Stanley Park (41 page)

They’d achieved the effect on purpose, he assumed. From the cut of the suit Benny’s shape was overtly presented, but
the sexiness was balanced by the austerity of the collar. It was the same straight-funky mix that underscored their thinking of the entire space.

“Is there one for me?” Jeremy asked Dante.

“For the kitchen, classic white,” Dante said, but then his expression changed as he looked very distinctly at Jeremy’s chin. He moved away towards one of the paintings.

“Right then, give us a hand.”

They spent a few minutes turning them all face out from the wall. Each painting was framed in heavy gold. There were twelve in total, all still lifes but one, which was a grainy portrait of a naked skinhead.

“Four local artists,” Dante said. “Are we not loyal?”

“Well …,” Benny said. “Bishop and Nygoyen are actually from Seattle. Kreschkov is Toronto.”

“Attila Richard Lukacs is Vancouver, sort of,” Jeremy said, motioning to the skinhead. “How much?”

“Jeremy,” Dante said, mock disappointed. Then: “Twenty-five thou. I like it at the very back, between the kitchen doors. Thoughts?”

“People will think it’s the chef,” Jeremy said. “Like a warning.”

Dante laughed loudly. “Perfect. The back wall it is.”

Jeremy walked around the room slowly, looking carefully at each. Kreschkov’s work was beautiful and menacing. The food she depicted was raised on a shining black background, suspended at the top of a void. Much of it was also clearly rotting. The cheese had turned. The shank of meat revealed maggots. The fruit was bruised. But each silky patch of mould, each broken pit, each rejected mouthful was rendered in achingly precise strokes. Jeremy examined the surfaces minutely and imagined that these images of decay had been painted with a brush of a single hair.

Nygoyen worked with multiple panels that assembled to make the whole. One work consisted of four square canvases
arranged in a row. Another involved four canvases arranged in a larger square. If the overall image was arbitrarily segmented, Nygoyen at least painted healthy fruit and plump vines that ran from one canvas to another.

The Lukacs was vintage Lukacs, and you either did or did not like phallic National Socialist imagery. Dante had already walked the canvas to the back of the room, where it now leaned in its place between the kitchen doors.

Bishop made no attempt to conceal a debt to the Dutch Masters. The arrangements were familiar: fruit, vegetables, meat and cheese on tables, slaughtered game birds on chopping blocks, even the conical twist of newsprint, out of which spilled a bit of salt and pepper. Still, they all seemed intentionally wrong somehow. The light glanced into the frame from no definite source, throwing shadow in unexpected ways. Perspective was skewed, enlarging a dill pickle until it rivalled a watermelon on the other side of the table. (No amateurish zucchini either—the dill was next to a glass jar full of similar green oblongs, the milky liquid very clearly containing mustard seed and dillweed.)

Benny took charge of the operation and, for half an hour or so, Dante and Jeremy carted canvases up and down the riser, leaning them in various arrangements until they had the configuration just right.

They went into the kitchen afterwards and Jeremy poured iced tea. Dante sat very gingerly on one of the prep counters and waited until he had their attention. “We’re almost there,” he said, removing an apple from a basket on the counter. He took a bite.

“I’m excited,” Benny said.

Dante ignored her, sipped his tea and chewed his apple in silence. He was watching Jeremy, who felt the next part coming with a delicious side-car sense that he doubted he could ever be fired.

“Who is Charmin?” Dante asked, finally.

Benny circled away from them to avoid the conversation. She pretended instead to inspect the kitchen. She ambled behind the pick-up counter and ran a finger nonchalantly along the edge of the front eight-burner.

“Can I help you find something?” Jeremy said to her.

“Benny, up front,” Dante said without looking at her. Then to Jeremy: “Oh, fuck it.” Uncharacteristic language. He took a last bite from his apple and held it out at arm’s length and commenced staring at Jeremy. Benny, returning from behind the range top, encountered Dante’s arm with the already browning, half-eaten apple at about eye level. Unsure of its significance for a second, she finally registered the unspoken command when Dante waggled his wrist impatiently up and down.

Benny took the apple between two fingers. She carried it down the room towards the dish pit and dropped it in the garbage can.

“The beard comes off tomorrow,” Jeremy said to Dante, whose stare did not waver.

“The eighty-five-hundred-dollar shave,” Dante said.

Benny returned from the garbage, expression lost.

Dante shook his head. “Benny, show him.”

“Show him what Dante?”

“You like the uniform?” he asked Jeremy.

“I like the uniform fine,” Jeremy shrugged.

“Oh don’t,” Benny said.

“Do it,” Dante said. “Show the Chef.”

Benny turned to Jeremy, fiddling with her buttons, adjusting the front of the suit. “Albertini’s idea. He calls it aesthetic team-building.”

“It wasn’t Banks’s idea,” Dante said. “Banks only understood how to implement
my
idea. Now, Chef, I want you to imagine a set of perfect clones. Perfectly beautiful. They are dressed identically. Richly. An almost eerie combination of sex and money. Sensuous and yet efficient.”

Jeremy nodded. “Ah yes.”

“What did Albertini say?” Dante asked.

“Sexy robotic specimens,” Benny answered. Jeremy imagined the quip had been a joke coming from Banks, but nobody was smiling.

Dante finally turned to Benny, expression impatient. She began unbuttoning the front of the suit jacket, her cheeks red. He looked back to Jeremy. “Sexy robotic specimens. I like that. A dozen perfect meat puppets.”

Benny’s top was now open. She pulled the sides of the jacket away from her chest to reveal the tight top. Black sports underwear, no big deal really beyond the fact that waiters’ uniforms did not typically come with standard-issue underwear.

“Cover up,” Jeremy said to her. “Sorry.”

“Do not cover up,” Dante said. He was still sitting on the edge of the prep counter. He had not moved a muscle since this exercise in humiliation and authority had begun.

Benny began unbuttoning the pants.

“The back,” Dante said. “It’s your ass that interests me.”

She turned, dropped the back of her pants. Unisex briefs that came down the leg a few inches. Again tight.

Jeremy was resisting the urge to leave his own kitchen. “What?” he said to Dante.

Dante opened his eyes wider, staring at Jeremy. “The tab, Chef.”

He hadn’t even noticed. In fact, he had to lean in closer to make out the words embroidered Dolce & Gabbana-style on the waistband of Benny’s briefs. She stood, breathing a little raggedly, hand on the prep counter for balance. Dante stared off into the middle distance.

The chef leaned forward across the tiles of his magnificent kitchen.

He read:
Gerriamo’s—Welcome to the Inferno
.

He had a sense that it was time to get going. Ideas forming, a swell picking up on his mental seas. He had a sense of the forest around him and everything in it. But he also felt something that he hadn’t felt in years, maybe not since those very first days, first months.

Caruzo responded to it. He went to where the Babes in the Wood were. He found the trail. The secret offshoot. The crush of ferns, the leaning trees that did not touch the sacred ground. He went to the edge of the moss. Right there, he put his hands flat on the ground. Both hands, side by side, the thumb and index fingers touching. His heart beat faster, painfully. He sat in the salal. Sat and could not move, his legs sticking out in front of him, temporarily useless. He managed only to pull a hand to his chest. A hand stiffened with weather and age. His hand hurt. His legs hurt.

Everything hurt.

But Caruzo felt a degree of certainty that they were near. First time in a long, long time, this feeling. Them right close.

“Frankie,” he said to the fern. “Johnny,” to the moss.

They had both been face down. Red plaid jackets. Aviator helmets with toy goggles upturned. Bodies tattered inside their clothes.

It grew dark without Caruzo noticing the day disappear. There was light, then less. Then much less. Deep in the forest he
did not see the sunset, did not feel the heat of its orange glow.

He made to move, but couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.

He pressed his back into bark of the fir tree behind him, pressed his shoulder blades around the trunk, holding it. And finally the smaller lights began to wink out between the trees, pierce the blackness all around. He let the lights penetrate to him, find him.

“Frankie,” he said. “Johnny.” They were close. They stood in the salal behind him, he thought. Silent as they often were.

Caruzo folded his legs under him, pulling his shins with his hands. It took all his effort and, when he was finished, he clamped his shoulder blades against the tree and did not move again. They were very close now, one on either side. Frankie. Johnny.

There was a way to rise above yourself in this forest, it came to him. There was a way to have your sight carried high above your own head, up and up, through the trees. You closed your eyes and let the tiny hands hold you. Caruzo did this now and he felt them draw near. Still silent. And then the small hands clutched his sleeves and pulled him up, just as he had known they would, through the cedar trunks to the canopy. They held him there, very high.

He could see the Professor from here, curled inside his tent, asleep. He slept on a field of yellow pages, thousands and thousands of tiny words like wild flowers under him. He slept a peaceful sleep tonight. Utterly without dreams.

They carried Caruzo further. They spun him around like a beacon in a lighthouse and broadcast his sight over the entire park. Siwash, always. In the forest outside his bunker. At the edge of the cliff, holding the green glowing box in one hand and his blade in the other. He was weeping in anger. In fear.

Chladek sat in the bridge supports, rocking back and forth. Smoking and thinking, a square green bottle balancing on the I-beam next to him.

Caruzo floated. He turned, smiled to himself. There
were other fires, other people. And to the east there was the city, a blaze of activity, Jeremy in it. He was setting the future just then. Deciding what came next. His face glowed white. Pale and certain.

And for a time these faces and lights and sounds filtered up to Caruzo, and the tiny hands held his arms, and the tiny forms pressed against his sides, holding him high in his impossible perch. He drank in the flow of these sensations like wine. He drank it in until it had been absorbed. He was filled. He was overflowing. He thought to rise again now, up past the trees, out of the forest and into the clear, black sky.

“Frankie,” Caruzo whispered. “Johnny.”

But their forms had vanished, their light touch fluttered away. Caruzo began to descend towards the earth. The wind picked up on his face; he fell gently. He slid between the highest branches of the trees, through the canopy, skating along the trunks and vines. Bursting through the salal, then the scrub. Plunging faster as the distance to the earth narrowed. Speeding and speeding, the air now pasting his hair to his head, howling in his ears. The ground inches, millimetres, microns away. The red strewn forest floor. The soil with its billion particles.

There were lights all around him. Lights in the forest. Lights in the earth. It all glowed, its shape and every one of its individual grains. A person might slide among these grains. Become a part of the composite. Slide into the leaf, the twig, the earth. Be made one, at last.

Caruzo put his head on the ground. His ear filled with dry leaves that made no sound. A root pressed his cheek without sensation.

The lights and the trees shimmered together. He shimmered himself. He grew warmer for a time. Each of his own grains warm and very, very light.