Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good: A Novel

Matt keeps having to remind himself he isn’t the sick one. By the time the maids hectored them out of the Cubby around noon Zane was approaching spry, but after a muffin and a couple of coffees Matt’s still in a serious funk.

It’s the Nightmare. The damn thing visited him again last night, second time since he’s been away. As usual he was sitting in a cinema, and as usual Mariko was by his side. Her tense murmurings were barely obscured by the film’s soundtrack, drum machine and boinky bass. The movie, a big-budget dud, was set in a war zone this time. It was dim, darkly romantic—Last Tango meets Apocalypse Now. Sumptuous decadence, sexy despair. Meg was in it, and (yeck!) a Speedo-clad Mr. Skinner. Matt recalled his recent review of this turkey, and found it good. The eloquent savagery, the poisonous precision.

As the film progressed though, as one scene unfolded and then another, something began to come clear: it was no turkey. Jeezuz aitch, this thing was brilliant. “Tour de force,” “towering achievement,” those are the clichés Matt ought to have reached for. How could he have been so wrong? Was there any way to make it right, reverse his blunder? He jumped up, started shoving his way past a knobby infinity of knees, his lungs clutching at air that had suddenly gone thin on him. Underfoot there was a minefield not just of pops and popcorns but of sundry other stuff too, tomahawks and forks and fingers …

Matt woke up, as usual, mid-thrash, in the throes of a crushing sorrow. Quick peek—Zane was still asleep, his head sandwiched (bagelled?) between two pillows. Matt remembered hearing him up a few times before dawn, mopping at himself (night sweats, check) and rattling for pills in the biffy. In the morning light, though, he looked serenely ruined. A kindergartner after the fever breaks.

Matt slumped back, exhaled heavily, half sigh, half sob. When Jean Renoir premiered The Rules of the Game—that Mozartian masterpiece, that comedic cry against all fascisms—folks tried to burn the cinema down. Reviews were abusive. Who’s to say Matt wouldn’t have been right in there with the rest of them, most articulate of all the philistines, royally crapping on the tender masterpiece?

So he feels like garbage today. Sick of judging. Convinced that all his judgments—what’s good-slash-bad, beautiful-slashugly, worthy-slash-worthless—are worthless. Maybe one more coffee.

Or better idea, Coke. The weather … well, there isn’t any. Weather’s been cancelled. Nothing changes from one day to the next, even darkness doesn’t make much of a dent anymore. The old Corolla’s air conditioning is laughably inadequate. It was designed eight or ten years ago, after all, during an entirely different epoch in the earth’s accelerating history.

So they pick up cold sodas, and they get back at it. They put in another good hour of fruitless zooming, dust pluming in the rearview. The gravel-rattle turns from wholesome to headachy. Left, then left again, then right, then straight on through.

Matt’s at the wheel again today, while Zane works the dial. He’s sipping at some appalling elixir he brewed up in the Cubby’s coffee machine. If you decanted the green gunk from the bottom of a long-forgotten vase you could maybe reproduce this smell.

“I’d just let myself die if I were you,” says Matt, swatting at the rank air. He runs a palm ruminatively up his chin, against the grain of his one-day beard. This inspires a new thought. “Hey, the hair on your head,” he says. “How fast does it grow? Faster than on your chin, or slower?” He reaches over and rubs Zane’s noggin—the bald bit, and then the horseshoe of dark head-beard coming in.

Sixties stuff, early seventies—songs they first heard on their transistor radios. Matt’s was a Bible-sized black box, just small enough to slip under his pillow so’s he could rock himself to sleep. “1050 CHUM!” chimed like a fancy doorbell. “Dock of the Bay.” “Wild Thing.”

“So that’s why I can’t take in anything new,” says Matt. They’ve been singing tunelessly along, not missing a line. “I know every word.”

“Yeah, bizarre,” says Zane. He has a go at harmonizing to “Hang On Sloopy,” abandons the attempt.

“As in, ‘Be nice to your Uncle Zane, he can’t help it that he’s like that’?”

“But really, this could be happening, right? You could already have a tiny little son or daughter. Bet you’d be good at it, if you ever got to do the daddying.”

Zane pantomimes a direct hit. “How do you think she’ll manage? The money and all that if she does it alone.”

“Not sure. I’ve never really … I’ll have to ask her. I bet she’ll be all right. And with the hotshot bucks I’ll be raking in …”

“Older. Younger. Speaking of which, loved your Purple Jesus review. Thanks for sending that.”

Matt delivers a dismissive guffaw. “I showed Mariko the movie. She thought it was silly, can you imagine?”

Matt’s last review, for Zane’s eyes only, was of Zane’s very first film. It was actually a combo effort, but Zane got director credit, which meant he got to say “cut” and had to buy the beer. Second year at York. The concept came to the two of them pretty much as one. They were goofy drunk on Purple Jesus—one part grain alcohol, two parts grape Kool-Aid, swirled up together in a giant plastic bucket. The party was all jocks and wannabes, there to get warmed up for a Lions hockey game. Rah-rah-rah till you ralph, kind of thing. Matt and Zane, artsy infiltrators, were there to snicker and sneak free booze. And then, just like that, eureka. The thing happened. They had their first masterpiece.

Zane makes a balloon of his empty muffin bag and pops it. “I’m amazed you didn’t go ahead and publish that one,” he says. “I mean, if you’re going to be a fugging idiot why not be a complete fugging idiot?”

“Moron, you mean,” says Matt. “And yeah, I probably would have, too. If Nagy hadn’t nabbed me.” He does a bit of “Crimson and Clover,” thumping his chest to get the tremolo.

Wait. Auto parts, fruit stand, burnt-out barn. And over there, could that be a circle? Impossible to say for sure, the field’s so flat it’s like trying to read a shop’s sign when you’re standing right under it. Something’s definitely taken a divot out of that green, though.

They clamber out, stand swaying a moment in the unconditioned air. The car clicks as it cools. A pickup truck dopplers by, making the sacred om sound, the syllable that gave rise to the universe. “Aaaaaooooouuuummmm,” is how Anirvachaniya says it. The Absolute, the Unknowable.

Zane grunts as he shoulders his gear—Matt grins at the “Shoot Film, Not Bullets” button on one of the bags. He leads the way into the field, effecting a placid breaststroking motion through the nipple-high corn. Slap and tickle.

It’s way out in the centre. Matt thinks of a tattoo at the heart of a back or a buttock. Zane’s puffing before long, then coughing. Shortness of breath, check. That brutal pneumonia you get. Matt relieves him of the bags, presses on more slowly.

And suddenly he’s in the clear. He steps into the circle … and it pops open, a trap door dropping him through all four (all ten?) dimensions into that other circle. Side by side, still, with Zane.

Mid-July, 1977. They’d kicked off their time abroad with England, kind of nice to capiche for a while. The initial nerves were just starting to give way to euphoria, the traveller’s giddy greed for Experience. The boys were busy sorting out their routine, who got the WC first in the morning, all that stuff. Who’d wimp out first when they were glugging Guinness. Who could work the English what? most often and most inappropriately into conversation. “How many pee in a quid, what?” “What, what?”

It was a summer day, cool and dingy. They’d just done Stonehenge, a colossal disappointment. All the ancient uncanniness, all the Druidic dread had been leached out of it by the last kajillion visitors. The boys did get a few wicked photos with Zane’s Nikon, arty shots through a stretched Slinky of barbed wire—Matt’s got one blown up in his study at home. Back at the road they stuck out their thumbs. The plan was London and then, tomorrow, on to the continent, try out their French. “Je suis Canadien, voulez-vous what’s-the-word-for-picnic avec moi?”

It took them an hour to score a lift in a minuscule Morris Minor. The packs needed some serious pummelling before they’d consent to be rammed into the trunk, sorry, boot. The lifters were a pair of middle-aged guys—Londoners, as it turned out, a stroke of luck. One stop first, though, if that’d be okay? “We’ll surprise you,” and the two shared a conspiratorial chuckle.

Brothers? Buddies? But no, it became clear they were not-so-surreptitiously holding hands up there in the front seat. Matt and Zane shared an oh-gross glance in the back.

“I’m Henry and this is Brad,” said the guy in the passenger seat, swivelling to face them, elbow over the bench seat. “Brad’s a complete flake. Tarot, you name it. Pyramids. Me personally I think it’s all bollocks, but hey, he tags along to the opera. What can I say?”

“Quid pro quo,” sang Brad in a gushy baritone, as though he were lamenting a lover.

“Canada, huh?” said Henry. “Hey, what about your prime minister’s wife? That Margaret …”

They puttered through a series of dopey hamlets. Church, pub, bakery. Landscape came in unbreaking waves, exhaustively rectangled into farms. Sheep shuffled about, black and white on green; clouds parted now and then to permit a splash of gold. As they crested one hill, Henry, who’d been noisily navigating, instructed Brad to slow down.

An ogre or some other great Celtic critter had been fooling around with his geometry set. There were five circles, a big one with four smaller ones at its cardinal points. An old compass? A Celtic cross? Landing gear, that’s what it looked like, the imprint of some craft that had just vroomed off into the ether. Matt pictured Apollo 11, the central pod with its four round feet at the end of jointed bug-legs.

“You call it a quintuplet,” said Brad. “Or a quincunx. Looks like they beat us.”

Cars clotted the road. You could see people milling about in the formation, pacing it like a maze, posing for snaps. The farmer had set up a stand at the edge of his field and was charging two pounds, the price of a movie. Brad paid and the foursome swished through the thigh-high wheat.

Stamped down? Blown down? Stroked down is how the wheat looked, all in one direction. Combed. The four tarried awhile in the central circle. Brad joined a ragged group of dancers—headbands, baggy mullah trousers, a chewed button or two, one imagined, of peyote. Zane joined him and the two pranced about hand in hand like a pair of believers on Judgment Day. Hand in hand. How did Matt see no significance in this? Morocco, that revelation, was still six weeks away.

Later that night, bunked into a north London hostel, Matt and Zane compared notes. Zane confessed to a weird tingly sensation, a sort of buzz over his scalp and down his back. Matt reported feeling—for pretty much the first time since they’d crossed the ocean—homesick. Sistersick, really, it was Erin he missed. Standing at the centre of that outlandish scar he’d found it intolerable, all of a sudden, not to be where she was. What would become of her? What would become of them?

Come Again
by kritik@themovies

Look carefully. Before she climbs the plank onto the Titanic, Rose’s beauty mark (that most erotic of end stops) is on her left cheek. Once she’s on board it’s on her right. There’s a puzzler for you.

Here, look again. As she prepares to jump off the Titanic (bloody iceberg) Rose is in lace-up shoes. But then she’s in slip-ons, then she’s in lace-ups …

Continuity is an illusion, and it’s incredibly hard to maintain. Just ask the folks who made Titanic. They spent two hundred million bucks and they still screwed up. Everybody does, even the greats. Dorothy’s pigtails change length from one shot to the next in the Scarecrow-rescuing scene …

In the case of Purple Jesus, though, there seems to be something quite other going on. In Zane Levin’s very first film (circa 1979), Jesus Christ (played with youthful zeal by Levin himself) launches his Second Coming at a college hockey game. When we first glimpse him he’s purple all right, but in subsequent shots he’s green, then orange, then purple again, then green, then orange … In a film that comes in at just under six minutes (two rolls of Ektachrome Super 8, my informant tells me), it seems unlikely that such violent shifts are unintentional.

So what’s Levin driving at here? Presumably he expects us to take note of the colours themselves, which are all secondary, all hybrids: red-blue, blue-yellow, yellow-red, round and round the colour wheel. Jesus was, to many, the prophet of impurity. He confounded the rigid dichotomy of clean and unclean, refuted the brutal class system of first-century Palestine. He championed compassion over righteousness. Is this a theology to which Levin hopes we’ll hearken? Or were those just the cheapest colours of stage paint he could come by?

Hard to know. What we can state with reasonable certainty, given the self-reflective theme which crops up so often in Levin’s subsequent work, is that he hopes we’ll attend to the deceptive nature of the medium itself. Film establishes its effect through a semblance of continuity, a series of stills dragged across a lens at twenty-four frames per second. And life? Yes, we’re performing the same trick here in the “real world,” concocting a continuous narrative from myriad discrete moments—twenty-four hours blurred together to make a day, seven days to make a week … In that context what might “salvation” signify? A freeze-frame? A tear, an actual rift in the celluloid?

These are just a couple of the virtual infinity of questions Purple Jesus fails to address. As Levin himself has been heard to lament, “You were expecting what, a work of genius? We were pissed out of our gourds for pete’s sake. Anyway, we couldn’t get Charlton Heston.”

The Heston issue aside, Purple Jesus’s primary virtue may well be the refreshing spontaneity of its performances, which give the impression of being completely unscripted and unrehearsed. For its time the film’s camera work, too, must be considered an act of bravado. Kudos to the cinematographer (identified only as McEye) whose hand-held shots supply almost more vérité than a person can tolerate without Gravol.

In terms of plot, Purple Jesus is what we might construe (in a charitable mood, à la Christ) as minimalist. The Son of God shows up at the rink and gets the bejeezuz beaten out of him (during an on-ice donnybrook) by the fans of not one hockey team but both. He suffers a particularly vicious knock on the noodle and is last glimpsed in “heaven”—that is to say, he’s last glimpsed getting a free ride on the Zamboni after the game. Zane Levin made, let’s face it, a silly start here.

Hallelujah.

They’re alone this time, just the two of them. Others have come and gone—here’s an empty twenty-sixer of rye. Is this what hippies get altered on these days? Whatever happened to Mary Jane, whatever happened to mescalito? At least there’s still sex—somebody’s tossed aside a condom as they might a candy wrapper.

Zane squats a moment to compose himself. He digs out his video camera—a robotic-looking armload with flared lens and phallic microphone—and sets about collecting his footage. He hands-and-knees it to get close-ups of the felled corn, swished flat in a spiral pattern as though it’s circling a drain. Then he does a walking tour of the human detritus: dead soldier, deflated rubber, crumpled “Keep Out” sign. After a brief break for a coughing fit he moves on to some deer’s-eye shots across the bowed heads of the corn—to the road, to the surrounding woods, to the quaint huddle of farm buildings. Fun to watch the guy work, it’s been a while.

“What we really need’s a chopper, eh?” says Matt. The human sound stands out starkly against the scraping of the crickets, that wall of white noise. “Alien’s-eye view.”

“Yeah, you never know. Hey, is that … I think there’s another circle.” It’s forty or fifty feet off—the other half of a dumbbell, maybe, missing the connection. But no, it’s much smaller. A moon circling a planet, a planet circling a star.

Matt swishes his way on over. Dead centre of the circle there’s a little bald patch, a wee disk of soil, pale and tender. Matt bends, puts a palm to it. “Gaia,” he says. “Gaia?” When he gets up he discovers himself the object of Zane’s digital gaze. He waves histrionically at the sky. “Down here, fellas!”

“Me too,” says Matt. He plods his way back towards the big circle. Corn plants thwack him with their ripening cobs. Nature’s got him in its gauntlet, hazing him, having at him with its many paddles.

“Here, let’s switch for a bit,” says Zane. “Remember how to handle one of these things?”

“So I’ll show you,” and he does. There’s a wallet-sized screen that swivels out from the side. There’s an intricate console of buttons that Zane advises him to leave alone for the moment. All he really needs is the little rocker on top for zooming in and out.

“And … action,” says Matt, and he thumbs the red button. This feeling, with the camera in his hands.

Penetrating? What does that even mean when applied to eyes? One blue, one brown, both of them biggish. Zane’s cheeks (which fill the screen when Matt goes all the way in) are sheened with sweat. They really have lost their bulge, and are betraying the bone structure that’s supposed to be so beautiful.

“Hey, it’s weird over here,” says Zane. “On the other side of the lens.”

Matt crazy-zooms in and out, bobs and weaves rock-video style. Zane obliges with a standard aren’t-we-wacky face. Then, “Day one seventy-two since I refused the antiretrovirals.” No beat, no break. “My viral load is up, my T cell count is down. Well under two hundred now, that threshold. And there’s this.”

Matt zooms out as Zane bunches the sleeve of his T-shirt and tugs it up to reveal his shoulder. It’s still a meaty thing but detectably leaner, and graced now with a mini-bruise or tattoo. The size of a bottle cap, not even. Mandala? “Mother”? Matt zooms back in. It’s an elongated circle, a lozenge. It’s a galaxy, a thousand billion stars circling the bowl, the black hole at its heart. Reddish purple, purplish red.

A flash of sky, a zig-zag across Zane’s body and then Matt’s back on target. He keeps shooting, keeps watching through his tiny window.

“I have to assume further opportunistic infections will soon follow,” says Zane. “Unless, of course … Lots of people have been cured by crop circles, after all. Arthritis, insomnia, impotence …” He spreads his arms, performs a little dance, a sombre, solo version of the one he did all those years ago with Brad. You could believe he’s waiting for something.

“Right,” says Matt. “I get it.” He’s breaking the rules here, inserting himself into the scene. Edgy stuff. He finds himself searching for a better angle. Watch the glare, mix up the framing, close-up, medium, full. “This is the real movie, right? You doing this, you dying?” He starts to circle his subject, some ancient film-school instinct kicking in. He orbits, Zane his still centre, his sun. “The whole crop circle thing was a hoax.”

“A cute way to get your cameraman out here.” Don’t forget frame balance. Resist the facile symmetry.

“Wrong. The crop circle thing’s for real, I want to do it. I want us to do it together.” He turns as he speaks, in sync with Matt—a plastic bridegroom on a wedding cake. “But yeah, I want this recorded, I want this to count. That’s why I’m shooting Nico too.”

“But I can’t shoot myself.” Just over Zane’s shoulder a bird appears in the middle distance, some soaring bird—another of those hawks, presumably, riding the air without a flap. Matt widens his frame a touch, allows the bird to eerily hover there. “And once it’s done I won’t be around to shape it, make it matter.”

Zane grimaces. “I told you it was too much,” he says. “But these people, Shanu, Ola. You think anybody will actually see them?”

How to end the shot? Extreme close-up—the lesion, the look in his eye? Or maybe swing off across the field, allow it all to be absorbed by the landscape? How do you decide?

Weird to see white up there after so much blue. Can these really be the first clouds Matt’s glimpsed all week? Cotton balls, like the little ones they tape to your arm when they’ve taken blood.

“John Barrymore,” says Matt. “Now that’s odd.” He’s creeping his way past a dead traffic light, the second one they’ve hit since making it back to Canada. There was a kerfuffle at the border, grumpy guards barking into cellphones. And now this.

They’re doing movie stars who’ve OD’d. After an hour or so of dense silence between them, Matt offered up the idea he’s had for a review of the new movie, his new movie, the one in which Zane dwindles and dies. Can you be both kreator and kritik of the same kreation? Time’ll tell. Matt’s thought is to open with a list of movie-types who’ve killed themselves with meds, then segue to the story of a filmmaker who’s killed himself by refusing meds.

People are being good. They take turns, pretend it’s a four-way stop. Down deep maybe that’s what people really are, is good. How would you know?

“Judy Garland,” says Matt. And it occurs to him, man, if this were a movie, it sure would’ve picked up over these last couple of days. Chase scene, road trip, reams of startling revelations. The protagonist’s under a whole new kind of pressure, implicated in the crime he’s been trying to prevent. And now …

An aging sedan pulls up to a convenience store—we glimpse an unlit “E-Z Mart” sign. The car brakes in a dry CLATTER of gravel.

MATT and ZANE, two casually dressed men in early middle age, climb out into the torrid afternoon and, SLAM-SLAM, start towards the store’s entrance. Matt glances up.

MATT

Mart? What the hell’s a mart?

Zane smirks, but offers no reply. We form the impression of an easy intimacy between the two, a timeworn jocularity that’s under an unaccustomed strain. Both men are on alert.

As the pair approaches the store’s propped-open door an ELDERLY GENTLEMAN exits. He totes a crate of bottled water.

ELDERLY GENTLEMAN and MATT

(in unison, as they nearly collide)

Sorry.

(in unison)

That’s okay.

MATT

(chuckles)

Can I help you with that at all?

ELDERLY GENTLEMAN

No, I believe that’s the last of it.

Wearing puzzled expressions—and still busy trying to read one another—Matt and Zane step into the store. Through closeups we register further bemusement on their faces as they note, along with us, certain unexpected elements of the scene within. There’s a crepuscular silence, in stark contrast to the truck-whooshed brilliance outside. The place is humless, buzzless, tickless. Nothing works.

At the counter an Asian man—MR. E-Z, we presume—tinkers with a boombox surrounded, Christmas-tree fashion, with savaged wrappers. “Energizer,” we read. “Duracell.”

Mr. E-Z spins the dial. BLURTS OF WORD erupt, as though doors are being rapidly opened and shut on a dozen conversations. We catch snippets: “… transmission grid … cascading collapse … Toronto and Ottawa, as well as New York, Detroit … that terrorism may be …”

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE
(off-screen)
Goddam A-rabs. They can kiss my A-ass.

Matt glances up. Matt’s point of view: we witness the scene reflected in the convex surveillance mirror at the back of the store. Various customers patrol the dim aisles, hurriedly chucking provisions into their baskets and mini-carts.

MR. E-Z
They say fifty million people.

A burly, BUZZ-CUT young man approaches the till with a basket of canned goods. He’s the source of the unidentified voice we’ve already heard.

BUZZ CUT

How could anybody not see this coming? Where else are they going to hit us? Powerless people, right? So they knock out our power.

He produces his debit card and offers it to Mr. E-Z, then remembers. He sheepishly returns the card to his wallet, starts rummaging for cash.

A woman in TRACK PANTS and sweat-mottled T-shirt steers her cart into place behind him. She’s opted for dry goods—crackers, chips.

TRACK PANTS

Yes, and I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse. Those people have finally realized they have nothing, and we have everything. And now they’re going to come and take it from us.

BUZZ CUT
(with hushed bravado)
They can try.

Matt and Zane exchange a glance. Matt moves towards the wall of fridge units at one end of the store, browsing the still-chilled bottles.

ZANE
(addressing the room at large)
Right, but whoever they are, are we sure they really want this?

MR. E-Z
I’m sorry, no trouble please. We close in five minutes.

ZANE
There must be something else to want, mustn’t there?

He shakes his head, starts for the door. Matt—grinning broadly—squats and peers through the frost-rimed door of the cooler. Close-up of his face as he ponders his choice—pop or juice? what brand? what flavour?—as though the fate of the human race hangs in the balance.

Back out on the road the boys sip their root beers. Root beers? A retro impulse on Matt’s part, school trips and birthday parties.

“I thought you were going to start a fugging riot,” Matt chuckles. “No wonder you’ve been packing heat.”

In the back seat they’ve stashed two racks of fizzy water, a twelve-pack of squat white candles, E-Z’s last pair of batteries. Matt knuckled under, at the last moment, to the prevailing panic.

But things have already calmed down. By the time Zane got the CBC tuned in they’d ruled out terrorism. Americans are blaming Canadians (a transmission gaffe in Ontario), Canadians are blaming Americans (lightning in New York, fire in Pennsylvania). All’s well.

“Something? Is that what you’re doing this for? Are you doing this for something?”

They’re on the superhighway now, everybody howling along at the usual DOA pace. This time Matt’s passing. Eighth floor of a condo, how does that work without power? Matt’s tried his cellphone but it’s dead. That whole system seems to be down. The matrix, the great vibrating web has gone still.

Serena leaves at noon. The Dadinator will be alone. Will he have the wits to switch over from the electric concentrator to the portable oxygen tank? Will he get flustered, make some childish mistake?

“Hey,” says Matt, “if there really is something, do you think it’s a he or a she?”

“Right. Make it a chick.” Matt weaves over a lane, weaves back. “Mariko’s into the goddess thing, did I mention? She’s even written a screenplay about it.”

“That it isn’t terrorists. That this isn’t it. The relief of that, everything being over.”

“Hm,” says Matt. He scratches at his stubble. “Suffocate or burn to death.”

Zane gives his pate a pensive rub. “Get bitten by a rattler or get struck by lightning.”

“I don’t think about how I’m going to die anymore, I think about how everybody’s going to die.”

“But maybe everybody’s like that,” says Matt. “Remember disaster movies when we were kids? It was a shipwreck or something, maybe a burning building. Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine. Now it’s a meteorite or whatever and the whole world’s done in.”

Matt will be dead before long. Zane may beat him by a few months or years or decades but in the big world—the world Kate conjured for a bit there, the world of big bangs and missing dimensions—that’s bupkes. That’s nothing. So what’s the big hairy deal?

“Walk into a helicopter blade,” says Zane, “or choke to death on your own vomit.”

Chances are Matt’ll get stuck with the eulogy. When I think of Zane today, here in the presence of those he most loved, I recall the time … Insert epitomizing incident. Another of those early filmmaking crazinesses, maybe?

Matt’s only had to speak at one funeral so far, his mum’s. In Erin’s case the whole ceremony was handled by a minister. Matt recalls stirring briefly from his zomboid state to sob at the expression “lost soul”—a deplorable cliché, a formula made wretched by its ghastly accuracy. When his mum died, his dad asked Matt if he’d be willing to say something on behalf of the family.

Finally, Matt’s way with words was to be of use to somebody. He laboured over those paragraphs on the plane, and in his old bedroom at the McKay house. What did he focus on? His mum’s sly humour, which so few people ever really got. Her painstaking intelligence, which remained almost entirely unexpressed (those twelve years at Timely Temps not quite the career she deserved). Her tenderness in the home, which was twisted out of shape by the loss of her daughter. It was only afterwards that Matt recognized, and lamented, the fact that he’d spoken mostly about what his mum hadn’t done, about the life that had never made it out of her body and into the world. He added this blunder to his burden of grief, which threatened to break him right open.

Mariko, that plane trip, was the very next day. Anguish transformed, presto chango, into ardour.

Or it could go the other way, Matt could be the first one out after all. DROO or FYNC or KSKS could turn out to be a wickedly swift-acting virus. A few days of fever, a few weeks of dormancy and your brains melt, puddle on your pillow. In which case it’ll be Zane who has to dream up something tender yet refreshingly irreverent to say about Matt.

“That’s okay,” says Matt. “That’s cool. I’ll scoot you straight to your place, then whip back to Dad’s.”

Look, the universe is back tonight. The city-static, the fog of light that normally blots out the night sky has evaporated. Toronto itself seems to have been snuffed out—the blinking beacon of the CN tower, the office blocks with their intricate geometry of lit and unlit windows, the pulsing logos … Poof.

“Oh, Zane,” says the Dadinator. He’s just now realized who’s been hanging around his condo these past few hours. “You were the peculiar. One, yes?” Can it be worse already, the breathing?

Smear of baby barf is right, the Milky Way. It’s beginning to fade now, what with the moon on the rise. The moon has finished its wax since Matt last noticed it—that first night on his way in from the airport—and started its wane. One side’s been squashed, a tennis ball flattening on contact. And could that maybe be Mars, just up and to the right, reddish and not winking? So many lights, so many possible patterns—might there be a message up there, some star-scrawled augury visible just this one night?

The Dadinator favours Zane with one of his patented scowls—Toto working at the peanut butter on the roof of her mouth. It’ll likely be the last thing to go, that scowl. Just now the old man looks pretty good though. He’s skinnier of course, but still heftier than Matt if you factor in his swellings back and front, his hunch and his paunch. He’s tricked out in his usual blue track suit, though it’s plenty warm out here on the balcony.

“Two perfectly. Bright kids.” The Dadinator toys glumly with the singed hair on the side of his head. “What a waste.”

It’s been an adventure. The trip into town was slow but surprisingly steady. Civilians played traffic cop here and there, that helped. You thought of London under the Luftwaffe, everybody in it together. Streams of pedestrians headed north out of the city centre, a weird, white-collar exodus. Best image so far: a derelict streetcar, its juice shut off before it could creep for cover.

At the condo, emergency lights had turned the halls and stairwells sepulchral. Eight flights, Christ. The boys had to stop at every landing, Zane gasping for Matt to go on up alone. By the time they made the Dadinator’s floor Matt had his buddy draped over him, a fireman dragging a last survivor from the fumes and flames.

He looked dead. Matt found him floating face-up in the bathtub, the better part of his head submerged. He had a flashlight burning faintly on the back of the toilet, a tube of oxygen propped up against the tub. When he finally opened his eyes and saw Matt he should have had a fit, some kind of coronary catastrophe, but he didn’t. He rose, weirdly serene—a craggy old Venus or Ursula Andress rising up out of the sea. “Hello, Matthew.”

And he was so tolerant. He permitted Matt to dress him, endured his son’s ministrations with what amounted almost to tenderness. Had Matt ever seen him in the buff before? The odd changing-room glimpse when he was a kid, nothing since. A sight both harrowing and grand, the McKay flesh wearing the impress of going-on ninety years of history.

Serena had left a precooked casserole, so the three of them shared it cold. The fridge clicked and dripped as the freezer unfroze. What would you call the natural light at this time of day? Gloaming, good word. Matt scrambled back down to the car for the provisions, and for Zane’s gear. He left Erin locked in the trunk, disturbed to find that this disturbed him. Back upstairs he set up candles in strategic locations throughout the condo—best to save the batteries for late-night trouble. Flames flapped in the breeze coming through the windows, thrown wide for the first time, one imagined, since the place was built.

As for the Dadinator, he was preternaturally well behaved. Nothing overtly critical or quarrelsome, he just kept asking benign questions and nodding at Matt’s replies. The job? Fine and dandy, just got an offer to move into a whole new area. The shack? Looking great, we’ve done a few things. Mary? Mariko, Dad. She sends her love. The blackout was clearly pleasing the guy, serving as proof of some larger pattern unfolding as it should. He’d totter to the window now and again, blink up into the blackness, come back grinning.

And then off to bed. No tube, Matt couldn’t fall off the wagon even if he wanted to. He gave Zane the couch, and jerry-rigged a mattress for himself out of extra cushions. They gabbed awhile.

“Godard,” said Zane at one point. “Truffaut. Some pretty amazing filmmakers were critics first, eh?”

“Hey, about the fame thing? It’s something you’d really have to be ready for. If you were to do this.”

He seemed to be building towards something, Zane did—a retraction? a reaffirmation?—but then the Dadinator reappeared. He was in his PJs, dragging his oxygen tank on its little trolley. He had his pillow with him, held aloft like a sword or sceptre. The pillow was on fire. The general effect was of a superannuated saint or prophet, flames halo-ing his wispy head. By the time the boys got the pillow tamped out, and soaked down the Dadinator’s smouldering temple (no harm done), the chance for sleep seemed to have passed them all by.

When he finally got through to the airline just after dinner (his finger blistering on his dad’s old rotary phone, the only one that worked) the folks were happy to cancel his ticket for tomorrow. They were happy, too, to hold off on rebooking, since of course a zillion other panicky travellers were trying to get through to check their flights. But it raised the question, what next?

In the theatrical release Matt would stay on for a couple of days, then race home to the west coast. What with Sophie straying, he and Mariko would have another chance. They’d go for the fresh start, take the defib paddles to their arrested love. They’d move back to the big city, back to the way it originally worked for them, save nature for weekends. He-She? A hit, Matt and Mariko sharing the Oscar for their sweet yet incisive script. What a pair.

Click here, though, for two alternate endings. In one, the wackiest, Matt heads the other way. He heads east. After sorting out River (Matt’s a virtual black belt, having seen Billy Jack five times plus all sixty-odd episodes of Kung Fu), he finds Kate and commits himself, willy-nilly, to the new life kindling inside her. His baby? Another man’s? No matter. In this version Matt’s bigger than that. He’s outgrown “mine” and “yours.” He’s everybody’s. Everybody is his.

And then the third version. He stays put. He crashes with his dad for a few days (healing, while he’s at it, a lifetime’s worth of hurt) and then settles into Zane’s spare room. He puts out feelers job-wise. To hell with Nagy, he goes big league, the Globe and Mail or Premiere. Best to stay kritikal. Meanwhile he’s McEye again, meticulously documenting his friend’s path from life towards that other thing. It nearly kills him but he crafts, from his rage, a redemptive vision for the world. His work matters again. Even if Zane pulls a switcheroo, even if he gets it in his head to live, they’ve still got the crop circles, the whole trilogy of films based on his fakes. Oh, and India. They’ve still got India. Tigers and cobras, Shivas and Buddhas …

But a DVD it isn’t. So what to do? WWZD? Better yet, WWMD, what would Matt do?

The whole thing was Matt’s idea. Jumping off the cliff at Georgian Bay that summer, he came up with that all by himself. He was looking for a chance to impress his dad (he’d tried chopping wood, nearly amputated a foot), and maybe to take the pressure off Erin for a bit, let the old man obsess about his son for a change.

But he couldn’t do it. “Watch me!” he shouted down to his dad, who skeptically raised his movie camera. But then he froze, Matt froze. Erin stood murmuring encouragement, but couldn’t bear it for long and went on ahead. Matt watched her from above, all that red hair swept upwards in flight like the hair on one of her dolls. What were they called, trolls? Like the shocked hair of a shaken troll. And then she was gone, received by the water like a sliver received by flesh. Matt eventually followed, when the fear of humiliation overcame the other one, the fear of the fall.

Whereas tonight, up here in the humid heavens, the challenge is quite the opposite. The challenge here is not to jump. You peep over the precipice (one, two, three, four barbecues flaring down there on the condo’s lawn) and it tugs at you, tempts you, all that space. There’s nothing there, and the nothing leaves you weak, willing. You want this barmy thing, this goofy oblivion.

Matt shudders, swivels to face his father. Zane’s gone in, it’s just the two of them. “Know, Dad?”

“I’m not following you, Dad.” Matt settles back into his deck chair. The balcony gazes south and east, out over the cemetery and the ravine. And then the real city. During the day it looks like a motherboard, chunks of linked gadgetry bleeping and blooping towards some prodigious calculation. Here and there you’ll glimpse, too, the flatline, the silenced heartbeat of the lake.

The Dadinator reprises his scowl. “This glint.” He leans in, but the moonlight is too dim to furnish the effect he’s going for. “The way. The pupil reflects.”

Ah. “Well, right. But isn’t that … I’m pretty sure your eyes have looked that way ever since you had your cataracts done, Dad. I think what happens is they replace—”

Oh dear. The Heimlich laugh has grown even more intense, a paroxysm that has you clutching at your own chest. This one’s punctuated by a dismissive batting at the air. “She’ll get a kick out. Of that.”

She? “Say, that reminds me, Dad,” but Matt draws a blank. Oh wait, what about the universe? That’ll distract the fellow for a bit. “Quite something tonight, eh? The moon I mean?”

“Sea of Tranquillity,” says Matt. “One small step. One giant leap.” He’s on the floor at his father’s feet. The TV in the living room crackles, it crepitates with news from out there. “Remember, Dad? It was just the two of us then, too.”

Well now. Here’s something you don’t often hear the man say—his daughter’s name. Could this be an invitation? Maybe it’s time for Matt to open things up, make the first—

“Checked the cabinet Monday. Morning and there she was. Gone.” He cranks his head back, peers fiercely skyward. “Got away!” If there’s a sign up there, a trace or trail, you have to believe he’ll find it.

So. Matt really is free now, to deal with that box of bones. Invent a ritual, an un-ritual, an anti-ritual. “Hey, Dad?” he says. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Yep, you’re going to have a granddaughter.” Or grandson. And he may be black, and unrelated to you. Still.

And then Zane is back. He steps from the condo’s flickering gloom out onto the balcony, video camera in hand. He takes hold of a chair, drags it in between father and son. “Mr. McKay?” he says. “You’re a crop circle guy, is that right?” He flips open the camera’s little screen.

“Hey, you know what?” says Matt. “It’s been an awful long day. What say we all just—”

So what they do is they settle in. The three of them huddle around this tiniest of TVs, this puny box of light in a night suddenly grown monumental. If it were a fire, this screen, it would be three or four twigs on a curl of birchbark. Zane’s got his footage cued so it starts with the flattened stalks of corn, the minutiae, and then pulls back to give you the big picture. He pauses here and there to permit the Dadinator a better look at some particularly uncanny detail. The old man’s rapt, there’s no other word for it. Rapt, rapture—he’s ready. His breath is a crazy code of gasps and sighs, of dots and dashes …

And now Matt. He rises up out of the earth, gambols about in the far circle, gesticulating at the sky. He fits right in with the crop—long and lean, bowing under the weight of the blue above him.

Look. He’s a figment, is what he is, an artifact of light. He pushes his way through the corn, sucked in by the vortex of the camera’s lens. Just before he fills the screen Zane pauses, rewinds and lets him go again.

THURSDAY