Yes Cecil, A Long Story Short, Part Seventy Seven

It hadn't been funny at the time, she thought, as the laughter of co-workers and friends encircled her like the plaiting of a holiday wreath. She must tell the story again they insisted, so-and-so hadn't heard it yet. So-and-so was new. New to Sophie's Christmas party for librarians, an annual event which had been held in her flat on Esplanade Avenue for the last eight years, and at which Melisande had first related the story with great dramatic energy, and a panache that had surprised, and later embarrassed her, due to the absurdity of it, and the underscoring of cathartic joy at having left the environment in which it had occurred, a story which now, in its eighth holiday incarnation, had withered somewhat, at least to her, before the bureaucratic expectations of saint-hood when it came to dealing with library patrons. She sipped her wine, smiling at the laughing faces around her as she remembered the actual day, when, on her first job at a downtown public library, one frequented a great deal by the homeless, the drug addicts, the mentally ill, the eccentrics, the local characters, and those with time and nothing else on their hands, she'd been called to the circulation desk from the office and told that there was a disturbance in the reading room. It had been a Saturday. She'd been in charge. The circulation staffer had pointed out the individuals involved and had whispered to her that the young man had complained that the person facing him across the table had been looking at him and giggling. The individual in question, a youngish woman with her head wrapped in tin foil, was sitting very low on her chair, her arms on the table, her head resting on the back of the high wood chair. Melisande had conjured up a sentence she hoped would be sufficient to ease the situation: “I'm sorry Miss, if you could refrain from laughing, you're disturbing the other patrons.” She had approached the table, the two patrons looking up at her, the young man with relief, the young woman with uncertainty, and she had said, “I'm sorry Miss, if you could refrain from laughing, you're disturbing the other patients.”

It hadn't been funny at the time.

The young woman had looked up at her, a smile breaking upon her face like the reflections of florescent light upon her aluminium foil, and, having caught the Freudian slip, had begun to laugh quietly which had made the young man indignant. In that moment of embarrassment, having reduced everyone to a patient of a psychiatric ward, she'd managed to look around the reading room at all the faces turned her way, many haggard and weary, beaten down by life and circumstances, their bodies frozen in the act of reading papers, magazines, books, a nightmarish vision of reverse judgement, and not knowing what else to say, she'd turned around and made her way back to the office, made a pot of tea to sooth her nerves, and thought a job in a private or university library would suit her better, feeling that her undergraduate degree in religious studies and her graduate degree in library science had not prepared her for dealing with such encounters.

“It hadn't been that funny at the time,” Melisande said over the thinning laughter around her, feeling that every ounce of amusement would be accounted for in some grand Karmic register and there would be hell to pay as her Father used to say.

“Patients,” Sophie said, tapping the new girl's arm with her hand, “It's still funny after all these years Melisande. What a wonderful transposition of words.”

“In the library I'm working at,” the new girl said, “we've been instructed to call library users, 'customers.' They think library user, patron, and client are outmoded. Customers. Sometimes I think I'm working in retail.”

The sound of Randy Travis's rich voice singing Meet Me Under the Mistletoe overlay the awkward silence that settled upon the party goers as they struggled to respond to this rather mundane remark.

Jonathan, a subject specialist at the university, came to the rescue: “At least that'll keep the word patient out of the equation.” A wink to Melisande. “Here's to customer,” he said, raising his glass, “may the Walmart greeting be soon to follow.” Having saved the party from a minor denouement, everyone raised their glass, and after they drank, a scattering of ideas for conversation, like the multiple trajectories of a fireworks explosion, spread through the room, their voices reduced to more intimate levels,

“So Jonathan, how's Frank doing these days?” Melisande asked, trying not to stare at his expensive mock-tortoiseshell—at least she assumed them to be mock turtle—glass frames.

“Well my dear, he's working away on a new book, provisionally entitled The Rake's Profit, or Tally Hoe: John Cleland and his Publishers. He's up to his earlobes in research. Just last night he was regaling me with details of one of Cleland's bookseller publishers and his stint in the pillory for publishing Fanny Hill.” Jonathan rolled his eyes.

“I guess Fanny Hill seems pretty tame compared to reading material these days. I overheard a woman at a bookshop tell a friend that she'd been reading one of those Fifty Shades books and how she had laughed her way through it.”

“God knows where all those millions of copies will end up. Elderly pensioners burning them in their fireplaces for warmth perhaps. Throw on another Fifty Shades Darker, my dear,” he said imitating an elderly voice, “I feel the draft on my back like the frigid breath of Dr. Freeze .”

“So, when do we get the wedding invitations Melisande?” Sophia asked from across the living room.”We're all looking forward to the day.”

Trying to appear her regular organized self, not wanting to let on that she and Pavor had yet to choose from the examples available, with their plethora of fonts, shapes, sizes, colours, embossing, ribbons, lace, textures, and photograph options. Pavor had offered to write a short short story to include with the invitation as well. A keepsake. “January, the month of Janus, the doorway to the new year, looking back, looking forward” she said, not wanting to commit to a specific day, “it will be a simple wedding.”

Sophie raised her glass, “Here's to Melisande and Pavor, may their wedding day be blessed with good friends and good weather.”

Jonathan gave her a squeeze with his left arm and whispered in her ear, “So, since it was a leap year, did you propose to Pavor or did he finally man up?”

Melisande slapped his thigh and gave him a playful nudge with her shoulder. “On bended knee between the pews of the McGill Chapel no less.” As the memory came back to her, she recalled the dual nature of the proposal, the confession before the request, the past before the future, the revelation of a predeceased wife and child, and how their ghosts had thrown a shroud over the proposal, one she hadn't noticed at first, but later had felt settle round her like a gloaming mist upon a farmer's field.

 © Ralph Patrick Mackay

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Yes Cecil, A Long Story Short, Part Seventy-Six

The scent of old books greeted Edward Seymour as he entered his study, the gilt stamped titles and the varicoloured bindings speaking volumes to him of distant pathways taken, memories, and relationships. At ninety-two, he knew they were unlikely to be revisited with anything but nostalgia. He went to the shelves where he kept books inscribed to him by old friends and associates, and breathed deeply as he gazed upon them. Wilder Penfield's novel The Torch, stood with his The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, and his No Man Alone: A Surgeon's Life; beside them, books by Karl Stern, his Pillar of Fire, his The Third Revolution: A Study of Psychiatry and Religion, his The Flight from Woman, and his novel Through Dooms of Love. Edward recalled the year of 1960 when both Penfield and Stern had come out with a novel and many had wondered who would be next. Even he had contemplated writing one, and having produced twenty pages, had but it aside. It must be in one of his old files he thought. He reached out a wrinkled slender finger towards Stern's The Flight from Woman, an interesting study of its time, and with his striated fingernail like old ivory, pulled it out and put it on his desk to hazard a glimpse of the past. Then, seeing Rainer Maria Rilke by Willem Graff, he pulled it off too, and opened it to to see Willem's inscription to him. He fanned the pages and a paper fell out and slipped down to the carpet like a glider making a perfect landing upon an Aubusson field. Carefully, he bent down to retrieve it and went to sit at his desk. A letter size sheet, folded in half revealed two poems, typed, one from each end as if mirrored, and when folded, resting upon each other in an intimate alphabetical embrace. He remembered. the attractive woman, a former patient, who had transferred her affections to him in the mid-1970s. She'd fallen for Rilke, and then for him. Or had it been the other way round? She'd left him with these poems after he'd discussed the issues with her and made her cognisant of the transference, as well as the boundaries of propriety and professional duty. The temptation now seemed less significant, but it was tinged with longing like the fragrance of musk. The paper itself was like a desiccated leaf preserved as an emblem of a path not taken.

C'est le paysage longtemps . . .

C'est le paysage longtemps, c'est une cloche,

c'est du soir la délivrance si pure;

mais tout cela en nous prépare l'approche

d'une nouvelle, d'une tendre figure . . .

Ainsi nous vivons dan un embarras très étrange

entre l'arc lointain et la trop pénétrante flèche:

entre le monde trop vague pour saisir l'ange

et Celle qui, par trop de présence, l'empêche.

Dans la multiple rencontre

Dans la mutiple rencontre

faisons à tout sa part,

afin que l'ordre se montre

parmi les propos du hasard.

Tout autour veut qu'on l'écoute,

écoutons jusqu'au bout;

car le verger et la route

c'est toujours nous!

The poems didn't arouse in him a dormant longing for youth, but did arouse the feeling that poems were embedded in timelessness, waiting silently for the next passerby to grab hold and briefly experience a sense of eternity. She had been a doctor of internal medicine which had made him think of poets being the doctors of eternal medicine. She had laughed at his play on words. He folded the paper and put it back in its old resting place almost hearing the echo of her laughter. He opened his desk drawer and withdrew his journal and began to write:

Wednesday December 19, 2012 - 7 p. m.

It has been many days since I've written this journal. Preparations for the holidays, doctor's appointments, fatigue and forgetfulness have all played their part.

A mild day, a light drizzle, and now, a light snow is falling.

Received two Christmas cards this morning. One rather special. It is lonely at the top of the age chain.

Nostalgia overcame me this evening. I dipped into old books. In one, I came across a slip of paper given to me by an old patient of mine, a woman who had transferred her affections to me, the classic therapist dilemma. It's good to know she worked through her issues and led a happier life. I wonder if she is still with us? She was very beautiful I recall. Having dealt with the fallout of such temptations over the years in treating a diversity of patients suffering at one of the three points of the classic love triangle, perhaps I'd been conditioned to resist such extreme emotions. So many affairs had ended in broken families and ultimately, loneliness. Very few had been successful diversions. Thankfully I resisted the temptation. Happily married to my dear wife, my friend, my equal, I had been fortunate. The latent affairs of the heart had stayed within my imagination.

Another Christmas will soon be upon us. Every year I think it might well be my last, although young doctor Bergeron thinks I'm 'bien fort.' I feel like a man in an hour glass, or a life-glass perhaps, standing on a small mound of remnant sand, a mountain beneath me in the other sphere. If only I could push on the sides of the glass, pound my fist upon the surface, rock the glass back and forth until it fell sideways to form a symbolic sign of infinity, and I could sweep the remaining sand into the concave feature of the glass and lie down and rest, cupped in eternity. I wonder why it is that some individuals when they reach a great age, catch a second wind and become avid for life? More to lose perhaps. Looking back, there seems to be a life hurdle that takes so many in their fifties and sixties due to lifestyle or genetics, but if they pass through, or over, that barrier, those last laps can be richly fulfilling. They have been for me, though a sense of guilt surrounds my willpower like the piping on my dressing gown.

Amelia and Duncan are doing well. She keeps me informed every other day as to Duncan's well-being. It has now been ten days since he emerged from his three day coma. He is functioning very well, his memory is solid, and what physical effects he sustained, he has overcome with minor therapy. The doctors are still uncertain exactly what caused his fall. A close call with an aneurysm like an asteroid passing through the Earth's atmosphere and burning up perhaps. The only oddity of his three day coma seems to be strange and random expressions in Norwegian, a language he did not know previously. A mystery. He seems to understand what the expressions mean, but he is unable to control their capricious and seemingly unconscious eruptions. Naturally, specialists and postdocs have been interested in his case. I have advised him to avoid researchers. Let it work itself out I told them.

This has me somewhat worried.

This special case of Duncan, along with today's card from Isabelle Cloutier, have convinced me to tell Amelia the truth about her Mother and Father. If I should falter, hesitate, or pass away before I can tell her, I will write it here, in brief, in the hopes she may some day read my journals which I will bequeath to her:

My youthful half-sister Catherine, the progeny of my wayward Father and a young secretary, was sent to Canada before my arrival. Suffering from depression, she found herself ushered into the care of Donald Ewen Cameron where she was exposed to his experiments with Electroshock and drug therapy, leading to her later spiral of dysfunction. What an unfortunate place to have met a husband, but meet Richard, Amelia's father she did, another patient of that misled research. When I arrived to teach at McGill, Catherine and Richard had already found a hippie haven in the Hare Krishna movement. Though I tried to help, they'd distanced themselves from us. Amelia was young when they left that group and changed religions once more, following a Yogi off to California and we secured legal custody of their children. I never broached the subject of Cameron's experiments upon them with Amelia. I had thought it best to avoid creating a need to stir up the truth. The players involved were too powerful. The whole unfortunate affair had been sealed away, an episode from the cold war no one wanted to revisit. The truth revealed in these cases is as rare as elephant eggs in a rhubarb tree.

It has been decades since I've written in my journal about Catherine and those difficult years. Guilt? Catharsis? If you are reading these words Amelia, please forgive an old man his sins.

As to Isabelle's letter within her Christmas card—un hibou comme d'habitude—she informed me that she had received a cryptic letter signed with the initials of what must be Thérèse Laflamme, with the names of David Ashemore, an arrow pointing to the name Jarvis Whitehorne, and the acronym, P.R.I.S.M. It seems Amelia must have heard me discuss Isabelle's name or I absentmindedly mentioned it in passing. Isabelle researched Jarvis A. Whitehorne and discovered a rogue researcher in the footsteps of Cameron. This man seems to have his own research company, Whitehorne & Associates. The acronym seems to stand for Peremptory Remote Intra-Sensory Manipulation. No longer is it necessary to have a patient in a room to experiment upon according to Isabelle, now they can insert devices and activate them remotely, or, by the use of acoustic devices, disrupt sleep patterns and manipulate the body's chemistry from afar. It all seems so far-fetched but Isabelle assures me such experiments are taking place. It is a great abuse of science and technology. The rational male mind has objectified the other and is able, without conscience, to break their very spirit. Isabelle sees the abuse of such types of scientific and technological advances as a greater threat in the future to individual freedoms than concerns over big brother listening to their phone calls, or is it reading their emails now? The rational male mind and the objectification of the other will always be the source of great evil. Isabelle suggests that David Ashemore had come across the activities of Whitehorne and had begun to write reports about them, only to find himself, she thinks, a target. She fears that Ashemore was told to desist in his investigations, but continued. Much conjecture on her part she admits.

A sense of dread overcomes me as I think of such abuse. I will tell Arthur all about Isabelle's discovery on Saturday over our chess game. I just realised we won't be playing chess till the New Year. Well, it will keep. Best not disturb his holidays anyway.

I shall wait till after Christmas to tell Amelia about her parents. She has too much on her plate right now with Duncan's still delicate health, and the closing of his business. Good news is that Duncan has a buyer for most of his stock, and some of the funds will be put towards a new car and a trip to England. I would not mind seeing England once more, but for the travelling. And I'm sure a third wheel would be unwelcome. They never did take a decent honeymoon. I shall add to their financial purse and also provide them with addresses of our living relatives on that distant island.

Edward drew a line beneath the last sentence and taking up Isabelle's letter, pasted it down upon the facing page, then closed his journal and returned it to his drawer. Walking over to the window, he looked out upon the limbs of the naked trees with their layer of light snow like Gothic tracery. Here he was, with the night birds and cobwebs, the city glittering below like distant stars. He closed the curtains and his eyes alighted upon the framed piece of paper hanging between the bookshelves and the drapery. He had discovered it in a strange book published in 1918, a book explaining the details of the gas mask created by a research group under B.F. Goodrich, a book with haunting images of a soldier modelling the mask, and looking like an undersea monster. Images enough to haunt a child's dreams he thought. One of the authors was a certain Major R. G. Pearce, who he learnt through the head librarian at McGill, had been a medical doctor in Ohio, and a sometime poet. The piece of paper was Pearce's poem entitled Entropy. Edward never felt closer to the words:

When the night raven finds our hearth and fans

The dying embers with his wings, and space

Which time has warped into our frames expands

In unstrained rest, there will remain no trace

Of us on earth, but in the firmament

Perhaps a Protean cloud will hold my form

And it will catch the light your star has sent.

When like my song your molten heart was warm.

Since crumpling power shares not in our estate

Contented we should lie in dreamless sleep;

And hurried time will never confiscate

The tryst which mutual souls have sought to keep.

Our elsewhere and our here will then be one

Beyond the reaches of the cyclic sun.

L'envoi

If this would be, our lives may not be vain

For smiles might ripple over space again.

The head librarian had given him a short lecture on the prevalence of poets who had trained as doctors, offering a long list of names, some well-known, others obscure. Such individuals were able to maintain a balance of science on the one hand, and the intuition of poetry on the other. It gave Edward hope, acted as a soothing balm for his sense of dread. From the door, he looked back and scanned his bookshelves for an instant, then, turning the light out, carried the books by Stern and Graff to the living room to spend an hour or two with his hands in the past.

© Ralph Patrick Mackay

Yes Cecil, A Long Story Short, Part Seventy-five

With the visibly evanescent fingers of frost on the windshield leading the way, Pavor drove along Sherbrooke Street enveloped by the aroma of fresh baked bagels while the words of the eccentric Fitz resurfaced in his thoughts like pieces of academic flotsam. He certainly lacked inhibition, he thought. A coffin fly no less! There was something about Fitz, something dispassionately erudite that irritatingly lingered like the itch of a mosquito bite. Perhaps he was a new professor at one of the Universities. As this thought settled like a well-placed puzzle piece, he recognized Amelia driving towards him, her face bathed in a shard of angled sun created by the tall buildings. He waved but she didn't see him for the light in her eyes. Probably on her morning errands, he thought, much like himself, a translator and a novelist out and about while their respective partners, a bookseller and a librarian, kept the books. A fanciful notion passed over him: perhaps in another dimension their relationships were inverted, Melisande and Duncan the symbolic bridge partners to Amelia and himself. Two bibliophiles and two wordsmiths, the cataloguers and the scribblers. The notion faded quickly as he considered how little he knew of Amelia's character and personality. She was much like an artist's picture to him, lightly sketched and enigmatic, but disturbingly more real than his late wife and child who now seemed to have faded into a haze of natural evocations, manifestations of seasonal intimacies; unwonted, diurnal creations of his imagination. In bed at night, looking out at the framed darkness, he often wondered if they had existed at all.

He would have to deal with the storage locker with their archived belongings. It was time.

Approaching his apartment building, he noticed the street parking was a clean sweep, the other residents also having sought distant landfalls: Saturday morning breakfast diners, glistening powder on the Laurentian ski slopes, or shopping malls with their echoing fountains and endless sales. Or were the drivers all one night stands slinking off to their private worlds? He pulled into his old spot and noticed the space in front of him had a circular oil stain on the asphalt which resembled one of those coloured NASA images he'd seen on the Internet, a supernova, or some kind of gas emanation, captured instants of the past, like colourful paintings on black felt, interstellar art. As he walked towards his apartment, however, he realised that the position of the stained pavement was indeed from his last departure. The possibility of a leak took the sheen off his morning, the fresh air dulled to hints of exhaust.

*

Amelia released her foot from the gas pedal and coasted along Sherbrooke Street towards the red light in the distance, passing between the towering modernist Le Port-Royal Apartments on her left, and the human scale span of the late-nineteenth century row houses on her right, buildings clad in grey limestone with rusticated front entrances, oriel windows, gables and attics updated with modern, dark jade green awnings dusted with snow, buildings long ago transformed into upscale art galleries and boutiques. As she came to a stop at the corner of Bishop, she thought of all the translation work she'd performed, all the local writers she'd been reading, both in English and French, writers who were creating their own version of the city, laying claims like stake holders in a gold rush, and an overwhelming impression of a tiresome tug of war overcame her. A city with contentions lay all around her camouflaged by the calm effects of habit. Perhaps she should have been reading and translating the text of the city itself. She felt a wave of exhaustion overcome her as she thought of all the local books and authors being pushed and marketed by publishers and the media like the latest in fashion trends. She massaged her neck. She must be burnt out. The stress of Duncan's condition and their uncertain future had stripped her of her resiliency. Pessimism and defeat had seeped in. Taking a deep breath she imagined having experienced a simpler life: to have been born in a small town in Ontario without language issues, to have married a high school sweetheart, to have bought a house in the hometown, to have raised children, travelled, bought a cottage. To have had normal parents to act as grandparents instead of ones lost in the semi-spectral existence of post-hippie, blissed-out blindness. If only they'd waited for the new age to fully break upon the shore, they could now be taking advantage of the alternate medicine, the yoga, the acupuncture, the Tai Chi, the organic foods, and the mindfulness that had finally spread to the mainstream. But no, they had forged ahead seeking the golden horizons of self-fulfilment and were now left behind by the shifts of time and twists of cultural evolution. Amelia stared ahead of her wondering what it would have been like to have experienced a plain, uncomplicated path. Normality, consistency, continuity. Continuity. The light turned green and she drove on, passing between the the old and the new buildings of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with their promise of high culture, enough to unsettle her confusion of thoughts for a moment and make her think of her imaginary double in that imaginary small town, driving her own imaginary streets at this very minute, thinking how wonderful it would be to escape the clinging communal knowledge and suburban restraint of the small town and move to the stimulating anonymity of a great city like Montreal.

Caught in the sequence of red lights, she came to a rest at Mountain Street with the exclusive Holt Renfrew on her right, and the revitalized Ritz Carlton Hotel ahead, luxury and exclusivity of wealth surrounding her, and as she watched the pedestrians in their diversity pass by, she concluded that ultimately, it was all about adaptation. Having lived all her life in the inner city, she'd be ill-adapted to small town existence. With this thought, she continued on to her Uncle Edward's with a renewed sense of will, and a reinvigorated, though shaky, desire to deal with the crumbling facade of her life. She had to be strong for Duncan. She had to be strong for Uncle Edward. She had to be strong for Hugh.

*

While Jerome inspected the fine-haired points of a selection of brushes, Thérèse looked down at his studio table and searched for music among the papers, pens, pencils, erasers, tubes of pigment, cotton rags, and opaque glass jars sprouting paint brushes like perennials at the back of a garden. Seeing as they both leaned towards a laissez-faire attitude to house cleaning, she wondered how they'd manage living together. She assembled the scattered cassette tape cases and created an arc like a spread of playing cards, a curved mixture of colour and black and white images: Pierre Flynn's Jardines de Babylon and his Le parfum du hasard; Etienne Daho's Paris ailleurs, and his Pour nos vies martiennes; Renaud's Morgane de toi, Mistral gagnant, and Marchand de cailloux. She then saw the edge of an eighth cassette tape and slipped it out from beneath pencil sketches of eyes. It was a band she was unfamiliar with. The La's, with a photograph of a woman's eye on the cover. Jerome was in a retro mood.

She heard his approach and felt him kiss the nape of her neck and gently run his hands down her arms. “Creating order out of chaos,” he said

“You and your old cassettes,” she said turning around to give him a squeeze. “Why not get an iPod?”

“With my fingers covered in paint, cassettes are good. I can toss them around and not worry.” He reached over for Pierre Flynn's Babylon. “Anyway, I like the feel of them, the sound of them, and they've taught me to wait for the better songs, or at least, my favourite ones. Have you ever noticed how after listening to the sequence of songs on a tape, you get to know which song is coming up, and in the silence between songs, you can anticipate the first chords to come, the words, the melody? You can almost hear them, recreate them in your mind. Why should I purchase their digital phantoms? Little ghosts unconnected to each other, mixed up and shuffled like a deck of cards.” He gave her a hug. “I'm all set if you are.”

Thérèse sat in the arranged armchair by the window and opened the book she'd chosen to occupy her, a Boris Vian novel she'd never read before. Jerome pressed the cassette into the machine and soon Pierre Flynn's rich baritone voice was singing Complainte du chercheur d'or. She couldn't concentrate on the text before her, the music and lyrics leading her thoughts astray, but she continued to look at the open book as a prop for her portrait. She hadn't told Jerome she'd recalled the name of the man who she thought responsible for the death of David Ashemore. She hadn't told him she'd learnt of the name of Isabelle Cloutier from Amelia who had mentioned it in the hopes of giving her some confidence that the Ashemore case was being taken care of. And she hadn't told him she'd found Ms. Cloutier's address and mailed her a card with the simple inscription within, David Ashemore – Jarvis Whitehorne, the acronym, P.R.I.S.M., an acronym representing a program instigated by Whitehorne, and she had added her initials, T. L. / T. S. She didn't want to know of the resolutions, conclusions, retributions. The card was her closure. An arrow shot in the dark. An arrow for Jarvis Whitehorne.

*

In preparation to make a batch of vegetable soup, Mary withdrew the large soup pot from the lower cupboard and placed it on the counter near her cutting board. Taking the top off and looking in like a magician into a top hat, she noted the faint rings of colour, orange, green and blue, a remnant gleam of olive oil embedded in the fine metal burnishings, and she thought of the demonstrators last spring who had walked the streets of Montreal banging their pots and pans in defiance of a legislative bill. There's always something, she thought, there's always something. What can you do? What can you do?

The aroma of her fresh baked carrot muffins had made its way down the corridor into the living room where Arthur Roquebrune sat musing over the chess board. The aroma confounded his concentration as he began to anticipate the arrival of Mary's baked goods, with the promise of melting butter on their fluffy, dark bronze-tinted cake-like textures, the touch of fresh jam, and the pot of tea with its cozy in the shape of an orange cat. Edward Seymour looked on as he massaged the scalp of George III who sat on his haunches beside his chair. “Do I have you there Arthur?”

“Oh, it's far from over Ted, far from over.” Arthur liked to use the shortened form of Edward's name when they played their weekly Saturday morning chess game. A subtle handicap to deflate the home team. “Let's hope we don't find ourselves in perpetual check like last week. Somewhere out in the ether your echo is still moving the Queen back and forth ad infinitum.”

“I had a patient once,” said Edward, the image reminding him of an old case, “who was taken with the game, taken rather too far. It had turned into an addiction.” Arthur nodded his head as he mapped out the possible moves and countermoves before him. “He began to see games in patio stones, floor tiles, women's patterned dresses and gingham tablecloths. He did like Italian bistros. Well, we tried behavioural conditioning, but the bio-feedback didn't seem to work. I suggested he take up another game, distract him from the chess. I suggested tennis.”

“Hmm, and so, what did the patient do?” Arthur said not looking up.

“Well . . . he became addicted to the game of Go. Instead of squares, his attention was drawn to the interstices: the crossing of phone lines, the pound sign or octothorpe, the lines and points between squares of floor tiles and patio stones. The cross hairs in the very fabric of life. Lines, lines, lines.”

“Ah,” Arthur emitted somewhat distractedly.

“And then he took to carrying a box of candy M&M's because they aped the convex shape of the playing stones, and were cheap enough to leave behind on bistro tables and friend's bathroom floors.”

Arthur looked up. “Montaigne thought chess was absurd and trivial,” he said, and then shook his head. His thoughts drifted back in time and he wondered if Jacques Cartier and his men had played the game at Charlesbourg-Royal during that difficult winter of 1541-42. Did they have the necessary leisure? Would it have soothed their nerves? Had it been a welcome distraction from the dangers facing them?

“Ah, yes, your Montaigne. Are you still reading his diary of that journey to Italy?”

Arthur moved his black Bishop to King Bishop's fourth, and then sat back. “Yes, yes. There are some interesting moments and details. Local customs, food, that kind of thing. The spas, baths, the drinking of the waters, but the sections recounted by his hommes d'affaires dwell too much on Montaigne's bladder and stomach ailments yes, due to his suffering from the stone. Perhaps some are more interested in how many stools he passed that day, how many stones, or the quantity of urine.” Arthur shook his head. “But I will continue. The good outweighs the bad.”

Edward rested his chin on his clasped hands in a semblance of prayer, and scanned the chess board in an overtly secretive manner, pursing his lips and blinking his eyes as if communicating in code.

“The Montaigne is not as entertaining as the Vathek by Beckford though,” Arthur continued. “This Vathek wasn't on my list of books to read, books I wanted to read when young but never had the time, but my bookseller pushed it on me saying he thought I'd enjoy the tale. Somehow I think I'll never get through my list. It keeps growing.”

Edward nodded absentmindedly. “Hmm.” He moved his white Knight to King Bishop's third. He crossed his arms, and in the silence that fell upon the game with its counterfeit infinities, Hugh made his appearance. His clipping nails upon the hardwood floor drew their attention from their wooden officers and foot soldiers to Hugh's sprightly curiosity. George III lowered his head and sniffed him as he passed by.

“And who do we have here,” Arthur said dropping his hand down to entice Hugh with a stranger's scent.

“Hugh, an orphan for the night. Amelia's pet. She dropped him off last night. George here is uncertain what's going on.”

“Yes, yes, territory and all that.” Arthur scratched Hugh's ears and rubbed his back. “That reminds me,” he said, “last week when you were telling me of your friend Ms. Cloutier who was looking into the David Ashemore case, I wanted to tell you he was an orphan, adopted by the Ashemore's when a baby. When Amelia walked in, and we stopped our discussion of the Ashemore case, I never got to mention it. Perhaps it would help your Ms. Cloutier with her interests.”

Edward looked down wondering if he should reveal that Isabelle had reached a cul de sac. “That's an interesting fact Arthur. I'll let her know next time we talk.”

As Arthur returned his attention to the checkered square between them, Mary made her way into the living room with a tray laden with muffins and mugs of steaming tea. She didn't like to see grown men mincing about playing Mother with fine china cups. Big mugs of tea it was. The chess players preferred them as well, something to warm their hands, stimulating distant memories of hot chocolate and childhood.

“Thank you Mary, something to keep us going,” Edward said.

“Yes, yes, thank you Mary, your muffins are ambrosia,” Arthur said smiling up at her. “My dear wife thanks you for the recipe.”

“Ah, well she's very welcome Mr. Roquebrune. Glad you both like them. So now, who's winning this week?”

“Hard to say at the moment, but we may be here some time.” Edward winked up at her.

“I'll be making a quick vegetable soup for lunch. It might be ready before you are. I'll be back to top up your teas. Enjoy gentlemen.”

They thanked her again and watched her departure with a sense of admiration and guilt at being so pampered. Hugh, looking up at the tray, sniffed the air, a physical language that still resonated with his human counterparts.

As Edward busied himself with his muffin and tea, Arthur contemplated taking his pawn with his own pawn, but then quickly considered that moving his Bishop to King's fifth would be the better choice. He did so, and raised an eyebrow on his opponent.

Arthur, now relaxed and confident, prepared a muffin with butter and a touch of marmalade.

“That move seems familiar Arthur. Are we repeating ourselves?”

Arthur's laughter faltered with the appearance of Amelia and Mary holding an arm around her shoulders. He stood up out of concern and respect, pieces of his muffin falling to the floor where Hugh and George quickly competed to snuffle them up. “Now sit yourself down and have a word with your uncle and I'll bring you a nice cup of tea.” Mary exchanged a glance of deep concern with Edward before going back to the kitchen.

“What's the matter my dear?” Edward said, quickly running through the possibilities of distress: Duncan running off with a circus performer, money woes, car failure, the reappearance of her parents.

She told them how she had been phoned on Friday night by Duncan's friends wondering where he was. How she'd phoned the shop and then driven down to find him lying unconscious between the bookstacks, and how she'd called an ambulance and spent the night at the hospital hoping he'd survive what ever caused his collapse. She was wiping tears away as Mary brought her a big mug of hot tea, and together with her uncle and Arthur's kind words, she began to feel the solidarity of family and close friends fortify her belief that all would be well. “Don't worry Amelia. I'll make some phone calls. I still have many connections with the Royal Vic. We'll make sure he gets top notch care,” her Uncle said.

Arthur sat down heavily upon his chair, overcome with a nauseating dread that Duncan's collapse may have had some connection with Thérèse LaFlamme's in Bergen. He glanced at the chess board and saw nothing but randomness and escape, and he recalled the words of Montaigne: quelle corde de son esprit ne touche et n'employe ce niais et puerile jeu? 

© ralph patrick mackay

Yes Cecil A Long Story Short, Part Seventy-Four

After a nod and a hello to the bookstore clerk, a fresh face filling in on a slow Saturday morning, Pavor busied himself in looking for a certain title by Boris Vian. Being so close to The Word bookstore on his way back from picking up bagels and feeding Clio—whose feline dismay had been assuaged by a dish of food, soft words, and a gentle stroke down her spine—it was inevitable that his desire to replace Vian's The Froth on the Daydream, the small 1970 Penguin Modern Classic with the cover image by Felix Labisse, a book he'd purchased from The Word thirty years ago and had misplaced or lost, and had, for the last few years, been quietly looking for, would draw him to that cave of delight, that veritable cornucopia of the world's voices offered with a Zen-like calm, a bookstore whose shelves held the quiverings of countless words ready to take flight with the turning of a page and escape out the door between the supple fingers of a contented customer to which he hoped he was one.

“What was it with Beckett and the letter M anyway?” a male voice behind him asked.

Startled from his romantic musings about the pursuit of secondhand books, Pavor exchanged a brief glance with the clerk, and then turned around to see a middle aged man sitting in the low slung upholstered chair parallel to the display table laden with history books. The man's greying moustache was exemplary, full, finely trimmed, and ever so slightly tweaked at the ends. It hovered beneath his long nose like a circus canopy over the stage of his open mouth. His large horn-rimmed glasses engaged the brim of his baseball cap, one that sported a logo like a street sign, a dark silhouette of a faceless man's head with a bowler hat, and a line drawn across it on the angle, an heraldic bend, the logo for the music group Men Without Hats. Worn with irony, or as some kind of emblem of antiestablishmentarianism, Pavor could only wonder.

“Magdalen Mental Mercyseat, Murphy, Malone, Molloy, Moran, Mahood . . . and yes, Macmann. There are others I'm sure.”

Pavor thought the man's patent, hadn't quite pended.

He noticed he was holding a book entitled Visions by Leonid Andreyev, the hardcover dustjacket revealed an image of the bearded author looking much like a 1970s French Canadian folk singer.

“Can't you just see the stiff-haired Sam sitting cross-legged at a café table in Paris, tweed jacket, scarf, a demi-tasse before him, a thick white cigarette trailing smoke, those striking grey-blue eyes looking past you?” The man looked towards Pavor as if expecting an answer. “I had the good fortune of meeting him. Yes, Paris, 1979, Montparnasse. He signed a copy of Godot for me. Such nice hands.” The man returned his attention to the Andreyev leaving the clerk and Pavor holding the silence between them like a sheet ready to be folded.

Pavor began to recall the images of Beckett whose multi-lined and deeply etched face was like a road map of all the disillusions he'd surveyed. An iconic image, a caricature of all things modernist and literary. Images of authors unsettled him. Photographs could rarely go beneath heir split-second captured surfaces. His own author photograph for his publisher was just such a facade. His had been poised, looking stalwart, strong-willed, in control, and yet at the time, he'd been fragile, his will power crumbling like burnt toast—he could barely get out the door. He often looked at author photos and wondered what inner frailties gnawed at their self-confidence beneath their bitmapped images.

Pavor returned his eyes to the shelf before him, but could see no Vians between the Vernes and the Vidals, and having no interest in either of those authors, it increased his frustration seeing them cheek by jowl.

“Excuse me, but are you P. K. Loveridge?” the clerk enquired from the built-in cash desk beneath the stairs, a position that reminded Pavor of a Dickensian workplace, something akin to Kenge and Carboy.

“Yes, that's me.”

“There's a couple of books of yours here we'd like you to sign, if it's no problem that is.”

“Sure, no problem.” He came around to the little counter while the clerk rummaged behind him for the books. “You wouldn't have any books by Boris Vian by any chance?”

Placing the two softcover volumes on the counter beside a volume on wine, the clerk looked towards the front window as if daylight would help his memory search the storage shelves upstairs. “Nothing at the moment. They go pretty quick.”

“Umm, I bet.” Pavor began to sign the copy of Olivaster Moon when he heard the approach of the lugubrious man with the moustache.

“Ah, a writer I see.” The man was taller than Pavor expected. “What is your style Sir?” He didn't wait for an answer. “Are you a practitioner of dirty realism, that efflorescence of rural ruminations? That migratory method from the midwest, rural Gothic, hayseed haiku if you will? Or perhaps you proffer examples of real dirtiness, British influence, lad lit yes? A progenitor of bawdy metropolitan graphic with a touch of graffiti rap?” The man, whose clothes carried the scent of the coffee house, paused. “Esoteric eroticism perhaps?Vampiric youth narratives? Regional, coming of age reconstructions? Family saga fandangoes? YA lite, or narratives as clean and uncluttered as a staged condominium open house?" The man chuckled like a critic. "Or are you one of those coffin flies who scuttle along the edges of famous crypts in order to co-opt an historical life for a story?”

The clerk, a Page to Pavor's Knight, came to his defence. “Mr. Loveridge writes spy thrillers with nuances of noir crime, Fitz. Haven't you read the Rex series?”

Fitz ran a hand over his enviable moustache and looked sideways at Pavor. “Ah, I see, a novelist who works for a year to produce a book that's consumed in an evening. Your poor readers Sir, they must suffer to wait. Or, to reread. Are your books worthy of rereading?”

Pavor was at ease with eccentrics. Like players of solitaire, their cards were on the table. “Well, I don't know. I hope so.” He closed the signed copy. “I can tell you, I can't reread them if that's any help.” He smiled.

“Ah, well put Sir, well put. Unfortunately, having not read your work, I can't say I am a bona fide fan. No autograph seeker here," he said, tapping his plaid shirted chest. "Don't get me wrong,” he said touching Pavor's arm, “I'm not an urban snob, a snurb as it were—not to be confused with the snurd which is the slushy snow that builds up and freezes in the rims of cars and is deposited along roads and left in parking lots, veritable vehicular defecations, snow turds, hence snurds—no, I am not a snurb. I'm quite as willing to delve into the noir as the next man. Yes, give me a Stark, a Westlake or a Leonard and I'll be content . . . for an hour or two.” Fitz raised the copy of Andreyev before Pavor's eyes. “Have you read this author.”

“Andreyev? No, I'm sorry, I haven't.” He signed the second book, Rex in Arcadia. “I played Russian roulette once and came up with Gogol. Haven't gone much further than that.” He hoped that confidence would baffle the eccentric Fitz enough to make his retreat. “I really must be going. I have a cat to feed. Nice to meet you Fitz. I'll keep Andreyev in mind.” He thanked the young clerk and asked him to say hi to his boss for him and made his way to the door.

“Ah,” Fitz exclaimed, picking up the book on wine, “it's extraordinary what the humble grape has achieved is it not? Just think of its shrivelled little cousin, that desiccated delicacy, the raisin, how . . .” Pavor was out the door, and as he passed the large front window, he waved to the shadows within seeing only his dark reflection in the glass. Melisande had told him stories of peculiar and eccentric library patrons, but secondhand bookshops also had their share. Especially if a comfortable seat was provided.

Back in his car, Pavor observed the slender fingers of frost formations on his windshield, constellations of crystals with inconceivable tenuities, sidereal impressions in frozen molecules. He remembered his daughter's fascination with window frost, “winter writing” she'd said, “an unknown language.” Pavor rested his forehead on the steering wheel and closed his eyes.

His cell phone rang.

Reluctantly he pulled his phone out. He recognized the number. “Hey Jerome, how's it going?”

“Sorry for calling you on a Saturday morning. Hope I didn't disturb you.”

“No, not at all. Just out on errands. How's Thérèse doing”

“She's good. Better every day. Thanks.” Jerome cleared his throat. Pavor thought he sounded rather excited. “I just wanted to let you know that the client whose wife's portrait I painted, heard I was getting married and has offered to host a celebratory dinner. I told him it was a double wedding. All the better he said, and when he heard Duncan was the best man and his wife the bridesmaid, he invited them as well. Six of us for the night at their country estate. What do you think? The food will be gourmet.”

“Wow, the perks of your trade eh? I'll talk to Melisande, but it sounds lovely.”

“He said he'd have his Mercedez Benz van pick us up on the Sunday after the wedding, and we'll stay over till Monday or even Tuesday if we'd like.”

Pavor had yet to think of honeymoon destinations but such a visit seemed a pleasant precursor to a trip abroad. “Thanks Jerome. Sounds great.”

“Good. I'll talk to you soon. Say hi to Melisande for me. Ciao.”

Ciao? He hadn't heard Jerome so animated since he won an arts grant to study in Europe. Pavor started the car, left the defroster off, and made his way home.

*

Amelia wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror but her features were still fogged by the remnant moisture. The words of the doctor came back to her like the steam returning to the mirror's surface. A liminal state the doctor had told her. He was stable. They would perform more tests during the morning and afternoon. She should go home and take care of herself and then return late afternoon when Duncan would be back in his room.

She sighed deeply and wrapped a towel around her hair.

The apartment was quiet without Hugh. Mary had picked him up last night to stay with Uncle Edward and George III. She hadn't revealed the reason why she needed a dog sitter. There was nothing they could do to help Duncan, and the hospital with its inevitable germs was no place for a ninety-two year old. She didn't want Edward catching some virus. She would drive up to see them for lunch and reveal all.

Passing the study, she stopped and looked in at Duncan's desk, a cluttered assemblage of papers, books, and collectibles he'd acquired over the years. She sat down in his chair and looked at the bamboo holders full of pens, pencils, book marks, chopsticks, and the letter openers he liked to collect, miniature swords and daggers in brass or copper, Victorian copper paper knives, finely polished multi-coloured wood ones, and carved exotics from other continents. On the right side of the desk sat a bowl filled with small sea shells, some pearly and transparent, others pure white and solid as stone, colourful pebbles, slender petrified coral pieces, and a small starfish, and sticking out of them like a pen in a pen holder, a brown and white feather, a feather with a story. Duncan, alone at his Father's country cabin, had been looking out the living room window at dusk watching a rabbit munch the grass under a birch tree. The next morning he'd found the feather where the rabbit had dined, an owl's feather. He'd kept it as a memento mori. A reminder of the way of nature. She withdrew it from the shells and gently ran her finger along the soft edge. Twirling it around she held it like a quill pen, and then, overwhelmed with a superstition that any action might have an effect upon Duncan's recovery, she was overcome with a feeling of having disturbed the spirit inherent in the object, and slipped it back in place between the shells and stones. She knew it was illogical, but at such desperate moments in life, the scope of influences became panoramic and all embracing.

She looked at the small colour photograph propped on a set of reference books, a photo of Duncan before she knew him. The year was 1981, he was twenty-two, slimmer, with longer, darker hair, and sporting gold-rimmed Ray-Ban aviator glasses slightly out of fashion by that time. He was facing the camera and standing near a tall mirror, his reflection, an echo of his lost twin brother Gavin. He called the photograph André and Me. His little joke. The reason being that for many years in his late teens and early twenties, he experienced people greeting him using the name André. A bicyclist passed by, raised his arm and blurted out, 'Salut André.' Or a pedestrian passed him with a 'bonjours' and a nod as if he knew him. Or from an open car window, a voice calling out André. Or that occasion on the Metro platform at Berri-UQAM, when a young woman waved and called to him from the other side of the tracks. She had been going east, he west, and the noise of their respective metro trains entering the station had precluded any further verbal interaction. From the inside of his Metro car, he had waved to her, and she'd waved back, separated by an arm's reach. There were other occasions. Each time he'd been caught off guard. Each time he'd been stunned and unable to react quick enough. Each time he'd been left mystified. And then it stopped. He never did learn who André was. Never did meet his French doppelganger. The end.

With failing logic and a sense of shame she wished it was his doppelganger in the hospital and not Duncan.

She slumped back in his chair, crossed her ankles and suddenly felt disconnected from everything around her. Floating upon a cloud of anxiety, she could hardly feel the chair. She closed her eyes and consciously breathed in and out, seeking strength from some hidden reserves of perseverance. Fearing she had little left, she concentrated, and visualized a water well, the kind found in old farmsteads, and imagined herself bringing up a bucket overflowing with replenishing liquid, and pouring it into a bamboo irrigation trough that fed a small garden. Breathing deeply, she continued the process until she drifted off into a light sleep.

Roused with a sense of falling, she looked at the clock and saw she'd only been asleep for ten minutes.

She dressed quickly thinking of the items she should bring back to the hospital. His comb, toothbrush, fresh boxer shorts, socks. Reading material she remembered. Yes, she could read to Duncan if it was all right with the doctors. Going around to his bedside table, she noted his selected bedtime reading was not promising: a Loeb Classic edition of the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, My Friend's Book by Anatole France, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing, and McAlmon's Chinese Opera by Stephen Scobie. A prime example of his eclectic and wavering interests. She didn't think she could manage any of them, but did choose the Gissing. Looking at her own stack of books, she selected a novel she'd been reading, a collection of short stories and Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, one of her favourite children's books she'd been rereading, a book Duncan had never read. She thought that it might be just the thing for him. She could read it to him with a soft voice, fil de voce, like a bedtime story. It might be just the thing to bring him back to consciousness.

© ralph patrick mackay

Yes Cecil, A Long Story Short, Part Seventy-Three

He opened his eyes and found himself lying upon a small bed in a small room. He noticed a porthole above him framed with dark smooth wood. Kneeling upon the pillow, he looked out but could only see a fog of shifting patterns spinning slowly like a kaleidoscope of café au laits.

Out in the hallway, the walls were wainscoted and featured polished brass hand rails, and beneath his bare feet, a carpet runner leading to a set of narrow stairs. As he made his way to the top stair he could see a large wood-panelled room with four figures seated around a table. Approaching, he recognized Yves wearing a captain's hat and puffing on a pipe, and beside him, Melisande and Thérèse dressed in dark suits, white shirts and black ties, and beside them, Jerome in brown rags with a cigarette behind his ear. They looked up at him.

“What's put on a table, cut, but never eaten?” Jerome asked.

Duncan didn't understand.

They all smiled as Yves produced a pack of cards and began to shuffle the deck while he hummed the tune to Gilligan's Island. His navy pea jacket sported a crest with a large fish. Duncan turned around and saw Amelia in a long evening gown with pearls around her neck, Hugh at her feet. She waved to him. Nearby stood Tom wearing a long green overcoat and holding an umbrella in one hand and a swinging pendulum in the other.

“Don't worry Dunc,” Tom said, “I've brought my ultrasonic weapon in case we need to break down any walls. We'll find your old friend David Ashemore don't you worry. Have a drink, relax.”

Standing to his left he discovered P. K. Loveridge in a butler's outfit holding a tray with shot glasses arranged in a spiral formation. He took one, drank it, and found himself out on the deck of the ship. The life saver read: SS Qupode. Leaning on the railing, he looked down but neither saw nor heard any evidence of water, only foam. They were floating on foam.

“How deep is the ocean?” asked Yves who now stood beside him puffing away on his pipe.

“A stone's throw,” replied Tom, standing on the other side of him, swinging his pendulum out over the railing.

Yves took the pipe from between his lips, the smoke rising from the bowl of fading embers, and tossed it into the fog. “I feel we're close to L'Isle de Mont Lautré. It shouldn't be long now. Tabarnac Dunc, you'll be fine, just fine.”

Duncan felt extremely fatigued, and turning around, found himself back in his childhood bedroom, the den over the garage. The large twin windows were open and he was lying on his bed looking at the night sky, the strobe light of Place Ville Marie swept the underside of the clouds. He began to count slowly to eleven. One, two, three, four, five . . He remembered those early years going to the library with David to take out Tintin books. He could see the small, white clap-board library, the steps down to the children's library section, the Librarians at the desk, the colourful books, the path home through the park with its benches with elderly people feeding squirrels and pigeons. The path home. The light swept the clouds once again. One, two, three, four . . . The hidden lighthouse searching for lost souls. He breathed in the scent of rain. Petrichor Amelia had said. From the Greek petros for stone, and ichor, for the golden blood of the Gods. Petrichor. He looked beside him and there was the National Geographic map from his youth tacked to the fake wood panelling, a map he would gaze upon for hours dreaming about the Mediterranean Sea from the straits of Gibraltar to the port of Jaffa where Jonah set sail, and everything between, the place names magical, mythical, romantic. He could see the pencil lines he'd made as a youth, the supposed route of Ulysses according to some book he'd read and long forgotten. How ridiculous he now thought. How ridiculous. The light from Place Ville Marie swept past once more. He began to count, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . .

*

The Doctor checked the vital signs monitor and then looked down at the chart of test results. The Glasgow Coma Scale looked promising: GCS 11= E4 V3 M4 at 7:10 this morning. Eye response at 4 points: spontaneous eye opening. Verbal response at 3: random words exclaimed: haddock? Cupid? Motor response at 4: withdrawal from pain stimulus.

That was promising she thought. She lifted Mr. Strand's left eyelid and noted the condition of the pupil and then with two gentle movements, brushed his brown hair back from his forehead thinking he didn't look his age. There was something about his chin and the curve of his lips that seemed familiar. She rearranged the bedspread and held his right hand and bent down to speak softly into his right ear. “Hello Duncan, my name is Doctor Julia Yee. You're doing fine. Your wife Amelia was here with you and will be back soon. We're taking good care of you. Don't worry. You'll be fine.” And with that she gave his hand a squeeze. There was a slight response in return. Then, with the soft edge of her thumb, she swept a stray eyelash off his cheek.

*

A fragrance of sandalwood and jasmine overcame him. Memories were evoked, memories of Montreal's Chinatown and the Chinese soap he used to buy when he dated Yiyin, the Bee & Flower brand, so beautifully wrapped and labelled, everyday exotics, golden emblems of their time together. He was now sitting across from her in a booth at the Tean Hong Café, the restaurant that had burnt down years ago. She was explaining the various Dim Sum dishes to him while he practised his chopsticks. The waiter, a young student in black dress pants, white shirt and black bow tie, brought them a pot of Chinese tea, and she began to pour.

The light from Place Ville Marie swept by once more, and he began to count again. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . .

*

Melisande sipped her tea and looked out the window. She could see Pavor scraping frost from his windshield and then brushing it off. He looked up, noticed her, and waved. She smiled and waved back. A few moments later, she watched as he pulled out from the curb and made his way east along Sherbrooke Street on his way to her apartment to feed Clio, and to stop by St. Viateur Bakery for a dozen sesame seed bagels and hummus. She felt somewhat guilty for not being there to feed Clio her early morning meal, but inversely, she luxuriated in the freedom from responsibility. Looking back to the parking space Pavor had vacated, she noticed an oily slick, circular rings of orange, then indigo, light blue and back to dark orange and the blues once more. Her Mother used to say such spots were evidence of rainbows touching down. She sat at Pavor's desk and stared at the small antique brass compass resting on a stack of leather bound notebooks and wondered if he'd ever witnessed a rainbow from this window.

She put her tea down and opened the central desk drawer, and slipped out the latest instalment of his work in progress. He'd told her it was there if she wanted to look it over with her keen-eye for typos, faulty grammar, factual mistakes, and implausibilities, and give him what he called his much needed 'elaborative and corrective reinforcements.' Rereading his own work was the most creatively draining task of any day, 'like retracing my steps across a beach looking for a cipher in the sand.' It was a sentence he often used. If she'd come across the sentence in his work, she might have to put brackets around it and add a question mark in the margin.

She opened the binder and began to read:

Rex Under Glass, Part Eight

Rex parked the Venetian green sedan in an unlit spot around the corner from Vernon Smythe's house. The digital numbers on the clock glowed like binary poison, 11:00. Too late for people to be walking their dogs. Most residents were likely preparing for bed, checking their emails, or hypnotized by the litany from the late night news. He folded the car rental papers and pushed them into the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a good time for him to make his surprize visit. With his collar up around his neck, hands in pockets, and a dark ball cap on his head, he counted the steps as he made his way to Vernon's front door: forty-two. As he pushed the door bell, he thought he saw something move on the lawn to his left. There was a faint hint of skunk in the air. A shiver rippled down his spine.

“Yes, who is it?” Vernon demanded, his voice sounding more annoyed than perplexed as it issued from the small intercom speaker above the doorbell.

“I come bearing gifts from the old city of Prague,” Rex said. He waited in silence, casting worried glances at the shrubbery. Then he heard footsteps approach the door, a hesitation as if he was being viewed on a video screen, and finally the door opened.

“Well Rex, you've caught me on my movie night. Come in, come in.” Vernon sniffed a few times. “A bit skunky out there tonight isn't it. Or is that one of your gifts?” He stood there dressed in a long, richly woven brocade house coat and matching slippers. “Have you ever seen the movie, The Dark Corner, 1946?”

Rex shook his head.

“Don't worry Rex, few have.” He motioned to the half open door revealing a fully furnished drawing room. “Please join me. Don't worry about your shoes. Yes, The Dark Corner, quite a film. You've arrived just as the camera panned away from the great Eddie Heywood on the piano in the High Hat Club. Ah, those were the days, elegance, savoir faire.” He motioned to Rex to take a seat at one of the two highback upholstered chairs facing the large flatscreen television on an antique table. The film had been paused leaving a still shot of an attractive actress sitting at a nightclub table wearing a striking black jacket with white stripes in a V design. “Lucille Ball,” he said, gesturing to the actress on the screen. “Perhaps you know of her from old reruns of I Love Lucy? The famous scene in the chocolate factory with the conveyor belt conveying confections unremittingly. Oh, my, such hilarity is rare indeed, rare indeed. How we laughed.”

“What's The Dark Corner about?”

“I'm sorry Rex, I didn't offer you anything to drink. You must be jet lagged and dehydrated. What can I offer you?”

“I'm fine. No need.”

“Well, if you change your mind, the bar is over there,” he said pointing to the corner. “Beer, orange juice, tomato juice, ginger ale, water. Help yourself.” Vernon sipped his Cinzano Rosso and crossed his legs. “So, The Dark Corner is a lesser known film noir. A private detective played by Mark Stevens—a part more suited for Alan Ladd but alas, he was busy with The Blue Dahlia, another film noir which came out the same year—the detective is framed for the murder of a playboy lawyer who was having an affair with the younger wife of a wealthy older art dealer. The art dealer set it up using a thug to do his dirty work. Lucille Ball plays the detective's secretary. Quite simple really, but the writing is decent, and Lucille Ball provides a very good performance.” He picked up the remote control. “I can start it from the beginning if you'd like to watch.”

“Evan Dashmore told me about the young man who had an affair with your wife, the files on the thumb drive, and how you were essentially responsible for his death.” Rex withdrew a thumb drive from his jacket pocket and held it in his open palm. “Evan wanted to mail this to you. He advised me to avoid you altogether. Change my name. Start a new life.”

Vernon sipped his drink and rested his head back as he contemplated this revelation. “William Powell might have been good for the part as well, but I imagine he was on contract for the Thin Man films. Yes, good old William Powell,” he said, looking up into the darkness seemingly lost in nostalgia. “Jean Harlow, such a tragic loss. Love of his life, dead at 26. And then his son, a suicide. Yes, Rex, even the high and mighty have their afflictions.”

“What's the truth Vernon? Did you drive the young man to his death?”

Vernon placed his tumbler on the side table and rested his hands on the arms of the chair. “Rex, Rex, Rex. Evan has played you. He's taken the shark out of you. The young man in question worked for the service and was planning to reveal certain secrets about our contracting of certain operations. He was discredited and fired. As for having an affair with my wife, that is neither here nor there. As for myself, I have been retired from the service for a year now. The private contract companies I oversee provide solutions for international problems. We use finesse, not hit men. We provide training and techniques, expedience and methodology. Today's science and technology has made our work much more efficient. You've worked for me, not the service. Cash on the barrel. You should have no quarrel with me.”

“Maybe I'll have that drink.” Rex walked over to the bar and opened the small fridge and took out a bottle of orange juice, popped open the cap and drank deeply. “Evan thought you might have sent me to Prague to set us up like your film noir detective.”

“I think Mr. Dashmore has been reading too many European spy novels.”

“Why did you send me to Prague?”

Vernon directed the remote control towards the television screen reducing it to a dark shadow. “If you must know, it was sleight of hand. I needed someone to draw attention away from the man I sent to Prague on your flight, make it look like you were the courier. Information was purposely leaked concerning your connection with my interests. Did you notice extra attention to your passage through customs, the taxi driver, the hotel workers. Probably not. They're very good.”

Rex reviewed his memories of the trip, his arrival and subsequent movements, and could now see how people's interactions with him could be reinterpreted. He'd been followed and watched. “What about Evan? Won't he be under suspicion now?”

“Evan works for Czech intelligence. I imagine he's now recognized he's been played. You were my smoke screen. Your final payment is in the second drawer, on your right.”

Rex opened the drawer and took out a legal size envelope. He placed it in his jacket pocket without looking at the contents. “So what about the thumb drive?”

“A souvenir.” Vernon drank the remnants of his vermouth and stood up. “The world we inhabit Rex, has a custom of misfortune. Civilization is a thin topsoil easily swept away by barbarity. Stoics cultivated the soil for the nihilists to sow and religious extremists to waste.” He walked towards the bar, hands in his house coat. “This is not a world for jaded postdocs, cynical ambivalents and hip divines. You may think I have an endless Rolodex of disreputables, but really my work is the very syntax of international cooperation. The sand in the mortar that keeps the masonry of relations intact.”

“You know Vernon, I don't know who, or what to believe anymore. I don't think I'm suited for your world.” Rex placed the half-finished orange juice on the bar and taking the thumb drive from his pocket, dropped it into the wide opening of the bottle. They both watched it sink to the bottom, a shadow in the glass.

Vernon looked at his watch. “Ah, 11:30, half-past hanging time. I want to thank you Rex for your work. If you have second thoughts, you know how to contact me.” He held out his arm as a sign to escort him to the door.

In the foyer, Rex noticed the painting leaning against the wall, “Why don't you put that up on the wall?”

Vernon turned his head sideways. “Ah, yes, de Chirico's The Nostalgia of the Infinite. A decent copy, but a fake as they say. Those two figures in the foreground and their dark shadows are us Rex. The tower and its flags dominate our lives. We're just shadows in the sun.” Vernon approached the painting. “Why don't you take it. It requires a new home.” He picked it up and held it out towards Rex.

They shared eye contact for ten seconds, then Rex accepted the gift.

Vernon opened the front door and Rex stopped, and held out his hand. “Good bye Vernon.”

A brief solid handshake passed between them.

“Not at all, not at all,” Vernon said. “Careful as you go . . . mind the skunks.” He watched Rex meld into the shadows of the street and then closed the door. He walked towards the staircase and stood with his hand on the ornately carved newel post, one foot on the lowest stair, and listened. Nothing. Not tonight he thought, not tonight. He would not see his ghostly double tonight.

He entered the main floor powder room to pee, and standing before the mirror, noticed the two vertical lines that rose between his eyes to meet the horizontal wrinkles of his forehead, a crossroads which produced an outline reminiscent of the outstretched arms of Christ the Redeemer, the one that loomed over Rio de Janeiro on Corcovado Mountain. Looking directely ahead, he rested his gaze upon the bags under his eyes, crescent shaped dumplings, puffy, plump. He stared at them until they brought to mind the rounded scales of a balance, weary with the weight of decision. How ravaged his face seemed. How grim. In another dimension he was certain he'd found a sense of the sacred, lived a life of beneficence, of honours, and one night that munificent soul would be waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, and would lead him away.

*

Melisande closed the binder and put it back in the drawer. Her tea was cold. She stared at the passing clouds and wondered where Pavor was going with this narrative. Swinging around in his chair, she got up and looked at the painting hanging over his small fireplace, Jerome's copy of the de Chirico mentioned in the story, The Nostalgia of the Infinite. She breathed in deeply and thought a quick hot shower would clear her mind.

© ralph patrick mackay

Yes Cecil, A Long Story Short, Part Seventy-Two

Mrs. Shimoda sat at the dining room table performing her monthly Saturday morning ritual of going through her purse, purging it of loose change, bills of sale, old tissues, slips of paper with appointment reminders, crumpled grocery lists like shadows of every list made and every one to come, pink post-it notes with numbers for fashion patterns desired and notions required, individually wrapped candies from restaurant visits with her son, ATM bank receipts as thin and smooth as India paper, and the inevitable dross of dusty lint in the seams of interior pockets. Hesitating, she withdrew a small strip of cloth in a pale shade of purple, one she had brought to the fabric store to seek out the right buttons for the blouse she'd been making; she rubbed it between her right thumb and forefinger, and recalled the Sunday afternoon she wore it to her grandson's birthday party, an afternoon overflowing with moments of gratitude and pleasure, moments of lucid smiles and gentle laughter no camera could possibly capture. She placed it on the table beside the loose change, and in doing so, shuffled a few coins off the edge with her sleeve. She heard them fall and noticed one rolling in a long arc towards the corner cabinet like a rogue car wheel after an accident. With a sigh, she made her way over and bent down on her knees to look underneath, and as she reached in to sweep the ten cent coin out, she saw the rough side of a jigsaw puzzle piece nestled behind one of the front legs. Picking it up, she recognized the shape. She turned it over to the shiny side glazed like a porcelain bathroom fixture, and there was the hand of the geisha holding the parasol, the missing symmetrical jigsaw piece reaching out to embrace and complete the image with the other 999 interlocking fragments she no longer had. Her son had returned the puzzle to the shop seeking a refund. She could hear his laconic explanation, 'defective' he would have said, 'missing a piece'. She looked down at this now redundant fragment in the palm of her hand thinking of a compass, a delicate hand holding the shaft of the bamboo oil-paper parasol, the thumb pointing North.

She couldn't conceive how it found its way under the corner cabinet.

Back at her seat, she began to return items into her purse: wallet, keys, pens, a vintage compact with an image of pale flowers which reminded her of an Aubusson carpet, lip gloss, a notebook, a package of tissues, a comb, a folded blue nylon tote bag in its pouch which mimicked her dark blue and white embroidered omamori (a gift from her daughter-in-law as a charm for her travel safety, one she hoped would bring green lights, never red), a tape measure, miniature scissors for coupon cutting, spare reading glasses, a nail file, and a few adhesive bandages for small cuts. Picking up the jigsaw piece, she thought, for the briefest of moments, of placing it in the bottom of her purse, but quickly dismissed it as an idea induced by a mischievous spirit. She would dig a hole in the earth at the base of her small bamboo shrub in her back garden, and bury it deep enough to avoid the reach of squirrels. Best place for it she thought. She looked out the dining room window and was reassured that such a task was still possible. The snowfall had been minimal over the last week. The ground was still friable. Tomorrow, she thought. She would bury it tomorrow. Her morning shopping lay ahead.

Halfway down the hill on her way towards the Atwater Market in search of a nice piece of fish for her dinner that evening, she recognized a car coming up the hill, the driver looking tired and expressionless, her hands grabbing the steering wheel at the eleven and one position as if it at a ship's wheel and lost at sea. Mrs. Shimoda smiled and nodded her head, but Amelia didn't see her. Poor girl, she thought, preoccupied with Duncan's business closure. Amelia had told her all about it and had jokingly reassured her that they wouldn't be bringing the weight of a bookshop home. She had been reassured, though the thought of lying on her bed beneath a dangerous weight of books on the floor above had given her a singular nightmare one evening. She'd dreamt of waking up in her room with books pouring from the ceiling like sand into the bottom of an hour-glass, an unstoppable influx of print, and there she was clambering up the growing pyramid of books only to slip down to the bottom perimeter where the door of her room had been wedged shut. She had awoken, the sheets in disarray, the ceiling intact, mumbling the word hashigo, hashigo, hashigo.

The sidewalks were more slippery than she'd expected, the patches of ice and city-spread sand were distributed along the concrete path like frozen ponds and hazards of a golf course. Carefully she made her way down the hill. She decided she would take a taxi back from the market, and she wondered with anticipation if she'd be fortunate to come across Olivier. Such a pleasant smile and so polite. So helpful opening doors and helping her with packages. She was usually disinclined to participate in small talk, but with Olivier it was different. He asked how she was, talked about the weather, asked after her family, discussed his, all with his Haitian-accented English which charmed her into amiable and relaxed responses as she breathed in the sandalwood aroma of his car, making her feel as if she was sitting on a sofa in his living room. She had to admit, she accentuated her elderly qualities when around him, stooping slightly, walking a little slower, sighing with a touch of dramatic nuance. It was all give and take, authentic and studied, like life itself she thought.

*

Isabelle Cloutier closed her eyes and listened to the coffee machine. The inhalation and exhalation of water and air sounded like a Jacques Cousteau underwater adventure, the clicks, the bubbling, the drips and splashes of the dark tinted liquid leading to the heightened finale as the machine coughed and burbled, an expiration akin to the scuba diver taking the mouth piece from between their lips and releasing the oxygen into the water.

Breathing in the aroma of the fresh-brewed coffee, she felt as weightless as her imaginary diver rising to the surface of morning.

Pouring herself a cup, she walked over to her bistro table by the window where a sun-catcher in the shape of a snowy owl cast an opaque reflection upon her. She turned her tablet on and clicked on her Twitter account with its made up name and Twitter handle, AtheneNoctua. Her profile image, a small owl, looked back at her as she entered her password. Each Tweeter's distinctive profile picture acted as an immediate sign post to their content, a diverse news feed for her interests. Her eyes quickly scanned the tweets, skimming the surfaces, reading the first words and passing on:

A question of . . .

Scientists find . .

Do you have . . .

Watch this . . .

A look at . . .

Is the . . .

When asked to . . .

How crime will . . .

Who was responsible . . .

Your voice will . . .

Around in circles . . .

So excited . . .

Looking for a . . .

I can't be the only . . .

Nothing's more . . .

What does it say . . .

RIP . . .

Good morning . . .

Excited about all . . .

In a cab with . . .

Scientists have made . . .

Sad news . . .

Oh joy . . .

If the weather continues . . .

Still buzzing from . . .

I've decided i don't . . .

The top 20% of . . .

On this day . . .

Are Saturn's rings . . .

Between her hangover and her work week exhaustion, her concentration was as passive as a cat lying in the sun. She logged out of Twitter and checked her personal email. Messages and updates from a science magazine, online shoe sale, Clearly Contacts, travel opportunities, and one from Sotheby's with a catalogue of an upcoming sale of nineteenth century art. She knew her energy was low as she logged out of her account without looking at the catalogue, usually such a pleasurable weekend pastime as she searched for possible depictions of owls in paintings or sculpture she might conceivably afford.

Looking down into the back yard, she noticed her empty garbage can on its side, possibly knocked over by the wind, its dark opening like a tunnel entrance. This triggered the memory of a dream. She'd been walking into a tunnel, about twenty feet in circumference, and after a long trek in, the tunnel had begun to narrow, gradually at first, and then dramatically so, until thirty feet ahead of her, her flash light had revealed a convergence of the circle into a point like the inside of a steeple. Turning around, all had been dark. She couldn't see the light of the entrance, and she thought the tunnel must have curved. It was then she'd awoken wrapped and tangled in her sheets feeling frantic and trapped. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and wondered if it was symbolic of her evening spent with her girlfriend Carol at the book launch she'd dragged her to. 'You might meet someone new,' she'd said, 'someone literary, artsy.' She sipped her coffee recalling the evening spent drinking cheap red wine while a University of Montreal professor read from his latest book of poetry surrounded by hipsters with facial hair, plaid shirts, small fedoras, tattoos, dark rimmed glasses, and sloppy jeans and running shoes. The young women had worn outfits with shear panels, visible zippers, tall leather boots, and looked like they lived off cigarettes and carrot juice. And everyone had been so bloody young, and seemingly more concerned with the activity around smart phones and selfies than the obscure meanings of the poet's offeringss. What had Carol been thinking? But they'd had fun afterwards at the trendy Baldwin Barmacie on Laurier, where they talked, releasing all the stress and demands of their respective jobs while confirming each other's woes in soft voices and undertones. She smiled thinking of Carol's wordplay concerning the young men and women at the reading: Between the sad men and the Mad Men, you have the plaid men. Between the tattoos and the Jimmy Choos, you have the whose who's.

In the living room, sitting in her comfortable high back corner chair, she curled her legs up and wrapped a crochet throw around her shoulders and stared at the painting entitled Phantom of the North, a Great Grey Owl in flight, its piercing yellow eyes and hooked yellow beak facing her as if she was the prey, the enormous head and its heart-shaped face with semi-circular feather arrangements in curving lines of super-symmetry and its extraordinary outstretched wings showing off its banded feathers ready to wrap her in an embrace before the talons found their mark.

After a long, seemingly dreamless period of moody darkness—imageless dreams sightless people are said to experience—she thought of the abundance of evocative dreams she'd had this past week. A dream with owls was not uncommon with her but this one had been unusual. She'd awoken on Thursday morning to recall one of finding an owl in a barn-like modern house; she'd looked up to see it in the peak of the rafters, and she'd opened a door and called to it as if to a cat. As it swooped towards her, she'd prostrated herself on the floor facing a glass-fronted China cabinet which reflected the owl's flight over her, a baby owl she could see. Then fear had entered as she'd sensed a large mother owl swoop down and join the owlet. Realizing the owls were still inside the building, she had opened a further door and followed the same procedure only to find herself in a large screened in porch and she had to reenact the process once more. Finally, the owls had been released and she was standing in the sun, a sense of great contentment and freedom overcoming her. If it signified a revelation in her life, she had yet to see how.

A small stack of envelopes and flyers, Friday's mail, lay on the table by the door. She got up and brought them back to her chair and sorted through them. An envelope with Edward Seymour's distinctive script caught her eye. No stamp. Hand-delivered. She opened it and found a card with an image of a Dutch interior. Her eyes first lighted upon the dog in the foreground beside the leaning broom, then the grey-striped cat with its arched tail in the middle distance, then the parrot in the opened cage above, then the white piece of paper, an envelope, on the bottom stair to the right, and only then did her eyes wander down the black and white tile floor to the the depths of the painting and notice a framed picture in a room to the right, but quickly concluded it was a mirror and the reflection of a black-hatted man with his back to her facing a young woman in blue to his right. It was such a richly detailed interior, it pulled her in, instilling a desire to be there, petting the dog, cuddling the cat, calling up to the parrot, and reaching down for the letter and opening it to read its contents. Isabelle turned the card over and read that the painting was called, View of a Corridor by Samuel van Hoogstraten, 1662, Oil on Canvas, Collection of Dryham Park, National Trust. Within, she read Edward's short note.

Dear Isabelle,

I was rummaging about in desk drawers and found some old cards I bought when on vacation in England in the mid-eighties, my foray into the Cotswolds and environs, all Chipping this and Chipping that. Such lovely stone buildings in that area of the world. Such golden warmth. I remember visiting Stanway House and from there, making my way south west exploring Cheltenham, Gloucester, Bristol, Bath and all interesting sights along and around the way, including Dryham Park which has, I seem to remember, an astonishing collection of Dutch art. You must make a trip my dear. Well worth the time. The cage door is ajar. The cage door is ajar.

I just wanted to let you know that our Thérèse Laflamme visited me unannounced this week, and her memory of the David Ashemore case had returned to her. Something about reading a friend's work of fiction in progress had triggered her recall. I just wanted to warn you in case I had possibly mentioned your name to my niece who is now friends with Thérèse, and who could possibly mention your name and your enquiry on my behalf. My old brain. I can't be sure if I mentioned it to her or not. In any case, I told Thérèse to get on with her life. If there were wrong doings involved in Ashemore's death, time will work it out. It is out of our hands now.

I can't guarantee anything. A strong willed young woman like Thérèse is a force of nature.

Anyway, my dear, we must get together over the coming holidays. If you're alone for Christmas dinner, consider yourself invited. Please let me know.

All my love,

Edward

She held the card wondering if she was indeed called upon, would she take up the cause? Or would she take that vacation?

© ralph patrick mackay