CHAPTER 10

It is difficult to feel natural in striped pyjamas that should have been changed two weeks ago, but who has other pyjamas, inside a big black foreign car with several gunsels also in black, in fact to be sitting between two large and probably Slavic gunsels if that isn't a racist observation, in the back seat, and because this was back then, with one's bare feet up on the bump in the middle of the floor that he never had understood but it was something to do with the driveshaft or transmission or something, n'est-pa? But he had never been able to sit in the middle of the back seat, and especially next to serge overcoats, and especially next to black serge anything in the canine days of August if that is what it still was. He always got nauseated in the back seat in the middle, especially if there was fabric anywhere near his skin or eyes.

"I may vomit," he said, reciting the best line he had ever heard M pronounce on a stage.

"Like shaddup and listen to the radio," said the gunsel in the death seat up front. Solicitously, perhaps, said gunsel turned up the sound.

"Aprilllll love, is for the very yu-hung" opined the vapid voice that emanated from the tinny dashboard of the Daimler.

CFUZ was playing a whole hour of Pat Boone songs, and the radio was not tuned quite right. Boone's voice, which usually sounded as if it came from a throat that had been simonized and freed of all nodes, now had a kind of dryer-lint margin to it.

"I wonder, could you get something on CBC?" asked G.

"Shaddup, like," expounded a Slav.

"They play the Archers around this time of the morning," G persisted.

A hard object introduced itself between the two halves of his jammies. G was happy if that is not an inappropriate word in such a circumstance, that it felt cold. He was quick enough to fear that these guys could have been the agents of Franklin Garshaw's misfortune in the Roundtowner. He looked around for clues, hotel matches, a towel with a name on it.

No luck.

G hated being in the middle of the back seat of a crowded Limey car while it was going over the Lion's Gate Bridge. He hated going over the Lion's Gate Bridge, because it was so high and so old and so narrow, and they didn't have anything like it back in Lawrence, B.C. in the middle of the gentle Okanagan Valley, where he wished he was right now, a sentiment he did not remember having during peach-picking season. Peach-picking always made him feel nauseated. He had often upchucked in orchards.

He had often upchucked while listening to Pat Boone, but this had usually happened just outside the kitchen of someone's apartment. Once he upchucked a combination of Old Niagara Port and onion pizza on Fee McMannic's raincoat.

They had reached the other end of the Lion's Gate Bridge, and the Slav at the wheel stomped the gas pedal and got through the toll gate free. Then they proceeded west, along Marine Drive. G was awake enough now to be frightened, he told himself. He looked past the swart faces on either side of him to the ambient bourgeois life on either side of the verdant road. He did not know anyone in this part of the world, so his minimal activity was done without hope, without irony, without breakfast, but with an annoying stomach flavour in the back of his throat.

On a cedar shingle roof, among stray pine cones and what looked like a dozen issues of the old yellowed and baton-shaped Vancouver Province, he espied a man and a woman performing illustration 47.a of The Illustrated Kama Sutra. She was holding his ankle high. He was wearing a mortar-board on his head.

"It's enough to make you puke," said the gunsel in the death seat.

"Speaking of puking . . . ."

"Shaddup," suggested the gunsel in the left rear seat.

"Writing love letters in the sand," added Pat Boone.

"I wonder whether he ever thought of writing love letters on the side of the brewery," mused G.

All the gunsels turned their silent meaningful faces to him. As these included the driver of a large foreign car with the steering wheel on the wrong side, on a road that turned every time it had just turned, G decided to shaddup.

Why aren't these gunsels wearing fedoras, he wondered. A clue to remember when he spoke to the authorities without irony later on. If he ever got to talk to the authorities.

At this moment A was probably talking to the authorities on the telephone, telling them that he had disappeared in his pyjamas, again.

No such luck. Because with the irony shared between author and reader we are privy to the information that at this moment A was indeed on the telephone, her other hand idly looking for a less-full ashtray, but she was chatting with Rhonda Toogood, a sensible friend recently arrived from Toronto, telling her about something that had happened in the woods near a clearing on a Gulf island just after the War. If G had known about this he would have been relieved that at least a call to Rhonda was not long distance.

G watched the granite cliffs going by, the far shiny ocean on the other side. They had not turned down the hill to Horseshoe Bay. They were headed to the far north! Think think think think, he urged himself. Puke puke puke puke, his essential self replied. Think, he insisted, all this in his very loud head. Get all the details right for later. How come these guys were not wearing hats? What did they pitch playing cards into during their long periods of enforced idleness? Who killed Cock Robin? Shut the fuck up! You always throw that question in at inappropriate moments. What is the meaning of life? Shaddup.

The last time he had been in the back seat of a car was on the way to Seattle, and he had felt somewhat nauseated, that is for certain, but at least although he had not been sitting next to a window in the profmobile, he had reached across the promising heat of the personage to his right to crank it open a slit and allow the clam-scented air to bathe his face. And he had been sitting nigh not a gunsel but a damsel, sweetish Dorcus Davenport, a damson if there ever was one in the Green Room at the University on the Hill. Now this very Davenport was M's obsession. "What orbs, what fixtures, what recipience, what cosigns!" M had often exclaimed, his hand in his chin whiskers. "I would give my collection of Red Ryder comics and all my Mario Lanza '45s for a half hour of her chunnility," he appended.

"Really, chunnility, this is a word?" sneered Tommy P, a barbecued chicken leg in his gloved hand.

"She is chunnilitous!" averred M. His hand strayed from his beard and tentatively approached the dome of his head, then retreated chinward.

This all happened last Autumn, on a bench at a bus stop on Denman and Burrard. Crisp maple leaves gathered around the feet of these worthies. Tommy P's famous white teeth flashed among the flesh.

Anyway, in the flashback before that flashback, G was sitting beside Dorcus in the back of the green Oldsmobile. He did not know his lines, or rather M's lines in Our Town Cops Pleas, but on previous occasions he had somehow, miraculously, known the lines at the very last second, onstage, under lights, makeup drying on his face. He would give himself to the gods yet again. Besides, he was teleporting the spirit of M. He would open his mouth and M's stentorous voice would emerge, ending as M always did each thespian phrase, with a short whine meant to sound like something from Stratford on Avon. Besides, G had more immediate maters at hand.

His left hand, to be exact, though in the best of circumstances he liked to employ the dexter. Dorcus offered not a complaint. In fact at one point she placed her right leg, which had been atop the left, beside it, and fortuitously, beside G's left. These legs were attired, as was the custom of campus starlets of the time, in black stockings that did not shine and could not stretch. Said stockings were obfuscated at one end in desert boots such as Pat Boone fans were wont to wear save when they could get hold of white bucks, and at the other end by a mid-length tweed or plaid skirt, often featuring pleats. "Campus," this outfit bespoke. "The Arts." Yes, and "Kurosawa."

Sometimes these black stockings had wrinkles at and around the knees. Sometimes, if one were lucky, round holes, through which mucilage-hued skin made itself known.

His gorge rose from time to time. Especially while plummy Arthur recited such renowned poems as "There was an old Codger from Wales," and "There was a Young Darling from Dallas." Sometimes when the maniaquess at the wheel wrenched the sedan back onto a southbound lane of Highway 99, Arthur Maguay's corduroy-clad leg would crush his own, alas. But nature and science have a way of evening things out. His gorge, he decided, if he were given time, would be expended to his starboard side, perhaps just as a final quintuplet was being launched.

These black stockings, then. Sometimes, sad to say, they were a kind of trouser outfit, called "tights" even if they were not. They had been conjured by a disappointed lifelong scholar of the Belarus Kabbahla. They were always too snug or overly loose at the waist. They allowed no air to pass outward or inward. They looked sad on clotheslines. Their only felicitous use was as bonds with which to secure wrists to bedposts. They were flags flown by sere nihilists. They had to be purchased from ashamed stores in the less-sunny streets of downtown Vancouver. They were worn by ballet dancers more interested in pain than Venus. Tommy P had a pair dragging from the back bumper of his roadster for a winter.

Fortunately, fatefully, Dorcus was not wearing such an outfit. Her blackness stopped halfway up her loafy thighs, where oldfashioned garters such as your grandmother might have worn in West Summerland secured the stockings against unrolling and sagging. The injury done to her presumably whitish skin was imaginable but not, finally, of the first importance to G. G was a whiz now, taking advantage of every lurch of the sedan, his gorge suggesting itself while his sweating fingers insinuated, and that was the story. Later in Seattle Dorcus did not even look at him when she passed the salt.

But now in the purring Daimler that was approaching the obvious economic structure of Britannia Beach, oblivious as its driver to the political nuance of that community's title, G's woebeworn pyjamas had given way to his aroused yard, and two gunsels recoiled as best they could against the upholstered walls of the touring car. G's memory-filled roscoe stood as a young man's roscoe might stand, swaying slightly at its proud one-eighth of a meter.

"Get rid of that thing or we will get rid of it for you," remonstrated the more protected gunsel in the death seat, where just a few moments before G had been imagining poet and playwright Prester John.

"Stick 'em up!" intoned G.

He had not wanted to say any such thing. There was something that came over him at such moments, a weakness for jests on the precipice, a stupidity unknown among his confreres.

The Daimler crunched gravel, and came to rest in a small quarry beside Highway 101. Three of the four gunsels in black took the pyjama boy outside the vehicle and hit him several times with stones they especially fancied. "Are you sorry? Say you're sorry," one of them requested.

But G was still, despite the pain and the sudden loss of his eyeglasses, in the grip of his unrecommended impulse. "Each petrific blow is like a sudden flash of light," he managed to say. They hit him twelve more times, taking turns. Then they hurled his limp body into the car, this time permitting him only the floor with the bump in the middle of it. He did not feel like upchucking. Nothing was about to rise. Until Paul Anka sang something about his fetching high school teacher. The hour had passed.

G was lying on the floor, without spectacles, so he did not see the man hitchhiking southward on the highway. The driver was sitting on the right hand side of the car instead of the left, so he did not really notice this semi-spectral figure. The two gunsels in the back seat were stomping G with their Bulgarian-looking shoes. The gunsel in the death seat may have noted the hitchhiker but he made no mention of him.

We are interested in this figure because he was D, clad in wrinkled gabardine slacks that were probably not his, and a sweatshirt upon which one might in decent light make out the words SQUAMISH SON ET LUMIERE. Now we know that D had always detested the North American habit of wearing clothing with words on it, no matter the language. Even when he purchased shirts with the label from Davenport's Discount Clothier hidden inside the collar, he scissored the offending words away. So what are we to make of this morbid figure beside the road in broad daylight, oversized huaraches flapping on his narrow feet?

Back in Kitsilano A was conversing with Rhonda Toogood. She was telling Rhonda about the adventure she had had with a fraternity boy who had made the mistake of feeding her creamed onions.

M at that very moment was consuming creamed onions, along with baked ham and green beans and mashed potatoes at the groaning board of a large family in Kerrisdale. Each member of the family was wondering which other member of the family had invited this handsome young man with the luxuriant beard and the practiced way with a fork and knife. Some of them were wondering what might have happened to his hair.

Arthur Maguay was in bed with Dorcus Davenport in West Point Grey. Well, not a bed, precisely. Rather a pair of air mattresses on Maguay's floor. The air mattresses slipped and skidded, turned over and flipped endways, as they might have been intended to do at the beach. "Here's a good one," said Arthur. "A lazy old Scot in Beirut . . . ." Dorcus was already starting to giggle.

Angus Carey was impressing the living shit out of a sophomore. "Listen," he said, standing with thumbs under imaginary vest. "If there was a man sitting in the forest trying to make the sound of one hand clapping, and the tree he was sitting under fell on him, and there was no one else in the forest within ear-shot, would there be, after this failed Bhuddist was no more among the living, any sound?" The sophomore had not heard anything after the word "clapping," and was still wondering about that. "Forget the tree," said Angus. "Suppose he managed to make the sound of one hand clapping in that forest. Would there be any sound? The sophomore did not know. "Suppose," said Angus, "that you are driving a big black car through the darkness at the speed of light, and you turned on the knob that is suppose to ignite the headlights. Would the headlights light up the way ahead?"

"Well, I suppose so," said the sophomore, "if they were working."

Angus Carey smiled his I have you in my trap smile. He continued the questions. "If there was suddenly a giantific flash of light over the North Shore mountains, and no one happened to be looking in that direction at the time, would there be any flash of light, in fact?"