, crumpled suit, dirty collar, five o'clock shadow that seemed semi-permanent wanders in.

Now, remember, the counselling is voluntary. People come to let it all out.

But this guy, he just kind of sat there. Said nothing for ten minutes.

It was really unnerving.

Finally he reaches down into the blue canvas bag he had brought and pulls out a .38 caliber revolver.

Places it gently in front of him on his side of my desk.

I thought of lunging for it, then thought that that was a rather insane idea.

George Crandell, it turned out that this was his name, gives me a little, I guess ironic, look.

I came here today to kill them. I was going to go up to senior management, floor three, and put a bullet into everyone of their fucking heads. Fantasized about it all night. The chaos. Their screams.

God it would have been great. But you see the problem is that it is not them, its me. The failure lies within.

Now that, of course, was total horseshit, and without encouraging him to revert to his original plan I was about to say as much. But he snapped the gun up as I started to speak and shot himself in the side of the head.

The only words I managed to get out were hold on now before his life dissolved into a crimson cloud of blood and brain matter.

Saying I was in shock would be to understate matters significantly.

Gazing emptily at his half skull. A glazed look in the eyes.

After the police, I recall that I called Celeste's dad and told him that I was done. Forever.

She and I separated shortly thereafter.

A couple of years later I was in this antique shop in Kingston, right near Queens. Full of all manner of junk and ephemera. I have no idea what I was looking for. Just looking.

Moving aside old military uniforms. Shifting through dusty prints. Thumbing pages of leather bound volumes of Dickens and the Bard.

I saw that behind some ancient, tattered, dangling Soviet banner was a hidden shelf. Drawing it away there he was, Seneca, looking at me.

Knowing.