Idea in Stone (2 page)

He shook his head.
I live in a cargo cult.

~

Stefan stood outside the church.
This is crazy,
he thought. He’d read about these people in one of his mother’s “hocus-pocus” magazines, as he called them. This group claimed that they’d managed to synthesise science and religion into a new practice which gave them power over the mysteries of life and death. They called themselves the Matholics, and Stefan couldn’t believe he was actually walking into one of their hives.

This was one of Toronto’s older churches, having been built in the early 1900’s. Stefan looked around and laughed to himself: if his mother saw him doing something spiritual, she’d be almost as ecstatic as she was when she discovered he liked men. “At last, I knew you’d have something interesting about you!” There was no way he’d give her the satisfaction of knowing about this.
 

“Can I help you?”

Stefan turned to see a man in clerical robes of shiny black material with a high, straight collar. The man smiled, warm and friendly, without the spinning hypnotic whirls in his eyes Stefan half-expected to see.

“Uh,” said Stefan, embarrassed to say it, even though these people claimed this was their stock and trade, “I’d like to get in touch with my father.”

“I’m going to make two assumptions,” said the clergyman. “You’ve never been here before, and your father is dead.”

“Two for two,” said Stefan, relaxing a little.

“Not a problem,” said the man. “I’m Brother James. Welcome to the Toronto chapter of the Matholic church. Let me show you around.” He showed Stefan the old features of the church and the parts that they’d renovated. Finally, he led Stefan to a bank of confessionals. “You don’t need to believe in our doctrine or anything in particular for this to work. It’s been proven time and again. But you’ll see for yourself. Here,” he said, indicating the curtained entrance of a confessional.

Stefan sat in the dim light. The cleric slid open the small window, but Stefan couldn’t see him through the mesh. “The trick with the Eter-net is that the dead use a different logic from us sometimes, and the way they communicate, well, it’s subtle. It’s easy to miss, which is why there are so many doubters. But it is very powerful. So you should be absolutely sure you want to do this before we begin.”

Stefan paused. He wasn’t sure if he believed in any of this, so it seemed pretty harmless. And if it
did
work at all...

“No, I want to do this,” he said.

“Alright,” said the cleric’s soft voice, “let’s begin. You’ll see a piece of paper in front of you, and a pen just to the right of it.” An angled light-box, like a photographer’s, illuminated in front of him. On it was a single sheet of paper with a pearlescent tone and tiny, hair-like filaments running through it. Stefan looked to the side and found a squat blue fountain pen. He uncapped it with an audible click. “Good,” said the cleric, “now write to the person you want to reach. If you make any requests, try to use simple sentences, as much for yourself as for the recipient.”

“Uh, alright,” said Stefan. The very idea was preposterous, yet he put his pen to the sheet and wrote the words “Dear Dad”. He paused there, a stream of memories flying through his mind—his parents playing on a campground stage while he toddled through the crowd; his father and a slightly taller him in a picture, behind them a black Lake Superior and a blazing pink and red sunset sky; his father giving him his first drink—a hot rum toddy at a ski lodge where they performed some Christmases; his father pulling the car over because he and Stefan were crying with laughter at something on the radio; his father, his father, his father.

For the next half hour he wrote, his handwriting getting smaller and smaller as he went so he could say as much as possible in the space of the page. He wrote all the things he’d never spoken before, and described as best he could everything that had happened since he was nine and his father made that fateful step off the stage, falling into the percussion section of the orchestra pit, impaled on a high-hat. People said his father was a drunk, but he refused to believe it. With barely enough room for another line, he realised he hadn’t actually asked his father for anything. Maybe there was no need. But that was the point of this exercise, so he wrote two words in the tiny space left in the corner of the page: “Save me.”

He’d completely forgotten about the cleric. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said a contented voice from the other side of the divider, “are you finished?”

“Yeah.”

The curtain whipped open with a clatter and Stefan squinted at the daylight. The cleric stood there, smiling, while Stefan clutched his piece of paper. “Come with me,” he said. He led Stefan to a vestibule near the front of the church and gestured to a device that looked like a cross between a Roman pedestal and a photocopier. Its top was open, and the man gestured for Stefan to put his paper down on it. The cleric was about to close the top, but stopped. “Oh,” he said, “there’s just the matter of payment.”

“Right,” said Stefan, “how much is it?”

“One hundred and fifty dollars. That includes tax.”

Stefan blanched, but he had to go through with this, and not just to save face. “Do you take credit cards?”

“We certainly do,” said the cleric, pulling out a device from his robes. Stefan handed his card to the man and he zipped it through. A moment later, he said, “Good, it’s been approved. Thank you.” He closed the top of the pillar, and a strong light leaked from under the lid. Stefan could feel the heat, and heard his paper crackling.

The cleric opened the top and the sheet was gone. “All finished,” he said. Stefan smiled and nodded, feeling quite stupid, having fallen for this magic trick. He quietly followed as the cleric led him back to the front entrance of the church.

~

Stefan turned the corner to his street and walked under the canopy of trees. He saw a rental truck parked and knew it was for his house. Closer now, he watched men in blue jumpsuits moving large objects from the open rear of the truck to his front door—boxes, gnarled antique furniture, and a procession of cello cases. Stefan stepped around the workers and boxes to get through the door.

“Stefan,” he heard Delonia saying from somewhere in the mess. He kept moving, wanting nothing more than to reach his room, the place his friends jokingly referred to as The Fortress of Solitude. However, the notion of Superman living in his mother’s basement had loserish implications he didn’t like to think about.

“Stefan,” repeated Delonia. She’d spotted him and closed in. He tried to dodge around a cello case, but his foot made contact with something disturbingly soft, and the thing made a hiss of feline protest. “There you are,” said Delonia. “I wanted to ask you to stay home for supper tonight. It’s the first night Cerise will be with us, and I thought it would be nice for us all to eat together.”

“Mom, can you understand how galactically weird this is for me? You’re asking me to have supper with my mother and her goddamned—”

“Hello Stefan,” said Cerise, suddenly at his side.

“Hello,” he replied. “How are you?”

“Frankly, I’m a bit nervous about the move. I was in my other house for a long time, and I’m not sure how the cats will adjust. Also… I don’t want to come between you and your mother.”

Feel free
, he thought. “Well, thanks for being so honest.”

The phone rang. It stood on a table next to Stefan, but he made no move to answer it. Stefan watched as Delonia rushed awkwardly through the slalom course of detritus, then he picked up the phone and handed it to her. Offended on his mother’s behalf, Cerise asked in a tone far too parental for his liking, “Why didn’t you answer that for her?”

“I can’t use the telephone.”

Delonia covered the mouthpiece, aware of the exchange. “He hears things on it, voices,” she said, wiggling a hand next to her ear.

Cerise looked at Stefan blankly.

“She exaggerates,” he said. “It’s just one voice.”

“Oh.” Not sure what to do with the information, Cerise picked up a cat.

~

Stefan took off the respectable-looking sweater he’d worn to the supper table, folded it up, and stuffed it in a drawer. He put on his cordless headphones and put a CD in the flat stereo on the wall. The upbeat music made him feel happy, and he danced around as he pulled off his trousers. He stood in front of the mirror in his T-shirt and Y-fronts.
You’re kinda short
, he thought,
and skinny, except for that.
He lifted his shirt and poked his small tummy.
And you might lose your hair.
He lifted his drooping bangs to inspect the tide-line with its V-shaped peak. His eyes were big and brown, set into a long face that tapered (maybe a little too much) into a small chin. His long nose led to a wide smile bracketed by long dimples.
I think you’re cute,
he thought.
But cartoonishly, friendly-cute.
The aquarium guy was smoulderingly cute. I want to smoulder. People like smoulder. Smoulder, smoulder, smoulder.
The word lost its meaning and sounded funny, foreign.

He hit the Stop button on the stereo, hung up his headphones, and dropped into bed, the rhythm of the song still in his head, carrying him away.

He drifted backwards, flashes of the day’s sights before him, giving way gradually to a soft darkness. A familiar voice spoke words he couldn’t quite hear, then faded out, replaced by the sound of his father’s voice singing a simple tune. Then that, too, became a faint echo in a large space.

He opened his dream-eyes and found himself sitting cross-legged on the moon. The powdery landscape stretched away in every direction, punctuated with the odd rock or crater. Fireworks went off overhead in the dark space-sky. Stefan reached for the can of beer which he knew, by dream logic, was at his side. He took a sip, then placed it back down, noticing as he did that the ground wasn’t dusty anymore, but covered in prickly, purple, almost floral undergrowth. Looking up again, he saw the whole moon was covered in purple.

~

Stefan’s stereo turned itself on, blaring music. He sat upright in bed, but couldn’t see. Blearily panicked, he groped at his face, discovering his T-shirt was up over his head. He pulled it off and looked at the clock beside his bed: seven-thirty.
Time to get up for work.
He looked down and scratched his stomach. There was something in his belly-button.
Lint?
He plucked it out and looked at it: a tiny piece of newsprint with the letter E on it. He shook his head and put it on his bedside table, then went upstairs to have a shower.

Two

Jacks and Queens

Stefan waited for the subway, leaning against the glazed, curry-coloured tiles of the platform wall. He let the other passengers crowd along the ledge: he wasn’t in a hurry to get to work, he didn’t like being jostled in a crowd, he was afraid of “pushers”, and he wanted to feel cooler than everybody else. And cool, he knew, was all in the little details.

For one, his job allowed him to dress however he wanted. Today he wore a T-shirt and a pair of baggy hemp trousers his mother bought him as a birthday present a few months ago. To his surprise, they became his favourite trousers, and they also seemed indestructible. He allowed that some of her wing-nut ideas had merit.
Some
.

A subway train, silver and burnished like something from the back of a kitchen drawer, pulled up and its doors opened. The crowd flowed toward them like water to a drain. A voice came over the station’s public address system telling the riders to let the other passengers off first, but it went unheeded. As the voice spoke, Stefan heard something else, as if a second person was speaking close to the announcer. But he knew otherwise. The faint, broken words were a mix of English and perhaps a foreign language, but the voice was as familiar as his own. He’d learned to dismiss it years ago.

He pictured a film clip he’d seen of a Japanese subway in which men used large aluminium potato-mashers to shove people into the cars. He smiled.

The pixel-board on the platform showed it was now after 9am. Predictably, the crowd thinned, and Stefan moved away from the wall. Minutes later, the next train arrived, comfortably empty, and Stefan strolled leisurely through the doors as they opened. The subway game was all about getting a seat, and he’d just scored.

~

Stefan waited in a small room that was beige in every way except for the posters on its walls, relics of past children’s shows. Cartoon characters and live entertainers looked down at him, smiling so big and happy they looked about to drool. He moved the overflowing ashtray on the coffee-table aside, put his legs up, and leaned back. His fingers probed and massaged under his jaw, loosening the root of his tongue from below. He hummed with his mouth closed and stretched the soft palate at the back of his throat.

A woman opened the door, smiled, and said, “We’re ready for you Mr. Mackechnie.” He nodded, picked up his jacket and satchel and followed her. They walked through a maze of halls decorated with similar posters and children’s broadcasting awards.

The production assistant remained strangely silent as they walked. “You’re new here,” said Stefan. “What’s your name?”

“I, uh, my name’s Wendy.”

“Hi,” said Stefan, “nice to meet you. So did you study broadcasting, or is this just a job?”