The Book of Stanley (14 page)

 

THIRTY

I
n Tony Roma's, where the breakfast buffet smelled overwhelmingly like a breakfast buffet, Tanya Gervais rested her head on her arms. She had stayed up all night, drawing up plans. All good religions, like all good entertainment products, created and fulfilled mass desires. What the people wanted were granite countertops in their kitchens.

So what would a religion of granite countertops look like? It would not be demanding. With work and family life and the rigours of a nightly television schedule, the people did not have time to attend church or some facsimile regularly. That said, real estate remained the number-one long-term investment an individual, or organization, could make. So the religion would need a holy place–preferably with shopping and daycare. Thoughtful interior design. Good lighting. Giant-screen televisions and–why not?–a wine bar. Followers could visit whenever they had time, pray, watch a hockey game, and pick up an organic cotton T-shirt.

A religion also needed a good story. If Stanley were the real thing, he would need something heroic in his past. On
the Internet, Tanya had discovered a career-by-career list of the most and least respected professions. Politicians and journalists were near the bottom. Teachers were near the top, along with firefighters. Florists, unfortunately, were not represented.

Then again, Christians had the Jesus fish. Maybe there was something she could do with a flower. Stanley Moss: the florist of men. No, the florist of people. No. The florist of humans. Watering, weeding, fertilizing, protecting from frosts. In Tony Roma's she gazed at her notes, and her flower sketches, and the fatigue was like a bomb waiting to go off behind her left eye.

“More coffee?”

The young waiter had a goggles tan. He carried a carafe and blinked in slow motion. The name tag on his chest said “
ANTON
.” Tanya nodded, “Please.” As the thin young man in the white shirt poured, Tanya asked if he was a Christian.

Anton stepped back from the booth. “Are you giving out pamphlets or something? There's no soliciting in the restaurant.”

“Just asking, Anton, that's all.”

“Can I get you anything else? Another soy milk?”

Tanya declined and considered the exchange, made another note. For Anton to become a believer, they would need to shatter his expectations. And it couldn't be something commonplace or easy, because Anton and his peers had grown up in the digital era; he would have been a toddler when
Jurassic Park
came out. It wouldn't be easy, but the risk was worth taking. The overhead, for a nascent religion, was so low. The product was abstract. Shipping costs were nil.

Her booth was nearest the lobby so she would see Stanley and the others. The first was Kal, who waved and hopped up
the stairs into the restaurant when he saw her. “I called your lawyer this morning. He's awesome.”

Tanya nodded. She didn't want to look away from the lobby for long, and worried suddenly that Stanley and his wife had slipped out of the hotel while she was staring at the table or questioning Anton.

“He called the insurance company already.”

“Do you know if Stanley was ever a firefighter or a teacher?”

“I just met him last night.”

Soon, Kal gave up on socializing and went to the buffet. When Stanley did appear in the lobby, a few minutes later, Kal was drenching his eggs and potatoes with ketchup and talking about the magnificence of the accordion. “I must have heard accordions before, right? But they weren't speaking to me like they do now. The accordion is the secret language of the human heart, don't you figure?”

Tanya ran toward the lobby and slammed into Anton. He dropped his carafe and briefly watched the coffee leak into the carpet. “Oh sweet,” he said, “sweet cherry fucken pie.”

Stanley's white hair was wet, parted on the side, and he wore a distinctly unfashionable blue suit–to match the grey suit he had worn the previous evening. His tie was thin and old, all wrong, and the knot was too tight. This was Tanya's special gift: instead of seeing this as flawed, she saw it as beautiful. Believers looking for someone uncorrupted, in these cynical times, were growing tired of vain and vigorously coiffed men, riding to their mega-churches in limousines and helicopters.

“I have an idea,” she said.

Stanley smiled. “Good morning.”

“Yes, sorry, hello. Did you sleep well?”

“I don't sleep.”

“Of course not. You're…what are you again?”

“I don't know, to be honest.”

“We'll work on that. Your brand.”

“My brand?”

“I'll need to see a miracle, Stan, and
tout de suite
. If we have something here, we have to get out ahead of it. Web presence, media coverage, press kits, viral marketing. Round two: products.”

“Frieda and I were talking this morning. I'm not sure if this is something I can do, Tanya. Alok's enthusiasm is Alok's enthusiasm. To be honest, I don't see how we can create a religion here when I don't believe in God. Never have.”

“Every problem is an opportunity, Stan. Let's take that, your doubt, and run with it.”

“Run where?”

“The people can relate to doubt. I bet, in our hearts, we're all a bit doubtful. All but the loons. If there is something
inside
that doubt, something resonant, we can package and distribute it.”

“Why would we do that?”

To make money. To become famous. To spin it off into books and films, get on
Oprah
. Was he really so naive? “To help people, of course. To, uh, save the land.”

The elevator door opened and Frieda stepped out, with a walking stick. She wore a sun hat and smiled neutrally. “Hi, Tanya. Ready, Stan?”

“Where are you going?”

“On a little hike.”

Tanya lied. “I love hikes.”

Stanley and Frieda had no choice. They invited her along.

 

THIRTY-ONE

W
alking up Tunnel Mountain with Maha, it occurred to Kal that he didn't know what a miracle was, really. The first thought that came to mind was of an extremely tall black man performing a slam dunk, as one of the all-sports channels called its nightly highlight reel “The Miracle Plays.” Catholic school had provided him with a few biblical examples: walking on water, making water into wine, bringing a dead man back to life, surviving a crucifixion. But these miracles didn't seem to fit the time, the place, or the weather, and Stanley wasn't much of a sports figure. When Kal was small, his mom had once taken him to the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium to see a man called “Raveen, the Impossiblist.” Raveen was supposed to be a miracle-worker. He was supposed to cure Kal's mom of her smoking habit and give her a new lease on life. There was a spinning disco ball, and manufactured fog, and loud music. Raveen seemed determined, if nothing else. The miracle lasted three days.

There were plenty of pitiable things in the world that a proper miracle-worker could fix. Starving babies in Africa and Ukrainian car dealers who waltz right up and steal a man's wife from him, to name but two. Kal didn't share these thoughts with Maha, who walked up the mountain with Raveen-like determination.

They passed clumps of fir trees and wildflowers, and the air smelled faintly of smoke. Kal wanted to comment on
the trees and flowers, or on the distant forest fires of northern British Columbia, or the accordion, but he was mindful of appearing frivolous before this serious girl.

Stanley and Frieda walked in front, and Kal noticed that Maha wanted to keep her distance. When Frieda stopped to inspect a flower or point out a bird, Maha stopped too, and turned to gaze upon the town. Alok and Tanya were below them on the trail.

They were halfway up the little mountain overlooking Banff before Kal thought of something to say. It concerned him that he was almost out of breath, as he hadn't done a lick of exercise since stepping off the team bus in Saskatchewan. “Do you know what an impossiblist is?”

“No.” Maha didn't slow down or stop.

“Tanya was saying Stanley's going to perform a miracle, so I figured–”

“A magician?”

“What?”

Now Maha did stop. “An impossiblist. It sounds like a fancy name for a magician.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“What about it?”

Kal wished he hadn't worked so hard. Silence was much more relaxing. Maha had her big brown eyes fixed on him, and swiped her hair to reveal the full shine of her forehead in the haze. “I was just thinking that maybe that's what Stanley is.”

“He isn't.” Maha started walking again.

It pleased Kal that she wasn't staring at him in that accusing manner any more. His lower back had broken out in an instant sweat, before that stare. She was a powerful girl, inside and out. “Okay.”

“You're Christian, right? What if I said Jesus was a magician?”

Kal had to give her that. It didn't seem right at all. But he did have questions about Jesus, now that Maha had brought him up. “Why did he spend all that miracle-working power on turning water into wine, anyway, when he might have–I don't know–got rid of deserts? So babies wouldn't starve in Africa, for instance. The miracles of Jesus, when you sit right back and think about them, are pretty damn selfish. If you were his friend or in his town or whatever, it was a pretty sweet deal. If you lived in a different desert, though: look out, Charlie.”

“Look out, Charlie,” said Maha, as though hearing it had disappointed her.

The only sounds on the path up Tunnel Mountain were their footsteps on the small pebbles and the odd breeze moving through the boughs and branches. Now and then, a couple passed, going down, and said “Hello,” with their various accents: Japanese, German, French. Up ahead, Stanley and Frieda stopped. They appeared to be arguing, very quietly. Maha stopped, and turned, and together they looked at the town some more. Alok was way down, bent over.

“This is so weird,” said Kal.

Maha didn't concur.

“Do you sometimes step out of yourself and see yourself doing something weird and think, ‘I can't believe I am where I am.'? I did that a lot, playing hockey. I'd be on the blue line and the puck'd be in our end, in Syracuse or Rochester, and I'd think:
I am playing hockey in Syracuse.
Or Rochester or whatever. I'm definitely having one of those moments right now, up here on this mountain with you.”

It appeared Maha wasn't listening. She took a deep breath and blew it out.

“Maybe later on we could head down to the hot tub again.”

“I don't think so, Kal.”

“You got a boyfriend back home, don't you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Someone you like? Or love?”

“I have a fiancé in Toronto.”

It was like someone had sneaked out from behind a juniper bush and kicked Kal in the face. He half expected his nose to start bleeding. Stanley and Frieda continued along and so did Kal and Maha, up the switchback. Kal had a great idea for a miracle, if Stanley was fixing to dole them out and the babies of Africa were already taken care of. He could go ahead and give Maha's fiancé a nice bit of rectal cancer. Then, a bouquet of shame bloomed in Kal and his stomach ached fiercely.

“Well, congratulations to you. I bet he's real handsome and rich and smart. Lucky guy. Your family likes him, probably. That's good. Why rock the boat, right?” They walked past a thorny bush and Kal grabbed a handful of it. “Great news.”

 

THIRTY-TWO

A
t the summit of Tunnel Mountain, everyone but Alok looked out over the deep valley and commented on the view.

On the slope of the mountain not far from his wife and new friends–were they friends?–three mule deer stood together in sweet silence.

Stanley watched them for several minutes, their smooth and careful movements. It was easy to see why deer inspired longing in humans, for a purity lost to avarice. Knowing what he knew, or half knew, since the powers had come to him, Stanley saw this longing as yet another expression of weakness. All that was pure was contained in the vain hope for purity.

All morning, Stanley had been wondering if it was ethically sound to deprive the world of special powers, if one had acquired them. Sometime in the late 1970s, he supposed, Stanley had stopped believing in good and evil. It wasn't easy to catch up. Where should special powers be directed? What
was
good?

Like the hunt for purity, goodness was a mirage. So far, the special powers had moved Stanley to empathy and pity, to a fuller understanding of weakness, but not much else. Every time Maha called him “Lord,” he flinched. He continued to distrust the conceits of religion, of a comprehensive historical and spiritual world-view. At the same time, he didn't feel capable of driving home with Frieda later that afternoon.

Alok lay on some moss, breathing heavily and moaning about the ugliness of morning hikes. His skin, in the flat light of an overcast day, had a somewhat green quality about it.

“Never again before breakfast,” said Alok. “Never again!”

Two women with a distinctly European mien about them took pictures of the deer and started back down the mountain. Stanley helped Alok to his feet. “I think Frieda has some water.”

“I don't need water. I need to be in town, with eggs, bacon, potatoes, coffee, and a small glass of Grand Marnier, and you know it.”

Stanley led Alok to the far end of the summit, where the others looked down at the Bow River half a kilometre below. Kal was telling them about a plaque he had read; it turned out there was no tunnel through Tunnel Mountain.

“Someone wanted to build a tunnel, or something, but everybody else figured it was a bonehead idea.”

The wind came up out of the valley in cool gusts and whipped their hair about. Frieda looked away from the valley and into Stanley's eyes. Since arriving in Banff she had been uncharacteristically quiet and docile. Her manner now was inscrutable, but Stanley knew what Frieda wanted. She wanted, even more than before, to walk down this mountain immediately, load the Oldsmobile with their luggage, and drive home, preferably by way of the Columbia glacier.

The light, even with the cloud cover, was bright up on the mountain. Frieda squinted and the beautiful lines above her cheekbones, lines she had inherited from her mother and her mother's mother, were long and deep. It occurred to him that the relevant fact of being God in a godless universe, thanks to a chemical reaction in his backyard, was simply this: Frieda would die and he would live.

“Well,” he said.

Frieda hugged herself. It was not a warm day and she wore only a zip-up sweater over her blouse. Alok spoke into the wind now, about the majesty of the view. The sacredness of this place, the good omen of deer, the significance of mountains in nascent religions. “Someday,” Alok said, “the people will look at Tunnel Mountain and they will see much
more than a mountain named after a stupid idea. The plaques will say, ‘Hark!'”

Alok continued but Stanley stopped paying attention at “Hark!” He took a few steps back from the ledge and Frieda followed. “What do you think they want from you?” she said, just loud enough to be heard over the wind.

“They want answers.”

“Do you have answers, Stanley?”

“Not yet.”

Frieda sighed. In these last days, she had become a world-class sigher. Not long ago, she had concentrated all of her powers on making sure her husband got through each day with a morsel of hope. She had been an unpaid nurse, psychologist, and cheerleader. Now she merely followed him, and sighed. Frieda did not even argue any more. Of all the answers Stanley hoped to receive–from where? on high?–he awaited a strategy for Frieda with the most impatience.

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Stan.” She stepped in close, took his hands. “Let's get out of here.”

Another gust came out of the valley, this one so strong that Frieda stumbled. She let go of Stanley's hands and looked up, perhaps for rain. Stanley wanted to tell her what he was about to do, but he didn't know how. “Don't worry,” he said.

“How can I not worry?” Frieda spoke without looking at him, and laughed. “You and I, that's what we do. We worry.”

“We can stop now.”

“Stan, there's more reason than ever to worry. Unless, of course, you're keeping something from me.”

Stanley took his wife's hands and kissed her. He took three steps toward the edge of the mountain. And he jumped.