Arctic Smoke Read online

  “Chapter six: For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness.”

  Lor peered into the room’s darkness, spied a glass jar of bright, ice-like chunks, resting on the cart. The chunks were translucent, glinting green and blue highlights. Something familiar about their iridescence.

  “I’m getting a little tired of your oracular horseshit,” Lor said. “Don’t you have work to do?”

  “Work?”

  “Yeah. There’s a snowstorm in the middle of autumn here. Snow piling up in front of the hotel.” Lor got up from the bed and walked to the window. “This town. Even the seasons don’t make sense.”

  “Chapter three: To every thing there is a season.”

  Over in the shadows the green and blue highlights winked out. The jar disappeared.

  † † †

  Lor took the Sevens bus to Rotten Belly, the last stop, out where the grass burned and the trees withered. At one time Sevens had been a thriving residential district, now a geography of broken hope. Almost a ghost town, still cleaving the city’s borders. Old houses peeled in rows, mainly uninhabited, late Colonial with faux Old World details. Some housed front-yard trailers, blocked and rotting beneath old man willows and poplars. The Museum of Evil itself was a sandstone Romanesque at the end of the lane, trimmed with turrets and brownstone, wholly inappropriate for its time and place. The door was open, unbarred. Lor entered without incident. Grinned. The Lutheran was going to love this.

  Inside, it was so hot he shut his eyes. When he opened them, wiping the sweaty sting, he saw that the radiators were all on, leaking steam and boiling water, clunking and bubbling as if the word summer was entirely forgotten here. He mopped his hair. Had he smoked this morning? No. Those rads really were humming, must have been for years. All the paint was blistered, the laquer, the varnish. Even the floor was bumped and bubbled.

  Shit, wow. Lor grinned, walked through the steaming hall.

  The first room was straight out of a Euro Victorian boy’s tale, filled with skulls, pickled toes and fingers, stuffed crows. Long knives, dried orchids, bright bottled liquids. He laughed out loud. This was exactly the kind of place that would have fired Franklin’s imagination. And Alistair’s too, for that matter. Lor missed them both.

  Next room. Books—stacks and stacks, shelf after shelf, a moth’s kingdom of dust and dim light. Lor paused. Where was this penumbral light coming from, since there were no windows? Well, whatever. He knocked over a few books, checked the titles. Again, a boy’s delight: satanic Bibles, alchemical tomes, long-forgotten religious texts like The Book of Ozahism. Even a gigantic opus on puppetry, some weird old-world volume called Casey and Finnegan’s Wake: A Tayle on How Divers Angels from Heav’n Fell. Obviously bogus, made to look old. Lor chuckled. He should have called his old friends, invited them back for a family reunion, with this museum the first stop on the itinerary. But they were long gone. Franklin for good.

  A third room. Paintings. Thick oil on canvas, mostly northern landscapes, frozen barrens and icy skies, a tendency to abstraction. Lor seemed to recall that Canadians loved this stuff. He was more partial to the realistic portraits on the north wall of the room, mainly snow-skinned circus folk in various poses of calculated perversion. He liked especially the boy with the knife, who stared out with a defiant look of hatred, longing, and compassion.

  Lor stared back. His toes began to burn. He looked down, saw boiling water had oozed from the rad to scorch his running shoe.

  “Jesus!” Rubber steaming.

  He saw something else on the floor. A splotch of sparkling green and blue powder. He forgot the paintings instantly, stooped to take a closer look. Somehow the powder shimmered, produced its own luminescence. The radiators hushed.

  “Shit,” Lor whispered. Couldn’t get enough air in his lungs. “She is going to love this.”

  He reached, touched. A bright tingle thrilled up his arm, like the first tongue of fellatio.

  “Shit!” He snapped back his finger, gulped a deep breath. His lungs filled with metallic tang.

  All of a sudden he didn’t miss his old friends at all—boyish lunatics, both of them—in fact, Lor was glad they were gone, glad he hadn’t seen them in years, glad he’d never see them again. God damn, he was twenty-nine, he’d had his fill of gleeful adventures and mystifications and freakish New Age pathologies, had his fill of the Lutheran too, come to think of it. And this museum—shit. Completely ridiculous, he hated it. What a dumb-ass monument to boyhood fancy, everything a punk despised.

  He ground the powder to the floor with his boot. Time to go.

  Outside, an old woman and young girl watched him from the weedy walk, both sallow and Caucasoid.

  “Good afternoon.” The old woman adjusted her shawl. “You’re our first visitor today.”

  Lor sniffed, stalked for the bus stop with toe still burning.

  “We can provide a guided tour,” the old woman called.

  “Are you lost?” the girl added.

  Lor turned. “Shut your fucking cakeholes,” he said, surprising the woman, the girl, and—most of all—himself.

  He was about to apologize, but there was the bus.

  The Weird hit him that night, at an all-ages show, where he was playing with an ad hoc hardcore outfit, composed of former members of The Stinging Nettles, Greasy Skank, and Phantom of the Pop Machine. In the middle of an out-of-tune cover of PiL’s “Fishing,” he saw flies buzzing in a dark cloud above the drummer’s head. He swung his blue guitar at the cloud, hitting cymbals, knocking over his guitar stand, cracking the drummer’s knee. The drummer kicked in his own bass skin and came at Lor with the hi-hat, smashed him on the head. Flies peeled off in squadrons and went for Lor’s face, angry as bees, buzzing into his darkness. Last thing he saw was his own finger, still tingling, still sparkling with a dab of that museum powder.

  Powder?

  CHAPTER THREE

  One for Sorrow

  Soon after the museum, Lor began shedding friends. He had no explanation. He started watching a lot of videos alone. He walked to the other side of the street. He ignored his phone.

  “You’ve frozen inside,” said the Lutheran. “All your unguarded parts like toys and tools in a summer snowstorm.”

  “Nice,” he sneered.

  “Dear Lord.” She was horrified. “Did I just sound like Franklin there?”

  Lor walked alone that night, after their first real knock-down fight. He couldn’t figure out why he was suddenly so malign and anti-social. It sure felt good.

  “You’ve got to shake this jitterbug loner nonsense,” the Lutheran had said. “I’ve already done this tour with Franklin, don’t need to do it again. So, here’s the final offer: come to church with me tomorrow. Learn to listen and be still.”

  Lor wasn’t much for final offers. Minutes later he stood in a still pool of streetlight, gazing at an arborescent greenstrip. He found himself walking into a darkened wood.

  The centre of the wood broke to a small clearing, lit with drops of moonlight. He felt a hush, a thickness pressing down on his head and toes, as if something was waiting to happen. It was hard to breathe. His heart bopped. His chest pinched. He stepped in, gasped.

  A tall Japanese woman crouched under a tree, her face framed by a jumble of waist-length hair. She looked familiar. One of the paintings from the museum? She grinned, peered into his eyes, then raised a finger to her lips and pointed upward.

  Slowly, Lor looked to the treetops. High above, hundreds of wide-awake crows perched in the branches, basking in the percolating moonlight. None moved or breathed or made the slightest cackle or caw. It was a tightwound church of silence.

  The speckles of light began to jitter. The crows blurred. Lor’s legs elongated, and he teetered forward. He shifted his eyes down in order to regain his balance, then glanced back at the tree.

  The woman.

  Gone.

  Same thing for his girlfriend, next morning.

  † † †

  “A
drink, Lor?”

  Lor watched moonlight dice through window frost and crawl up his arm in radiant splinters. “What happened to sir?”

  “A good name is better than precious ointment: chapter seven.”

  Lor clamped his teeth. “You won’t tell me yours.”

  Silence. Then, “Some names shall be covered in darkness: chapter six.”

  Lor scratched frost from the windowpane, feeling ice beneath his nails. What was it with this town? “I used to know a guy who would never tell his last name. Played in a band with him a whole year, right here in Lethbridge. Never knew his last name.”

  “Well. I see you don’t need a drink to loosen your tongue.”

  “I lived here. Played with the psycho and a friend who ran off to Vancouver. A long story.” Lor twisted back to the nightstand, opened a drawer, plucked a picture.

  It was grainy, slightly out of focus. Shot against the sandstone of a Lethbridge post office on a clear summer day. Lor, smiling, bearded back then, framed by two tall and slender men, one with ponytail, the other with prematurely greying hair.

  “Franklin and Alistair.” Lor sat on the bed. “Og’s missing, the bass player. Lost him to speed.”

  “Car accident?”

  “Amphetamines. Last I heard he was in a Calgary hospital being treated for full-blown psychosis.”

  “And this. . . .” The bellboy brushed his shirt audibly. “This Franklin?”

  “The one with the grey hair. The psycho.”

  The bellboy floated over. “So. Your mentor in premature grey.”

  A flash of blue and green iridescence in the shadows. Lor’s stomach tweaked. “How do you know he was my mentor?”

  “You served a kind of apprenticeship, here in Lethbridge.”

  Lor shifted, folded his arms. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “And now: regrets. All is vanity and vexation of spirit: chapter one.”

  “How do you know all this?” Lor said.

  No response.

  “Put the goddamned Bible away.”

  Silence.

  Lor stood and invaded the shadows. “Maybe a birthday is a dangerous thing. But dangerous to whom?”

  “Don’t touch me,” the bellboy said, raising the Bible. “That you would certainly regret.”

  † † †

  Three and a half weeks before his thirtieth birthday, Lor asked his latest girlfriend, a Wiccan of Welsh descent, not to touch him anymore. The sex was getting too close, too warm. He even had a set of her keys.

  She was so angry she chipped his tooth with a pool cue. “Do you even believe in the spirits of love?”

  He retreated behind the pool table. “I’m an atheist.”

  “Then why aren’t you fucking an atheist?”

  He fingered a pocket. “Maybe you should be fucking a witch.”

  She gently laid down the stick. “Maybe you should feed your spirit.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  She was already leaving.

  “At least I know who I am!” he called.

  That night, in his drummer’s apartment, Lor sat crumpled asleep beneath a bent hi-hat. His guitar began to speak: not the jealous blue guitar, the unfaithful black one. Run, it chimed.

  Toward morning he heard Christmas bells, faintly at first, then louder, an approaching sleigh in the night. The ringing gradually pulled him out of his dream, into the first rays of sunlight, where he sat cramped beneath the hi-hat, desperately jingling his ex-girlfriend’s keyring.

  † † †

  Aye aye aye!

  “What’s that noise?” Lor asked.

  “A bird on the windowsill.”

  They faced each other tensely in the shadows, Lor with fist clenched, bellboy with picture in one hand, Bible in the other.

  “What’s a bird doing out in this weather?”

  “Bird things.”

  Lor peered from the shadows, focused on the window’s bright halo.

  Aye aye aye.

  “I’ve got to see this shit.”

  Aye aye aye.

  His guitar exhaled as he passed the stand. Bits of light pumped through glass, dappled his arm. He heard the Bible drop.

  Aye aye aye.

  Lor rubbed frost from the window, pulled back a bit of curtain, looked out into the night. On the icy ledge sat an enchanting black and white bird, poised, balanced by a long tail, chattering at the storm. The bird cocked its head, fixed Lor with a glossy eye.

  Aye aye aye!

  Lor’s heart jumped.

  “Holy shit. What is that bird?”

  The bird shook itself and flapped its wings. Feathers caught moonlight; tail and wings glittered briefly, iridescent blue and green, just like that powder back in the Museum of—

  Aye aye aye!

  The bird flapped from the sill and flew at the storm.

  “What is that bird?” Lor wheeled toward the shadows, stumbling. “What’s it called?”

  “Sir?”

  “I want the name of that bird.”

  “You must already know it.”

  “We don’t have that bird in Underwood.”

  “I realize, sir. But you’ve also lived here.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I was a little less tuned in in my wasted youth.” Lor strode back out of the light. “The name?”

  A sigh in the shadows. “Magpie, black-billed. Pica pica. Member of the corvid family, whose most notable members are the crow and the raven and all the European variations: the jackdaw, the hooded crow, with its white cloak and. . . . ”

  “Magpie.” Lor stopped in the middle of the room, still speckled with light. “Beautiful bird,” he whispered.

  “Well, then.” The shadows whispered back: “Two for mirth. Six for the Devil’s own self.”

  “What?”

  “Seven for a journey. Which I now implore you to take. I do implore you with the utmost solemnity.”

  “More Bible verse?”

  The bellboy scratched his shirt. “An old English counting rhyme. One can predict the future by counting magpies. Seven magpies for a journey.”

  “Only one here.”

  “It’s the sign, sir. Take the powder north. Do not ignore your quest.”

  “Superstitious horseshit.” Lor stared down at the floor and noticed the small hotel Bible, opened to an unreadable section of Old Testament. “What’s one for? One magpie?”

  A pause. A return to whisper.

  “One for sorrow.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bring It Back

  Lor sniffed himself to sleep for two nights, crouched beneath the hi-hat. He couldn’t name his misery. He missed the Wiccan, superficially, along with all his other shed friends. But it went deeper, down to secret places that expressed themselves through symptomatic romantic failures. On the third night he collapsed in sheer exhaustion, next to his new girlfriend, a Buddhist with skin white as hotel sheets. She reached for something on the dresser.

  “Do you like it?” she held up a crystal globe full of water and snow. “Shake it, you get a blizzard.” She shook. Snow whirled. “My daughter’s.” “Daughter?”

  The Buddhist was already asleep. Lor gently pried the snow globe from her fingers and replaced it on the dresser. Then he re-lit one of her candles and tucked himself in. The window rattled open and gushed night breezes, snuffing the candle, flapping light cotton sheets. Lor moaned once, turned over.

  He sat up in bed. He was a boy. His heart was ticking like an old clock. The room was soft with snow, the ceiling swept with stars. He coughed fog and pulled the covers to his neck, away from the sleeping woman.

  At the foot of his bed lay a snowbank imprinted with a snow angel. In Lor’s ears, a chorus of windchimes.

  Let me touch you . . . . Unvoiced words in his head, filled with rain and delicate blue.

  No, he tried to tell the angel. He drew the blanket tighter.

  The angel lifted, peeling from three dimensions. It grew and grew, pouring into itself. Lor looked away, squinted at the snow
’s luminous imprint, covered his ears against running water, cracking ice.

  The room polarized. The bed elongated toward a blasted wall, bricks and twists of rebar. Beyond the wall, gigantic night: sky choked with burning stars, trash fires at the bottom of a lake.

  Let me touch you, just as you touched part of me.

  No way, mister.

  Bring it back to me. Make me whole again.

  The boy shuddered under the covers and searched for the speaker, but found only the woman sleeping next to him, coated with hoarfrost.

  The room darkened. The angel floated from behind, over the bed, mercury dropping its wake.

  What do you want? Lor clutched the covers.

  The angel hovered at the bed’s foot.

  My spirit wants to touch you.

  Touch? No.

  The angel flickered and leaned forward.

  No! The boy dived beneath the covers.

  The bed disappeared from beneath him, and he was inside the snow globe, looking out from the dresser top at a giant’s bedroom. The angel now a thousand feet of towering dark, studded with sundogs and coruscations, iridescent blues and greens.

  It floated toward him.

  Lor screamed. His lungs filled with water.

  The angel reached down from the skies and plucked the snow globe from the dresser. Lor stumbled as his crystal world floated up toward the sky and stipple. Then suddenly down, down, as the angel dashed the snow globe to the floor. Lor saw, for one eternal second, each scratch in the polish, each scuff, each accelerating whorl in the woodgrain.

  Bring it back. Bring back my powdered heart.

  Then the world smashed.

  Night air surged in. Water surged out. Lor was carried away in a snowy river, over the woodgrain, under the bed, back into the sheets.

  He blinked.

  “Lorne?” said his new girlfriend, deep inside her dreams.

  He shuddered, opened and closed his eyes.

  “It’s Lor,” he said, finding his voice.

  After a few minutes of paralysis he realized he was soaked.

  “Shit!” he whispered.

  He rolled out of bed and crouched, pulling his wet hair.