The Thinking Cap

Posted on March 26, 2012 | Leave a comment


Spinning Sky, Modified Flickr image, by Lomo-Cam

“Where the hell am I?”

I came to in a contraption like a dentist’s chair, tilted back, my legs, arms, torso and head strapped in tight. In front of me, arranged on a cross, was a set of lights – I counted nine bulbs on the horizontal arm, four on each side and one in the centre; thirteen on the vertical, four above and eight below the intersection point.

“Good afternoon Mr. Drofrethru,” a voice welcomed me over a PA system. “I trust you had a pleasant sleep.”

Drofrethru? What the hell?

“This won’t take long and it won’t be painful. I promise.”

“What won’t take long?” I said, but it wasn’t my voice issuing from my chest, it was Farmer John’s. It felt like my head was stuffed with cotton batting. “WHAT WON’T TAKE LONG?”

“Don’t struggle,” the man said pleasantly. “You will only tire yourself out, and quite possibly injure yourself against the restraints.”

“What are you doing to me?”

“Come now. This is part of your treatment John.”

“Treatment?”

“You remember signing the ETP agreement when you confessed, no?”

“ETP agreement?”

“Please,” the mans said, an inflection of of impatience altering his voice. “The Expedited Treatment Protocol Agreement. You are a lucky man, Mr. Drofrethru. You will receive the most advanced treatment available to people afflicted with your condition.”

Funny, I didn’t feel so lucky. I swiveled my eyes trying to put together an image of the room where I was being held. It appeared to be empty. I could make out the top of a large window off to my right. I imagined the white coat who was talking to me sitting in a control booth hunched over bank of knobs, buttons and dials. To my left stood a large grey, metal box plugged into a thick umbilicus of electrical cable. I followed the wiring up and over my left shoulder, until my vision was impaired by the rim of something like a bicycle helmet.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“Relax Mr. Drofrethru.”

“Why are those fucking wires going into my head?”

“We will be monitoring the electrical activity in your brain during the procedure. There’s nothing to worry about. You won’t feel a thing… well, perhaps a little dizziness and nausea, but nothing more than that.”

“I don’t remember signing any agreement.”

“If you wish, we can sedate you Mr. Drofrethru. That won’t interfere with our treatment. We prefer not to, of course. We are better able to monitor your reactions if you are not sedated, but it’s totally up to you.”

I hadn’t noticed the plastic tubing snaking into my right arm from an IV stand positioned over my right shoulder.

“I can administer the relaxant from here, John. It will incapacitate your muscles without affecting your mental acuity. Unfortunately, there may be some unpleasant side effects if I am forced to do that. Patents sometimes soil themselves because they lose the ability to control their sphincters.”

What choice did I have? I could struggle, maybe even break free before the paralysis set it. Then what? I imagined a squad of white uniformed orderlies behind the locked treatment room door, padding about on crepe soled shoes, their hairy arms protruding out of short-sleeved shirts, ready to grab me and drag me back to the rack kicking and screaming.

I imagined other patients and staff in the sanitized hallway looking on, their faces contorted in disapprobation, standing back and letting the professionals do their work.

“That’s better,” my handler said. “When the procedure begins all you have to do is watch the sequence of lights on the armatures above you. They will guide your thoughts and help you achieve the state of mind needed to effect treatment. Do you understand?”

His question hung in the air like a stale fart. I wanted to tell him  to fuck off.

“If we cannot achieve the appropriate mind pattern, Mr. Drofrethru, we will assist you by administering muscle relaxant. You must follow the patterns in the apparatus. It is an essential component of your treatment.”

Still, I didn’t answer. But that only left me feeling powerless, like a stubborn child resisting the sing-song threats of an all knowing, ever patient adult.

For what seemed a long time we remained like that. Nothing happened. I closed my eyes. Drifted in and out of consciousness. Then the crucifix lit up, starting at the four extremities. The pinpricks of light penetrated my eyelids as if they were made of cellophane. My eyes blinked open.

“Follow the sequence Mr. Drofrethru!” my handler coached.

The second light on the bottom armature winked on after a while, its companion winking off. The lights on the other three armatures held steady. Then after another interval all the outer lights winked off in unison, the adjacent inner lights winking on simultaneously.

“That’s it John. Follow the pattern.”

This sequence repeated four times until all the light converged in the center of the cross. In the second iteration I noticed that the lights went from bright, to slightly dimmer as they closed in on the focal point. At the centre the light brightened noticeably – or was I imagining it. With each iteration this dimming and brightening effect became more pronounced, and the speed of the sequence quickened.

I don’t know how many iterations it took, or exactly when the transition occurred, but at some point the identifiable stages of the sequence merged into a pulsing movement of light. It drew me inexorably toward the point of convergence. I wanted desperately to look away, but even if I had been loosed from my bonds I would not have been able to break the spell of these flashing lights. I felt consciousness being drawn out of me… felt like a man clinging desperately to a lamp post while a tornado tore at his clothes, his skin, sucked at every pore and orifice, eager to turn him inside-out.

Then I let go.

I bolted upright in my bed.

“Jesus Christ!” I gasped.

The room was dark. I could make out the ghostly shapes of things flung against the wall as if by centrifugal force: the dresser, chest of drawers, leather bucket seat, end tables. The digital clock winked from 3:41 to 3:42 a.m. I swung my feet over the side of the bed, stumbled over and ripped open the curtains. I needed to confirm there was still a sky out there that matched the pattern of my version of my universe.

It was a clear night, cold, with stars spangling the impenetrable black of the heavens. I couldn’t help looking for one, singular star brighter than all the rest and wondering if that was the same celestial object Farmer John had been staring at in my dream.

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca

~~~

To be continued. The Cosmic Chicken is a work of dynamic, speculative fiction. You have reached the expanding ‘event-horizon’ of this story, which is being written online. Send me an email if you would like to be added to the Cosmic Chicken collaborative group.

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Posted in Thought Particle

In the armchair

Posted on March 12, 2012 | Leave a comment


Modified Flickr image, The Chair, by Metro Centric

Dr. Morrow sits on a straight-backed chair, which he positions in the periphery of your field of vision. He becomes disembodied voice materializing on the brink of consciousness. He’s good at asking questions that need the answers I don’t have.

“So what’s that like?” Dr. Morrow asked when I said so.

“Like there isn’t enough air in the room to keep me alive. Like a fish in a pond full of murky, oxygen depleted water, who knows it will only make things worse if he gets mad or desperate.”

He seemed to understand, but it’s hard to tell with Dr. Morrow, because he seems to understand all my quirks, absorbing my reflective monologues like the modern-day version of a Greek oracle forever getting ready to impart obscure wisdom… before asking another question.

Sometimes our sessions seem like a contest of wills, him probing, me setting clues and traps. I know that sounds ridiculous, but cat and mouse is part of the process, no? I think – at some level – I’m posing clues and riddles for myself, not Dr. Morrow. His knack is to get me to follow my own leads, to alert me to the snapping of twigs somewhere off in my unconscious realm, or to the crunch of boots on a gravel pathway round back of the house.

I like it when he has to pause and reflect for a while on something I’ve said. There’s this subtle sense of importance that creeps into our sessions, which gets accentuated when I surprise him – like maybe he’ll think my case might be worth a write up in Psychology Today, which I’ve started buying at Chapters since beginning my therapy.

But nothing seems to perturb the tweedy calm of Dr. Morrow, who bears some resemblance to Sigmund Freud, sans spectacles and cigar. I asked him once if his personal appearance had influenced his practice. A silly question, really. But a part of me chuckles to think he might have been dubbed Ziggy in his university days, and another part of me is pretty sure he would have taken the teasing and made something useful of it.

“Do you feel Kally’s decision to go with Mr. Buckley to his church is directed at you?”

I suppose I could turn that table around and ask how Kally would react if she walked back into my life right now – if she saw the ungodly mess of our kitchen, the rumpled sheets of our unmade bed, the cobwebs, dust, spots on the picture windows.

Is that deliberate neglect? Am I being intentionally helpless, as if I’d never rinsed a plate or tidied a counter when we were together? As if I hadn’t done most of the shopping, swirled a brush round the toilet bowl every now and again, done the handy-man thing? Changed Elgar’s diapers? Shaved every day?

Did I want her to see that? What she had done to me?

“No,” I said. “I think she’s as fucked up as me right now, only she’s trying harder not to show it – even to herself. I’ve made things worse for her Dr. Morrow. I’ve been selfish. A prick, really.”

“Why’s that?”

I glanced at him for a second, annoyed. He remained unperturbed and somehow implacable. His question wriggled around in my brain like a larva settling in for a spell.

When I described myself as a ‘prick’ it had been a bit of hyperbole intended to catch the good doctor’s attention – one of my hints, albeit even crasser and more blatant than usual. In the millisecond of utterance – I now realized – I had gauged it a sufficient mia culpa to make my own outrage at Kally seem justifiable and perfectly reasonable.

Dr. Morrow was calling my bluff, the bastard!

“Why’s what?”

“Why do you think you’ve been selfish in your grieving?”

“I believe ‘prick’ was the word I used to describe myself – my self.”

When I think back, I can’t remember my parents ever throwing a birthday party for me. I guess they were too busy throwing other things. But if they had, and if they had asked me to blow up the balloons as part of the preparation experience, I would have blown up at least one rubber until it popped. You have to do that once in your life, right – keep blowing and blowing and blowing until BANG! the damn thing explodes in your face and your mother scolds you for scaring the bejesus out of her and tells you to stop being such an idiot.

“So how’s that related to your being selfish in your grieving?”

Kally and I flew to Calgary to visit her parents and share the good news of her pregnancy. We hit some turbulence over the Rockies. The fasten your seat belt command crackled over the PA system. Even the stewardesses packed away their things and buckled up. I remember holding Kally’s hand, but thinking: If we crash, would I be thinking of her in those final moments, or would each of us be staring in horror out the window as the horizon tilted, praying from a strictly first person point of view, “Don’t let this happen! Don’t let this be the end!”

“Do you feel Kally was sensitive to your needs in her grieving, Rich?”

“We were both so damaged. I don’t know that we could have helped one another. And there was stuff we couldn’t really deal with at the time.”

“What stuff, Rich? The blame for Elgar’s abduction, you mean, or something else? You need to ask that question Rich: is there other stuff behind what’s happening to you and Kally right now. Stuff that predates Elgar’s abduction.”

Sometimes silence becomes a waiting game. It stretches on and on and on, its internal elasticity expanding each second into another forever. Sometimes you can almost believe that parable about the seagull transporting a beach across the continent one grain of sand at a time, then discovering eternity’s still out there waiting to be filled once the job is done. That he hadn’t really accomplished a damn thing.

“And what about now?”

“Huh?”

“The stuff you couldn’t deal with? Are you ready to deal with it now?”

“Now’s too late, don’t you think?”

Dr. Morrow frowned, perplexed.

“It’s not too late, Richard,” he said. “In fact, it might be too early.”

God damned oracles! They never give you a straight answer.

“How’s Cosima?’ he asked suddenly, as I was getting ready to launch.

My face puckered. Wasn’t I the one who brought up the subjects of the day? What? Was he so into Cosima’s story that he needed a weekly installment?

“We’re on the road to Aveneg,” I said. Then I described the incident with the lunatic in the luxury car and our spectacular escape.

Dr. Morrow frowned, perplexed.

“What?” I wanted to know.

He gave me an odd look, as if I were a combination lock he once owned, but he’d forgotten the sequence of numbers that would open me up. “I’m going to step outside what is strictly practice for a second Rich, if that’s okay, and describe a hypothesis that’s taking shape – call it a speculative diagnosis, if you will.”

Intrigued, I nodded.

“I’m thinking that maybe our dreams can sometimes be a means of re-enacting the unalterable facts of our lives in a venue where we can take meaningful action to resolve them. Maybe – and please excuse me for the term – maybe personal fiction is a place where we can engage in quests…”

“And emerge as heroes?”

He bobbed uncomfortably in agreement. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it’s our unconscious intent to be the antagonist in the drama – to seek the punishments we deserve. Like I said, this is outside what I would  strictly call my practice.”

“You mean I’m not paying a hundred-and-fifty bucks an hour to hear this?”

Dr. Morrow laughed and relaxed.

“You’re also hinting I’m never going to find Elgar in Gallus, aren’t you?”

I wanted a fly, or a wasp, or a mosquito to materialize in the room. Something buzzing around, banging into windows, disturbing the palpable silence. But we were alone, Dr. Morrow and I, with nothing to distract us.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“You’re right,” he answered quickly.

 

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca

 

 

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Posted in Uncategorized

The Empty Nest

Posted on March 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

I found myself peering over the contours of a rumpled linen landscape. I could have moved had I wanted, but deliberately imagined an army of Lilliputians tightening their skein of ropes over my hulking form. They had crept in through the open bedroom window as I lay snoring, and lashed me to the magic, form-fitting carpet of my nightmares.

In a former incarnation I would have woken to Kally laying next to me. I had not yet accustomed myself to a state of consciousness without her, and the vacuum of her leaving threatened to suck me in once more. The stubborn bonds of my captors held fast, however, and the moment’s grief subsided like a shout, echoing down the graduated darkness of an unlit hallway.

Sourness came next. An awareness of the body’s nocturnal excretions and emanations. Trapped as I was, I could not escape the taste of bile and the smell of sweat on my pillow. My skin itched. Soon I would have to break free to commence my morning ablutions. But not yet. The thought of brushing my teeth, shaving, clipping nails, showering, combing, perfuming – it all disgusted me somehow. It seemed a pointless subterfuge, a disguise for the gulls who believed toothpaste, deodorant, soap and cologne actually had restorative value.

I didn’t want any of that.

“The stench of fire and brimstone permeates the flesh.” The words came back to haunt me. Brian Buckley had uttered them one morning, standing on our doorstep with a pamphlet he wanted me to take. He apparently believed – believes – that in our dreams we visit hell, and that no amount of scrubbing and rinsing can take the stink of it away.

Kally and I shook our heads at that one even as we tried to understand, tried not to judge.

Where was Cosima? What was he doing at that precise moment? I felt I had abandoned him and unless I returned his progress would stop, like a windup toy bumping into a wall or running down its store of potential energy. I pictured his movements becoming random, intentionless, distracted by every crumb or pebble along the way. If I didn’t point him in the right direction, how would we ever get to Aveneg and the National Corrections Institute in Nedlawbow, where they were holding Farmer John?

“Why are we going there anyway?”

Sometimes it takes a superlative act of will to ignore a question like that. Call it faith, stupidity, anything you want, I simply had to continue my quest. I had gone to Gallus in search of Elgar. Nutrino was there too. Hope did not lay in any other direction. So no matter how convoluted the trail became, I had to follow it. But I had appearances to keep up in my home-dimension. Chores that needed tending to. My appointment that afternoon with Dr. Morrow, for instance. Picking up the mail and newspapers from the front porch. Maintaining a semblance of sanity, at least enough to keep the meddling authorities at bay.

I groaned, a Titan directed by incomprehensible rules of Fate.

I willed my limbs into motion, snapping the imaginary mesh that had been my excuse to lie in. The momentum of my left leg swung my body over then I pivoted to an upright position, sitting on the edge of the bed facing the closet, and off to the right the door into the hallway. I felt like a hibernating bear awakening, dimly uncertain of what to expect outside the entrance to his den. But that illusion of doubt lasted only a few seconds. The world beyond my bedroom had not changed since I’d last shambled through it. A crew of pixies had not visited in the night to tidy the mess.

Shuffling into the hallway, I made a pit-stop in the bathroom, then carried on into the kitchen. “Shit!” It was an even worse mess than I’d remembered: dishes stacked in the sink, garbage can overflowing, bottles and tins littering the counter – the detritus of a disorganized life piling up, forming new layers of evidence that might someday be unearthed by future archaeologists tracking down the genealogy of human intentions and mistaking my kitchen for something other than an aberration.

My ‘real world’ – it seemed to me – was becoming a tiresome cliche: a first-person singular version of the Odd Couple, starring Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau…

“Brrring!” The phone jangled. I glanced at the base unit, but the handset wasn’t there. “Brrring!” Empty soup cans, a cereal box, a stale loaf of bread. “Brrring!” Plastic milk containers, a half empty bag of nachos… “Fuck!” “Brrring!” I found it at last, in the cutlery drawer where the forks should have been.

“Hello!”

“Hello, is Richard Mather there?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Dr. Morrow’s office calling to confirm your one-thirty appointment.”

“Yes. Thanks. I’ll be there.”

“See you then Mr. Mather.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

I punched the off button and tossed the phone back into the cutlery drawer, where I now knew I would be able to relocate it. The digital clock on the stove said 9:23 a.m. I subtracted an hour to account for the Daylight Savings Time shift, then added an hour and twenty-seven minutes for the power outage we’d had in January, and came up with 10:50 a.m. Two hours and forty minutes to make myself look sane for my psychologist…

“Brrring!”

“I haven’t even made my god-damned coffee yet!”

“Brrring!”

“Hello!”

“Hi Rich. It’s me.”

“Oh. Hi Hun. How you doing?”

“I’m okay. You?”

“Good. I miss you, I’m not gonna lie about it.”

“I miss you too,” Kally said.

The line went dead for a second. She wanted me to think about that. There had been a barely audible inflection in her voice, a nuance hinting at deeper meaning. Then I got it and smiled wryly, wishing she could see that I understood perfectly – as only a sometime husband and former lover can.

Even if there was nothing else left, just that iota of shared confidence would have been worth the remembered pain.

“I’m calling to give you a bit of a heads-up actually.”

My heart clenched like a fist. I wanted to tell her to stop. Not to say anything that couldn’t possibly be true.

“I’m going to church this Sunday.”

“Huh?”

“I’m searching, too, Rich. In my own way.”

“Of course, Hun. It’s just a bit of a surprise. That’s all.”

“I haven’t really got to the surprising part yet…”

“Oh?”

Oh shit!

“I’m going to a service at The Church of Christian Science.”

“Sorry?”

“Brian Buckley’s church…”

For a second I didn’t get it. The words refused to add up, as if my brain had stripped their meaning away, or they had been run through a mental chipper. They were empty sounds. Utterances from the very top of a quaking Tower of Babel…

“What?”

“Don’t say anything,” she cautioned. “Please, Rich, just don’t.”

“But Kally! He’s a…”

“Don’t Rich! Please!”

I swayed, steadied myself against the counter with my free hand. It felt like someone had attached a giant hose to the room and sucked all the air out. I couldn’t breathe, felt myself slipping into a faint. First Elgar, now Kally. That’s what my brain coughed up in its death-throes.

“We talked a few times when I was out jogging,” she said hurriedly. “I listened. For the first time, I really listened to him. He’s not crazy, Rich. We just weren’t in a place where we could understand. Now I am. So when he invited me to Sunday service, I wanted to find out a little bit more. I said I’d go.”

“I see.”

“I wanted to let you know, just in case you saw us drive by…”

“You mean you’re leaving from his place?”

“I’m meeting him there, yes,” she said defiantly.

“Oh.”

“You okay.”

“No,” I said. “Not really. But I’ll try to get over it.”

“Don’t be like that Rich.”

“Like what?”

“Self-pitying.”

“It’s not me I’m pitying, Hun,” I said.

She hung up.

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca

 

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Posted in Psychology, Relationships, Uncategorized

In your face!

Posted on February 26, 2012 | Leave a comment


Cockfight, modified Flickr image, Advanced Source Productions

Move!

I shouted this into the numbed gestalt of Cosima’s brain, hoping to activate him. His paralysis went beyond fear, was like fear captured in a 3D pixel image then preserved in a block of plastic.

Then I remembered… remembered something from my own past…

When I was a young man, oh so long ago, I was visited by a recurring nightmare. I would dream myself as myself, lying exactly where I happened to be, on the verge of consciousness. I might have been supine, on a lawn in a  public park; or in my bed, sunlight activating the nerve endings in my skin; on a beach; in the seat of an airplane; anywhere.

The part of me that had wakened would be impatient. I wanted to move, get up, get going. But my body would not listen. At first this refusal didn’t seem such a big deal. Sometimes a car doesn’t start with the first twist of the key; the TV screen might remain blank for a moment or two after you clicked it on. Nothing to panic about. My sluggard body would respond soon enough, I reasoned. Then we would be away.

But always a sense of entrapment crept in, as if I had awoken to a treacle dawn, locked inside a tomb of hardened amber.

You could not even struggle against that kind of fate. No earthly incarceration I can think of compared to the completeness of it. Yet there I was! Why? Who had put me there? What had I done? And overshadowing all these frightful observations: How could I escape?

“You will make a nice dinner my friend. Are you surprised to hear that?”

Our abductor’s mirthful taunt caught me off-guard. It upset the neural balance between Cosima and me. We were no longer the dyad – an opposed pair in static equilibrium. Suddenly we had become the astronomical equivalent of the earth and moon, in deteriorating orbit around a swollen, blazing sun. For me, at least, our universe restructured itself around the resonance of our abductor’s voice. I strained to hear the next signal from our death star.

He had gone silent, though – had become an invisible planet whose massive presence could only be measured by instruments attuned to the malevolent gravity of a sadistic god. I waited. Perhaps I would catch the intake of his breathing, or the shush of fabric as he shifted in his seat. But he emitted nothing, had become a lurking presence occupying interstices in the background noise.

Mum, Dad and I used to go on an annual trek from Victoria to Calgary where my paternal grandparents lived. Dad was an endlessly impetuous driver. As soon as one goal was reached – usually the next gas station or ‘piss stop’ – he’d set a destination marker for the ‘next leg’ of our journey. Then we’d drive, and drive, and drive some more. Mum bitched, I whined, but none of it mattered, and somewhere past Hope, as we entered the unyielding fastnesses of the Coast Mountains, we would give up.

I discovered on those trips that if you shut your eyes and let go the determinants imposed by vision, you could not tell weather you were moving forward or backward. Direction became meaningless. I could even imagine the wheels of the car spinning in reverse as we hurtled along the Crow’s Nest Highway, Mum sleeping in the passenger-side seat; Dad in his driver’s-trance, guiding us toward a destination that – in truth – was split three ways. Cosima, it seemed to me, had slipped into that kind of road trance, but the ending would be different in his case. It was an ending we had to alter.

Displaced air hissed against the sleek metal skin of our car, the tires hummed, the engine strained silently as we sped along. All the elements of this machine conveyed a sense of power, an illusion of purpose.

“There are professional poachers out there, you know,” our abductor said. “I could buy the likes of you on the black market if I wanted. Sometimes I do. But it’s more fun this way… for me at least.” He chuckled. “I like my chicken spiced with a story. I’ll tell my friends how I caught you when I serve you up. How I spotted you on the side of the road, pulled over, coaxed you toward the back of the car, grabbed you…

“They’ll like the that. They’ll raise their wine glasses in a toast.

“I’m thinking you’ll make a nice serving of Chicken stuffed with macadamia and Camembert. You’ll be delicious.”

We drove on for a while in silence.

“I don’t talk about the execution, of course. Not at the table, anyways. Not in mixed company. A few of us might gather in my study or on the patio after dinner and talk about it. They like to know the details, the hard-core members of my club – those who will be leaders in the New Order. They want a step-by-step reenactment of the stretched neck, severed head, spurting blood, all of it.

“They’re not squeamish about such things. They know that when the time comes it won’t only be chickens that go under, eh? Power doesn’t come to those whose hands tremble when they must shoot, or whose voices quaver when they must give an order to kill. Power comes to those who will raise their glasses in salute to the New Order then sip jovially even when they know thousands, perhaps millions must die.

“Your kind will be common fare after that, my friend. You will be produced in factories and sold prepackaged in the meat section of every grocery store. What do you think of that?”

Cosima clucked.

“Ah! You don’t like my vision,” the man laughed. “I’m glad. It will make the next few hours memorable if you don’t like me. Hatred accentuates fear, eh? It spikes the ECG of terror.”

Cosima clucked again, then poked the blanket.

Pull it aside. Grab it and pull down. Pull down!

Suddenly he was tearing at the fabric with beak and claws, fully awake and fueled by panic and rage. The blanket flung aside, he scrambled up onto the back seat, his chest feathers fluffed, strutting defiantly.

Our abductor glanced in the rear view mirror, surprise registering in his cool blue eyes. “If you shit on that seat, I’ll make you suffer,” he said, half jokingly.

We hopped onto the armrest beside him then onto the plush leather of the front passenger seat. Emboldened by what seemed a temporary madness, Cosima fixed our abductor in a wary gaze. He bobbed his head forward, craned up and down, sizing up the driver the way a boxer might his opponent.

Get him to look at us. Crow!

Cosima clucked.

Crow! Cock-a-doodle-doo!

He clucked again, but this time a little more aggressively. He ruffled our feathers, and puffed out his chest. I felt his body elongate as he stretched his neck, taking in a lungful of air.

Crow! And fight!

We had no choice. Cosima could not possibly know what the situation was, and the desperate outcome I aimed for. But he knew we were in danger, and that flight was not possible in the enclosing glass and metal cage of the abductor’s vehicle. The feathers on his neck fluffed instantly and he flushed with courage.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” he bellowed. “Er-er-er-er-Ooooh!”

Our abductor jerked his face toward us, aroused by Cosima’s cry, reptilian hatred working his features into a scowl.

Now!

Cosima exploded off the seat, beak and talons jabbing and scratching at the abductor’s eyes, wings beating furiously at the conditioned air. “Argh!” the man shouted, trying to fend off his attacker. The car swerved to the right, then to the left, as the abductor over-corrected, sending us into a sideways slide. The right rear panel struck something and the car lurched into a screeching spin.

We came to rest in the ditch, the crumpled hood of the abductor’s car filling the windscreen. He was slumped forward against the steering wheel, coated in white powder from the deployed airbag. He groaned. Blood streamed down his forehead and cheek.

The passenger door had been flung open in the crash. Cosima stepped out into the tall grass and we ran, disappearing through the hedge of an adjacent field.

“You fucker!” our abductor bellowed after us. “You stupid, fucking fucker!”

Cosima had no idea what the epithet might mean, except that it was some angry version of a human cry – something he’d never heard pass through Farmer John’s lips.

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca

 

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Posted in Chickens, Death and Dying, The Fearless Chicken, Totalitarianism

Entrapment

Posted on February 21, 2012 | Leave a comment


Roadside Attraction, modified flickr photo, Mark Holloway

The car pulled over suddenly, veering onto the shoulder just ahead of us and breaking hard, it’s tail lights winking excitedly. Cosima baulked instinctively, not liking anything abrupt or out of the ordinary. I looked on with interest, wondering if the driver had some kind of problem. Perhaps he was lost, maybe he had spilled coffee in his lap, or a warning light had blinked.

His head bobbed as he wrestled himself out of his seat belt, then the driver’s door sprang open, his body swiveled, and a fashionable leather shoe popped out, making contact with the pavement. An expensively attired business-type, his grey suit flapping casually in the slipstream of the passing traffic, stepped onto the shoulder and walked round to the trunk of the car. He raked us with cool grey eyes, but without looking at us directly. Instead, he opened the trunk and retrieved a plastic container, which he pried open, tossing the lid into the boot.

Alarm bells sounded. I have to confess my experiences as a principal had resulted in a slight prejudice against suave business types. I had come to think of the upper echelon, ‘highly motivated’ dads as a sort of predator in our midst that captured its quarry in invisible nets of marketing and boardroom logic, then ratcheted the drugged prey inexorably in. The science of their lust and greed irritated me, even as I smiled and chatted with them on the playground or in the gym after the annual Christmas performance. I always felt they were trying to figure me and were slightly smug at their ability to do so.

That learned aversion got swept aside like old cobwebs. But now Cosima was curious in a patently Pavlovian way about what might be inside the man’s plastic pail. Curiousity kills the rooster, I thought, but could not restrain Cosima’s attraction to the bait. To him the plastic container was symbolic of something akin to Cornucopia. He was instantly mesmerized in the manner of a TV addict trained by closeups of sexy women, cheesy hamburgers, and powerful cars.

Cosima did not share my fear of well-dressed men with goodies in hand. In fact, his experiences in Revoucnav had taught him to trust them. So in the clash of impulses in our conjoined brain, hunger overruled good sense.

The driver fixed us with a penetrating stare. It wasn’t the casual glance of a man who had turned from some mundane task and found you in his field of vision; it was a laser glare, emanating from a dangerous machine. “Run!” That’s what instinct told me. Fly over the barrier and down to the river bank that had forced us onto the highway in the first place. Even if we landed in the water, we would have been better off, I thought. Cosima, I was sure, could have swum at least as well as he could fly.

Cosima overruled me, holding steady on a course I felt certain would end badly. The bucket contained feed, which our benefactor sprinkled on the pavement between us and him. Warily Cosima approached and pecked at a few kernels. It was high grade stuff, and after the first taste he went for another bit, and another after that.

“That’s it,” our benefactor encouraged, leaning casually against the rear, passenger-side fender, his legs crossed. “There’s plenty more. What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere anyways?”

Cosima clucked.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought so. Hopelessly lost and about to get squashed. This is no place for a chicken.”

He pushed himself forward, startling Cosima for a moment, then sprinkled a few more grains between us as he backed down the side of the car. Against my increasingly strident advice, Cosima followed, pecking hungrily at the offerings. The man casually opened the rear door and stood there waiting.

As a guest I had absolutely no control over Cosima’s musculature. I was a thought to him, a voice, a hallucination. As much as I wanted to turn and flee, he ignored me, refusing to translate my panic into electric pulses traversing synapses, contracting sinews, pulling ligaments, and making limbs roll in joints. He pecked away, straying closer and closer to the opened door.

“That’s it,” our benefactor coaxed. “I’ll take you to safety.”

There was a tone to the man’s voice Cosima wasn’t picking up on – a tone of malicious superiority immensely gratified. Stupidly, naively, Cosima followed the trail of food right up to the door frame, clucking as he continued to gobble down specks of grain. He did glance at his suited benefactor frequently, out of natural caution excited by my intensifying terror. And in those snatches I pieced together the man’s dilemma. He wanted to get Cosima into the car, but didn’t want to muss his back seat or the floor with food offerings.

“In you get,” he suggested.

For Cosima, though, there was no incentive. Why would he enter the enclosed space of this man’s car? What possible motive could there be to take such a risk? He continued to jab at the pavement until there was nothing left to jab at. The businessman then placed the plastic bucket in the floor well of his car and stood back. Cosima clucked suspiciously and looked askance at the proffered pot of feed. He tilted his head, calculating the risk-benefit quotient of the situation.

“No!” I raved. “Don’t!”

He bawked, taking a step back from the trap.

“Run!”

But before he could translate fear into action the businessman grabbed us, his strong hands pinioning Cosima’s wings. Cosima squawked and tried pecking at our captor, but he couldn’t twist his head far enough to get in a good stab. We were thrust inside the car, then against the seat in the foot well. Our captor held us pinned there with one hand, the pressure of his grip making it impossible for us to breathe.

Then we were in the dark. Cosima instantly stilled, as his nervous system shut down.

“It’s only a blanket,” I said. “Get us out of here!”

But he gave up utterly, as if he’d been cut off from all means of conscious willing with the blotting out of the light.

“That ought to keep you,” the man said. He had placed something heavy on the bottom of the blanket and against the hump of the drive shaft enclosure, perhaps his briefcase. The door slammed shut. I heard the scuffle of his feet, the slam of the trunk, then the squeak of leather as he settled into the driver’s seat once more. His door slammed and the car moved off smoothly, powerfully, accelerating back onto the highway.

“Shit!” I thought.

But at least we were headed toward Aveneg at a speed one-hundred times faster than Cosima could have achieved on his chicken legs and wings.

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca

 

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Posted in Psychology, Relationships, Totalitarianism, Uncategorized

Seeking Farmer John

Posted on February 17, 2012 | Leave a comment


Feral Chicken, modified flickr image, fullerya

“If only we could frickin’ fly!”

That prayer came back to me with increasing frequency and intensity as we trotted along the highway from Revoucnav southwest to Aveneg. I didn’t know if we were running away from the place where they were rounding up chickens in preparation for slaughter; or to the place where they held Farmer John captive. All I knew was we had to move briskly, and keep moving.

The first road sign I saw said Aveneg was 350 clicks away, ten days travel at least… that is if we could make it that far without Cosima’s feet being worn down to raw stumps. He, of course, had no idea of the magnitude of our problem. All he knew was a vague sense of frustration and panic emanating from me.

Whenever we could we stayed off the highway, scrambling through the brush just out of sight, or through the patchwork of stubbly fields in the fertile, farmed areas. Cosima’s limited ability to fly came in handy, actually. Fences, deadfall, gullies, rather then find a way round, under or through these obstacles Cosima would flap furiously, becoming a contraption of feathers, sinews and skin that took laboriously and somewhat erratically to the air.

These moments of ungainly flight were strangely exhilarating.

Of course if I’d had a choice, I would not have entered my alternative dimension in the form of a chicken. An eagle, perhaps. Or even a swallow. How about a hummingbird? Any avian representative that could actually accomplish the evolved singularity of its species with elegance and grace instead of peddling at the air in the ridiculous frenzies Cosima was forced to execute.

But ungainly as his flights were, I came to admire my companion more and more with every launch. It occurred to me that Cosima was an organic Kitty Hawk compared to his sleeker relatives, whose bodies had been shaped into aerodynamic sculptures reminiscent of fighter jets, missiles or combat choppers.

At first sight you naturally admire the clean lines and efficient flight of his relatives. You think of them as more highly evolved, even though Cosima was perfectly suited to his own niche, and could not in the least be considered an evolutionary ‘error’…

Even to justify Cosima’s existence that way was hubris of a sort, was it not? It occurred to me that my companion didn’t have to live up to any of my engineered expectations. All Cosima had to do was be himself. Period. As if the graceful contrails, writ with mathematical precision by his high-flying cousins didn’t exist…

Why do we always end up committing a second sin to negate a first. Cosima didn’t have to deny anything to feel comfortable in his own skin; why should I feel compelled to erase species for him? He was wondrous without excluding anything or destroying anything. That should have been enough, no?

We humans, though, are trapped in our own singularities, categorizing being one of them. Walking with Cosima, seeing the world through his eyes, flying with him, being him… I had so much to learn. You may laugh. “So much to learn about being a chicken!” I can hear the titters already in the future tense. So much to learn about being a species that ends up shrunk wrapped and frozen on grocery store shelves in the world I’d come from.

So what’s noble about the Kitty Hawk, compared to a supersonic jet fighter, or a space shuttle, or an Apache Helicopter? I think it’s the vulnerability of the pilot. Not just that he’s visible, lying on the wing of his unlikely contraption, his post-nineteenth Century coattails flapping in the slipstream, but that he as an individual was so evident in the crazy design of his machine. The very audacity, idiocy, exuberant miscalculation of such an invention is what makes the Kitty Hawk such a wonder.

And the fact that there really is nothing else to compare it to!

There wasn’t much of traffic on the road from Revoucnav to Aveneg. When we were forced to walk along the shoulder we would listen to individual cars approaching – not their engines so much as the hissing of rubber on pavement and displaced air being muscled aside. They sounded like jets swooping in on us, the hum and sibilance building, building, until ‘Whoosh!” they flashed by, a compression shock of air ruffling our feathers, sucking us in then blowing us out.

Cosima got used to this repeated pattern quickly. He ignored the passing cars, even the transport trucks that grunted and rumbled by. Most of his attention was focused on the pavement and the grassy verge, where he hoped to spot something worth pecking at other than cigarette butts and flattened blobs of gum, which occasionally occurred even here, in a land where it appeared the highways were swept and scrubbed every night.

I could not be so casual. I wondered if the cars were keeping to their lanes, or if they might be straying onto the shoulder behind us. A malicious part of my brain – of Cosima’s shared brain – wondered if one of the drivers might be dozing or perhaps even aberrant, with a lust for cracked bones and splattered blood.

This insecurity of mine contrasted sharply with the tidy landscape. If Gallutians were prone to serial killing it would have been a deeply sublimated urge, which I suppose would have made it all the more lethal. In Revoucnav I had a sense of overzealous tidiness that amounted to fastidiousness. They seemed to me a people obsessed with neatness and intolerant to an extreme degree of anything that might even hint at slovenliness or filth – the kind of civilization that scrubs the cracks between tiles with a toothbrush.

Such heights of cleanliness must be suspect, no? One is left to ponder what patina of guilt the citizens of Revoucnav were trying to scrape away? What sort of biological culture had imbedded itself into the inaccessible spaces of the collective unconscious that had to be cleansed over and over in endless pursuit of sterility.

“God! If only we could frickin’ fly!”

If only Cosima’s clumsy, skyward tumbling could have corrected itself and become something directed and practical, I might have been able to escape the perpetual round of thinking that was becoming my share of our common journey.

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca


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The deadly cure

Posted on February 12, 2012 | Leave a comment


Chickens!, modified flickr photo by edder282

‘Avian Flu outbreak prompts poultry roundup’

The headline jumped out at me from the front page of the Revoucnav Times. The paper was being read by a business-type, sipping a latté and munching a muffin in an outdoor café near the rail station on Essaresstauhp Street. Cosima and I had been patrolling the sidewalk looking for crumbs, when I happened to glance up and catch the latest news.

Cosima cannot read, of course, so he had no idea of the headline’s significance. But he sensed alarm bells going off and my determination to examine what had been written, so he stopped, tilting his right eye up at the front page, which happened to be facing us and concealing the upper body of our distracted benefactor. I read.

An incident on a farm just outside Revoucnav has forced the Ministry of Health, in coordination with the Ministry of Agriculture and Directorate of Avian Affairs to call for a quarantine of all chickens in the vicinity of Revoucnav. Avian hosts are being asked to keep their chickens in their roosts until the extent of the outbreak and a response to it can be determined.

Fears of an outbreak were sparked when authorities arrived at the property of Farmer John Drofrethru, just north of Revoucnav. They were responding to reports from neighbours about maltreatment of the chickens at Mr. Drofrethru’s Farm, and to evidence that the man, who was arrested yesterday, had been reading to his chickens, which is an offense under the Gallutian Criminal Code and the Sacred Birds Conservation and Protection Act.

“What the authorities found there was very disturbing,” said Avian Affairs Minister Dr. David Stern. “There was clear evidence that Mr. Drofrethru has been contaminating his birds by reading to them. We have also examined the birds and several have tested positive for the Avian Flu virus.”

He would not confirm reports that the flock’s souls had been released. “As you know, a permit from the Directorate must first be obtained before a chicken can be released from carnal bondage. I can assure you if and when such a decision is made, it will be done according to proper procedure and in a manner that respects the dignity of that flock, which has already been so compromised by the shocking behaviour of Mr. Drofrethru.”

Asked about reports that the accused has been transported to the National Corrections Institute in Nedlawbo Dr. Stern said it was not up to him to release information about Mr. Drofrethru’s whereabouts or the stage of proceedings that may be taken against him through the criminal justice system.

“I can say that he has been forthcoming to authorities, and has agreed to assist us in our ongoing search for a cure to the scourge of Avian Influenza.” The minister refused to say if Mr. Drofrethru has confessed to any charges.

A confession would initiate Expedited Trial Proceedings and make it possible for Mr. Drofrethru to receive remedial treatment at Nedlawbo more quickly. Convictions under the ETP protocol result in reduced or indeterminate sentences with an emphasis on remediation rather than constraint.

“All I can say is that Mr. Drofrethro is behaving in a manner that indicates remorse, which is the first step in  finding a cure for his kind of aberrant behaviour – if a cure can be found.”

Police have blocked off the road leading to Mr. Drofrethru’s farm. Locals have been allowed in and out of the area, but have been cautioned against speaking to reporters. “All I can say is there were a lot of trucks and equipment up on John’s farm,” one neighbour remarked, asking not to be named. “Whatever’s going on, they’re spending a lot of time and money to make sure they’ve got their asses covered.”

He said he was shocked to hear that Mr. Drofrethro is facing charges of Avian Abuse. “Frankly, I don’t believe that. John would never hurt a chicken is my view,” he said. “Nobody around here believes he would ever do anything harmful to any kind of bird. He’s crazy about animals. I won’t say anything more about it.”

The man refused to speculate as to whether or not Mr. Drofrethro might have read to his chickens, or to guess at what kind of literature he might have contaminated them with. “Not my place to comment on that,” he remarked.

“Bawk!” Cosima said, startled at the news of Farmer John’s predicament.

The man behind the paper rustled, lowering the pages and peering over the top of the crumpled sheets at us. His annoyed look quickly morphed into fear as he watched us suspiciously. “Get away!” he muttered, glancing up and down the sidewalk to make sure no one was watching. “Shoo!” He jostled the paper in our direction, trying to frighten us with its crinkling.

Cosima ignored him, strutting a little closer, eying some crumbs that had fallen from the businessman’s muffin onto the cobbles. We were hungry, not having had a proper feeding since fleeing Farmer John’s. Despite the man’s obvious discomfort, Cosima went for the leavings, sidling closer to the table.

“You’d better be off,” the man warned. “They’ll be rounding your kind up this evening. Best you get back to your roost right away. What do you think will happen to chickens they can’t identify, who have no home? Eh?”

That piece of news must have been farther down the page, I thought, alarmed at its implications.

Undeterred by the man’s warning or my fear, Cosima inched us forward, bobbing tentatively with each step and clucking nervously. The man’s eyes widened as he shrank back in his seat. Then he jabbed at us with his pointed boot. “Get away, I tell you!” he growled.

Flapping furiously, Cosima avoided the prodding toe, but didn’t give up. Circling, he came at the crumbs from a more oblique angle. Seeing an opening, the businessman catapulted out of his chair and darted past us, making for the railway platform across the street. Cosima didn’t waste any time. First he took a couple of stabs at the crumbs on the cobbles. Then, noticing the unfinished muffin on the glass tabletop, he flapped furiously, hoisting himself up, up over the wrought iron rim.

There was no sense warning him during his frenzy that we had to get away from Revoucnav. Quickly! And that we had to find our way to the National Corrections Institute in Nedlawbo. First things first. Cosima was ravenous.

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca

 

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Posted in Farmer John, Renegade

Shrink wrapped

Posted on February 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Evolution, Modified flickr image, by Shylah Erskin

“So why so you think you did that, Richard?”

I read the other day that we humans now strutting and sashaying up the runway of life are the distillate of close to a billion years of evolution. That’s right. Our lineage can be traced all the way back to those first protozoic assemblages of molecules that sloshed about in the salt-sea cradle of evolution. I’m not talking abstract genealogy here. The pre-sensate life form, which is my ancestor, managed to reproduce before it got gobbled up by some other predatory archetype and there’s a direct link coded into my DNA between it and me.

There must be a scientific notation for that, something I could write on a blackboard with chalky fingers to explain precisely what I mean. If Richard equals R, and his plot-driven mother equals M, and his scotch soaked father equals D, and that distant relative adrift in the pickle jar ocean equals P, then:

(R/(M+D) x T x 10 to the minus 9=P

Dr. Morrow isn’t interested in that kind of equation. Today he wants a present tense limited to pertinent boundaries – Kally and me – and he directs our conversation inexorably in that direction. Gently – ‘subtly’ I am inclined to say – but inexorably. Today he will barely accept mention of Cosima and Gallus as a passing reference. Like the leafy scenery on the other side of his office window, Gallus on this day is a distraction as far as Dr. Morrow is concerned. Perhaps necessary. Maybe even ‘real’ in some vague sense of the word. But not something we are interested in at this moment. Today we are dealing with the crisis of last night and its consequences.

“Did you want to say something by papering the wall like that?”

Apparently scientists can now pull the human brain apart like a succulent orange, it’s physical, emotional and intellectual segments intact after unnumbered evolutionary iterations. I think Dr. Morrow should be interested in that, don’t you? Surely the composition and layout of the human brain remains pertinent to any discussions we may have about Elgar, Kally and me. Can there be any doubt that the mystery of me lies somewhere in the complex of neural networks connecting those three spheres of who-I-am? How many people are there who really believe that the sum of those three parts doesn’t equal something greater than the neural whole – that there is yet another ghost segment, which transforms brain into something we call ‘mind’, which can’t be clearly identified, but must exist in the complex folds of our touching, feeling and thinking anatomy.

Isn’t that where we’ll find our answers?

“Can you tell me what you were thinking as you hung that wallpaper?”

“I don’t know why I did it really.”

“But it concerns you? No?”

“I think Kally’s going to leave me.”

“Why do you think that?”

The way she looked at me said it all, and the jaw-clenched silence that ensued. I knew Kally was exerting every shred of self-control not to hit me. Not to yell “You fucking imposter? Where’s my husband?” I could feel the commotion in her muscles and nerves as she strained against the furious urge to slam doors and bang things against the counter top in the kitchen.

How could I sit there, reading the morning news? Sipping my coffee?

Even then things could have been reversed if I had apologized; pushed through the sullen resistance and hugged her; said, “Sorry Hun, but I’m really fucked up right now”

In the end, that’s what got to her, I think: the mounting evidence that she couldn’t help me. Maybe if I’d asked for understanding, said I needed her more than ever, even if I was behaving like an asshole. Maybe that would have given her some kind of handhold on our marriage. But I’d become smooth as marble and sacred as the things marble represents. Was that deliberate? Had the atomic structure of my being been altered by that invisible and unidentified segment of my brain – invisible perhaps because it has to exert itself in the subatomic realm, in the interstices only mind can reach.

I hadn’t moved when she left for her morning run. I still sat in the kitchen nook, reading the paper. Was I pretending even to myself that an unassailable version of me had been left behind to inhabit our world, while the real me had slipped into space where I assumed no one could follow, a theoretical universe where Elgar might be found.

“She thinks I’m pathetic.”

“What do you think, Richard?”

“I think I have to do things that don’t make any sense. I have to become the person who will find Elgar, and I can’t do that if I remain Kally’s wounded husband, off on stress leave from his one-time job as elementary school principal.”

“So you have to be strong?”

“Yes.”

“Strong enough to leave Kally?”

Formulas, if they are scientifically true, don’t waver. They are undiscerning in their clarity. If I equals me; and K equals Kally; and E equals Elgar; and F equals our family, then:

I = F-(K+E).

And you could take things farther than that, your chalk dusted fingers shaking as the ineluctable truth materializes out of that segment of brain that does all the thinking. If Ev equals the evolutionary sequence of all time, spreading like a chain reaction from this day forward, and I am not able to find Elgar in whatever reality I search, then:

Ev = (Ev-I) – (Ev-E).

It might also mean Ev = Ev-K. But I can’t be certain of that.

As I’m leaving his office Dr. Morrow places his hand on my shoulder. That’s what I like about him. It’s a gesture perfectly tuned to the circumstances. Enough to say, ‘I’m human, I feel for you buddy’ at the same time as it preserves the professional distance he must keep – a synaptic gap at the social level.

“Bye, Richard,” he says.

I like that too. He never assumes I’m coming back.

© CraigSpenceWriter.ca

 

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Odd angles

Posted on February 2, 2012 | 1 Comment

I know what everyone’s going to think: that I was pissed off, and did a stupid thing. They’ll more or less call it a ‘crime of passion’. That’s a misrepresentation of course, but what does it matter? People are used to misrepresentations these days, get fed a rich diet of missrep on the evening news… heck, that’s not misrepresentation, it’s outright fabrication.

Anyway, that’s not how things went down.

I’m not saying I wasn’t pissed. I’d tried hard to make our anniversary a point of departure – like we were a couple of stowaways aboard a cruise ship leaving a troubled homeland. Not that Kally and I would ever forget what had happened, that we’d ever stop looking for answers, or for Elgar. But I wanted the place we inhabited to sink beneath some sort of horizon. I desperately wanted us to get beyond the borders of bitterness and despair. A part of me hoped we might be able to love again, maybe have another child, gain admission to that ever-forever dreamland called ‘the future’.

Instead, we were left standing on the dock while our ship sailed. For good. We both knew it. We would never celebrate another anniversary again, no matter how long we stayed together and no matter how hard we pretended. Kally chawed on her Chicken Penne and I picked away at my Apple Pecan Harvest Salad as reality set in. Sweat trickled down my back, cold like winter rain. It seeped through the fabric of my turtle neck and into the tweed of my jacket. I shivered.

And I allowed myself one of the rare, consciously selfish considerations I’d granted in the months since Elgar’s abduction. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I thought. ‘This is it. This is how we’re going to live for the next twenty-five years.’

I blushed, flushed, call it whatever you want. Kally noticed, but went right on chewing because whatever it was, she didn’t want to talk about it.

Did we hate each other?

No. I could never hate Kally. But the friendship that had been the heart and soul of our marriage had evaporated. All the humor, and gentleness, and inquisitiveness had boiled off and we were left with nothing but a hot element of resentment. Neither of us could switch it off. We could fake it for Kally’s parents, my Mom and Dad, the small coterie of friends who had stuck with us. We might even be determined enough and kind enough to fool each other. But we both knew the irradiating anguish would not abate, ever – til death do us part.

When we got home Kally went straight to bed. I brewed a pot of coffee. I needed to do something. I paced. Fixed my coffee and sipped at it disconsolately. I thought. But nothing dissipated the corrosive energy sizzling inside. Then I remembered the wallpaper sitting in my study closet, waiting to be hung. “What the hell.” Ten-thirty on a Friday night might seem an odd time for home improvements, but a man does what he’s gotta do and disregards the rest, I guess.

The instructional video made it seem so easy. The guy putting the paper up was decked out like he might be about to step onto a golf course – natty blue polo shirt, comfy tan slacks, sensible dress shoes, with not a speck of paste on anything. He had a calm air about him, and a deep voice, exuding the confidence of an expert about to show off his you-can-do-it skills. He looked old enough to be a principal with a decade of experience under his belt.

I did exactly what the video said I was supposed to: cut the lengths of paper, carefully aligning the floral design and allowing a couple of inches on each end for trimming; ran the strips through the plastic water trough provided at the hardware store; folded them carefully, then rolled and stuck them into a plastic bag allowing the paste to get ‘booked’; marked where the edge of the first sheet was supposed to line up on the wall; then started hanging.

Actually, the first piece went on just like the guy said it would. I worked the bubbles out with the plastic smoothing implement that had also been provided, then trimmed off the excess paper along the ceiling, floor and adjacent wall. I stood back for a second – just like the guy in the video – and admired the work so far. Seemed pretty good. ‘I can do this,’ I thought. ‘While Kally’s sleeping, I can do this.’

When I was butting up the second strip of paper, though, something happened. I started thinking about the wallpaper guru in his polo shirt and it annoyed me. How much did they pay him to make paper hanging seem so easy – even around windows and light switches? How many on-camera takes did he get to make sure his presentation came across just right? What was his wife like? His kids? Did he have any? Was it dawn in his neck of the woods just then, or did he inhabit the same wedge of longitude as me and Kally?

“What the fuck does it matter?”

So I stopped fiddling and put the second piece on crooked. Not by much, just a little skewed. I laughed, imagining my mother stepping into the room and cooing ‘Tch, tch!’ while she shook her head. Or Kally in better days laughing out loud and calling me hopeless. Or Elgar as a teen mocking his Dad. I smoothed the sheet, then trimmed off the excess.

‘Perfect!’

I got more radical with the third sheet, tilting it in the opposite direction and at a greater angle, just managing to overlap the entire wall space between it and the second strip. But a patch of bare wall was exposed at the top right corner. I cut a square off the next sheet and pasted it in place, tucking it under the third sheet and butting it up to the ceiling. The sheets went on at greater and greater angles of deviation.

By the time I got two-thirds down the wall I was using quarter sheets, overlapping them like crazy, sideways shingles. The last sheet I put on perfectly straight, as if to say, ‘I could’a done it right if I’d wanted.’ As if to say, ‘I’ve got a polo shirt and sensible shoes in my closet, too.’

Then I slumped into my swivel chair, leaned back with my feet on the desk and fell asleep. I figured I could put my tools away in the morning.

 

©CraigSpenceWriter.ca

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The problem with anniversaries

Posted on January 30, 2012 | Leave a comment


Modified Flickr Image, Penne, by Ina Walter

Kally wasn’t in the mood to be entertained. ‘We can push through,’ I thought. ‘If only we can have one night that looks sort of normal, maybe we can take that as a starting point.’

So I made the reservations. Nothing fancy. Montana’s qualifies as a cut above your typical family restaurant – cheap enough that your average, middle class up-and-comer can afford the tab; expensive enough to keep the family hordes at bay. It seemed a place where we could have a semblance of the fun without upping the stakes too much.

But I knew from the minute we started getting ready I’d miscalculated. Kally went through the motions. She tried hard, I can say that much for her – put on some extra makeup, switched from her jeans into a plain but stylish black dress, even put on her fancy-night-out necklace. But there wasn’t any joy it in at all. More like she was dressing a motorized mannequin really. Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t feeling compelled to grab her in the middle of her preparations and entice her into bed or anything.

I put on casual tan slacks, a brown tweed jacket and a turtleneck shirt. If it had been 7:30 a.m. on a Monday morning, and I hadn’t been off on long-term disability, I might have been going to work. Kally said so, joking half-heartedly. I laughed to keep things from getting embarrassing. After that we didn’t say much beyond what was necessary to get us out the door and into the car.

Rather than go through my complicated avoidance route to get to 2ooth Street, which would have been fastest, I turned left onto 88th Avenue, right onto 216th Street, then left again onto Telegraph Trail, which would take me to Glover Road where I would turn right, then right again onto Langley Bypass, where I could turn straight into Montana’s parking lot. Kally sighed. I didn’t have to glance over to know her lips would be pursed and her brow creased. I also knew better than to extol the virtues of a drive through rural Langley.

If Elgar had been in the car with us he might have pointed out a gigantic plastic marshmallows of hay stacked near the corrugated steel barn; a flock of sheep with red dye markings on their fleeces, a horse pair trotting exuberantly around their paddock, a newly planted blueberry field. Kally and I would have laughed, delighted at his inquisitiveness, wondering secretly if we could keep the ‘Look Mommy’, ‘Look Daddy’ enthusiasm alive until he was old enough to go to university.

But Elgar wasn’t with us, and Kally was pissed off that we were taking the long-way round again. ‘We’ve got to get over it,’ she was thinking. She didn’t even have to say it. Resentment tightened the molecular structure of the atmosphere we breathed, in our swaying Suburban, rolling down Telegraph Trail.

If I’d really splurged that evening, would things have turned out differently? After all, it was our anniversary. Maybe we should have gone downtown, to Bishop’s or something, where dining has been rarefied and ritualized to the point that it can be considered a form of art. Maybe I should have rented a limo, and a tuxedo to go with it, added tickets to the opera onto the tab, insisted that Kally go out and spend a grand or two on a new gown and a pearl necklace.

Montana’s?

Kally’s heels clicked on the pavement as we walked from the car toward the entrance. I held the door. “Mather’s?” the greeter said brightly, then led us to our table. It wasn’t so much that we’d gotten old as the world had regressed into youthful twilight behind us. Banality was in the air, conversations about things that really didn’t matter, but which added up to lives-well-spent.

We had once been a part of all that. Our voices had blended into the cheerful babble effortlessly. We might have joked about time Kally’s bikini top came off when she dove into the swimming pool at a friend’s house; or the night we made love in our canoe out in the middle of Hick’s Lake, then slipped into a drifting dream and woke up near the far shore at dawn; or how the Justice of the Peace had to open city hall on a Saturday to grant us the marriage license I’d forgotten to procure before our wedding-day.

We would have chattered, laughed, and added the clink of our glasses and clatter of our cutlery to the general cacophony of a pleasant night-out.

Ours was a sombre celebration, though, cut off from the general levity by an irrevocable emotional break. For us young love pointed toward marriage, which would eventually lead to an only child named Elgar, which would ultimately lead to a rent in the fabric of time that could be placed geographically at the Mac’s convenience store on the corner of Walnut Grove Drive and 88th Avenue. That was the precise coordinate where our herniated universe was turning inside-out.

Nothing escapes that gravity. Everything spirals into it: my birthday, Kally’s, Elgar’s, the day my parents got married, Kally’s parents’ anniversary too… everything, headstones toppling into a single grave, the cemetery turf getting pulled down like a carpet through a hole in the floor. Not even public holidays avoid the general fate: Canada Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s, Independence Day south of the border, Bastile Day… they all tend toward one date, the tick of the digital clock’s readout toward a lacunae, a lost moment when Elgar disappeared.

“Have you decided?” our waitress said.

“Chicken Penne,” Kally said.

I ordered an Apple Pecan Harvest Salad.

“You were dreaming this afternoon,” she mentioned after the server bustled off.

“Was I?”

“Yes. You shouted out in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

“Stop!”

“That’s all?”

“It sounded as if your life depended on it.” Kally removed her cutlery from the cloth napkin it had been rolled up in, then spread the napkin over her lap. “Did your life depend on it?”

I realized then she had been thinking about that shout all afternoon. That my desperate command to Cosima had been echoing through her thoughts as we got ready for dinner, as we drove down Telegraph Trail, as we walked through Montana’s parking lot.

“In my dream, my life depended on it, yes,” I admitted.

Kally nodded and sipped at her wine. “We’re near the edge, Rich, aren’t we.”

“I love you,” I insisted. “That hasn’t changed honey.”

“But we’re still near the edge?”

“Yes,” I conceded.

And it occurred to me then that as long as we were together we would have to be near the edge, because that’s where I was dancing, and in truth I wanted to go over. It was only fear that held me back – fear for the others who would see me go, would have live with their own sense of helplessness for the rest of their lives.

‘How noble of you,’ I thought. ‘What a fucking prince!’

 

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