The Book of Stanley (17 page)

 

THIRTY-EIGHT

O
n his way out of the Rose & Crown, a number of the drunks thanked Kal for his piano playing. A woman his age, with glassy eyes and sticky-looking blond dreadlocks, grasped his hands and whispered, her face so close he could feel the heat and moisture of her vodka-cooler breath on his cheek, “I'm staying at Two Jack Lake, in a red tent. I got a bottle of white wine and a whole box of soda crackers. Meet me there in twenty minutes. That ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini' was hot.”

Tanya pulled him away from the woman and down the sidewalk. At this elevation, the warm air departed with the sunlight. Kal wished he had brought a jacket. Tanya shook her head and scrunched her eyebrows, as though she were in the middle of an argument. “This isn't a democratic religion, Kal,” Tanya said suddenly. “All we need is a strong spiritual leader, with one or two trusted advisors and a heavy. You can be the heavy.”

“I don't want to be the heavy.”

She ignored him. “We'll book a venue at the Banff Centre, introduce Stanley to the media, write ourselves a gospel.”

“Alok can be the heavy, how about. I mean, look at him.”

“Stop it, Kal.” At the intersection, they waited for the light to change. Tanya stuck her index finger into his ribs. “This thing's bigger than you and your petty desires. You're either with us or you're against us.”

Coaches always found pleasure in being loud and miserable. They were most themselves when, like Tanya, they were on the verge of losing their voices. When someone in particular messed up, got a penalty at the worst possible time or didn't get back on defence, Kal always noticed a flash of joy in the eyes of his coaches before they turned monstrous and started cussing. If Tanya weren't a television executive, he figured she would make a perfect hockey coach.

Stanley and Alok walked ahead. They crossed the street and entered the Chalet Du Bois. Just as they did, Tanya pushed Kal up against a storefront. She spoke softly, and so close that he could feel her breath on his neck. “Listen to me. I need an ally here.”

“Right.”

“This isn't playtime. This is the real thing. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Kal didn't have the faintest clue what Tanya was saying, and she was making him very nervous. “Yes.”

“So if it comes down to it?”

He nodded.

“Are you still mooning about Maha? Come on, man. Focus.”

Kal was focused, primarily, on the fact that he knew how to play the piano and, surely, the accordion. His instincts had been exactly right about music, about its ability to change him. Though he worried about losing Maha to her fiancé, the world seemed less chaotic now that
Kal could play the “Nocturne in C Minor.” “I'm gonna do whatever's best for Stanley.”

“Good.” Tanya released him. “Good. My point is, sometimes a person doesn't know what's best for him. Sometimes he needs an advisor, and a heavy, to show him.”

Also like coaches, Tanya lacked certain listening talents.

Upstairs, Kal passed Maha's room slowly. There were murmurings inside, and he wanted to stop and listen, but Tanya shoved him along. Alok met them at his door, where they had agreed to meet for a nightcap and brainstorming session.

Inside the room, Tanya hunted around. “Where's Stanley?”

“He's with Frieda.”

Kal put his ear up to the wall, so he might hear Maha and Gamal.

“She's a problem, Alok. A big problem.”

The big man opened the mini-bar, which at this point didn't offer much more than cans of pop and tiny bottles of hard liquor. “An unsolvable problem.”

Tanya sat on one bed and Alok sat on the other. Kal pretended to be engaged in their conversation about possible names for the religion, but he remained open to sounds from the adjacent room.

“Mossery,” said Alok.

“The Improvement,” said Tanya. “No, too vague and brainy. Awesomism!”

“Church of the Last Chance.”

“That sounds scary. I don't like it.”

“Goodology?”

“I think that's taken. In university I dated a philosophy major.” Tanya sipped from a tiny bottle of gin. “You don't like Awesomism?”

“It'll sound stupid when we're sober.” Alok sloshed the Grand Marnier around in his glass.

“I'm not drunk.”

“Of course not.”

“Are you saying I'm a drunk?”

Kal gave up on listening through the wall. “I think The Stan is still the best.”

It was noticeably quiet for a moment, as Tanya and Alok drank and thought. Both seemed ready to speak up when there was a slam in the hallway, and shouting. Maha said, “Go! Just go!”

In his haste, Kal forgot the hotel room door opened to the inside. He grasped the handle and slammed into the heavy door. It took a moment to compose himself and exit the room. Gamal and Maha stood together in the hallway like witnesses to a gas station explosion. There were tears in her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Kal said.

She nodded.

“You're pretty satisfied, I guess.” Gamal's face was red. “Drafting her into your sex cult.”

“It's
not
a sex cult, Gamal,” said Maha.

“No one's having sex at all,” Kal said, hopefully.

Alok and Tanya walked out into the hallway, their drinks in hand. “Everything all right, sweetie?” said Alok.

“There you go.” Gamal looked as if he might spit on the floor. “
Sweetie.
”

Maha hurried inside her room and slammed the door, leaving the others to stand and marinate in discomfort. Kal couldn't hide his satisfaction at seeing them angry at one another. “We're gonna take real good care of Maha.”

“Don't talk to me, meathead.”

Maha came out of her room with Gamal's small black bag and shoes. Satisfaction turned to overwhelming joy. Kal wanted to sing but he remained calm. For some time, Gamal stared at Maha. Then he turned to the others, and his gaze lingered on Kal.

“There's all kinds of fish in the sea!” Kal said.

In hockey, you always know when a fight's coming. It commences with yapping and shoving, some stick work, and by the time the gloves hit the ice there's a feeling of inevitability about the whole thing. That's why Kal was so shocked when Gamal slapped Maha across the ear and said, “
Sharmouta
.”

Maha crumpled against the thin wall with both hands up, looking more in shock than in pain.

“It's on, fucko,” Kal said, and took a swing at Gamal.

“No!” Maha said.

Gamal ducked the punch and backed away with a bounce. Kal stepped over the bag and shoes, and prepared to pound the smaller man.

No one in the
AHL
fought like Gamal. Before Kal had a chance to grab him, Gamal had punched him in the face several times, elbowed him about the cheek and neck, kicked him in the groin, and kneed his right eye in a jumping manoeuvre. All to a series of hisses and high-pitched whoops.

“Stop hurting him.” Maha sobbed.

Kal knew he should retreat, but he hoped Gamal had only scored a few lucky blows. He was woozy and nauseous, but he didn't want Maha to think he was feeble. Again, Kal moved in to attack. He wasn't sure how it happened, but after receiving several more blows, he bear-hugged Gamal. Since his options were limited, he was reduced to biting
the man's shoulder. Gamal put his fingers in Kal's eyes.

“Let me go,” said Gamal.

Kal had no choice. He did, and slowly lowered himself to the floor. First, he sat down. Then, nearly overcome by sleepiness, he lay on the rough carpet. Through his sore, watery eyes he watched Gamal gather his things and walk away without another word.

“I don't think I've ever seen anyone take a beating like that,” said Alok. “Even in the movies.”

Maha crouched over Kal. “Are you okay?”

“It's mostly my pride.”

“It's mostly your face,” said Tanya.

Kal was on his feet no more than thirty seconds before he excused himself to throw up in Maha's garbage can. Then, with her, and the smell of her, in a state of something like bliss, he began his second bloody journey to the Mineral Springs Hospital.

 

THIRTY-NINE

T
he young doctor allowed Maha to sit in the examination room while she stitched Kal's many wounds. His face had already swollen to almost twice its natural size. The fork stab had reopened and there were two cuts on his opposite cheek, below his eye. His lips were puffy and cracked and his cauterized nose was bulbous and purple. His shirt was
splattered with so much blood it looked as though he had eaten a live goat for dinner.

As she worked, the doctor refused to speak with Kal. Male hormones, she contended, were a scourge upon the planet. Proof that God was, at best, a buffoon. “You know how many faces I sew up every night?”

Maha did not want to encourage the doctor, who wore a ring in her left eyebrow.

“How many?” said Kal, the left side of his mouth frozen with anaesthetic.

The doctor ignored him. “Is he your boyfriend?”

“No.”

Kal slouched.

“I told my fiancé I didn't see a future for us, and he mistreated me. Kal intervened.”

“Oh, big hero.”

Throughout the treatment, the doctor condemned the male of the species. As she did, Maha found herself thinking more fondly of Kal. There was a word that suited him, one she had never actually said aloud:
guileless
. The doctor was wrong about Kal, who seemed stripped of excessive self-regard and a capacity for cruelty. Not that Maha was in a mood to argue with the woman.

Maha led a newly stitched Kal out of the hospital. On the way back to the hotel, they kept to the dark and tranquil residential streets off Banff Avenue. The spruce trees in front of large homes and small, cedar hotels were decorated with pale-yellow Christmas lights. Locals in out-of-season ski jackets walked big dogs that hurried over to every stranger they saw, panting happily, wagging their tails.

Kal walked gingerly and breathed through his mouth. He
expanded on his new feelings for poetry and music, and his thoughts about mountains. “Their bigness points out your smallness, and keeps you honest,” he said, his voice resembling a movie monster's after a couple of sleeping pills.

Was it Banff or was it the Lord? Maha couldn't say, but she agreed that her natural defences–the layers of protective falseness that made up what others saw as her personality–were on low. In Montreal, with friends and her parents, she had refused to discuss the night in January when she and Ardeen had acquired a bottle of vodka, Sprite, and green apple syrup. So when Kal asked her why she had been keen to leave home for Banff, she surprised herself by telling the truth. “At a party, I got drunk and had sex with a guy from Académie de Roberval while his friends watched.”

Kal stopped. They were in front of a brick house with a white “Beware of Dog” sign attached to its low chain-link fence. “No, you didn't.”

“I did.” Maha examined the sign, which had yellowed and faded in the sun. She wondered if the dog were now dead, as there didn't seem to be much evidence of digging in the yard, and no stuffed animals or bones or ropes. She fought an urge to change the subject, toward the nature of dog ownership. “I yelled out ‘Make me real' a bunch of times.”

“Make me real?”

“And the Lord arrived. Stanley.”

“You had sex with The Stan. That's…whoa.”

Even in her jacket, Maha was chilly. So she began walking again. “I didn't have sex with the Lord. While the guy was on top of me, I
saw
the Lord but I didn't
see him
. I felt he was there, and knew exactly who he was.”

“People found out?”

“An entire generation of teenagers on the island of Montreal found out, along with my teachers and eventually my mom and dad.”

“Shit.”

“They were horrified. Who wouldn't be, I guess. Things went badly with us and the next thing I knew, they were setting me up with Gamal.”

“No wonder you left.”

“But I wasn't just running away from something, coming here. I was running
to
something.”

Maha and Kal arrived at the front doors of the Chalet Du Bois. It was late and she was tired. A hot bath was in order, along with some reading. But since he had taken a terrible beating for her, she felt obliged to invite Kal in for a hot chocolate. If he could drink through his messed-up mouth. Before she could offer, Kal extended his hand, awkwardly, for a shake. “It was real pleasant of you to come to the hospital with me.”

“Of course.”

“Where did Gamal learn to fight?”

“Thailand. I tried to warn you.”

Kal continued to shake Maha's hand. His grip was too tight and his hand was moist. There was a lopsided aspect to his face, on account of the swelling, so she couldn't tell if he was making eye contact with her or looking at the Chalet Du Bois logo on the door. “Your hand is soft.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Maha gently pulled her hand back, and Kal released it. She looked down at her hand, to avoid his stare. “You're okay getting home?”

“For sure, yeah. I doubt there's any more Thai boxers about.”

He didn't turn around, or even look away.

“Well,” Maha said, buoyantly.

“Well. Yeah.”

“Good night, Kal.”

“Absolutely. Back at you.”

Maha smiled one last time, opened the heavy door, and walked into the Chalet Du Bois. At the stairs, she glanced back and saw Kal through the frosted window, waving.

 

FORTY

S
tanley and Frieda walked alongside the rushing and roiling Bow River, its power constant and–Stanley thought–random. It seemed he was now obliged to believe in a cosmic force that controlled and sustained rivers, mountains, snowmelt, clouds, and the human heart. This is what he kept secret from his new friends who called themselves his disciples: belief didn't lead to comfort. It only inspired more questions about the possibility of belief.

They passed a tour group from Italy. As they did, the round-faced woman leading the tour smiled and said hello. The Italians repeated it after her, like children trying a new word: “Hello!”

Each time Stanley attempted to hold his wife's hand she pulled it away. They had been speaking in bursts, unable to avoid arguments. It was simple, though out of love for one another they had attempted to make it complicated.
Frieda insisted they go home and Stanley insisted they stay.

“How could a god or prophet make them any happier?” Frieda pointed back at the Italians with her thumb.

Another question without an answer. “I'm not sure they're happy. Affluent, sure, but happy is something else.”

Frieda placed her hands in the pocket of her thin, baby-blue windbreaker. “Happiness didn't exist before we could buy it.”

A large hawk hovered over the river and the Italians, behind them, took photographs and called out.

“I disagree.”

“Because you're a preacher now.”

“I think the religious or spiritual aspect of humanity has been crushed by the desire to buy and sell, to acquire wealth and power. What I want to do, if I can do anything, is separate them.”

Frieda shook her head. They were not far from the bridge that would lead them back to the hotel. Stanley was already due at the Banff Centre, to help prepare for his public debut as a man of miracles.

“When did religion, as we know it, begin?”

Stanley didn't know the answer to this question, so he guessed. “Old Testament time.”

“All right. When did the market economy, as we know it, begin?”

He was trapped, as usual. “Old Testament time?”

“In Israel and India and China, it was a time of war and suffering
and
capitalism.”

Stanley knew where Frieda was heading with this, so he pulled one of her hands out of her jacket and led her up the riverbank to the bridge deck. “I'm already late.”

“That's all this is, you know that. It's a sell job.” The
wind picked up as they crossed the Bow River Bridge, adorned with the heads of imagined aboriginals. “Religion and happiness are both products, like new cars.”

At the Chalet Du Bois, Stanley opened the door for Frieda and they stood in the lobby together. He couldn't remember a more uncomfortable moment with his wife since their early dates. They stared at one another, and at the faux-rustic furniture. He was, at once, reluctant and enthusiastic about the afternoon's planned activity.

“This won't take long, darling. It's for lighting cues.”

Frieda nodded, dispassionately.

“Hour or two at the most.”

Another nod. “Whatever you feel you have to do.”

Stanley wanted to shake this attitude out of her. There was, he was certain, absolutely nothing he could say to bring his wife to his way of thinking. The more he tried to discover a solution to this fundamental problem, the more he desired an escape from it.

Stanley was still thinking about Frieda twenty minutes later as he stood on the empty stage of the Eric Harvie Theatre, waiting for the lighting technician to finish his cues. Frieda's doubt was not regular doubt. Historically, it had more weight and nuance than his own, Roquefort to his cheddar, provoking innumerable crises of confidence. But the rental fees had been paid and Tanya was finished with the handbills and posters. He knew what had changed in him and his wife did not. Despite the abstract quality of his ultimate goal, for the first time in his life Stanley was thoroughly motivated. It didn't really matter, now, if he was ready. Readiness was a question for his audience.

In the aisle, Tanya yelled at the man in the booth as various colours and angles of lights flashed on Stanley's face.

“No,” she said, with a stomp of her foot. “That's too much. Go soft, muted, subtle.”

“I like the bright orange,” said Alok. “It makes you look damn imperial, Stan.”

Tanya growled.

There were more than nine hundred seats in the theatre, and all of them were empty. When the lights flashed on Stanley's face, he could not see out but he could certainly hear, and feel, Tanya and Alok, the absence of Frieda. That is, until the lights went down for ten seconds and Stanley spotted the pale girl from the Volkswagen and Far East Square. She sat next to an older woman in the back row.

He hopped off the stage and started up the aisle toward them.

“Get back up there,” said Tanya. “We only have another fifteen minutes with the tech.”

By the time Stanley reached Alok at the middle of the seating area, the child and woman were gone. “Did you see two people sitting back here?”

Alok shook his head. “Do you need a break, pal?”

“Bush league!” said Tanya.

The woman and child weren't in the lobby either, so Stanley rushed out of the theatre and down the sloping St. Julien Road until he reached Grizzly Street and the cemetery. He spotted them sitting on a bench, near some old grave-markers and a vase of dried-up flowers.

Worried the little girl might disappear again, Stanley approached without taking his eyes off her. There wasn't room to join them on the bench so he sat on the ground, at the edge of the path that ran before them. The woman wore a black dress and a gold-coloured cardigan. Her clothing didn't seem old-fashioned but her posture did, and so did
the straw sun hat she wore over her light-brown hair. The woman avoided eye contact haughtily, as though Stanley had insulted her.

The girl spoke first. “Call me Darlene,” she said. The girl, whose luminous skin was so beautiful it seemed to be made of tinted glass, was dressed the way children dressed when Stanley was young–like miniature adults. She wore a dress with a long coat that appeared to be cashmere.

“Pleased to meet you. I'm Stanley Moss.”

“My name is Mary Schäffer,” said the woman, who did not look at or even acknowledge the presence of the girl beside her. Stanley recalled the woman's name but couldn't remember why. She offered her hand, inside a tight black glove. “I am here to find out who you are.”

“Stanley Moss. I'm from Edmonton.”

“Are you a demon? Abbadon or Dagwanoenyent or Gaap?”

The girl laughed. She formed her right hand into a gun and pretended to shoot herself.

“I don't think I'm a demon.”

“Well, demon or not, this is highly irregular. We have decided you must explain yourself immediately or risk expulsion.”

“Expulsion from Banff?”

“Don't sass me. Don't you sass me.”

The girl rolled her eyes.

“I speak for my entire community,” said Mary Schäffer. “We've been watching you and we demand that you clarify your presence here.”

Stanley smiled, as the girl seemed to indicate this was a joke. He looked around quickly for cameras. “You represent Banff, somehow. The town council?”

Mary Schäffer stood up off the bench, stepped around Stanley, and began walking down the worn path that zigzagged through the cemetery. Stanley got up to follow and then, with an elegant slide off the bench, so did Darlene. “I've been here in this capacity for almost seventy years but the community has been in place for much, much longer. Thousands of years.”

“What community?”

“She's not a good listener,” said Darlene.

“And you are the most potent irregularity we have come across.” Mary Schäffer sniffed at some flowers in an old wooden barrel. “Now, who sent you?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you here to rule us?”

“Rule who?”

Mary Schäffer sighed. “Do you have a list of demands? Have you come from Mictlan? Feng Du? Yomi? Rangi Tuarea?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“You're hostile.”

Stanley clapped his hands together. “I'm not hostile. I don't even know what I'm doing here. I was in Edmonton, dying, and this blue light and loud rumble came through me, from the sky, and…” It was clear Mary Schäffer was not listening. There were unripe berries on a small bush in the graveyard and she had busied herself in pulling them off and stuffing them in a breast pocket of her black dress. “Hello?” he said.

“Are you here to unseat me? To become mayor?”

“Mayor of Banff?”

“Fine, then. Perhaps I'll have you killed.”

Stanley looked around. The child was now sitting up on a handsome plinth with its inscription worn off. He was having trouble understanding this conversation. “I haven't come here to take your job. And if you'll let me explain myself, I will. I have come here–”

“My patience has run out.”

“Before you threaten me with further violence, can you tell me who you are? Maybe you can help me understand what's happened. I was on my deck one morning. I was quite shamed, actually.”

“You take me for a fool, don't you?”

“No. No. Ms. Schäffer, is there someone else you're talking to? I really don't understand you at all.”

Her front pocket was now full of berries. Stanley should have known the names of the bush, and the berries, but they were lost to him. This absence in his memory, and the frustration of speaking to this obviously crazy woman, was demoralizing. Mary Schäffer began walking away, and disappeared into a white spruce. Her child consort, Darlene, had not followed, but she was gone too.

Stanley sat on the bench in the Old Banff Cemetery and attempted, briefly, to figure out what had just happened. His black shoes were scuffed. A demon, surely, would have more impressive footwear.