52 Cancellami Means Cut Me Out

Outside, the flower child with the cassette recorder is spread on the grass reading a paperback copy of Timothy Leary’s Flashbacks: A Personal History of a Cultural Era. I’m so glad to not be her. Several feet away, Lucky perches in the grass, deadheading red clover and tossing the flowers in her general direction.

Hal and Dr Jaguar Tongue sit across from each other at Rose’s picnic table. They inspect an album of photographs. “Mornin’, sleepy heads. I thought you’d never wake up.” Hal waves us over to his side of the table. “You gotta look at Jaguar’s photos.” Jaguar smells unmistakably of Nag Champa. He wears a long white lace vest with shorty-short jean cut-offs. I marvel at the uniformity of his tan. His hair is the exact golden hue as his skin. Rose looks him up and down as she brings us coffee. I wonder if she’s into muscles, young Fabio Lanzoni types, right off the cover of a drugstore romance novel. Fucking eh, Rose. When was the last time she had sex?

“Life’s a beach,” Jaguar reads the slogan from the one-inch Crystal Beach Park button I wear on my denim tank dress. “Cool. Cool. We say that on Centre Island too.” He flips through the pages of the photo album. “Most paranormal photos are nothing more than mist or smoke. Here’s how early-morning mist appears in a photograph. Easily mistaken for a ghost by the untrained eye. And here is an example of cigarette smoke.”

He shows us a photo of two women standing toe to toe with a drab nimbus floating between them. The photo is intimate, neither of them aware of the camera. They look like they’re telling each other a secret.

“Our angel ain’t smoke,” says Hal.

“True. Smoke doesn’t switch lights on and off. And smoke won’t set off one of these.” Jaguar passes Tamara a small black device with two knobs on the top.

“EMF,” she reads the letters embossed on the device. “Electromagnetic …?”

“Electromagnetic Field Meter.” He shifts a little closer to Tamara on the picnic bench. Am I going to have to keep an eye on this guy? As if I don’t already have enough to do. “I track real spiritual energy by finding anomalies in the visible world. Light holes. Vortexes. Orbs. My specialized shamanistic abilities allow me to sense these anomalies through the mind’s eye. That’s my gift. For everyone else, I track electromagnetism, psychotronics, thermographic energy, and, as you can see, I take a lot of photos.”

“How’d you find this kinda job?” asks Hal. “And where do all these thingy-ma-jiggers come from?”

“It’s a shaman’s calling to identify energy potential,” Jaguar says slowly, putting his manly naked arm around Hal as if he were a child. “And more importantly, it’s my job to ensure that these energies are in balance. The machines are tools, like a wrench in the hands of a skilled carpenter …” Jaguar carries on. “I measure energy potential by the spirit’s ability to affect the visible world …” Hal’s attention is locked. “… Spirits appear for one of three reasons. One, being vengeance …”

Hal silently shakes his head “yes” and also “no.” He’s having a hard time placing his angel into one of Jaguar’s three categories.

“All this fancy stuff ain’t much use to me,” says Hal. “God as my witness, she’s an angel.”

“She might be. Out of the ninety-six photos I took—”

“Ninety-six!” I snap. “How’d you even get prints so fast?”

Hal pats my hand in a ‘there, there, calm down’ kind of way. “Ya seen Jaguar’s campsite? It’s like NASA over there.”

“Out of the ninety-six photos I took,” Jaguar continues, “an anomaly appears in ninety-four. Here’s a series of you leading last night’s circle,” he says, shifting a stack of photos from the bench to the table. “A light hole or orb always appears over your shoulder. Excellent circle, by the way. Healing, sister, it’s our path. I could teach you to really hone those gifts.”

Tamara picks up an eight-by-ten and wordlessly hands it to me. “Yes. Here you two are walking around the quarry last night with light constantly hanging between you both.”

Tell me there’s one photo, just one is all I ask, where I look like myself, says Etta. She pokes my chest through the Crystal Beach button. No one sees me. No one except you.

I search through the photos more furiously than I’d like to. I don’t want Jaguar to think I’m his new biggest fan. But like Etta, I need to see her image. See her manifest somewhere besides in my own comprehension. I need more proof of her being. I need proof.

To my left, Tamara fidgets in her skin. She’s scratching the underside of her jaw, and I’m watching pink heat spread under her aqua-painted fingernails. It occurs to me that she never asked to be photographed. She hates being photographed—or at least I know she hates when men try to sneak photos of her at the club. These photos of us should be ours. I want the negatives. “The light intensifies whenever you’re with the little boy over there,” continues Jaguar. “Here’s one of you standing side by side. See how the light anomalies intensify? Excellent light striations across the whole image. But the strongest anomaly is of you tucking him into bed. I sent a copy of this one up to my buddy at Spiritual Truth News.”

“Wait! Wait. The circle is one thing. I can’t control all the cameras there. But these others, these are private moments. Private photos.”

“Photos are never private, Starla,” says Jaguar. “We’re not private property. I’ve paid to be here. Like Disneyland.”

“Yes, but this one is shot through the window of Bobby and Hal’s trailer. How is that not private property?” Fuck. What did those art school brats teach me about photos and the law? What if Jaguar is right? “Lucky is a kid,” I give it another shot. “You need permission from a parent. Bobby would never let you send out pictures of her boy.”

The awful pregnant pause is forewarning. Tamara squeezes my thigh, hard. Hal confirms what I am afraid of. “I gave permission.”

I try to rewind the last twenty-four hours. What private moments might Jaguar have caught on camera? Tamara asks, “Why, Hal? Why would you give permission for someone to peep through your windows?”

The word “peep” bewilders me. I hope one day I can not have to think about something unwanted coming into my childhood bedroom, something unwanted seeing me while I sleep. Taking something from me. From me. From Lucky.

“Come on, Hal,” is all I manage to say. I hate myself.

“He’s my boy, too, dammit,” Hal huffs, then immediately softens. “Folks wantin’ the truth. The almighty truth. Yer not the only one who talks to her. Lucky hears her too. He’s a visionary, and I ain’t keepin’ it a secret. Miracles ain’t meant ta be secrets.”

I concentrate on Etta. My mind aches and stretches like a hand in the dark, feeling her out. Etta, this guy’s not a friend. He’s here to fuck us up. Can’t you do something to scare him off?

It’s not Etta, but Bobby and Dolores who intervene. “We being documented?” Dolores says, tapping her finger against a photo of her and Bobby in the circle. Both wear sour faces. “Hal, you coming for the meeting?”

“What meeting?” Jaguar asks. Dolores means the AA meeting, but she ignores his question.

Hal shuffles on the picnic bench for a second before declining. He leans over the pile of photos, laying his elbows across the table. “Jaguar and I ain’t through talkin’ yet.”

“Well, I’m going,” Bobby tells him. “I’m going, and I don’t even got a drinking problem. Trying to be supportive, like I always do, hey, Hal? Anyway, Dolores is taking me to the Friendship Centre after to meet somebody. Lucky will want hot dogs and carrot sticks and dip. And make sure he washes his hands.”

“Bobby doesn’t know about the photographs, does she?” I say.

Hal shrugs.

“Hal, you can’t fucking hide it from her.” I grab the photos of Lucky in his bed and bolt up from the picnic table. Tamara is already running after Dolores and Bobby asking them to wait.

“I’m going with or without Hal,” Bobby barks at Tamara. Now all four of us—Tamara, Hal, Jaguar, and I—are speeding up the driveway. Bobby sighs at us. “You can’t survive without me for an afternoon? I’m going to meet a lady who got reunited with her sisters. She says she’ll talk to me, eh? Everybody’s gotta know everybody’s business round here. I’m working my own problems out, like always. So don’t come running after us, slowing us down.”

“She’s going to talk to you about dealing with the fucking CFS?” I ask, holding the photographs behind my back.

“Yes, Sherlock. Now can I go?”

Tamara kicks me as Dolores and Bobby drive away.

“Hal, either you tell her or I will,” I say. Hal clasps his palms together. He looks as if he is counting down from ten to keep from shouting at me. “Think about it. What’s it going to be like if she finds out from someone else, eh? What if one of her friends calls her up because she saw it in a newspaper? How’s that going to play out?”

“If it runs in a paper, then everyone sees our angel. That’s a good thing. Bobby will be happy.”

“Bobby doesn’t even believe in the angel,” says Tamara. “Neither do I. Neither does Dolores. I’m sorry, Hal, I know you want your ‘angel,’ but this thing is way more complicated.”

“Smart women see complexities. Indian women are the visionaries of our age,” says Jaguar. I smell the odour of his hippie perfume as he steps his long golden body closer to us.

Tamara smiles sweetly at him with the same smile that she uses at the strip club. She leans close to Jaguar and says, “Fuck you and the Porsche you rode in on.”

I follow her cue and storm off toward Rose’s house. “You kick ass,” I whisper to her.

“You don’t need a fake angel to speak up, you know,” she replies.

“Shit, Tamara. I was speaking up. I was the one who told that prick he couldn’t have the photos. Don’t come after me.”

“Who should I come after then? If it wasn’t for you, pricks like him would never be snooping around here in the first place.” Something in her shifts as she turns to face me, clear and foreboding as the smoke in Jaguar’s photographs. We both pause, waiting for this something to take further shape. We are one word, one syllable, away from our first big fight.

“Yeah, if it wasn’t for me, Hal would still be drinking, Leanne would still be getting beatings from her husband, and Rose would be losing money on this shitty campground.”

“Well, thank god you came back to save us all.” Tamara looks at me with such pity and disdain. I should have a response for her. Say something to blow away the smoke between us. Instead, I close my eyes. I hear the screen door to Rose’s house slam as Tamara goes inside. I keep my eyes shut. I can hear Rose asking Tamara what’s wrong.

So much is wrong. Isn’t it? Etta, make me faint. Make this moment grow dark. Cancellami.