Echolocation Read online

  In the tent that night, he says, We’re part of a larger experiment. We could have everything. Don’t ruin it. She recalls now his stories of previous girlfriends, their perfidy, their inexplicable betrayals and sudden abandonments. She hears her grandmother saying, You made your bed; now you have to lie on it.

  He doesn’t go to the cliffs that day, but crouches by the fire. He says he’s thinking; he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Later, he talks again about the cougar that menaces their camp. He says, If you could see its trails at dawn, they’d glow, like tail lights in time-lapse photographs. He says, If you could read its dark ammoniac trails, you could see that the cougar is stalking our dreams. He says he wishes they had a fence, but he will protect her. And she says she knows he will.

  Is there even a cougar?

  She wakes to find that he has tied the bear bells to the outside of the tent zipper. She sees that he is going to catch naps while she’s asleep, and remain alert when she’s awake. She teaches herself to hold perfectly still in the tent when she is awake, and to sleep for a few minutes only: to swim to the bottom of sleep, just till dreams begin, and come right back up for air.

  She wakes to find that he has smashed their remaining cans of food with rocks, has opened all of the packets and plastic bags and Tupperware and poured all of their contents on the ground, ground them into the thin coniferous-forest soil.

  How many days before they will be picked up? She can’t remember. She gets back into her sleeping bag, closes her eyes. The smell of her unwashed body and clothes is somehow comforting. She hugs her knees to her chest. She is sinking back into the ground, a pod, a pupa, something furred and curled on itself, earthing itself for the winter.

  But then at dawn she crawls out of the tent to go into the woods and pee, and though the bear bells jingle, she sees that he is asleep on the ground outside the tent, and even when she calls his name and prods him with a stick, he doesn’t wake up.

  She knows what to do, now. Her brain tells her in a series of clear images.

  THE HELICOPTER ARRIVES AT DAWN, on a Wednesday. She does not know that it is a Wednesday. She has kept the fire going, even though she could only find wet wood, and the helicopter comes straight from the sea to the clearing and sets down, the wind from the propellers blowing the fire out and battering the tent, making it fling itself sideways and strain against its pegs and cords as if it contained a wild beast.

  Even when the helicopter blades have stopped spinning she does not rise from where she has been crouching, by the fire, almost in the ashes; where she has been holding the radio against her for several hours, pressed against her chest. Two people get out of the helicopter: the pilot and her husband’s supervisor. She points and stays in her crouch while they open the tent, while they enter the tent where she has put him to keep him out of the rain. She waits for them to see him as she has left him, as she has had to leave him, in his fouled cocoon of duct tape and sleeping bag and more duct tape. She waits for their cries of reproach, of anger at her cruelty. She braces herself so that she will not shake. She has not eaten for three days, and she is soaked with rain, and it is hard not to shake.

  He has said he will tell them it was all her: her madness, her burning of the clothes, her grinding of the food supplies into the ground. He has said that they will believe him. Her hair is snarled and there is dirt on her face. She doesn’t know if they will believe him.

  But she does not care much. There will be blankets and hot food, soon, but even that does not matter much. Something new and foreign, but at the same time, utterly hers, has taken possession of her, has entered her bloodstream, permeated the membranes of her cells. She tenses and relaxes her joints, secretly: her shoulders, her knees, her jaws. She feels their quick vital response. She feels the pure clear force in her own sinews. She feels her nails growing, her teeth shining white inside her head. She sees in a kind of vision of herself, the inside of her own body: that she is made of sinew and thick red muscle and living, glistening bone.

  She feels a sudden fierce joy pulse through her. What is it?

  They are coming out of the tent, now, the two men. They are half-carrying, half-dragging something. She stands up to meet them. She is not afraid.

  THAT ERSATZ THING

  IN ITS PRESENT INCARNATION the restaurant is pretending to be Cuban, and framed black-and-white photographs of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara line the long galley walls: They look somehow as if they’ve been torn from old copies of Life magazine. There are cigar-ad posters, too. One reads, with odd formality, Accept No Substitutes. Mirrors with ornate gilded frames. Underneath, the walls have been painted a deep oxblood, and below that is a layer of tarnished gold. Below that, white. You can see all the layers where the walls have been scarred by scratched initials and graffiti, all the way along the wooden booths. I wonder about the graffiti: Was it there before? I don’t remember it. It occurs to me that the paint might have been scratched intentionally, for effect. Faded grandeur, that’s the phrase.

  The menu seems similar to what it was last time we were here, ten years ago, except that there was fruit in everything. I remember Patrick deconstructing the selections. Ordering the spiced-peach blackened chicken salad, and telling the server to hold the peaches.

  “But it’s a peach salad,” she had said. “You want peach salad, but no peaches?”

  “That’s right,” Patrick had said, smiling at the server with exactly the same degree of attention, the same warmth of smile (all white teeth and crinkly eyes) that he offers me.

  The fruit has gone from the menu. It must have been a fad. Now it’s seafood, beans, guacamole. Pulled and jerked meat. Will it be too ordinary for Patrick? But he’s smiling over the menu.

  Seeing Patrick after a hiatus, I’m always dazed, like when you walk from a dim room into sunlight. There’s somehow too much of him, too much intensity. I look forward so much to seeing him, and then I have to look away. I have conversations with him in my head for months or years, and then I am unable to speak.

  I wait to see what Patrick will order, before I decide. There’s an art to ordering sympathetically. You have to order something complementary: not the same, but not in an entirely different universe. When there’s a big menu, I want to have a kind of tree diagram in my mind. If a, then b.

  He says, “There’s so much. So much meat.”

  “Beans, then,” I say.

  “But I haven’t had a lot of meat lately.”

  He will decide on the mussels or the pulled pork taco.

  “Do you think the mussels?” he asks, irradiating me with his crinkled eyes, his teeth.

  Patrick looks back at the menu, the laminated trifold leaflet, and I finally look at him properly. Seeing Patrick after a hiatus, I think, there are always a few seconds when his face seems altered, strange. In those few seconds, I can feel detached, separate. It’s just a face. But then there’s that moment of intense recognition, of realization that all the faces I’ve seen in the interim have been inferior copies of this ideal model. Then I do not know if I could describe him objectively, if I were asked.

  The server comes, and Patrick orders the pulled pork, and I’ll have the coconut chicken, and the server flirts with Patrick and asks for his autograph, and I wait, and Patrick asks if I’ll have sangria, and I say yes and smile, and wait. The gallery is lit by a row of large-bladed ceiling fans, each with a light fixture in the shape of a cluster of fluted glass bells. The fans are the kind of thing you associate with the Habitat for Humanity warehouse, or your grandparents’ dining room in the cheaper suburbs. Here, though, they seem glamorous, authentic. They say Plantation, not Abbotsford. It occurs to me that in their original context, the fans with their glass bells are meant to mimic a tropical flower, and that they are not kitschy at all, but romantic, sensual. I suddenly see that the faux-wood of the blades is meant to be bamboo, and that the flowers would be deep-coloured, thickly-scented blooms that would hang heavy and lush and cool on night patios. The fans would stir the war
m, dense, tropical air. In a room in which tendrils crept over the windowsills during the night, in which heavily-scented air lapped slowly, like a drawn bath, around you, the little glass bells would not be ersatz, but organic.

  Under the warm lights the server is flushed, a rising of blood in her downy transparent skin. I see the name on her tag is Saffron. She’s young enough for it to be her real name.

  I feel flushed too, the heat in my face and neck, along my collarbones.

  I wait for Patrick and the server to conclude their transaction, and two things occur to me. The first is that I am too tired to go through this again – the disappearance and reappearance, the sudden excitement, the disappointment, the internal rages of jealousy, the clamping down on my own yearning.

  The second thing that occurs to me is that I must find a new way of being, with Patrick, now that we apparently are going to pick up our relationship again. I have no more energy for irony, for self-abasement. I see that I have a choice, that I can either disappear, cease to be part of Patrick’s set décor, or find a new way, which is true and yet will not destroy the delicate equilibrium.

  “I like this place,” Patrick says, when the server has taken her too-aware self off. He always says that. He never remembers that he’s been here before.

  “So, you’re back in town,” I say, and feel my shoulders hunch. That was lame.

  Twenty years ago, Patrick and I sat in a chilly wind on the sea wall in False Creek. He was downcast, having broken up with yet another beautiful, insanely self-absorbed actor, and I, as usual, was applying first aid. And then I made my big mistake. I knew it was a mistake, that by speaking I would lose the pleasures of our friendship, that what I was about to do would be seen only as a declaration of war, but I was driven by a kind of despair, a desperation to have something of Patrick beyond the plays that I helped him build.

  “There’s always me, Patrick,” I said.

  His answer was so quick and appropriate that it sounded rehearsed. “That’s very flattering, Chris,” he said. “But you know, I just can’t see my way to it.” He behaved so beautifully that I can’t even remember which of us stopped calling first.

  So, you see, I’ve learned my lesson. But how can I talk to Patrick, if I am to abandon my facetious, flippant ways, and yet not admit, in every sentence, my futile love?

  There’s a channel-changing pause, and then Patrick says, “My series bombed.”

  “I know,” I respond. I admitted a long time ago to my possibly obsessive collecting of Patrick’s press clippings. Patrick gives his trademark self-deprecating grimace: corners of the mouth pulled down, eyes widened. It’s harder than it looks. When I try that expression, it turns out like a sad clown’s.

  “American TV,” I say. “All people want is mindless entertainment.”

  It’s a conversation we’ve had before. I’m good at this role, laying down my cloak. I’m good at this, being one of the invisible people who hold up the expressive and the famous. Good at being a channel, humble, effaced.

  But Patrick frowns, a real frown, creases marring his perfect forehead, his upper lip pulling back and thinning. I notice now that his skin has thickened, that the flesh of his cheeks has migrated, almost imperceptibly, from his cheekbones towards his jaw.

  “Did you see it?” he asks.

  I did. I watched the series, only because Patrick was in it. He’d played a blue-collar single-dad cop, one who bucked the rules, messed up, skated close to trouble, but always went with his gut, and was validated in the end. The real criminal caught; the line in the sand re-drawn. I had thought it glib, clichéd, full of holes, both logical and thematic.

  After the series ended, Patrick had gone to England for a stage role, filling in as a police detective in what Wikipedia calls “a long-running West End farce.” I hadn’t seen it, of course.

  I ask about the stage play now, though I know from Patrick’s website that it has folded, but he uses it as a segue into a different subject.

  “After things didn’t work out in London, I had a few weeks before my next job. I made a trip to my grandfather’s birthplace.”

  And now I prick up my ears. I already know a little bit about Patrick’s trip, from Allan, who’s one of my clients, and I remember that Patrick’s grandparents came from there – the very old walled city, in a country of old rifts and passions that has, in the last year, flared into violence. So it was a pilgrimage. I can see Patrick being into that.

  “Did you find the house?”

  “I did,” Patrick says.

  There is another pause; Patrick gazes at his plate. “It is a fabulous city,” he says. “It’s over a thousand years old, you know. There are stone streets and buildings, still, packed in with modern concrete and glass, and bombed-out brick, from the last war. And it’s much denser than cities here; there’s much more sense of life.”

  I’ve seen the city, on television, quite a lot over the last few months. I can see it now, the river with its stone bridges running like a dark vein through it, the clamorous mixture of old and new streets, Patrick winding his way through them, led by a salmonid instinct.

  “And?”

  Patrick shrugs. “It was an interesting place to see, that’s all. Very photographic. Atmospheric.”

  The story is there, but out of reach: a dark shape under river ice. But I am not able to retrieve it. And Patrick changes the subject, again, and tells me about his new deal for a TV show. It should be a hit, I say. But I’m not sure if I’m required to respond, even. The new series is based on one of his early plays, one that I read drafts of, years ago. It was about an Italian-immigrant family in the 70s, set in Trail, a mining town in the BC Interior. Lots of jokes about food and church and hockey dads. And the grandmother dies. I remember it. For the TV series, the setting has been moved to a small town in Nevada, but the series is being filmed in Vancouver and Hope.

  Patrick is very animated: his eyebrows leap, he laughs a lot, and tells me anecdotes about producers and television actors he’s been working with. Only I would notice, perhaps, that he isn’t really talking about the series, but giving a kind of performance, as for talk show appearance, and that as he talks, he seems to shift too much, as if his clothing is uncomfortable. What has happened to him, I wonder. He was always the one with the focus, the depth.

  “That’s great, Patrick,” I say, when he comes to a pause.

  “Yes,” he says. “I am lucky to have this chance.”

  “So, acting and directing in real television series that you wrote,” I say. “Your dreams coming true.”

  “Yes,” Patrick says. But his answer is a dead-end street.

  Is it only that we have not talked so long in years that the conversation seems to be taking place on opposite sides of a wall? We do not talk about me, but that’s okay; my life isn’t very interesting, compared to Patrick’s.

  OUR MUTUAL ACQUAINTANCE, prone on my 1930s massage table, asks if I have seen Patrick yet. I admit that I have, though I can see that he wants to gossip. He tells me that he, also, has had lunch with Patrick, that Patrick told him all about his trip and his new series.

  This client is a nuisance, a sycophant, a gossip. But also a messenger, and necessary.

  “I think the series is going to be fabulous,” he burbles. “And the important people Patrick’s meeting now! Well! He’s moved way out of our orbit, hasn’t he! But he deserves it. He’s so gifted. Some people are just born with it, aren’t they? And the rest of us might as well not even try.”

  “Do you think so?” I murmur, pressing the unsolid flesh at his waist.

  “Oh, well, you or I could never accomplish anything like what Patrick does, could we?”

  Speak for yourself. But I haven’t said this aloud, I realize, after a few apprehensive seconds. The flabby white shoulders, the dimpled posterior, face me with equanimity, the tongue clatters on. How would it be if I were just now to apply too much pressure to the carotids? Would my elderly receptionist help me to dress this client’s
inert body in his clothes and drag him to a dumpster?

  I am worried about myself. Envy: one of the seven deadly sins. At the least, bad karma. But stalking home along my east-side street at dusk, I wonder: Is it that I want Patrick to myself, or want to be him?

  At one time I wanted to shine, like Patrick and the others. Instead, I do massage. Ironically, I’m much sought after by the city’s glitterati. I minister to the artists, draw out from the muscles of my clients’ bodies with my strong and articulate hands their fears and anxieties, the garbage that blocks their creativity. Pain and grief reside not just in the mind, but in the body, in the tissues. It’s all technique, of course; it’s a matter of training one’s hands to be sensitive to the structures under the skin, to controlling the pressure and direction of the hands’ movements. I’m an amanuensis of the muscles and cartilage.

  A couple of days later, I bump into Patrick on the street near my offices. I’m flustered again at seeing him unexpectedly, and stand there, my hands in my pockets, grinning at him stupidly through the November drizzle.

  “Your new office is right on this block, isn’t it?” Patrick asks.

  Cool sludge settles in my mind. “Yes,” I say flatly. I will not make the offer. Then, because he seems to expect it, I invite him to come up and see my workplace, and he accepts with what seems to be eagerness. There isn’t much: first, a waiting room, small and painted a soothing shade of taupe and furnished with a desk, a file cabinet, a couch, a mirror, all arranged according to feng shui principles, and inhabited by my receptionist, who is actually out for lunch right now. I explain about Dorothy: She’s pushing seventy, I’d guess, and people are sometimes surprised to see her working. She needs to work, for reasons she darkly referred to as choices I made when I was younger. I assume that they were the kinds of choices that resulted in her having neither spousal support nor a pension plan, and I long to ask her if it was worth it. I hired her because I could only admire someone who had been so impractical. But she is extraordinarily competent; she understands computers and filing systems in a way that I don’t, and manages the clients well, too. They bring her gifts.