Aqueous floaters plied the liquid of
his eyes like pieces of driftwood, their shapes reminding him of
punctuation marks: comas, inverted question marks, and tildes, those
squiggly lines to be found on the upper reaches of his computer
keyboard. Pavor rubbed his eyes with his fingertips, the pressure
producing a mild version of the kaleidoscopic displays he used to
enjoy as a youth, the mandala-like formations of light expanding and
merging before dwindling to an opaque sepia tone which in turn
diminished to the darkness of an imagined interstellar space.
“Like elusive holograms,” he said,
as if to himself.
Mélisande, sitting at his desk, looked
round. “What?”
“Those little floating particles in
our eyes, they're like elusive holograms.”
“Ah yes, I have a little dark one in
my lower right eye. I'll be reading in bed, and I'll flinch because
I'll think there's a spider on my sleeve, or on the bedspread.
Something to do with the angle of light and shadow I imagine.”
“I wonder what creates them?”
“You can probably Google it.”
He stretched his legs out from his
comfy chair and yawned, arching his back. “That would just take the
mystery out of it.” He paused for a few moments.“What about . . .
optical fish swimming in our visual aquariums?”
“Optical fish.” She smiled. “More
like eye dust.”
He looked up to the corner of the
ceiling and noticed filaments of dust swaying in the radiator's rising warmth like undersea
vegetation. “My Mother used to call it Irish lace,” he said
pointing towards the ceiling.
“Irish lace?” She raised her
eyebrows and pursed her lips. “That's rather . . . .”
He sat up in his chair. “She didn't
say it with a negative connotation. My Mother must have picked it up
from my English Grandmother. When I was young, I knew nothing about
prejudices towards the Irish, and I thought it a magical term,
Irish lace. It wasn't until I was in my twenties, stuck as I was
in my subjective mind, that I could shake the reference and see it
for what it was. Then I wondered how I could have been so blind.”
“Great, now when I see the ceiling
dust, I'll think Irish lace, and
I'll have to catch myself from saying it.”
Pavor got up and walked over to her and
began to massage her shoulders and neck, watching their reflections
in the window, like two actors in front of a backcloth painted with a
night scene of tree branches, the historic Sulpician Tower with its
weather vane and the old fortification walls outlined with freshly
fallen snow. “I just remembered the oddest dream I had last night,”
he said, as he watched a small pick-up truck pass their building.
Mélisande gave up her reading and bent
her head down resting it on her hands. “What was it?”
“I was in a country setting, standing
before a pile of interesting carved stone ornaments, pineapple
finials and crosses, and I found myself wanting to take one, the
smallest of them, a ball finial which looked like a pawn in a chess
game. But I felt I shouldn't just help myself to them, especially as
I felt they were from a cemetery. Next thing I remember I have this
heavy stone ornament and I'm trying to attach it behind the seat of
my small motorcycle, which is odd, because I've never owned one. I
cover it with a jacket or something, and then I see an odd vehicle
bounce by on a nearby road it's truck bed laden down with these types
of stone pieces, and I think 'cemetery.' I feel they saw me in the
rear view mirror and I begin to worry they'll come after me. It was
an odd vehicle. One of those cars that have a pick-up truck bed in
the back.”
“Hmm, yes . . . an El Camino.”
“What? How'd you know that?”
“Librarians know everything Pavor.
You must remember this.” They laughed. “No, my cousin Frank
owned one. Always showing off his souped up half car to us. I
remember it was blue with red flames painted along the sides. We used
to joke it was like that hairstyle, the mullet. 'Here comes Frank
with his mullet car' we used to say. 'Business in the front, party in
the back.' Sorry, I don't know who came up with that
phrase.”
“Right . . . your cousin Frank.” He
realised he knew so little of her family.
“I probably would have forgotten the
name of the car but it's stuck in my memory alongside the pilgrimage
trek, the Camino de Santiago. So, what happened next?”
His fingers worked their way up to her
scalp like a pilgrim up a hillside. “I don't know. I woke up I
guess. That's all I remember. But I really wanted the stone finials,
felt they'd make great decorations in a garden.”
“You . . . don't have a . . . garden.”
“I know, I know. Maybe a future
garden. Our future garden.”
A silence overcame them as they each
envisioned their own variation of an ideal house with a garden,
Mélisande trying to accommodate Pavor's ball finial in her English
herbaceous border, and Pavor wondering if Mélisande would punctuate
his formal layout with a stone sculpture of a great Mother Goddess,
the type she'd been discussing over dinner the other night, one of
those pregnant stone earth Mother figures that she said long predated
the Greek Apollo and his control over the Delphic oracles like some
kind of Parnassian pimp. Such thoughts led to further speculations on
how they'd balance the feminine and masculine elements within the
house. Would the living room be masculine decor, and the bedroom
feminine? His de Chirico copy of The Nostalgia of the Infinite
over the mantle piece, or her portrait as Mélisande by
Marianne Stokes copied by Jerome?
He continued massaging her scalp,
exploring the geography of her northernmost hemisphere, deep in the
forests beyond the tundra of her shoulders and neck, remarking how
the whorl of her follicle origin was counterclockwise and slightly to
the right of centre, which made him think of spirals, and he wondered
if it could it be connected to the golden spiral of the Fibonacci
sequence he'd been reading about? Softly, he massaged Mélisande's
temples and around her ears, gently kneading while his mind drifted
off to the phantom islands and lost atolls in the ocean of his
memories. She began to breath deeply and he sensed she'd eased
herself into a light doze. Gently, cautiously, he withdrew his hands
and listened to her inhalation and exhalation with the attentiveness
of a parent beside the crib of a newborn. He returned to his chair
and picked up one of his old writing notebooks from a box he'd
taken from storage in the hope that he'd find inspiration for plot
developments, and began to turn pages with fresh, though vague
thoughts of writing a mystery novel with clues laid in a pattern
according to the Fibonacci sequence. An expanse of white space upon
the paper brought his thoughts back. He'd come to little stacks of
poetry, lines like hexagrams in the I Ching. He'd written the
poems and fragments after the death of his wife Victoria and their
child Tamara and he'd half forgotten them. With apprehension, he
began to read:
Fare Forward
Dreams of puzzles
three-dimensionally crossed
With letters in glorious
enthralment,
Arouse to awaken, the
sanity of whiteness,
Free convention, and fresh
linen.
Grappling the flux with
porous invention,
I reveal how sea-drops
gather quickly,
The vestige apperception,
as it pales to confusion,
Cleansed by holistic
circlings.
A moral tenor, tending
notes to equation
In a forever ending
consummation,
'Farewell my love, this is
the last curtain,'
A vinyl disc, grooves ever
meeting.
With arm extended in
spring's dusty air,
I press the clock-radio's
pause,
And fare forward I flow
with mythical dreams,
Of stylistic fingers ever
repeating.
-
Silhouette / fragment
The silhouette of dark
consent, a pure
Memento mori; languor's
lenten ease.
The sails of hawk in
circle motion, dark
Beneath the quiet force of
sun; the growth
That breaks the earth, the
shadow of a cloud,
The silent image, slip of
dream, the mark
Of eye upon the page, a
soundless oath
That festers within
speech, a golden shroud.
-
In Buckram
In buckram with blank
cartridge, pavonine
Yet apterous, a fallen
angle lost
With ink dipped quills, I
flounce the mirror's sign
Of a Bobadil in feathered
humour's tost.
The quiet purist in me
shifts the page
To suit the hearth, for
ash to fit the soil
To benefit the sapor of a
fruit.
And yet, I draw the bow
again to wage
The shot of
apple-innocence, and toil
To render into verse, it's
very root.
Pavor closed the notebook
and slipped it back into the white filing box. A bad idea he thought.
A bad idea. The memories would encircle him like snakes, massaging,
constricting and ultimately suffocating him with past regrets. He
looked out the window above Mélisande, trying to focus on the night
sky through the reflection of the living room upon the glass.
Tomorrow, if the weather was pleasant, they should go for a Sunday
morning trudge up the mountain and follow the pathways to the summit
lookout, and breath the cold, crisp air, sip hot chocolate from the
chalet and watch the city before them, glinting, humming, and
steaming, alive with pre-Christmas activity, alive with new
generations of diversity, alive with anticipation and possibility.
Mélisande awoke, groaned
and stretched, wiping moisture from the corner of her mouth. “Ohh.
. . your massage put me right out.” She swept a hand across the
manuscript pages. “Sorry, I think I drooled on your novel.”
Approaching her, he bent
down, hugged her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “A
special watermark to remember then, 'this is where Mélisande fell
asleep!'
“Luckily it's only a first
draft.”
“What do you say to a walk
on the mountain tomorrow?” If the weather's good that is.”
“Sure, that sounds nice. I
could use the exercise.”
“Great, I'll let you
continue reading. Do you want anything from the kitchen? I feel like
a piece of that strong cheddar and some of that nice bread.”
She was tempted to joke
about him feeling like a piece of cheese but let it go. “No,
nothing for me, thanks,” and watched him leave the room, his
fingers scratching his brow. She sensed his distraction, his
preoccupation, his pale anxiety, and put it down to creative pains.
She picked up a pencil in her left hand and waggled it over the pages
and began to read:
Rex Under Glass – Part
Nine
She watched Rex Packard walk around the
corner carrying what appeared to be a painting. She put her car in
drive and pulled up beside him as he reached his rental. She lowered
the window. “Have you added art theft to your quiver Rex?”
His questioner's voice, a rather richly
toned feminine voice, though startling, was not threatening. If he'd
been in danger, there wouldn't have been sarcastic small talk. Rex
ignored the question and continued to place the painting in the back
seat of his car before turning to see a black Escalade driven by a
dark tanned attractive woman in her mid to late forties, her
short blond hair gelled and curled this way and that in an artistic
fashion. “We need to talk,” she said, and he heard the click of
unlocked doors.
She smiled holding out her hand.“Vera,
Vera Causalton, most people call me Vera Causa.”
Rex didn't catch the reference as he
fastened the seat-belt, but he shook her hand. “I guess I don't
have to introduce myself,” he said, feeling somewhat off balance,
both by the surprise situation and her attractiveness.
Without a word, she drove up the
winding streets with control and speed until they arrived at a
lookout on Summit Circle blocked to vehicular access by stone
planters. She parked just before the expanse along a sidewalk near a
gated entrance to one of the enormous Westmount mansions and got out.
Rex followed as she walked towards the stone balustrade and the
flickering city lights in the distance.
“Money and influence Rex,” she said
motioning to the stone planters with their rather scraggly floral
displays. “This lookout, or Belevedere, used to be open to cars so
you can imagine the late night revellers, the teenage trysts, the
creaking cars, the disruptive sounds, the broken bottles. Now . . .
parking is obviously curtailed and a curfew's in place.” She looked
at her watch, a large faced multi-functional dial. “Shouldn't be
long before one of the private security SUV's makes an appearance.”
She looked up. “Camera surveillance.” She withdrew a small brown
decorative box and took out a little thin cigarillo and lit up.
“Started smoking Schimmelpennincks when I was based in The Hague.”
She blew smoke out towards the city, the lights of the residential
lowlands, the towers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Westmount Square
and the beginnings of the rising cityscape with its condominium and
office towers to the east.
Rex was impressed with Vera's moxy, her
alluring figure and her large dark eyes, so much so, he forgot to
have one of his own cigarettes. Perhaps he worried it would be his
last. “Are you with one of the intelligence services?”
She ignored the question. “It's about
Vernon Smythe. His activities of late have been causing some . . .
ripples in foreign ponds. As you may have learned, he's invested
heavily in commercial applications of various scientific and
technological innovations. The Russians, the Chinese, even the North
Koreans have done business with our Mr. Smythe.” She drew heavily
on her cigarillo before exhaling towards the sky. “It seems there's
also money to be made in more . . . capitalistic endeavours at home.
For an example, when there's an urgent need for a city sports team to
win a championship, Vernon's company can be hired to use their
acoustic weapons to have the visiting team wake up in their hotel
rooms fatigued, irritable, and feeling like their spines have been
twisted like an elastic, and their jaws wired shut. Specific players
can be targeted, the goalies, the top scorers, the pitchers, the
heavy hitters, the quarterbacks that type of thing. Easier targets
are individual sports figures such as golfers, tennis players, etc.
Where there's a fortune to be won, some will shake hands with . . . a
Vernon Smythe.” She turned her back to the city and sat upon the
balustrade.
“So, what can I do about it?”
A large wheeled SUV drove up and parked
alongside the stone planters and a man emerged talking into a
shoulder communication device. Rex watched as Vera walked towards him
and began a conversation; she showed him some type of identification
and he tipped his hat, smiled, and made his way back to the security
vehicle. She came back to Rex, tossed her cigarillo to the concrete
walkway and crushed it out with her expensive black leather loafer.
“We want you to do the right thing
and help your country. Be one of our unofficial eyes and ears on
Vernon Smythe and Co.”
Rex looked towards the dark foliage of
the park trees, a sense of confusion overcoming him, as if he'd
wandered off a pathway and was lost in a forest. Was that a small
stream running across the park? He squinted his eyes but he couldn't
make it out.
“The future is all about conditioning
Rex. Conditioning, psychological control and manipulation. With every
keystroke monitored, every nuance evaluated, every communications
analyzed by algorithms to discover 'negative association quotients,'
or NAQs, Governments can then instigate a universal system of
protocols to adjust civilian behaviours. Someone visits a
questionable site, they receive a shot of acoustic or some other type
of conditioning. Over time, citizens will learn, like mice in a lab
experiment, to avoid such associations. Old fashioned conditioning
Rex. Avoidance therapy. The main problem is of course the male
population between the ages of 14 and 34, always has been. We've been
lucky to have the gaming culture in place—although it has its
problems too—but it's been much the best pacifier since television
and popular music. But you see, Vernon is pushing the envelope,
getting ahead of plans, possibly undermining such future
developments.”
“Sounds like a cheap science fiction
novel,” Rex said, turning around and sitting beside her, their
thighs touching.
She looked at him sideways. “We're
already living in a cheap science fiction novel Rex. HyperSonic Sound
is old hat. My trunk is full of parabolic microphones and other
acoustic paraphernalia.”
“Sounds kind of kinky to me, but
whatever turns you on.”
Vera Causalton got up and started
walking to her Escalade, while Rex stared at her hips swaying in her
tight dress pants. “Think about it Rex.”
He followed her. He felt he would
follow her anywhere.
-
Mélisande put the pages
back in the folder and placed the pencil back in the chipped blue coffee mug, its dark graphite spire head first past the glossy veneers of plump felt pens and retractable ballpoints to the shadows below where small coloured thumbtacks awaited, forgotten in the dust. Pavor's story lines
were too bizarre for her. His readers, however, seemed to enjoy them. What kind of person could torture an innocent with such acoustic weapons she wondered? Who could do such things? Who could be so drained of empathy, compassion, humanity? She wished he would abandon this darkness, this shadow-side, and find new subject matter. Perhaps if he wrote an autobiographical work of fiction, reveal the loss of his wife and child, cast it upon the page, it would be a catharsis, akin to a baptism, allowing him to embrace a new path.
She slipped the folder back in the desk drawer and turned her head towards the kitchen trying to understand what the
sound was, and then realised it was Pavor humming along to a song on
the radio. As she made her way to the warmth and brightness of the
kitchen, she recognized it. It was the song, A Holly Jolly Christmas sung
by Burl Ives, a song bound to brighten the mood of the
most jaded misanthrope. She began to smile.
© 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.