Note: Beta edtions of Mural Gazer stories at MuralGazer.ca
…when he saw his mother’s purse, sitting on the kitchen counter that day of his downfall, he froze, a tightrope walker quavering, struggling to regain his balance. The moral math was simple: He craved his cola; his mother had deprived him of the sugary libations that made life oh so sweet; tit-for-tat, he would deprive her of enough grocery money to buy himself a pleasure-sustaining supply of Kik. Still, he wavered. Get a Kik out of life, his jingoistic nature crooned; get a kick in the arse with a pointy shoe, a fatherly voice from up on high threatened. He teetered on the edge for a moment, then…
Harry glanced through the window, out into the garden, where his mother was busy weeding and pruning. Opportunity had presented itself, the thirst was upon him, he could either take his chance or leave it, and not expect another any time soon.
Still, he resisted the gravity of his yearning, aghast. How could he even think something so dastardly, so cunning, as to steal from his own mother… As he excoriated, himself his body slipped into an altered state, beyond the pale of ordinary consciousness. He witnessed sadly, as if in a dream, his hand reach out, fingers scrabbling like spider’s legs, prying open her purse’s lips, rummaging its contents for her wallet. He pulled it out. His breathing quickened and eyes widened as he riffled through the week’s house money, a sheaf of bills neatly sorted into their coloured denominations…
Taken out of context, I can understand how that plea might trigger thoughts of collapsed mines, bombed out apartment buildings, avalanches or any number of natural and man… er, human made catastrophes. You could add car crashes to the list, strokes, falls off ladders, the tally goes on.
That’s not what I intended, though, lounging in one of the blue plastic Cape Cod chairs out on our back deck, watching the progress of another home run for God arcing through the infinity of blue sky over Mount Brenton.
“You weren’t thinking at all!” was how Ashley put it. “You scared the crap out of me!”
Actually, I’d been thinking about a lot of things, before Plato came along and jumped onto my lap. Good thoughts, mostly, about how lucky I am to be living my retirement era in Chemainus. As suburbs go, Cook street rates pretty good. It’s got a crime rate that flat lines somewhere near zero, there’s not a single traffic light in town, strangers wave and say hello on the street and in the aisles of the Country Grocer store, and it’s located in the mild temperate zone of Southeast Vancouver Island—accurately fabled as a bit of paradise afloat on the Salish Sea.
There’s some irredeemably grouchy types who grumble in their coffee mugs down at Nic’s Café that the best thing about Muraltown is it’s within easy driving distance of Nanaimo in one direction, Victoria in the other. I say to them: If you can afford a patch of turf in either of those two places bigger than a dish cloth, go for it. I’m happy where I am.
I was especially happy to be out on the back deck that day.
Not that I don’t like company. I do. And I really like Serena, even if she is smarter than me and can’t help delving excitedly into the details about her research into ‘mitochondrial DNA and the role it plays in aging and degenerative diseases’. She’s ‘good people’, our niece. And my wife’s good people too. But put them in the same room, and you might as well stick your head inside a beehive, the way they natter. A quiet guy like me can’t get a word—or even a thought—in edgewise.
That’s why I retreated out onto the back deck. Once they’d talked their ways through the agony of childbirth, how to get your lemon poppyseed muffins out of the tray, the best deals to be had at the hospital auxiliary thrift shop, and so on, I decided it was time to take out the recycling and stop off on the way back for a snooze in the waning light of a balmy spring afternoon, while they continued with the task of sorting through the family photo albums.
“Oh look, there’s you uncle Martin, fifty pound lighter, with hair and no wrinkles!” “Aw! There’s Panda. Remember the time he ate your socks and we had to watch like expectant parents for him to poop them out.” “Auntie Ash, you were such a hippie. I love that dress, and the army boots are ever so chic! Ha, ha, ha!” “The Half-Lemon! Oh My God, we actually drove around in a yellow VW beetle? Look at the price of gas… 48 cents a gallon! Christ, they don’t even mint pennies anymore, and gas is measured out by the litre.”
Even though I was happy for them, I have to admit to being pinpricked by envy, watching Ash and Serena babble on like partners at a quilting bee. I’m not a feminist or anything, but I was thinking, if more men could get themselves into that head space, there’d be fewer Putins in the world, and the people of Ukraine might not be suffering through a senseless armageddon, watching their cities getting pummelled into dust like 21st Century Sodoms and Gomorrahs. I’m ashamed of my male gender sometimes. Wish I could have a bit less Y in my jeans and a bit more ‘Why?’ in my brain.
We have strange thoughts in that fantastical zone between awake and asleep. There I was, reclining in the Cape Cod chair out on the back deck, the brilliant sunshine lighting up the inside of my eyelids like lava lamps when, plop, Plato landed on my lap.
Cat’s paws are the closest thing I can imagine to an angel alighting… until they begin kneading that is, their claws tugging at your clothing and pricking your skin. Plato circled round for a couple of laps, like he was tamping down the grass under a tree on his vast savanna, then settled in and started purring. I sat perfectly still, trying to make my bony thighs soft as down filled cushions. The rumble of his contentment echoed through me. You have to feel a cat’s purr to really appreciate it, let it permeate consciousness.
Please understand, Plato is not a lap cat. He’s aloof, a strutter through our lives, more likely to show you the pink petunia when you make a move to pat him than to rub up against your leg. Usually he stumps off like you’re beneath his dignity. Ash and I are lap-cat-people, though, yearning for that mystical connection between cat’s fur and human skin, and that reassuring deep vibrato of feline contentment. He was deigning to settle onto my lap for a snooze that afternoon. But lap time with Plato? It’s like cuddling a land mine. Don’t touch, don’t move, don’t even breathe, or he’ll be off.
Ash and I share the joys of those moments as if we’d experienced a second coming. I often wonder what it is we’re missing in our lives, that we hanker so desperately after our cat’s erratic affection? We have each other, isn’t that enough? Our death-defying circle of friends? Our kids, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, our dog Sophie, neighbours who wave hello wherever we go in Muraltown? Isn’t that enough?
Not unless Plato loves us back, I guess.
How could I be so selfish as to not share that glorious interlude with Ash? So, risking all, I slipped my fingers like a bomb disposal expert into the hip pocket of my ever tightening jeans, pinched the top of my mobile and slid it ever so gingerly out from under Plato. He was still purring when the phone came to life and I pointed it at him in camera mode. His enlarged rump filled the bottom of my frame; my hiking boots—propped on the deck table—the top.
‘Click’ went the camera. Plato purred on. I dared not breathe a sigh of relief.
Kids can thumb in a text quicker than ‘u or i’ can let go a fart. I punched my mobile’s runes the same way you’d poke at an elevator button, my pudgy index finger hitting the wrong key half the time, so that I’d have to go back and try again, and again, hissing like a kettle too long on the hob. But eventually I got the message into the allotted space beneath the distorted image of Plato on my lap, then zip, off it went.
‘Help! I can’t move my legs!’ it said.
Panic is instantaneous contagion. It zaps the collective consciousness of a room like the sudden glare of a flood light. It’s another sort of bomb, its shockwaves radiating out into the neural network, forcing adrenaline to squirt like juice from a squeeze bottle into the guts of its infected tribe. On the one hand, panic gets us moving before the bus runs us over; on the other, it doesn’t give us time to think. The autonomic nervous system kicks in and we get jerked around like puppets. If we’re lucky enough to survive, we analyze ‘the event’ after the fact, picking apart the threads of mayhem.
My theory is we’re predisposed to panic. The Doomsday Clock is always ticking closer and closer to midnight, shaving off half the remaining time, then half again, until the calculus of destruction tells us there’s nothing, no measurable allotment of milliseconds left between us and…
Duck, cover and hold! We don’t want to hear that bomb go off!
Ash, for example, is predisposed by images of me snacking on potato chips and sneaking chocolate bars, munching toward the imminent possibility of a heart attack; she has witnessed my shuffle-footed stumbling often enough to anticipate my tumbling down any convenient flight of stairs; tick, tick, tick, the clock keeps blinking, until…
‘Bing!’ The text message slid into the corner of her screen, minus the cute, explanatory photo of Plato snuggled in my lap. It shouted: “Help! I can’t move my legs!”
So there I sat, swaddled in the joy of Plato’s fidgety affection, while Ash and Serena dashed about the house looking for the corner I had collapsed into, or the staircase I’d toppled down, expecting to find me dead, my finger still touching the screen after I’d shot off my desperate expiring plea for assistance…
“You scared the crap out of me!” Ash shouted without preamble once they’d zeroed in on the back deck. She slapped me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise, maybe even trigger some kind of cardiac event. “Serena was about to dial 911!”
“It was an accident!” I protested. “There was supposed to be a picture…”
“You’re the accident,” she shook her head. Case closed; sentencing to be announced over dinner and executed over some indeterminate length of future time.
Thoroughly harangued, I was left standing on the deck by my two saviours, who marched back into the house through the sliding door, shaking their heads, words like ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘stupid’ reverberating in their wake. I turned round, and looked wistfully at Plato, inscrutable as ever, purring away on the Cape Cod chair.
“You little shit,” I said. “I really do love you.”
Just past Chemainus Farms, heading up River Road toward Highway 1, there’s a gate that always intrigues me. It seems as much an invitation as a prohibition, because it’s centred at the entrance to a green, but has no surrounding fence to prevent curious wanderers and wonderers from simply stepping round it and carrying on. Is it meant to keep people in or out? Is it a remnant from a bygone time when livestock had to be penned in? Does it serve a present purpose—other than to excite speculative imaginings? What’s its story?
Photo and poem were composed after I spent half an hour reviving a dying wasp I found on one of the slats of our livingroom blinds. It is a living room, after all!
I’m so used to looking at things, not into them that I’m startled when I witness the space between our molecules of Being and come to realize: It’s not empty, this infinite sky, this eternal orbiting of day into night / into dawn / into the glare of high noon.
I wrote this morning in my latest revision of a fiction:
She glanced away then out the window at the sunrise he’d witnessed earlier; it had morphed into the blare of morning light the gorgeous tints of dawn burned off by the intense rays of a risen sun.
Will this epiphany of the dazzling light and its glorious host of questions well once again at at the end of day?
Can the invisible be divisible?
Is it my plight to know?
How many times can we split the atoms of our truths before we discover the ultimate germs of Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, and Spirit?
It’s been a long time coming, but my proof copies of The Boy From Under have arrived… now the work begins!
So much has changed since I typed ‘The End’ onto the concluding page of this novel’s first draft. From a writer who believed his work was done once those two words were appended to his manuscript I have morphed into one who believes the creative cycle is never really completed, and that his books have to be actively and joyfully promoted and shared.
The first step will be getting proof copies into the hands, and minds, of beta readers and reviewers. If you want to join that helpful group, let me know. Alas, I only have five print copies to share, but I’ve posted an online edition of the book too, which will be free for all you betas out there.
If you like psychological mysteries, I think you’ll find the Boy From Under an intriguing read from front cover to back…
Sound carries meaning.
A prayer carries meaning.
The words Happy Birthday carry meaning.
Listening to Lama Pasang chant Tibetan sutras
For my brother, Stewart, my thoughts and wishes
Expand across a continent, over mountains
Flowing into rivers and oceans,
And farther yet, on to distant shores.
They expand to encompass as much as I
Am capable of.
For Stewart to have long life… and happiness
I must think of
His partner Miao
She must be happy, too.
And his children, Sky, Joel, Sarah, Jesse, Josh, DarDar
And his siblings Lynda, Stephen and myself.
And all his many friends.
Then my reach must overflow, encircling
The families, friends and relations
Of all his family, friends and relations.
And beyond yet again, the chant reverberates
A rejuvenating echo
Heard by the children of his children’s’ children
And the families of families’ families
And the relations of relations’ relations
And the friends of friends’ friends.
And beyond again…
In all places
Children
Families
Relations
And Friends
May dwell.
It must rustle the leaves of distant forests
Live in the songs of heavenly birds
Survive the shimmer and flash of fins
Arise in the twitching of earthly noses.
It’s a chant that goes beyond
Anything I am capable of…
Except Hope…
Always Hope…
Wishing long life and happiness, Brother
To you and all our world!
Luv Craig& Diana & Family
Maria, Aaron, Laurence, Cathy, PI Pirelli… Crystal Doer…
Crystal Doer?
He hadn’t known any of these people two weeks ago; now they crowded his thoughts.
Victor closed his eyes, relaxed.
“Crystal Doer?”
She drew closer, a shadow taking shape within his darkened room. He half expected her to materialize in the midair between him and the billowing curtains, or to hear her voice threaded into the night sounds of the city. Could she be alive? Out there, after all these years? Her parents still hoped. She’s run away, they kept telling themselves. Someday she would come to terms with her demons, then she’ll come home.
She’ll phone from a town at the end of a long dirt road where the nightly entertainment is watching the Northern Lights. “Mom!” she’ll say. “Dad! Can you forgive me?” And they won’t even say a word. They’ll just cry, longing to hold their babe in their arms, to splice together the severed ligaments of their crippled lives.
Yeah, and now for the sappy music and credits, Victor objected…
You cannot have a name!
“What?”
The voice had no locus. It simply materialized inside and outside him and one and the same instant.
He says you can’t. So I’m going to call you Emanon – noname in reverse – because if you say something backward it makes no sense, yet it exists. I’ll still be obeying, but I will have a sound that means you and ‘not you’ at the same time. Do you understand?
If I even thought of a name like Billy, or Jake he’d know it. Even thinking about thinking it is dangerous. He senses disobedience the same way a hyena sniffs out molecules of sweat. You must never reveal your secret no-name to him. He’ll beat me and you within an inch of our lives if he ever finds out.
“Who is he?”
She didn’t answer. Her spirit faded, a weak signal obscured by the shifting electromagnetism of the city.
“Who is he?” Victor shouted after her, but she was gone.
He stared into the misshapen gloom of his bedroom. Am I going crazy? Had he become a medium for the long-lost spirit of Crystal Doer? Was he infatuated with a decades old photo of a dead girl?
Victor kicked the sheets away, freeing himself from their tangles and rolling out of bed. The room had become a locus of insanity, a place where reason wobbled, flew apart, the shrapnel of what had been tearing into the gauzy fabric of reality. He wrapped himself in his housecoat and padded down the hall. The inky well of False Creek, its shores encrusted with the garish phosphorescence of the city, came into view through his patio window. He stared down at his chosen world. At first nothing seemed out of place. Granville Island, the Granville Street Bridge, Burrard Bridge, all the meaningful structures that triangulated his sense of who and where he was remained in place. But…
You’re out there, aren’t you?
Crystal didn’t respond. Quiescent now, she’d become a presence perfectly merged into the dark interstices of his universe. When you speak, you become a point of absolute being; but your silence is everywhere.
He’d never thought such a thing, this connection to a certainty beyond belief. Crystal Doer’s spirit had broken free from the black holes of time and space, and he was the only human being in the universe equipped to pick up the irregular pulse of her background signal. She cried out for…
“Justice,” he pronounced, aware of the sliding door’s glass vibrating in harmony to the word. The world as he knew it was imploding, everything bending and buckling under the influence of an irrational new gravity.
Funny, how it seems like – no matter how long you’ve been away – you’ve never really left as soon as you return and cross the threshold into that familiar place called home.
Diana and I pulled into the drive at 3298 Cook Street Oct. 11, after catching the 3:15pm sailing from Tsawwassen to Duke point. Our son Ian greeted us, along with Sophie, our retriever, who has been hoarding all our shoes and slippers since we left as placeboes for our real essence. We waved hello to our neighbours across the street, but warned of our ‘radioactive’ state and promised to catch up once we’re fully recovered.
We’ll process our tsunami of cross-Canada memories and impressions in the coming weeks, but for the moment it feels good to simply be in the centre of gravity exerted by the place that is truly our own.
We’ve put off this final Realta Road 2022 update because we didn’t want people to know we were back right away. It’s taken a couple of days to feel we’re recovered enough from our illness. Our COVID tests came up negative, so we’re guessing it was an especially virulent flu… whatever it is, we don’t want to pass on.
Now that we’ve discovered so many amazing aspects to this country called Canada, we’ll have to rediscover Chemainus and see how everything fits into our new perspective. In that sense, the place we call ‘home’ is a sort of touch stone that we come back to again and again as we plan our next excursions out onto Realta Road.
(PS: One of Ian’s friends, whom I will never forgive, pointed out that the name of our RV is ‘Rialta’ not ‘Realta’. As far as I’m concerned some mistakes were simply meant to be, and our imagination on ramp merges onto Realta Road.)
We enjoyed a brisk walk around the Grand Bay West loop in Port aux Basques yesterday afternoon. It was a cloudy, blustery day… more like the kind of weather I’d imagined on this rugged coast. Wherever we go in this region I see the elements of land, sea and air in contention, each asserting its own power. The wind drives on the sea, which surges into the land, and we puny mortals are caught up in the midst of it all.
The sandy beaches at Grand Bay West were deserted, the colourful chairs in disarray, as if they had been abandoned suddenly. In the centre of the loop, an antique harrow atop a hayfield hill, a seeming testament to the challenges of farming in Newfoundland.
Now we’re aboard the Blue Puttees, lurching our way toward North Sydney and the recommenced start of our trip back to the West Coast. We first tried booking our return crossing for Monday, Sept.12, but couldn’t get a spot until Thursday, Sept. 15. That sailing was cancelled due to high winds, and we couldn’t get another booking until today. We’ve lost a full week and will have to redo our travel plans if we want to be back in Chemainus by the third week in October.
