“The same. You know the ‘Global Village’ section they run?”
Of course he knew, and he nodded mutely.
“They’re doing a Pacific Rim feature. Do you have any idea what their circulation is?” Here he glanced across at his younger colleague.
Philip responded without looking up: “250,000 worldwide. They’re huge in England. Sweet demos. Average income coming in at something like a hundred grand U.S.”
“Hip with money,” Dante said, smiling meanly. “Travel budget, Philly?”
“A lot,” Philip said, starting on his salad.
“Average number of languages spoken?”
Philip looked up from his plate. “Two and a half. The one with the most research rodents wins.”
Dante looked up at Jeremy, suggesting a response would be appropriate.
“So, what …,” Jeremy stammered. “Have they been through here already?”
Dante laughed out loud, some heads turned. “Of course not, Jeremy. But they only review who they like anyway.”
“And …” He wasn’t sure how to ask this question without seeming ungrateful, but he came up with: “And why would they like me, exactly?”
Dante sighed, disappointed that Jeremy didn’t just thank them and leave. “Jeremy,” he said finally, “journalists only know what’s hip because people tell them what’s hip.”
Philip took the tag. “They’re hot on this dawning of the Pacific Century idea. We just shot ’em some of that stuff. Shot ’em some of that stuff on a slant. Don’t worry, it’s all messaging. Keywords to take out the demographic target.”
“Well, thank you,” Jeremy said. “Thanks both of you, very much.”
“How’s your father?” Dante asked politely, moving the conversation along and inclining a little forward as he spoke.
Jeremy stumbled on the question, guilt leaching into his consciousness. “He’s fine.”
“We used to play chess on the odd Wednesday, he and I,” Dante said. “But it’s been several months now. Seems I keep missing him.”
“Oh, he’s around,” Jeremy said, growing nervous with the questions. He had the absurd passing sense that Dante knew of his father’s whereabouts and disapproved. Where was his father right now? Sitting cross-legged at the fire, duck grease on his chin, eyes animated as he talked with Caruzo about the Babes in the Wood, Siwash or one of the other tangled stories that consumed him.
But Dante only reached out his left hand to shake Jeremy’s. He stayed seated, and Jeremy gripped the proffered hand, which fit awkwardly in his own and made him feel like they were holding hands, not shaking at all. Dante squeezed tightly.
“I am really happy about how things are going here,” he said smiling. “And I am not surprised either. You are really very good.”
He was shaking Jeremy’s hand slowly back and forth, his fork squeezed in the fist of his other hand.
“Will you call me this week?” Dante asked, releasing him. “We could talk …”
“I killed ’em,” Jeremy called to Jules as he burst into the kitchen.
“Yolkless omelettes and canned peaches,” she said without looking up from the grill. “Who would have thought?”
They ran late. The last table was finally gone after midnight, and Zeena locked the front door. Dominic turned up the music, and they all danced in and out of the kitchen carrying
dishes and trays. Jeremy offered to make a late family meal and set a table for them.
“Frittata,” he announced, sliding a large plate into the centre of the table and beginning to cut slices. “Made with both the yolk and the white.”
“Wine, please,” Zeena said, holding out a water tumbler.
Jeremy got a bottle of Spanish red for them and poured. Standing there with the bottle in his hand, their glasses full and rising to their lips, he said: “I love you all.”
“That’s sweet, sugar,” Jules said, and then to Zeena: “How’d it go?”
“Awesome,” Zeena said.
They ate. They helped the dishwasher clean up. Afterwards Zeena and Jules danced because Dominic had to leave and Jeremy didn’t feel like it. He was on his fourth glass of wine, his fifth even, and found himself struggling to relax into the pleasant feelings he normally felt at this hour. He enjoyed watching the two of them tango around the kitchen to Astor Piazzolla, their faces glowing red. Stopping to smoke a joint Zeena produced from a pill bottle in her purse, then tangoing off again across the tiles, laughing. The truth was, he loved this time, when they ate what he fed them, as much as any other time he could imagine.
But he was thinking about unkept promises too, each sip of wine deepening a pull like gravity that was overwhelming his enjoyment of the moment, and the more practical impulse to get to bed and rest up for what would hopefully be an even busier Friday night.
“Let’s go to a club,” Zeena said.
“Yes,” Jules was saying. “Let’s all go to a club.”
A good Thursday behind them. Dollars in the deposit pouch. Dante’s partnership less a foreseeable requirement now than at any time since that first phone call from Quan three months after opening. There was every reason to celebrate.
And here I am, Jeremy mused, thinking only that the Professor would like to hear about these developments.
“I can’t,” he said to Jules and Zeena. He called them a cab, gave the driver ten dollars to get them up into Yaletown.
“You’re a terrible bore,” said Zeena.
“Bye, doll,” Jules said, and she leaned out the door to peck his cheek, but Jeremy caught the back of her neck with one hand and gave her a good hard kiss. She pulled the cab door shut, looking back at him curiously. Just before they bounced out of sight at the end of the alley, they both waved out the back window. Two little white hands.
He locked up quickly and walked up through Cross-town towards the density of downtown. The streets were shining, and the prostitutes were floating at the mouths of alleys like salmon waiting for their turn to run the rapids, tired but determined. He strode across downtown, picking up steam and speed as he sipped from a wineskin he had topped up with Sangre de Toro before leaving. He couldn’t explain his mood as he loped down through the West End, among the apartment buildings, and passed his own without a glance.
The lagoon was black. He wasn’t sure he could even see ducks out there at all. He stood at the cherry trees, sipping from his wineskin, wondering what to do next. And then he pushed himself off between the trees, down to the path, where he started off at a trot for the far forest.
He began by looking for the spot where they had caught their canvasback for dinner, the only way he could think of beginning to retrace his steps and find the Professor’s camp. But no single cluster of bulrushes was particularly distinguishable from any other. He tried searching for anything familiar, going first one direction and then another along paths that petered out in a few yards or wound away in the wrong direction. Above him a milky moon was trying and failing to squeeze its light down through the branches, and Jeremy stumbled pointlessly in circles and drank still more from the wineskin.
He found one trail that looked like the right one. He followed it into the forest, counting steps, trying to imagine where the sudden turnoff had come. Imagining the point from which he had stood and heard the song sung low:
With an hoste of furious fancies, / With a burning speare, and a horse of air
… And when he was sure he’d found the spot, he slogged deeper into the dense brush and realized he had found … well, nothing. No tree root, no upturned boulder. No place to climb onto the back of a great fallen cedar to observe the forest lying about him, to highway through the darkness to secret places. Instead, hanging bushes pressed down onto his head and shoulders, forcing needles under the collar of his jacket and down between his sweating shoulder blades. Forced him to see his own hand in front of him now, slashing uselessly at the darkness and the salal leaves with the Sabatier.
He froze, seeing it. He sobered. He woke up from a kind of sleep, feeling the familiar weight of it in his hand and the strong immediate sense of what a bad idea it had been to return to the kitchen, to find the magnetic knife rack without turning the lights back on, to feel it out with his hands, gently, wrap it in a tea towel and stick it in the waistband of his pants.
“Jesus,” Jeremy said aloud. “What am I doing?”
He stood still for many minutes. Listening to the forest. Sounds became apparent among the trees, sounds beyond the steady hiss of leaves and needles brushing one another, sounds coming through the million frictions in the canopy above. Voices. The sound of movement, of life and activity. It couldn’t be the Professor. Jeremy knew he had not accidentally stumbled so far up into the forest. Accidentally found a spot which had taken them thirty minutes of walking from the lagoon, after which he had been so disoriented he couldn’t have pointed a finger in the direction of downtown. Only the ocean had given him any bearing. That sliver of water from high on a cliff.
There was no cliff here. He was at a low point, somewhere near the park’s epicentre. And around him rose the forest, full of life. He was at the bottom of a well of hidden activity. He pushed the knife back into his waistband, took another long drink of wine, and considered he was lost and did not care.
There was a nurse log covered in moss and ferns lying on a low ridge that ran away to his right. He climbed along it on his hands and knees, peering ahead. And as he crawled, he saw the flicker of campfire come winking through the trees, first from his right, then his left. Voices became clearer. He could make out the peculiar feline mewl of a baby crying.
A guitar plucked in the near distance. A metal pot scraped against a rock.
He crawled further. At a fire through the forest ahead he identified the source of the baby’s cry, quieted now in the muffle of a heavy blanket, held in the arms of a bent figure, a woman, crouched near familiar low flames in a narrow trench. The woman rocked the child, sitting on the ground near the heat. As he watched, there was a disturbance in the brush on the far side of the fire, and two men emerged from the darkness and entered the low ring of light. One looked carefully into the darkness, his eyes passing slowly over Jeremy hidden in the blackness, while the other crouched and opened a black plastic bag. He removed items for inspection. Food, Jeremy realized. A pastry box, some apples. And then small grey shapes laid next to one another in a furry row. They were squirrels.
The two men warmed their hands in front of the flames while the woman spoke to them in a quiet, steady tone and rocked the baby. Jeremy sat in the darkness straining to hear, far enough outside himself and any experience he had ever had to pause and consider that he was eavesdropping, peeping like a Tom, hovering like a ghost, or a god, or a conqueror in ambush.
It wasn’t English, but an entirely unfamiliar string of sounds. Like insect sounds. Clicks and whirrs pushed from
behind the tongue, hissing fricatives spilling into the still air. Popping epiglottis, singing in the blue night. An ancient-sounding tongue that mirrored the sound of cedar branches hitting one another in the wind overhead, or the sound of wave slaps on algae-ed stone, the sound of sappy softwood popping in a dying fire.
After they were finished talking the figure holding the baby passed it, wrapped and invisible, to the younger of the two men. Then moved with the woman into the spill of darkness beyond the ring of fire, gently entwined and rolled to the ground. Jeremy could hear the crack of twigs on the forest floor, and see the two shapes briefly writhe, find their positions against one another, then steady into a shared rhythm. It took him a moment to realize what he was now watching. Not specifically intending to see anything, and now having seen and heard more than the three figures might have wished him to see. And, as if to confirm this impression, the solitary figure by the fire placed the baby in the fold of some ferns and slowly rose from his haunches. He turned from the fire so slowly that Jeremy had to watch carefully to see whether he moved at all, and when he was facing Jeremy, facing the darkness, he began to inspect the forest with studied interest.
Jeremy backed slowly down the nurse log, careful to thread his legs through the bristling huckleberry. The baby re-commenced its crying, its slow wail spilling after him. The fresh red eyes pinched shut, feeling the night and the fern and forest around itself. Feeling the heat of the man’s chest as he turned and scooped it into his arms. Sensing me here, Jeremy thought, and joining its voice were the sounds of the forest that followed him in his retreat.
Then the cry split into two, and he felt drunkenly certain that what he had taken for a baby had, in fact, been two babies. He climbed down off the log, and as he generously spilled wine onto the front of himself and down his neck, his thoughts spilled one onto another. He began to walk slowly,
examining the forest around him with minute interest. The base of a tree here. The bend of a salal bush there. He felt the natural looping of his own path through the landscape. He made large useless circles through the trees, stopping now and again to replenish the inspirational buzz in his head with a draw on the wineskin. Circling. Circling.
“Where are you?” he said at one point, talking to the darkness, the living and the dead that it held.
The forest finally rejected him, burped him up on the edge of the lagoon, tired and sobering up badly. His path had traversed the park from firelight to firelight, through the unmarked graveyard of the forest floor to a bench on the familiar pathway around the lagoon.
There were half a dozen Canada geese sleeping nearby, silent in the nighttime cool. And in the dark, as the last of the wine burned itself out inside him, Jeremy pulled the Sabatier out of his waistband and balanced it in his right hand, enjoying the dull light that the blackened carbon-steel blade still seemed to shed. The secret of the knife was its hand-forged, feathered tang, which gave it legendary balance. But Jeremy wondered now if its secret was also that a father had presented it to a son on his return from afar, and that it now filled the son’s hand weightlessly like a talisman. The Professor, meanwhile, slept soundly in the blackness behind him, dry under the plastic sheeting, in need of little. His fire would be smudged out, the embers buried in wet fern. Somewhere in the forest nearby would be duck bones, slowly disappearing into the mouths of ants and beetles, into the gullets of crows and the stomach of the earth itself.