“Oh, Diana,” Julien said, “we’re going to be living like farm animals.”
“Don’t whine. We have everything we need.” Though the place did resemble a halfway house furnished with two hundred dollars and a dream that died en route to the thrift store. “Julien, try to think of this as an adventure.”
We bought fish from the locals while we waited for a supply barge to make the trek from the coast. These locals were all members of the Haida tribe (non-Haida had been given the boot some years earlier), and they tolerated us only because Serge had persuaded them that our presence might, in some way, bring back the bees. In any event, their feelings were made clear when they showed up around sunset that first night and examined everything in our house, like CSI techs looking for evidence. “They’re looking for Solon,” said Serge. “It’s banned here.”
“Really? How come?”
“Because once you take Solon, you stop caring about the tribe.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
After my overwhelming reaction to even the smell of its blister packaging, I was happy that it was banned from the island.
In those first few days, all we did was walk around the village area, trying not to attract too much attention to ourselves. Most of Masset’s dozen or so stores were shut down, and along the wide streets, crows and ravens loitered like bored teenagers. The Haida were trying to return to their older way of life, fishing and hunting. At the end of a small street, where a co-op grocery store once stood, were racks of skinned Sitka deer awaiting conversion into pemmican. An introduced species, the Sitka deer roamed the island, multiplied like Norway rats and were a delicious, readily available treat.
After a week, Serge came down to the beach, where Julien and I were skipping stones on an ocean that had turned eerily glassy, as the Aleutian currents rip past the islands like steel wool. “Zack and Sam will be joining us tomorrow,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
That night we celebrated with deer stew and dandelion wine, got a bit drunk and then, out of boredom, decided to search every nook of our house for clues to who had lived in it before us. At the bottom of the bathroom drawer, we found an ancient calcified toothpaste tube containing Tweety Bird’s Berrylicious Looney Tunes toothpaste, with clinically proven fluoride protection.
“And look,” said Julien. “It comes in a ‘no-mess stand-up tube.’”
We locked eyes.
We looked back at Tweety’s preposterous body and head.
We locked eyes once more.
I said, “Let’s get right to the point. Tweety Bird: gay or straight?”
“A raging homo, I think. Or at least a eunuch.”
“Julien, we haven’t even established if Tweety Bird is a boy bird or a girl bird.”
“Good point. I used to think boy, but now that you ask directly, I don’t know. A female-to-male transsexual, most likely. Is it possible for birds to experience gender dysphoria?”
“This may be the first known incident. What species of bird is Tweety supposed to be, anyway?”
“A canary?”
“A canary, sure—if you’re wasted on peyote.”
“Tweety does have a hydrocephalic skull. And that voice . . .” Julien tried doing an impression, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Tweety Bird is just plain spooky,” I said.
We stared at the toothpaste tube some more. Then Julien said, “Gender and sexuality are kind of irrelevant with Tweety Bird, because it’s impossible to imagine him/her having sex, anyway.”
“Hot wild-assed monkey sex.”
“Sex with toys.”
It was a nice moment. A bonding moment. So we finished the dandelion wine and then Julien began rambling about a Japanese sci-fi cult he’s into, the Battlestar Tomato. My eyes glazed over. Then he began telling me about that online world he was addicted to, which accelerated my passing out drunk. I hadn’t done that in a long time and it was fun.
HARJ
Oh, my bitterness at missing my chance at carnal bliss with Andrea! And oh, my shock at learning that the Craigs were colour-coordinated Solon users. I tumbled out the second-floor window into the remains of a dead magnolia, only to land plop on a half-deflated vinyl pool toy promoting beer from Mexico. Through a window, I could see that the house was filled with non-Craigs, while approaching sirens and helicopters told me the situation was about to grow even more perilous to me. So I headed into the wooded area behind the house, and oddly, it reminded me of walking through Gomarankadawela Park in Trincomalee during the annual mongoose festival.
Fortunately, I am fleet of foot, and after a period of hours, I emerged onto Interstate 71—which I knew from Google Maps began in Louisville, Kentucky’s famous “Spaghetti Junction” and ended twenty miles south of Cincinnati. Kentucky—a new goal.
It was a lovely walk. Deep in the night, hours went by with out a car. I walked down the middle of the passing lane, feeling the newly born grasses poking up from the pavement—tickling against the bottom of my jeans. An occasional startled deer pranced away and I was able to hear one or two crickets, and I felt like I was truly in America and my time with the Craigs was only a dream, such as I would have after eating ill-spiced stews prepared by Hemesh’s untalented wife.
What more bad news would come my way as a result of having taken the low road? Where would I go for the long-term? What would I do? To make such decisions, I needed to rest. I stepped over to the side of the road, crawled into a thicket of grass and fell asleep. I was awakened by a strange combination of bright sunlight and a rather strong rain—as well as the sound of a cocking rifle in my ear.
“Okay there, Sleeper Cell, upsy-daisy.”
“I am very sorry, sir, you have the wrong person. My name is Harj Vetharanayan, but people generally call me Apu.”
“A comedian, huh?” With a deft jolt, he drill-pressed my chest with his rifle butt. His face was melon-like but pink. A fleck of spittle hit my left cheekbone. “Found him, boys!” The rifleman’s colleagues joined him. “I’m Chief Clancy Wiggum, and it’s a perfect day for a dose of terror, huh, Sleeper Cell?”
“Who is this person you keep telling me I am? I am no such person.”
“So, Mr. Cell—which was your favourite—the North Tower or the South Tower?”
“Excuse me?”
Chief Wiggum continued to hector me with absurd accusations as the other officers handcuffed me and pushed me into the rear seat of a sheriff ’s sedan that was in worse shape than a pirate cab driver’s vehicle back home—it smelled of cheap cologne and diesel fumes. I did not enjoy being in the back seat at all, but I did become curious as to our destination when we drove past what was clearly the police station and into a once prosperous residential neighbourhood now clad in plywood and NO TRESPASSING signs.
We arrived at a house whose occupants still made an effort to be middle class—a mowed square of lawn out front, dappled with freshly cleaned white plastic lawn furniture of a sort burped out by tsunamis. I felt a wash of homesickness before I was harshly pushed through the front door and down a mildewy hallway.
“Okay, Sleeper Cell, don’t make one single fucking move until we tell you to. In.”
They locked me in yet another strange bedroom, this one with a barred window that overlooked a rusted-out pair of snowmobiles on the thistled rear lawn. The room’s walls were papered with Mother Goose characters, and scented by a basket containing potpourri, a popular seasonal accessory item ordered in December along with yuletide-themed sweaters.
Upon closer inspection, I saw that there was no aspect of the room, aside from the barred windows, that wasn’t trying to cheer me up or make me feel childlike—and yet the room did not feel like the room of a child. It felt like the sort of room an adult might wish to inhabit if he wanted to ignore the real world and dream about the children he would never have. It depressed me and spoke of a belief in nonsense and magic.
I shouted through the door, “Gen
tlemen? Hello? Could I have something to eat or drink? A simple cup of coffee?”
Clumsy footsteps approached my door, and the sheriff ’s baritone voice boomed, “Coffee? Who am I—Scrooge McFucking Duck? The deposed Prince of Nigeria? Maybe you’d like some goose liver pâté and a chiffon cake while you’re at it.”
He walked away, sniggering.
I sighed and wondered what it was about me that I was always ending up in odd bedrooms, but never ending up in them in a good way. I removed my shirt and looked at the bruise on my ribcage, the shape and size of a cucumber. This was when I had the odd sensation that I was being picked out of myself—or that my body was doubling like a bacterium, a newer me rising above my body seated on the edge of the bed. I went through the ceiling and roof of the house and was above the fields of Ohio, like a helicopter, but higher and quieter. I kept rising and rising and soon was up where the atmosphere turns into space. I turned and looked at the sun, but instead of being blinded, I felt a moment of awe, a recognition that life on earth was fragile and delicate, and owed everything to the sun. I turned around and looked at the universe and shivered because it was so vast and essentially empty. I thought about Earth, this cosmic pebble circling a D-class star—and even then, this thing we call life inhabits only a tiny skim-coat of this fleck, and even within that thin coat, there isn’t that much life at all. I looked back down at the planet and I thought, What a marvel to be among the fewest of few molecules in the universe allowed to experience this thing called life—stars and nebulas and black holes by the quadrillion, and yet only a few molecules on Earth get to be alive.
And then I began to fall back down. Not quite falling, but the descent startled me. Plop, there I was, back in the Mother Goose bedroom, a prisoner, with the door now being kicked in by a syringe-toting Chief Wiggum and two very stupid-looking goons as might be seen on 1970s police shows found on a satellite station with a seven-digit channel number.
“We’re going to need a sample of your sleeper-cell cells,” he said, advancing on me.
I resisted but I was coshed on the forehead and woke up with a sore inner arm onto which a Band-Aid had been slapped. My chest was throbbing. I looked on the floor and there was a pizza pocket that had been microwaved but that was now cold, a pitcher of water, an empty but dirty water glass and a half-used, very old-looking bag of orange crystals labelled TANG. I felt like going home, but had no clear idea what home was to me any longer.
So I lay there on the bed, attempting not to panic by concentrating on remembering the names of colour samples from a series of old Martha Stewart brochures Hemesh had forced us all to study. (The contract went instead to some company in Tasmania that became our bitter rival, but that is another story.) In any event, I find that when you think of a colour, the chattering part of your brain turns off and you are calmed. I recommend this technique to anybody in need of peace.
ATLANTIC FOG
BABY BLANKET
BAKERY BOX WHITE
BELL FLOWER
BITUMEN
BLUE ASTER
BLUE CORN
BOX TURTLE
BROOM HANDLE
CAKE BATTER
CAMEO
CASHEW
CHALKBOARD GREEN
CLOUDLESS DAY
CURLEW
DAGUERREOTYPE
DUCK’S BILL
DUCK’S EGG
FADED INK
FOXGLOVE
I was just about to envision “Galapagos” when there was a roar, like the leaf blower of the gods, and several men shouting. My room’s door was busted open yet again! It was a team of DEA agents, just like in movies, except that their outfits were old and threadbare, so shoddy, in fact, that I was unsure if my rescuers were genuine DEA agents—but an open door is an open door. I fled, and as I did I saw my hill-people captors being clubbed on the head like Canadian baby seals. It is uncharitable of me to say so, but I was quite happy to witness them in pain.
Near the house was a helicopter. Somebody shouted, “Hop in!” And so I did, all the while thinking about how blasé I’d become about air travel in recent weeks. We soon landed at a private airstrip where a small corporate jet blazoned with the Disney logo awaited us.
“We are going to Disney World?”
“No. You’re going to Canada. We got this jet cheap from Disney.”
I’d read about Disney’s huge fire sale the year before, on reuters.com.
I boarded the jet and the doors closed. I was the sole passenger. Through a smooth five-hour flight, I ate a bag of potato chips and drank a bottle of water. We landed in Masset, on Haida Gwaii, at sunset. Zack and Sam arrived at the small airstrip moments after me, on two different planes.
Who could be paying for all of these extravagant flights? Vintage honey brokers?
At first, the five of us were bashful together—as when a friend tells you there’s another person you must meet, and of course the new person is as awkward as you are. We were on a bizarre and beautiful island on a quintuple blind date or, as Zack would say, a five-way.
Diana shocked me with her swearing disorder, but it is amazing how easily the brain will cancel out a dozen “fucks” in a row.
I had been worried that Zack and Sam would be Craigs, but they were not and that was a relief—nor did they seem like the sorts of people my brother would escort into Trincomalee’s handjob district. One might think Zack could be that type, but in the tropics, men like Zack sit on a beach and remove their shirts and the pleasure dome comes to them; no need to poke through back alleys or bribe a concierge.
Julien was a surprise to me, rather immature for his age. It’s not that I am such a beacon of maturity, but he seems to have had no experiences that might temper him as a soul. He lives in his head, and I am unsure of the depth of anything he feels.
And then there was Serge, who is someone with a secret—I suppose that is everybody, really—but in his case a secret he wants to keep only from us. I know, he brought us together and saved us from many potentially ugly situations, but there was a moment when I was hanging up my coat when I first arrived at the house, and we made eye contact for not even a second. I could see that he was calculating something, and I knew we weren’t in our northern Galapagos simply to bring back the bees.
We tried to suss out if and how well he knew our former handlers—Sandra, Dr. Rick and Louise. His response was arrogant and dismissive: “Them? I suppose. Why on earth should I care?”
Diana whispered to me, “Okay, we get it, Buster. You run the show.”
As for our lodgings, even I, with almost no understanding of North American housing, could tell that our house was at least a half-century old, maybe older—it had phone jacks and an antenna and a garage for two cars. It was humble and musty, and the rooms felt like drab tissue boxes. I was told that Haida Gwaii’s economy had been free of booms and busts for the entire twentieth century; a chart showing its economic progress would be a flat line. So it wasn’t as if there was a better place to stay. And the rain, so cold! And the storms, so violent and so common!
The morning after I arrived, we all walked around the town, garnering suspicious stares from the Haida. Our task was to locate alcohol for Zack. He is a declarative fellow: “The dandelion wine here tastes like rat piss, there’s no cough syrup or muscle relaxants anywhere, so a-hunting we will go.”
It is always nice to have a minor goal to motivate a pleasant walk. We stopped by the one local store that remained open. It sold only packages of chewing gum and potato flakes.
Zack’s temper got the better of him. “Booze, dammit, I want booze!”
A Haida man came into the store. Zack said, “Hi. I’m Zack. I’m one of the bee-sting people. Where can I find some decent fucking booze around here?”
The man was tall and had the widest, flattest nose I’d ever seen. He said, “Booze is no problem.”
“Thank Christ. Where do I have to go?”
“Here—later today.”
“What is it?”
/>
“Blackberry wine.”
“Consider it sold. By the way, I saw a basketball court over the hill. Want to shoot some hoops?”
“Sure.”
So we sat on tumbledown bleachers to watch Zack and some new friends shoot hoops. I was shivering, Sam was running laps around the block, Julien was lying down with a coat over his head, and Diana was inspecting the local women’s teeth to see who needed a cleaning. They, in turn, wanted to know who was sleeping with whom, and they must have been very bored with the answer. In a Hollywood way, one would expect Zack and Sam to become a glamorous power couple, but that was not to happen.
The sun poked out from behind some clouds and we all stopped to bask for a moment, and then one of the women, toying with Diana’s Tourette’s, said, “So, then, where are our fucking bees?”
Perhaps one had to be there.
From nowhere a storm erupted, and we raced back to the house, soaked. The storm got worse, and then it got even worse. The power failed and out came the candles. We sat by the fire on a large braided rug, and at sunset the clouds cleared, shooting bolts of beer-coloured light at us from the west. I felt as if we were visiting the past, and yet it wasn’t a déjà vu.
Into the silence Serge said, “We have a mission here on this island.”
I asked, “What kind of mission?”
“An odd one.”
“How odd?”
“Our goal here is for the group of you to make up stories and tell them to each other.”
“What?”
“It is as simple as that.”