Port Folio: A Harbour For Words

(11) Parkdale Huge Tree Poem

2009-11-09T20:18:00.000-08:00

King of summer,
at the corner of King & Bummer.

So dark green, you're black inside.

(10) Transit Shelter

2009-11-09T20:05:00.000-08:00

“I was architecture student, in Montreal. Judge, he tell me leave, get out of Montreal and don’ come back. I got in argument wid a Haitian guy. So I push him. He fall back and hit his head on a curb but den he jump up, pull out a gun and shoot me, den he fall down dead.”

“Oh yeah?” I said.

I thought of how in Toronto there’s a rule-of-thumb that only weirdoes talk to strangers, so if a stranger is talking to you then they must be a weirdo.

“Yeah,” he said.

This guy was 22 or so, husky; wearing track pants the colour of old city snow at twilight with a black hoodie over several t-shirts. He was standing with a dirty blue knapsack and a squeegee at his boots. He had on a black touque with the Canadian National logo on it, all around the touque a fringe of blonde hair hung down.

I had just stepped into the transit shelter at Bathurst and Queen. It stood beside the snow bank like a discarded aquarium, as grimy as the rest of the street. I looked up and there was his round face. Beside us was a sub shop, up ahead were the steps of an old bank where First Nations guys hang out all year, begging, sleeping, drinking, fighting.

“So I come to Toronto.”

I had no reason to disbelieve. Theoretically, it was possible. The Haitian guy might have had enough adrenaline, blood pressure, pride and anger in him after cracking his skull to get up and pull a trigger even though he was basically dead, a zombie. Shit happens in Montreal. I didn’t know what to say.

He just wanted to have a conversation. He was in the aftermath of a fateful moment. Me, I was an office worker on the way home. In general, I thought I might be going somewhere. I drank Starbuck’s coffee twice a day and worked at a publishing company off King Street.

I came out of the lobby into the cold and started walking west, toward Queen and Brock. The sidewalks were a mess. Millions of rough little rocks of salt lay everywhere, rolling and crunching under my boots all the way. After a block or so my girlfriend called me on my cell to ask me to pick up rotis for dinner, we usually ran out of groceries by Friday. The rotis were in the big pocket across the front of my black nylon parka, two potato-and-chana nourishments in foil. We’d trade heat for the streetcar ride of a few minutes until I was home.

“I was in hospital,” he said.

And he’d been in custody for a full year. My rotis were going to be cold if I had to stand here a long time.

“Wow,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic in a low key and disinterested way.

“That Haitian guy, he was a badass. The judge say he believe me I didn’t on purpose kill the Haitian guy.”

“Good thing,” I said.

A beautiful girl walked by the transit shelter with her long navy blue hair under a Russian army hat with ear flaps. She was wearing a big coat that looked like she’d made it by skinning a red muppet. She had on knee-high black boots with thick laces criss-crossed up the back.

“Yeah,” he said.

My girlfriend doesn’t hate winter at all. Her family was loaded by the time she was born and she grew up skiing, driving SUVs, going to Florida, Bermuda, Mexico, Cuba. For me, the snow is nice at first then becomes a dirty old bandage. The days flicker by with the faulty exposure of a silent film and none of the scratchy charm. Daylight is just an interval either side of lunch.

There was a Dutch painter named Albert Jacques Frank who came to Toronto in the 1930s. He painted alleyways, grey wooden fencing and footpaths set against white; unpopulated works of silence insulated by snow. His Toronto of red brick and damp porch boards is still here if you care to look for it.

I guess it seemed like I didn’t believe him, or that I was indifferent. To be honest, I did want to get home. The squeegee kid took the hems of his hoodie and shirts and lifted them about twelve inches. Like I said, he was heavy, so his belly protruded bare into the cold air between us. Sure enough, he had a scar, entry and exit wounds that almost touched each other. They looked like a long whitish pair of upside down keyholes.

“Jeez,” I said.

The Long Branch streetcar pulled up. He stayed there in the transit shelter chewing. The roti steamed where he had bitten into it.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(9) The Major Star

2009-11-09T20:00:00.000-08:00

He accepted our honorary doctorate in environmental sociology.

The Major Star arrived on campus for the award ceremony and we gave him a dark burgundy robe and mortar board with tassel. The weather was perfect. We all thought his smile was wonderful. As he began climbing to the stage to take his seat, we noticed the Major Star had no socks on.

Does it matter? the Major Star asked.

Well, the media is here, you’ll be front row and your bare ankles will show. You’ll be sitting there and the world will see no socks.

A professor from the awards committee, seated in the back, took off his socks. His wife suggested this and the socks were passed up, then along, to the Major Star. Regular brown dress socks. Hand-to-hand they travelled, like a hot dog at a ballgame.

The Dean and then the awards committee chairperson each gave a brief yet witty speech. A pipeline protest in British Columbia was mentioned. Dramatic pet rescues in New Orleans were highlighted.

When the Major Star took the podium he told a knock-knock doctor joke.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Doctor. Doctor Who? No, doctor me!

Brie, pinot-noir, organic beer, locally-grown salads were available under a white tent for everyone invited. Instead of joining in, the Major Star rolled the burgundy robe, hat and loaner socks into a ball. He gave them to the first person walking by. Bare-ankles, he got in his limo and left.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(8) Regret

2009-11-09T19:55:00.000-08:00

The ultimate is to be able to say you don’t regret a thing. I think that’s fucked. It’s like this phoney standard. It’s like taking the standards of a rock star and applying them to your little life as an office clerk. Doesn’t work.

Besides, who’s asking you? If you don’t regret anything it means you haven’t lived, haven’t learned anything. Or you spent your life in a cave on Mars? If you don’t regret anything it means you set some standard out of thin air and then decided you passed it with flying colours.Pin that medal on if you want. People who say they never regret anything usually have done horrible things and, racing to the grave like the rest of us, rationalized it away. Or they are lying. I don’t regret my five divorces, my syphilis or starting World War III. Wow, big man.

We’re talking about the same kind of asshole mechanism as “I never apologize.”Fine, a lot of apologies are not meant. You bump someone with your briefcase in an elevator and you say sorry. Just a little convention of politeness, there’s no sorrow there. Pretty sad when everyone is so narcissistic, self absorbed, enthralled by economics, so speciated that we don’t understand each other except through gut wrenching confessions or ego-maniacal monologues.

What kind of asshole cuts themselves out of a mechanism that is designed to reduce conflict, or the bad effects thereof, in a world so burdened by it? Don’t we understand this even from the point of selfish self interest?

Grow up. Learn to apologize, pay attention to what you are doing, to the world around you. This might mean embracing your sorrow, but if you don’t, well, ...you’ll regret it.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(7) Vlad the Landlord

2009-11-09T19:50:00.000-08:00

I razzed Vlad about not repairing the brickwork on the garage for two years. Vlad was my landlord.

His people came from a cold cave in the mountains. They owned nothing but a small bag of onions, a wooden crucifix and a picture of Hitler. Life was hard.

Canada beckoned. There was so little in the villages anyway. Twenty years and Vlad was a multi-property landlord in the heart of sprawling Toronto, North America’s fifth largest city. He bought beaten Edwardian houses in assaulted neighbourhoods. Three storey properties, subdivided into rooms and smallish apartments.

I didn’t mind the genteel poverty, the immigrants, quirky artists, lunatics and student neighbours. Across the street was a giant chestnut tree that bloomed beautifully every spring. Vlad’s rents were slightly lower than average, too. I even got a little agriculture project going.

When they were knocking down Massey Harris I slipped around there one night with my friend’s pickup truck and brought back some scrap bricks. I used them to make a raised vegetable bed in the back yard and to edge a garden beside the door to my apartment at the side of the house. I put in potatoes, tomatoes, a half dozen corn plants, and kitchen herbs. Nothing too crazy, just a nice bit of creative urban gardening. This being Toronto, raccoons could be a problem; they’d get at my plants or go in the basement now and then. Vlad hated raccoons.

With Vlad’s tenants it ends badly most times. If Vlad was running a restaurant, say, or any other kind of business, he’d have gone out of business in the first five minutes. Tenants complain to the bylaw officers. They fine him sometimes but he isn’t capable of being a better landlord. His own house, I was there once, it’s a hundred years old, too. Held together by coats of paint and bits of wire.

“Steve, no good you live alone, why no start family?” His idea of a conversation starter. His social skills were about that good.

I did move out eventually. After Vlad murdered the second raccoon, I’d had enough. He used an open can of tuna and a porcelain dish with an inch of water in it. He cuts the end off an old extension cord, sits it in the water and plugs in the cord beside the furnace. One-hundred-and-ten volts.

Going to get my bike next morning, I thought the raccoon was asleep like a last-call drunk with his face resting on the bar. The electricals in the house were late Jazz Age. Vlad could have burned us to the ground. Why wouldn’t he just fix the rotting storm door at the back end of the basement?

It wasn’t that kind of operation, Vlad and Son. His son was big, creepy Peter with the overlapping history of criminal convictions and head injuries.

“Steve, every day I go church pray drugs. Drug ruin son’s life.”

Vlad would come around and bother me without calling. I always knew if he’d been in the place when I was at the magazine because it was like somebody walked around with an aromatherapy spritzer full of kolbassa juice.

Once, I was surfing the web and he knocks on the door. Time again for the annual pre-winter ritual wherein he drains the air from the steam heating system. The rads are huge cast iron things with decorative feet. Like the rest of the place, they’d be something if you scraped them and repaired them.

“Steve, why you always on computer, work so much?”

I told him he could go ahead with the rads and went back to my laptop. Pfffssssst, went the kitchen rad. Pfffssssst, went my tiny bathroom with the squeaky floorboard in front of the mirror. Vlad clumped into the hallway and pfffssssst went the hallway rad. He came into the living room and pfffssssst went the rad under the window.

“Vlad,” I said in annoyance.

He had my favourite coffee cup and was holding it to the steam valve. The cup was full of rusty black drainings, like a toxic latte.

“That’s my cup.” I said.

“Well, what else I use?”

One day, I came home from work and discovered he’d helped himself to half of the bricks I’d used for edging the garden. He took the bricks out of the ground and used them to repair the garage wall. The stucco had fallen off years before. Where there had been a dozen rotten bricks you could now see my scavenged bricks had been cemented in.

“Cheapskate,” I muttered.

Vlad was the subject of a lot of muttering. He never spent any money on anything. We asked him to repair kitchens, washrooms, drywall, running toilets, loose stairs, basement mould, the front door. He’d mumble something about the gypsies or the injustices of Communism or German occupation or Russian liberation or the ruthlessness of the partisans who hated both or how hard it was when he came here. He smelled like booze often enough to boot.

The garage was tumbledown, narrow. Inside was a grey 1979 Ford van. Inside the van was the even older lawn mower. When he or Peter would come over to cut the grass they’d open the garage door, pop the hood on the van and hook booster cables up. The van would roar into life and be driven forward enough so the side doors could be opened to get the lawn mower out. Reversing the process, they’d put it back.

The lawn mower would vomit blue puffs and the smoke used to hang in a layer over the yard and sidewalk. He should have just dumped the gasoline on the grass and burned it off.
I whipped out my phone and gave Vlad a piece of my mind about the bricks. I sounded mad and was righteously glad I to. Vlad was an idiot.“Why’d you take the damn bricks from my garden?”

When I got home next day and was unlocking the door, I could see Vlad had been there. There was a row of brand new, factory-fresh bricks stuck in the ground around my garden.
That night I was in bed reading a copy of Wallpaper magazine. The lights flickered. I figure that’s when the raccoon went for the tuna.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(6) The Stupid Shoes

2009-11-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

Spring rolled around and she began to agonize over shoes. Lydia, my friend and neighbour, that is. Organic cork soles, tempting criss-cross straps, just a bunch of really killer shoe stuff started going on in her mind.

Now, Lydia is a starving artist and amateur opera singer. I got to know her because she’d practice scales, sing entire scenes outside during the summer. Not something you expect when sitting on the fire escape reading the paper with a coffee unless someone like Lydia moves to your street.

She couldn’t afford a whole lot of shoe lust. Lydia’s student loans were as big as ever ten years after they were acquired. I gathered there was romantic trouble as well. Instead of the usual choruses of Verdi I heard the final fight, with a local radio DJ, one afternoon. Talk about having a face for radio.

The major purchase the shoes would require was denied several times and then acted upon impulsively, like a spare doughnut. I’ve bought good used motorcycles for less money.
Sure, the shoes looked fantastic. She told me they felt even better. The shoes were also stupid.

First day out, the unfamiliar heels, soles and calf-flattering straps caused a stumble. Lydia tried to recover and whacked her left big toe straight into a curb in Kensington Market. I had to take the truck down to the hospital and give her a lift home. I also took her for groceries once and drove her to her physiotherapist twice that summer.

For a month, the only shoes that she could put on, because of the pain and swelling, were the stupid shoes.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(5) The Battle of Lansdowne Library

2009-11-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

Grandfather came to mind yesterday. An errand randomly sent me through the intersection of Bloor Street and Lansdowne Avenue. There’s a corner for you. A corner about as inspiring as a black-and-white photo of the Communist Party designated pleasure quarter of Minsk in 1959 during a wintertime power outage at night.

The coffee shop there is dubious. Its name changes more often than people overdose in the washroom cubicles. Traffic is heavier and buses seem noisier here. Most people avoid Bloor and Lansdowne because it flattens the emotions and is just a low-rise waste of a major intersection in Canada’s business capital and North America’s fifth largest city. About the only thing to catch the eye here is the slim neon tubing of a three-part sign that depicts a stripper. In blue pumps, she’s from an age of kinder, gentler smut. She leans forward at the waist every five minutes or so all night, every night.

Some of the now forgotten history of the corner may explain the taintedness of its present. That arch-fronted, stuccoed building holding up the stripper stands at what was once a weedy empty lot but had been the location of a graceful library.

Yes, a library! A fine one, noted throughout the British Empire for its spaciousness and sensible layout. Fifteen tall stained-glass windows graced the Lansdowne Avenue side. Equal to anything in the mother country, or the American republic, no expense was spared, dear reader, on the Lansdowne Library.

Lansdowne Library had acres of interior murals depicting a Dominion of Canada still all youth and clean water and made of nothing but scenic wonders. The latest standards in electric lighting and sound insulation were applied. Electric book lifts and pneumatic tubes were installed to speed knowledge to hundreds of patrons at a time. The newspapers raged as costs spiralled up for such things as a wonderful copper dome, twin observatories, music hall, and ornamental fountain. The interior was noted for its especially rich use of materials, mahogany and dark green and white marble.

Sadly, the call to war that so shocked the world in August of 1914 went up just weeks before the new library was to receive its many books, bound volumes of periodicals, children’s materials, Braille translation machinery, atlases, almanacs, geological and fossil specimens, gazetteers, stamp and coin holdings, musical recordings and planetarium fittings. The war did not go well and began to draw great resources. As the battles of 1916 began to unfold in failure, horror and strategic blunder the Imperial War Offices slid a tentacle toward the Lansdowne Library. It was taken up as a documentation office. Pointless, prolonged, scientific slaughter being as administratively intense then as it is now.

Grandfather’s part in the Great War came to an end when he made his last sudden explosive decompression with the Royal Canadian Navy's Diving Bell Squadron Number Six. In 1920, ex-second lieutenant Owen Russell found himself back in Toronto’s west end with relatively little to do. It is said that each day he put his big, dark blue duffel coat over his strong six-foot two frame and took a quiet walk through the streets of the place he’d been raised in, reflecting on the near lethal combinations of responsibility and adventure he’d recently experienced.

Thinking that he might be cheered looking in on what had been billed, at his departure nearly five years earlier, "the loveliest single cultural treasure within direct sight of a Great Lake," by Ontario Premier William H. Hearst, Grandfather decided to walk to the Lansdowne Library after his bacon and eggs one morning. He found himself looking through the dusty rear windows of a disused shell instead. Devoid even of the rows of meticulous Imperial War Office clerks.

By Christmas, Grandfather was the head of the Unemployed Veterans Committee barricaded in the library. "Jobs, Dignity and the Allotted Books or Red-style Revolution Here As Well," was the demand. A quotation from a UVC leaflet further illustrates the nature of the standoff.

"...if we are thrown out of our improvised home and the community soup kitchen closed we will surely march on city hall with these dozen Vickers guns for a petition. Oh yes! The authorities should remember that we are doing them a service in taking over this empty building. We are using it to distribute food which we collect from sympathetic dockers, market men and trades people on Saturdays and have now a scheme on hand to mend the kiddies' boots and send them dry-shod to school ...we in this way keep control over 17,000 unemployable men who might otherwise be driven to far more violent things than seizing an empty building ...ours is a sensible, direct sort of action, we don't want to break anything if that can be avoided."

New Year 1920 dragged in with the authorities showing intermittent interest in negotiation. A brace of water-cooled Vickers machine guns were more than enough to keep the Toronto Borough Constabulary across the street. Many of that force were just back from the European war and knew what overlapping arcs of gunfire meant for human bodies protected only by cloth uniforms. Others had become TBC men when specifically warned by friends and older male family members to seek local police employment in place of military service. At the same time, the Vickers guns enraged the authorities as did the hint of Bolshevism. A harsh, make-an-example-of-them response was inevitable.

Police Master Sergeant David "The Bastard" McMurrin, a Belfast man, hammered with his nightstick on the library door. Grandfather opened it two inches and asked McMurrin what he wanted. The Master Sergeant, newly promoted to the leadership of the Special Disturbances Squad, leaned in and uttered his foulest curses. McMurrin was taking the strike personally and the caution of many of his own men had angered him further.

Grandfather remained silent. The morning was all sun and ice.

“You’ll not see out the day in there, Russell,” McMurrin affirmed. The red hairs on his neck tingled with the prospect of smashing in somebody’s smug face for them.

McMurrin had been in charge of the security detachment in the shipyard that built RMS Titanic before he came to Canada and joined the Toronto Borough Constabulary. During his Belfast tenure McMurrin instituted a morale-building athletics program that increased its members’ skills in bare knuckle boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, rugby, football, Ludo, checkers and hitting Catholics with cement blocks.

Now, as I've mentioned, Grandfather was a navy man. And not just of any deck-swabbing kind either. In the salt chill of the North Sea mine fields he'd learned to skipper the most enormous class of diving bells, the Morris-Hawker Mark 10s. Complex craft, diving bells require difficult trim adjustments to operate smoothly. These adjustments are accomplished with a cast iron wrench, the size of which can be guessed by its having been nicknamed “the elephant's pecker” by the men who used them. Aside from the duffel coat that matched the eyes McMurrin now stared into, an example of such a wrench had been Grandfather's sole souvenir of participation in the First World War.

The sound McMurrin's skull made when Grandfather's wrench crowned him King of the Pigs was heard all the way to the steps of the Provincial Legislature, so it is said. At Grandfather's funeral in 1961 the largest of the floral arrangements was from Toronto's finest who also honoured him with their full pipe band. McMurrin, secretly in the pay of higher levels of government, had been unpopular for years and a younger, more progressive, generation of local police yearned to be free of him.

An entire brigade from the Provincial Police Force replaced the Toronto Borough Constabulary and directed a wave of arrests at the network of women supporting the barricade. Water and electricity was shut off. Also, an internal element favoured quitting the library protest when a relief act promising nineteen cents a week to all mothers with a minimum of six children was passed. Grandfather hewed to the wishes of the majority and led the march out of the library. He continued straight to the lounge in the Drake Hotel where he could be found for most of the next forty years.

At sunset, the day of the victory parade, a mysterious fire tore through the library. Each of the fifteen stained-glass windows exploded with a report like a sniper's rifle and dropped into Lansdowne Avenue. Grandfather is said to have winced each time.

When we walked by yesterday the stripper leaned over and, well, we knew how the old man felt.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(4) Happy Saint Victoria Day!

2009-11-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

Icons of Saint Victoria were first brought here by sailors in 1699. Victoria grew up beside the sea and when she as a girl was inspired to devote her life to God by the beauty of a starfish. She is always depicted with one.

Saint Victoria was one of the first saints to become associated with Canadians. For three centuries she has been looked to in faith and hope. Special in particular to the working classes, a popular love of Saint Victoria was confirmed during the bloodiest battles of the First World War. Indeed, she was the centre of a mass hysteria in scores of home front communities after accounts of a miraculous appearance over the field of battle leaked back to Canada. An event now at the extreme chronological edge of lived human experience.

Wanting to contribute to victory in the European stalemate, Canada’s Imperial Office of War Production commissioned the Dominion Cutlery Works of Cambridge, Ontario to manufacture a ferocious secret weapon. A martial implement to alter the course of the war and that would subsequently require a full paragraph of the Geneva Convention.

A reinforced battalion of the Royal Acadian Regiment was recruited to drill with the weapon in the woods near Ottawa. When ready, they were transported at night by the Grand Trunk Railway to a troopship in Montreal. The troopship raced to France. At dawn, January 15th 1917, a new chapter in the horror of war was written. Two thousand Royal Acadians, boots wrapped in burlap to quiet their approach, set off toward the enemy, their gleaming, fifteen-bladed, electric rotating bowie knives pointing the way across No Man’s Land.

By noon, there was nothing left on the German side over six inches high. The new weapon sliced flesh, broke minds, and left a score of pointy-helmeted Prussian generals, watching from miles away through field telescopes, with a mess in their grey woollen pants. The horrendousness left the men wielding the new weapon in little better condition. As the sun set Saint Victoria was seen weeping, starfish at her neck, above the carnage.

In our modern and peaceful times Saint Victoria comforts all who...

... have worked for a temp agency for more than sixteen months straight. Who drive a Chevrolet Cavalier with no insurance. Are binge alcoholics. Have tried to find homes for unwanted kittens and wound up keeping them. Have eaten Kraft Dinner with a hot dog cut up in it more than once. Were crippled working for a Class 1 freight railway. Were caught in the Jean Chretien/Paul Martin Employment Insurance crackdown of the early 1990s. Oppose bulk water exports but never vote. Have a landlord with breath that smells like kolbassa. Owe more than $35,000 in student loans and are over forty years of age. Have neighbours of a different ethnic group that party all night and sleep all day.

Happy Saint Victoria’s Day Canada!

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(3) Carbonated Meat

2009-11-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

The last carbonated meat came to the Royal Institute of Research as a scientific specimen. My wife, Pamela Osborne, first speculated on the existence of the carbonated meat in her master’s thesis. Over time she built it into a component of her diverse career as a biochemical physicist.

I love the field work of science. I went to Africa and got the carbonated meat. My wife handled the financing, did the project management and laboratory science. She was tracking the Earth’s cycles, iron, phosphorous, water, carbon especially. Traces within traces had pinpointed the carbonated meat.

A sizeable network of computers worked together and in a month we had coordinates. I still can’t tell you where I went for a variety of reasons; except that it was north of Burkina Faso and east of Morocco. Somewhere between the rising coastlines and the expanding deserts the last home of the carbonated meat could be found.

I told my Russian aircrew to descend in a half circle north of the smoke, upwind of it a few dozen kilometres. They were as exhausted too but we got down onto a flat spot on a dry plateau. Our search had not been easy. The locals were burning off the last of the carbonated meat with flamethrowers and steel buckets of industrial waste slung under helicopters.

We were in a great big Soviet-era Antonov biplane with tractor tires and wings of corrugated metal, huge four-bladed prop out front. Perfect for low altitude, high endurance work. The cabin and hold was stuffed with camping gear and food and the fourth seat had been replaced with detection apparatus. A silver box with a green light, a fan and a data port on the front. Our camera man died of an infection only a day into the interior. We’d traded his fancy gear and French passport and money and an officially provided stash of silver coinage for aviation fuel. I refused to trade the sniper rifle as it had already been needed.

I doubt the Royal Institute ever got a thank you note for what it had shelled out on this scientific rescue mission. Oleg and Vitaly were gruff and aggressive even when they were being friendly. At first I didn’t like them. As far as I know they are enjoying retirement in Dubai.

I’d saved their lives the day before we collected the meat. Back at the grass field, near Mara-Mari. We landed there planning to refuel at a Shell Oil facility and make one final hop to carbonated meat country. Child soldiers were thronging the terminal. They are never a good thing.

Two singled out the Antonov right away. They were a horrible sight, wobbling with anger, malaria and abuse. I killed them both with the sniper rifle, firing from the hip like some asshole in a movie. One crumpled and the other’s cranium sprayed all over Oleg JFK-style. My Russians certainly responded well to having their lives saved, they were convinced execution for the airplane and its contents was at hand.

This was the second run in with under age soldiery. The first one held an assault rifle in line with my chest at an intersection in the middle of nowhere. Another boy, unwell with yellowy eyes and puffy face.

His bayonet was round, an oversized nail, and as wide as an artery. The silver coins and satellite phone and other goodies were in compartments welded under the bodywork of the Land Rover. We kept money and other items available to hand over to checkpoints and so on. The child soldiers were a little early; we had barely left the capital city.

Where you have carbonated meat, you have diamonds and oil. Where you have diamonds and oil you have child soldiers pointing bayonets. You have corruption, insurrection, mercenaries, ecological degradation, social upheaval, under-funded hospitals, misogyny, extremism, refugee camps and vast, vast greed. We pushed the child soldiers’ bodies under an abandoned trailer and pulled a tarp across them.

With the oil and diamonds gone and the three local cultures left with none of the benefits they turned on the carbonated meat. Scientific value, the enormous rarity of carbonated meat meant little. Science had only just barely become aware of the carbonated meat while helping plunder the natural resources of the entire region. Which do you think had the most impact? A weird bit of flora and fauna. The swindle of the century?

What does carbonated meat look like, you ask? Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Yes, all three, in a cylindrical form about the size of an ottoman, tapered toward the bottom. Uniform in size they are gently warm to the touch. They are not harmful to humans, in fact they can be eaten by homo sapiens. They taste like beef jerky crossed with celery and the hard coating on a cherry-flavoured gumball. When sliced open they spill potable water and their skin can be used for shelter-making. Four holes, like for the threads holding a button, are clustered at the top of each carbonated meat, they release streams of pure oxygen, hence the reference to carbonation in their name.

As Oleg made the landing rotation we saw a small team of men torching underbrush at the edge of the jungle. That meant carbonated meat.

I told them to wait with the plane. They would keep the engine warmed up and had the child soldiers’ AK-47s. At least one carbonated meat should be between our landing spot and the edge of the jungle, indicated the detector. A ravine ran down from the plateau and it would guide me out and back. Carbonated meat are like humans in that they seem to thrive near bodies of water.

When I found the meat I was thorn-scraped and footsore and ecstatic. I took a deep breath of its oxygen and exhaled, slowly counting to three. Here it was! Here I was!

Simplicity and gracefulness; the meat was a cheerful shade of emerald. Blending to black along the sides it had near perfect camouflage under vine leaves at the base of a tree. From a few more feet away I would have missed it completely.

I leaned the sniper rifle against the tree, wiped a tear away, and began to separate the carbonated meat from the ground. I had a folding shovel with me. Then I unfurled a special knapsack my wife had designed for retrieving a carbonated meat. I feared the specimen would be heavy.

I had started out on commercial flights to London and then Casablanca. Then there were trains, jeep rides, crowded buses. The long trip in the Land Rover was next as were the shitty, bug-infested hotel rooms. Five long stretches in the air with Oleg and Vitaly in a jump seat made from aluminum tubing and canvas that had not done my joints a lot of good, came next. Also, I’m not really a kid any more. I’m forty-six. Nonetheless, I adjusted the knapsack, picked up my rifle and turned back toward the plateau.

It was hot but the carbonated meat was releasing a modest stream of cool pure oxygen onto the back of my neck. Grasshoppers popped about cheerefully and I kept a steady pace, drinking water often and in small amounts. Replacing what I was losing without swelling the belly. Something I learned in the Air Force Royal Reserve during college.

When I had regained some altitude on the way to the plane I sent a private text message to Pamela. I told her in short sentences without vowels that I’d secured a specimen. I’d be at the institute within three days if all went well. I confirmed her theory that a carbonated meat naturally repels harmful insects. Since starting back I’d had not a single bite from any kind of fly or mosquito even. Also, the carbonated meat was exhibiting a phenomenon we hadn’t known about. It made sounds. I tried my best to describe the sounds. Like a humming or strumming, or no, a purring sound. Like a cricket and like a dulcimer.

I LUV U! STAY SAFE!!!, replied Pamela.

The sounds were devoid of all but the loosest pattern and quite soothing, to be honest. With the carbonated meat keeping me company my back held up well and I kept a good pace, uphill along the ravine and through the lion-coloured grasses to the big biplane.

Oleg and Vitaly were still there but looked jumpy. They said they’d heard motor vehicles and gunshots other end of the plateau. We were afraid of the big, rocket-firing military helicopters we’d been seeing and what they could do to the Antonov while it was on the ground.

Oleg had CNN on his iPhone and the religious anarchy in the capital city was ratcheting up another notch or two. Radical militants were in our vicinity and you could say the only thing they hated more than carbonated meat was westerners with square glasses and heavy university accreditations or the equally godless mercenary servants thereof. Already they’d chucked the camping gear and the big detector box to save weight, stowing the carbonated meat in a custom-made travel case.

The Antonov’s engine hammered into life. We flew at low altitude dead north. The flight plan we filed with the authorities said we’d fly due south at medium altitude. We were going into the neighbouring country, to the extreme limit of the Antonov’s range.

We said we never wanted to be apart again. God, I had missed Pamela. She was beautiful and smart, a redhead. I was too tired to think, let alone talk for much of the first twenty four hours. I had lumps and lesions and lacerations and infected spider bites and I’d lost weight and grown a bit of a beard. There were burns on my left arm. I was bruised and battered, not feeling morally intact but I was excited, too.

Sure, there had been plenty of action. Thing is, presidents and secret agents don’t change the world. The James Bond stuff had been needed but retrieving the last of a dying species had more to do with money and paperwork. The most powerful people in our world are still the lawyers. Inequitable, nature-despoiling dictatorship thrives as much on the pretext of law as on visible force.

On the plane back I started trying to pull myself together. I’d been booked on a big fancy Airbus with two decks, a physiotherapist/massage technician and a little walk-in medical clinic on board. That and the French chef helped but I was still sore and depleted.

The same people that set me up with the cabin on the Airbus, and Oleg and Vitaly before that, got me back onto North American soil with no bother from Department of Homeland Defence or the Canadian Border Security Agency. The specimen and I arrived at the condo mid afternoon on a wet day in October, the sidewalk out front was carpeted with acorns.

Within minutes the lines were buzzing. Plans began to roll forward for press conferences, VIP receptions, academic and public access. We deliberately structured things so that we had a quiet period of about three days before the zoo really got going. Yes, it was selfish to have done that.

My wife and I hosted a little reception. Friends, artists, scientists, a philosopher or two, a couple of family members came.

I’d brought some soil and leaf litter from the spot on where I found the specimen. We used this as bedding for the carbonated meat, creating a spot in the dining room and one in the spare bedroom for it. We misted it lightly now and then with a spritzer. The carbonated meat required virtually nothing to thrive, glowing an even stronger emerald green under the attention of our low-key circle. Oxygen hissed lightly from it and it was as warm as a black cat sleeping on a sun porch.

Our friend Karl Hammer, the photographer, seemed quiet. My sister-in-law tried to bring him out of his shell. Karl removed his sunglasses and pointed out that we were part of a system that had effectively murdered the carbonated meat as a species.

“Here we are”, he said. “In the tasteful, caring environment of close friends, in awe of this living thing, mystified, reverent, even afraid of it, but failing utterly to comprehend the big picture.”

His words killed my wife. The syllables he strung together breathed into reality a fatal complex of doubt. We looked through each other at the table. I could smell the jungle burning again.

After the private social event came the work. Like a wedding, the ball had started rolling and now it didn’t matter if the marriage would be good or not. Pamela kicked things off with a briefing of the Board of Governance and the Major Sponsors Committee. All were floored. I started in on the mainstream media and the bloggers.

I hit the road; Pamela settled three major teams onto the science. The plodding, meticulous stuff that advances real knowledge in real ways. Sixty people, fourteen-hours-a-day and six-days-a-week. A hundred and three cures for a hundred and three cancers kind of thing. Coffee, committees, computers and pure knowledge. Two-hundred and eleven years and the Royal Institute for Research had never seen anything like it.

I was swept off my feet like a vice-president during a terror alert. My ass became famous. It was crazy. The carbonated meat, a previously unknown overtime project of creation, was blogged upon, photographed, holographed, podcasted, broadcasted, cast in bronze. Twittered and Facebooked until the Internet very nearly melted. A stuffed, emerald furry version sold 902.9 million copies in China alone on behalf of United Nations children’s charities. There were granite statues. Hospitals were renamed. Church bells were smelted and recast in the shape of the specimen and found to ring more sweetly. Women in labour cried out ‘carbonated meat’ to ease their pains and regulate their breathing.

Schools, civic parades, books and Roman-style orgies were dedicated to the meat. Children were christened in its honour. A tributary torrent of money and women offered any way I liked them, and I like both plenty of ways, proved unstoppable, too.

When I learned about Pamela, I was in Miami and still in the sack with two movie stars. Apparently, I tried to electrocute myself with a hair dryer and a hot tub carved from green travertine marble shaped like the carbonated meat. Then I remember being in a private jet

Federal police subsequently cleared the movie stars, and me, of any wrongdoing. The charges against us were just a new chapter in the panic. We were seven hundred miles away and pretty much out of our skulls at the time of the disappearance of the carbonated meat. I do not know where it is, if it is alive or not, if there are any left at all.

They said it was murder, but they didn’t see my wife’s note. It said that the carbonated meat was life itself.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(2) Railway

2009-11-09T19:27:00.000-08:00

Freight car tracking was done on paper back then. Mistakes were hard to retract. The railway freight office got one started and I completed it for them with some help from the vegetarians.

Going out in the dark dampness to check what we called the beef track, track number six, there was this big graffiti down both sides of a string of livestock cars. MEAT IS SHIT, in letters fifteen feet high. I couldn’t see the full serial numbers I needed to see for the spray paint. I released the movement tags to the night supervisor anyway.

Because I guessed at the car numbers, the plain brown hamburger cows showed up at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in the morning. The prize-winning, hand-raised dairy cows from Quebec were shunted to a west end slaughterhouse.

My daughter learned to swim then, while I was sleeping off my first dozen night shifts. I could have been fired, some jobless young guy taking my place. That was number one, the cows.

Then, I helped to trepan a drunk with the deflector on a locomotive. I’d gotten out of freight yard work and onto a transfer crew. An engineer and I were taking 801 and fifteen black tank cars to Kodak. The condemned man was out drinking with his buddies. Police said he’d started at lunch time. Eventually, he took a shortcut home from this little bar near the tracks. Blacked out, he was lying on the right of way. Stopping 801 in less than a mile was impossible.

Now, he was outside the gauge, head clear of the left hand track by a good foot. We should have missed him but as we rumbled forward, whistling and grinding thirty eight pairs of brake pads, the man was roused enough to try and sit up. His temple aligned with the corner of our deflector, a curved rectangle of steel under the front coupling. As good as a gun. That was number two.

Railways are worse than armies. All rules, hearings, demerits and discipline. We were found free of blame.

My wife came back, ending a trial separation, the same week. She said she liked that I still had about seventy-five percent of the hair I had in high school. My seniority was pretty high by then and I was around the house more.

Number three and I took early retirement. I’d been on passenger service for a decade. Better than freight service: good hours, cleaner, quieter.

I was eastbound in the cab car of an extra at 2210. Because of a baseball game and a Metallica concert the railway had put on more trains. We were doing fifty through an old industrial area by the lakeshore as the headlight swept onto a woman, about twenty-five, kneeling naked in the track.

There was no point as I lifted that red handle and threw the emergency brake. Her hands were clasped like she was praying and her eyes were closed.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009

(1) The Artists

2009-11-09T19:15:00.000-08:00

What if all the really great dead artists were brought back to life? How would it feel to be them? How would they react to the crazy shit that’s been happening in this world?

These were the noble questions. How could we have the ability to bring back all the really great dead artists and not use it? The temptation was too great. The science went forward.

As it was, some of the really great dead artists didn’t react well. I mean, how would you feel if some beautiful meadow you’d painted was under an airport? Automobiles, casinos, and internet pornography caused one or two to conclude they had actually opened their eyes in hell. A watercolourist, who had been close friends with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, killed herself on her first day. Some required emotional counselling to make their transitions successfully. Others seemed to thrive instantly on the new spectacles of life, capitalizing on opportunities right away.

Whatever the reactions, there were many questions. The state of the union? A state of Israel? The mini skirt? Did you say they walked on the moon, really? What had happened to Communism, syphilis, Abyssinia, the Kaiser, and the codfish? Fears existed that the artists might be subject to exploitation. There were unintended consequences. Vladimir Putin fell from power in a coup and was executed shortly after heckling William Turner at a G20 conference.

Auction houses trembled. The monetary value of art was turned upside down. Who would pay twenty–six million dollars for a stuffed vinyl shark in a glass tank full of mouthwash when Diego Garcia or John William Waterhouse or Thomas Hart Benton or Giotto is available and has time to kill? Selectively selling part of a collection of Van Gogh’s might not mean the income a collector could have planned on before the really great dead artists came back.

So yes, there were practical problems to be sure. Some of the artists spoke in disappeared dialects, had strange accents, or used words in obsolete ways. This was especially true when trying to find language for things new to them. Appropriate food and clothing had to be found.

Translators, art historians and sociology majors were recruited. They acted as mediums, did their best to provide answers. There were logistical matters of citizenship, prescription eye glasses, personal hygiene, estate settlements, driver’s licenses, taxation, paternity. Nothing that UNESCO, the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization, couldn’t handle.

True, the really great dead artists were hardly zombies but not all of them were in the best of shape. Gauguin was rough. Van Gogh, you know the thing with the ear, he did it again before his Xanax kicked in and he deeply upset a group of French school children. There were other episodes. Before long, it began to seem like they might have been given too much freedom.

UNESCO published an open letter to the artists. To their credit, the artists responded. They assembled in New York City to hear the world’s proposals. A park was set aside straddling the most scenic stretches of the Canadian/American border. The artists were provided for handsomely. Protected and supplied, their work was to be allotted equitably to the peoples of the world.

No sooner were the artists established in their comfortable cottage studios with picture windows than they rebelled. They sent a note down to the gatehouse.

'Until, above all other troubling things, the assault on nature is stopped, there will be no more art', began the note. 'World, you do not deserve wood carvings, cathedrals, marble sculpture, portraiture, action painting, gouaches, encaustic works, watercolours, drawings, songs, jewellery, landscapes, tapestries, scrimshaws, calligraphy, poems, novels, photographs, pen-and-ink drawings, or stained glass.'

The recently dead artists had snookered humanity! As far as anybody knows, they are still up there.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009