We’d climbed up some trees on the outer edge of the
area where Danny Quantum’s rapt disciples sat and listened
to the sermon. We heard every word. Daniel knew how to
pitch his voice. He was good at this. Too good.
I said, “Don’t tell me you believe any of this nonsense.”
For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe I couldn’t
trust Mark. The cold seized my heart.
He said, “Of course not. But somebody has to keep an eye
on Daniel. Who else is going to look out for him? Especially
now.” Mark looked away as he spoke.
As far as Mark was aware, his brother was the only
person he knew from before who’d survived the ice age — or
who hadn’t left without a word in the initial panic. That
Daniel was scary, that he was dangerous, Mark wasn’t ready
to acknowledge.
A fractallized airplane blocked the intersection of St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine, its tail propped up by the ice-encrusted building on the corner, the tip of its nose run
through the storefront window of a store the ice had altered
beyond recognition. Even the force of a plane crash couldn’t
shatter the quantum ice. Briefly, I wondered if it might have
been Grandma’s plane.
Someone had painted a likeness of the transmogrified
cross on the hull, with the words
The Quantum Cross of the
Ice Age
below it. That day, everywhere we went, we noticed
fresh graffiti of the Quantum Cross, on the asphalt of the
streets, on store windows, on sidewalks, on brick walls, on
concrete blocks.
The next day, Mark and I bicycled out to the airport and
stared at the planes: massive dinosaurs with limbs of ice, gore,
metal, and plastic.
Before going home — neither my old home nor Mark’s,
but an abandoned townhouse near McGill University whose
windows faced away from Mount Royal — Mark wanted to
check in on his little brother. These days, Daniel never left
the mountain. His acolytes brought food to him. Brought
themselves to him.
I complained. “I’m too tired to bicycle all the way up
there.” More truthfully, I was increasingly queasy around
Daniel and his sycophants, and I was eager to collapse in
Mark’s arms, even though the sun hadn’t set.
He insisted.
So we wound our way up the sinuous gravel path,
occasionally encountering Daniel’s followers. Despite the
cold, they wore white T-shirts — no coats, no jackets, no
sweaters. On the shirts, in red, were crude drawings in thick
dripping lines: bloody effigies of the Quantum Cross.
When we reached the cross itself, where Daniel’s
congregation assembled, I noticed that they were all dressed
this way, no longer individuals but a hive functioning with
a single mind. Danny Quantum’s.
First I heard the singing. Mark had just beaten me at croquet
for the third game in a row. I looked around, and then I spotted
them: to the south of the croquet park, twenty or so people
walking down the Jacques Cartier Bridge into Montreal.
One of them pointed at us, and the group headed our
way. They waved and kept on singing. I thought I recognized
the song. Something from the 1960s. The kind of stuff my
parents listened to.
Mark waved back. He said, “Hold on to your mallet. If
things get rough, swing for the head and knee them in the
crotch.”
They seemed harmless. Approximately as many men
as women. Long hair. Handmade clothes. Artsy-crafty
jewellery. A bunch of latter-day hippies. The song wound
down when they reached the edge of the park. I noticed a
few of them looked more like bikers. I tightened my grip.
Only one of them came up to us. The one who looked
more
Saturday Night Fever
than
Hair
.
He said, “Peace.”
Mark said, “Hi. Where are you folks from?”
“I’m from New York City. But we’re from all over.
Vermont. Ottawa. Maine. Sherbrooke.”
Mark asked, “So, it’s like this everywhere?”
“It’s like this everywhere we’ve been. The whole world
has changed. So many tragic deaths.” But he made it sound
almost cheerful, like a TV ad.
Mark grunted. Something about Saturday Night Fever —
his calculating eyes, his used-car salesman voice — made
me distrust him immediately.
“Are you two youngsters alone? It’s safer to stay in a
large group. We’re gathering people to form a commune. To
survive in this new age. To repopulate. We need children.
Strong, healthy children.”
His eyes appraised me, lingering on my hips. I tensed
my arms, ready to swing. Mark shifted, his body shielding
me from Saturday Night Fever’s gaze.
“Well, I wish you folks the best. It sounds like a great
project.”
“You and your friend should join us. We’d be happy
to welcome you.” He addressed Mark, but his eyes kept
straying to my body.
“Thanks, but we’re good here. This is home.”
Three of the men in the group were big. Wrestler big. No
way Mark and I could stop them if they decided to add me
to their baby factory by force.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Anyway, we should be on our way. Good luck.”
Mark took my hand, and we walked away. We held on to
our mallets.
Mark slept. He didn’t know, but I’d stayed awake through
the previous two nights.
His mouth was slightly open, and he was almost snoring.
I loved all of his sounds, even the silly ones. I traced his lips
with my index finger; it didn’t rouse him, but he moaned. It
was a delicious noise.
I stared at him all night, scrutinizing every detail of
him.
Dawn broke. As Mark stirred, I pretended to sleep.
The night Danny Quantum and his followers started
sacrificing cats and dogs, I told Mark, “We have to leave.”
I was bundled under three layers of sweaters, but the cold
still bit. Even the heat from the fires around the Quantum
Cross couldn’t keep me warm. I was tempted to lean into
Mark, for warmth, for comfort, but I needed to talk to him,
and for that I had to stay focused.
“You tired?”
“No. I mean, go away. Off the island. Leave all this
behind. Find somewhere else to live. Somewhere far.
Somewhere safer.”
I wanted him to say,
Yes, I’ll go anywhere with you
.
He said, “Who’ll protect Daniel? If I go, he’ll just get
worse. He’ll be lost forever.”
“Then talk to him. Make him stop this before . . .”
“It’s not that easy. Not that simple. He doesn’t hear what
he doesn’t want to. This is his way of coping. We’ve all lost
too much.”
“You know where this is heading. Soon, it’ll be
people being shishkebabed to satisfy Danny Quantum’s
megalomania. To feed the hungry bellies of his flock.”
I didn’t look at Mark. I didn’t want his dark eyes to sway
me. I stared at the fires burning at the foot of the Quantum
Cross. I looked at Daniel, prancing and shouting. Like the
maniac that he was.
“I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Getting away from
Daniel. Far away. Find somewhere to grow food. Somewhere
with fresh water. Head south, maybe.”
Could I leave without Mark? I wanted to kiss him. Would
I ever? Even after all we’d shared, the cold still held our
hearts in its grip.
“Don’t, Martha. Don’t make me choose.” He turned
his face away from mine and stared at his brother in the
distance. When he continued, his voice was firm — firm
enough to sting. “Besides, we’ve always lived in the city.
What do you know about farming, or even about gathering
food in the wild?”
“We can learn how to survive.” Despite myself, doubt
had crept into my voice.
Was I willing to stay and let this drama play out, despite
its inevitable horrors? Wherever I would end up away from
here, there might be other Saturday Night Fevers or Danny
Quantums. Or maybe even worse.
One of Danny’s people handed Mark a wooden stick.
There was a roasted, skewered cat on it.
I said, “Are you going to eat that?”
He said, “I’ll go with you. Anywhere.”
The wind on my face, the smell of grass and trees tickling
my nose, I race down the deserted road.
Mark is with me. Laughing. I laugh, too.
In the fields there are cows. Horses. Dogs. Sometimes
people.
Some of them wave at us, smiling. Some of them shoot
at us, warning us away.
We’re not ready to stop yet.
1.
The Object of Worship
“The Object of Worship” is both a tribute and a response to
Rachel Pollack’s magnum opus,
Unquenchable Fire
, one of
my favourite novels.
Unquenchable Fire
had a tremendous
impact on my imagination. Its use of primal mythic rituals
in an urban setting and its particular manner of presenting
the strange as commonplace spoke to me quite profoundly
and proved to be very influential on my own writing. As a
work of art it has never stopped growing within me since I
first read it in 1989. The way
Unquenchable Fire
deals with
pregnancy has always disturbed me — and not necessarily in
a good way. Thus, this story — working out both the literary
influence of and my queasiness with Pollack’s complex and
alluring masterpiece.
2.
The Ethical Treatment of Meat
It’s been said by others that writing fiction is an act of
creative misreading. Certainly, that’s true of “The Object
of Worship” as a misreading of
Unquenchable Fire
. In fact,
many of my stories are partly a result of working through
intentional misreadings. But no story of mine is more
directly the result of a misreading than “The Ethical
Treatment of Meat.” I began to glimpse this story when
an ambiguity in the first paragraph of an early draft of
Dora Knez’s zombie story “The Dead Park” led me to
misunderstand which characters were zombies and which
were alive. My confusion caused me to imagine an entirely
different story than the one Dora hoped to convey. Soon
after, I saw a call for submissions for
The Book of More
Flesh
, asking for unusual zombie stories. Synchronicity is
hard to resist: my zombie idea, already unusual to start
with, continued to evolve, taking on elements from 1960s
monster sitcoms
The Munsters
and
The Addams Family
and
from Kyle Baker’s 1992 comics story “Lester Fenton and
the Walking Dead,” until it became a story of its own — and
even more unusual. My story was indeed published in
The
Book of More Flesh
in 2002, while the final version of Dora
Knez’s “The Dead Park” appeared in
Island Dreams: Montreal
Writers of the Fantastic
, which I edited the following year.
“The Ethical Treatment of Meat” has been taught in a
number of high schools around Montreal. It’s always a blast
to meet the students and discuss with them the various
issues and themes raised in this story.
3.
Hochelaga and Sons
I love superhero comics, as “Hochelaga and Sons” makes
blatantly obvious. A lifetime of superhero comics reading
fed into this story, but three sources are clearly foremost.
First, Bernie Mireault’s
The Jam
— about an ordinary
Montrealer who decides to put on a modified gym suit
and pretend to be a superhero while hanging out on
rooftops — is one of my favourite comics of the 1980s, and
the spirit of that series is all over this story, especially in
regards to the personality of the father. Second, both the
narrative point-of-view and the manner in which I play
with superhero archetypes evokes Kurt Busiek’s
Astro City
.
And, third, there’s Jack Kirby, the King of Comics and one
of the greatest cartoonists of all time. Probably, he’s an
influence in some way or other on most of what I write. But
in this case I can trace back a direct influence, from a 1963
story: “The Hate-Monger!” (
Fantastic Four
#21) — one of the
many times that Kirby explored the idea of fascism as the
ultimate form of human evil and also where we can find the
seeds of later, more ambitious explorations of that idea, for
example in
New Gods
and
OMAC: One Man Army Corps
. But
more on Kirby below, in the note on “Destroyer of Worlds.”
4.
The Sea, at Bari
Ever since early childhood, I have had a deeply mythic and
emotional connection to large bodies of water. During a
2006 trip to Europe, I found myself in Bari, Italy, barefoot
in the waters of the Adriatic Sea. With the smells, sounds,
and sights of the sea engulfing me, this story came to me,
unbidden. I composed most of it in my head right there.
That evening, I was boarding a boat for Greece. The final
pieces came into place while I was standing on deck as the
boat ventured out into the darkness of the nighttime sea.
In my cabin, I furiously typed “The Sea, at Bari” on my
laptop.
5.
The Darkness at the Heart of the World
My Lost Pages sequence — a series of six urban fantasies
focusing on a bookshop that serves as a nexus between
realities — has all kinds of mythological shenanigans going
on in the background. I wanted to explore that mythological
backstory, but freed from the concerns, characters, themes,
and overarching plot of the Lost Pages series itself. Thus
this story, in which I pay tribute to both the mythological
fantasies of Lord Dunsany and the Flat Earth stories of
Tanith Lee.
6.
Spiderkid
I’d just finished writing the first (of many!) drafts of the
long-gestating “Destroyer of Worlds” (see below), and I was
eager to tackle something else — something shorter and less
difficult to wrestle into shape. “Destroyer of Worlds” owes
a huge debt to Jack Kirby, but there was an outtake where
I’d had some fun pastiching the work of Kirby’s 1960s
Marvel Comics colleague Steve Ditko, co-creator of SpiderMan and Doctor Strange. Out of that unused snippet grew
“Spiderkid” — a loving tribute to the work of Steve Ditko,
although I’m sure the ultra-conservative Ditko would
disapprove of many elements in this story. Another irony
is that the snippet in question did not survive the final edit
of “Spiderkid” either. I still have it lurking in my files . . . I’m
hoping something else will come out of it at some point.