The Book of Stanley Page 25

In the room Tanya shared with Maha, a bottle of sparkling water sat like a consolation prize on her night-stand. Tanya’s whole body felt as her legs had before, and the room went dark. In bed she considered removing the teddy, walking to Stanley’s room, and asking him, one last time, if he could deny himself these myriad pleasures. But when Tanya opened her eyes again all was dark, and she could hear Maha breathing in the bed across from her.

  SIXTY

  At the sound of glass breaking, Stanley gathered his most prized belongings: two photos of Frieda and a painted rock Charles had given him in kindergarten. If he lost these, he would forget everything. Then Stanley moved through the house to rouse the others, so quickly he hardly touched the floor.

  Swooping Eagle did not want to leave. There were too many sacred objects in the house. Wasn’t he God, or an approximation? Surely he could stop a fire.

  “I tried,” he said, in the kitchen, as Swooping Eagle pulled crystals from a cupboard. Creaks echoed from the second floor and smoke swirled through the upper half of the room. Swooping Eagle ignored his demands and continued to pack, so Stanley carried her out and met the others on the front lawn.

  Outside, the pilgrims and protesters dragged their tents and displays away from the house. Maha consoled Swooping Eagle. “Who would do this to me?” She turned to Stanley and wiped the tears away with her blackened hands. “Why am I being punished?”

  The fire department arrived and attempted to save the house, but it was too late. The volunteers had blankets for everyone, and words of encouragement for Swooping Eagle. Protesters claimed they were reaping what they had sown, and a small fight broke out. Police officers rushed over to break it up. A neighbour came out with coffee cups on a tray, and crackers with sliced cheddar, for Swooping Eagle and her guests.

  Stanley took this opportunity to sneak away. He slipped out of the yard, past several spooked pilgrims, and up the side of Tunnel Mountain.

  He reached a spot above the Banff Centre, deserted and covered by trees. In the darkness, Stanley jumped up. The wind, atop and above Tunnel Mountain, was warmer than he had expected. Over the mountain and the golf course, into the deep valley and along the highway, he flew. The night was faintly lit by a crescent moon and the occasional flash of headlights.

  It felt presumptuous and arrogant to fly horizontally, so Stanley moved through the July air with his feet down and his head up. There was a small body of water adjacent to the railroad tracks that he could not name, as he was familiar only with the highway view. From above, at night, this was a baffling and–Alok was right–haunted place.

  Just outside the Banff Park gates, Stanley crossed the highway and entered Harvie Heights. He lowered himself to the ground in the sandbox of a children’s playground, between the swing set and a blue slide. The hamlet on the side of a mountain between Banff and Canmore was perfectly silent and still at three in the morning. Now and then, a warm breeze shook the pine boughs. A bat, and another, fluttered overhead. Stanley couldn’t help himself; as he always did with Frieda, in holiday destinations, he wondered about real estate prices.

  The log house was down the road from the playground and community centre. The truck was still warm, from its trip to Banff and back, and Stanley could hear muffled voices inside the house. Around back, there were two large shovels propped up against the garage.

  Darlene leaned against the cedar fence that lined the large yard, wearing a baseball uniform. “What are you going to do?”

  “Help me,” he said.

  In the vast backyard, where the property met the forest, Stanley began to dig. Darlene joined him. “What’s your goal here?”

  “Punishment, I guess.” Stanley dug quickly, while Darlene was more deliberate and careful. Her pace seemed more reasonable, so he slowed down. “They have to know I’m serious. Someone might have been killed.”

  She sighed. “Eye for an eye?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Very novel of you.”

  She had stopped shovelling and regarded him with a flat, even bored expression. Stanley dropped his shovel. “If you know what I’m supposed to be doing here, tell me. All right? These lunatics tried to kill my friends, and me. The world is full of these assholes, always has been, and since I’m…”

  Darlene climbed out of the shallow hole, walked toward the house, and returned the shovel.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Mexico, maybe.”

  “Should I be Mr. Compassionate? Mr. Empathy? What’s the point of empathizing with zealots?”

  Darlene didn’t answer. The yard was empty.

  “Fuck!” Stanley said, into the air, and picked up his shovel again. He finished the hole and ran to the house. Without slowing down, he crashed through a large pane of sliding glass. The cowboys came running. One by one, Stanley yanked their arms out of their sockets and left them to howl and writhe on the floor.

  Overbite stared up at the ceiling and said, even in his agony, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”

  The woman was upstairs, sitting in her bed. She held up a cross and screamed. “Get back, Satan. Get back. For I am protected.”

  Stanley lifted the woman out of her bed and tossed her into the nearest wall, with just enough force to stun her. She moaned and cursed him. Then Stanley sent her floating downstairs with the others. He did not harm them further, and felt a bit nauseous over what he had already done. They continued to call out and castigate him, quoting from Revelation.

  He tossed them outside and dropped them into the hole. Just fleetingly he thought, as they cursed and damned him, that they should not be allowed to speak. And in the next instant they were silent. They opened their mouths and no sounds came out.

  “Well,” said Stanley, “that’s new.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  Maha sat across from two police officers, a man and a woman. Both wore uniforms, which surprised her. On television, the interrogators always wore cheap suits. And offered their subjects something to drink.

  They had been asking if anyone at the house had discussed insurance settlements recently, and Maha had been saying no. She was impressed by the number of ways they could ask the same question. They had already spoken to Kal and Tanya so it must have been at least their twentieth time.

  “Someone is trying to kill us. Isn’t it obvious?”

  The policewoman tapped the table with her fingers. “Why would someone want to do that?”

  “Because we frighten them. We have genuine faith. We have a leader. We–”

  “Thanks,” said the policeman, a tall man with perfectly clear skin and rosy cheeks. “You already told us all that, and so did your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  The police officers looked at one another briefly, and smiled.

  “Did you hear anything?” said the policewoman. “Breaking glass?”

  “Something, but I couldn’t tell if it was real or in my dream. Then the Lord came and whisked us out.” Maha squeezed the plush white lamb she had rescued, her sleeping companion since the third grade. “There wasn’t time to take much.”

  “And the Lord’s name is Stanley Moss.” The policeman wrote something in his notepad. “The other two didn’t call him ‘the Lord.’ What is he the Lord of?”

  “What do you think? The universe. All creation.”

  “Gosh, we’re lucky to have him here in Banff. But why, do you think, would the Lord allow someone to burn his house down? The Lord is omniscient and omnipotent, isn’t he?”

  Maha looked down at her hands, which were still black. They hadn’t given her time to wash them. All she could taste and smell were smoke and fire. “The Lord has a sort of amnesia. He doesn’t remember Mohammed, for example. His powers are growing slowly.”

  “Our research suggests that the Lord is a retired florist from Edmonton.”

  “Oh, that’s just his corporeal form.”

  The policeman looked up from
his notepad. “His what?”

  “Corpo and then real. Put them together and it’s a new word.”

  The policewoman ignored this. “What has the Lord asked of you, Maha?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, really?”

  “Nothing.”

  The policewoman leaned over the table and spoke in a near-whisper. “You’re a pretty girl. He never asks you to show him anything, or to touch him?”

  Maha wanted them punished. “Never.”

  “You don’t have an intimate relationship?”

  “It’s very intimate.” Tears flooded into Maha’s eyes. “I grew up feeling him, but I thought he was someone else. Now I know him, personally. I live with him. My heart is his and I am here to serve him.”

  Maha felt as though she had been too honest, as though she had somehow betrayed the Lord by telling the police about him. But she pushed the feeling away. The Lord embodied honesty and his disciples ought to follow his example.

  “What do your parents think of your new religion?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You aren’t speaking to them?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  The policewoman made a note and shook her head. “Do you know where we can find the Lord, have a chat with him?”

  “No.”

  “Where had you planned to meet?”

  “We didn’t. But the Lord knows our minds and he can find us anywhere.”

  The policeman looked up from the notepad. His partner nodded. “You sure are lucky, to be close to the Lord.”

  “I am blessed to have been called here.” Something occurred to Maha. “If you want to speak to the Lord, just come to the gathering.”

  “That’s at the high school.” The policewoman turned to the policeman. “We heard about that from your pals. What do you think will happen?”

  “I think we’ll all be transformed. Alok says the Lord is here because the land is dying. Or coming back to life, one or the other. Alok says he’s going to reinvent the atmosphere of sacredness in the world. Ritual and myth and intuition are lost to us, because we’ve literalized our religions.”

  “Who’s Alok?”

  Maha sighed. She did not want the police bothering Alok. “He’s sort of our spiritual guide, but leave him alone. Some fundamentalists–not Muslim ones–kidnapped him and he had a heart attack. We’re an oppressed people, you see? That’s why I’m here, covered in smoke.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  The policeman laughed without looking up from the notepad. “Ten to one he’s the big guy we’re guarding at the hospital.”

  “Leave him alone. He’s sick and doesn’t need to be patronized.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?” The policewoman sounded sympathetic but to Maha it was really the opposite of sympathetic. Maha was glad the Lord was not here to discover how she really felt about the policewoman. “We’re patronizing you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would that be z or s in patronizing?”

  “It depends,” said Maha. “Do your sympathies lie with America or the United Kingdom?”

  The policeman shrugged. “America.”

  “Then z.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I suspect,” said the policewoman, “that you just patronized my partner.”

  “Can I leave now?”

  The officers looked at one another, and seemed to come to a silent decision. Then the policewoman offered her hand to shake. “Would you do us the courtesy of phoning in and telling us when your Lord returns?”

  “When he returns from the desert.” The policeman slapped his partner lightly on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “Get it? Jesus, in the desert, tempted by the Devil?”

  The policewoman said, “Yes. We get it.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  One afternoon, in her late twenties, Tanya Gervais was honest with her therapist. At the end of the session, he declared her a possible sex addict. She laughed at her therapist in his East Vancouver strip mall office and laughed for days afterward, recounting the story to her girlfriends. Alcoholics didn’t play with their bottles, or withhold booze to cause frustration. If anything, she said, she was addicted to strategic frigidity.

  In the hotel shower, a few hours after the fire, the diagnosis came back to her. It felt as though Tanya had succumbed to a cigarette after three weeks of clean air–here, in the room of Francis, the producer. Cigarettes were wrong, sure, but they were right for Tanya. All her old motivations returned in the shower, and she regretted her weak and maudlin response to the slab of concrete that had nearly crushed her. The true message of that rainy day was simpler than she had originally thought: be Tanya, only more so. Don’t waste time or squander your gifts on increasing the net worth and global influence of a thirty-six-year-old. It was time to work, and work hard, for Tanya.

  She dried herself and wiped the steam off her watch. It was 6:45 in the morning and she had slept for an hour. Tonight could prove to be the most important of her life, and it wouldn’t do to be fatigued.

  Francis lay sprawled on his bed, naked and snoring, the sheets wrapped around him like a python preparing to squeeze. Looking at him there and smelling the regurgitated alcohol vapour and cigarette smoke that filled the room, Tanya recognized another old feeling. Not shame, exactly, or self-loathing. But wonder. Wonder that she could have touched someone so beastly. Wonder that she could remain a heterosexual, all things considered.

  Fortunately, 60 Minutes had an American-network-sized travel budget. This was no guest room, it was a junior suite in the manor wing of the Banff Springs Hotel. Tanya found some covers and pillows in the closet, pulled out the sofa bed, closed the curtains in the main room, and flopped.

  She imagined the multiple successes that awaited her later that day. For a birthday present during university, Tanya’s mother had bought her a series of motivational cassette tapes that outlined tactics for personal mastery. This was one of them: If you do not dream victory, it will not come.

  The phone rang just as Tanya punched through the membrane of sleep. In her confusion, she assumed it was Morley Safer. Who else could it be? She had to make a brilliant first impression, as the great man was surely the contact she needed to succeed in New York City. Morley Safer, a Canadian striver himself, would understand.

  “Hello?”

  There was a pause, and then a long inhalation. “Who is this?” said a woman with a Brooklyn accent.

  “This is Tanya Gervais.”

  “Who are you, Tanya Gervais?”

  Tanya was awake now, and she knew who was on the line. “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

  “An interview subject, I suppose. Are you part of the religious cult, then?”

  “It isn’t a cult.”

  The woman sighed. “Where is he?”

  “Sleeping, in the next room.”

  “We were supposed to be finished with this. He’s had help.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh shut up.” The click of a lighter and a deep inhale. Tanya imagined her sitting in the bright kitchen of an apartment in TriBeCa, cleverly purchased before the real estate boom. The woman exhaled with a faint whistle. “Do me a favour and tell me how it happened. Was he drunk?”

  “Very drunk.”

  “Who initiated it?”

  “He did.”

  “Explain.”

  “You know how it is.” Tanya sat up in bed. “He took his tie off, started smiling a lot. With each drink he became more charming and handsome to himself and, in his fantasy, to me. He took off his wedding ring.”

  The woman moaned with either pain or humiliation, and most likely a mixture of both.

  “He was very inelegant about that. I had already seen the ring.”

  The woman smoked. “So what’s your excuse?”

  “I have no excuse.”

  “You knew he was married. Does it give you pleasure to hurt people? I’m Fra
ncis’s wife, so I know–that must have been the only real pleasure on offer.”

  Tanya thought about that.

  “Aren’t religious people supposed to be good? Isn’t morality a part of religion any more, or is everyone an admitted hypocrite now? Will you see your shaman and find forgiveness?”

  “Our house was burned down. I had nowhere else to stay.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean, Francis was kind enough to let me stay here.”

  “You didn’t sleep with him?”

  “He’s in the other room. I’m on the sofa bed.”

  “Liar.”

  “I swear to you. I’m on the sofa bed.”

  Without telling a lie, Tanya convinced Francis’s wife that they were not sleeping in the same bed. Francis’s wife wanted to believe Tanya. So she did. They ended the call amicably, with Tanya promising to write a note to Francis about their oldest child’s piano recital. The date had changed.

  Tanya lay in bed again, harbouring no ill will toward Francis and his wife. If anything, Tanya was perfectly neutral on the subject of Francis’s rampant infidelity. Would it have been better to tell Francis’s wife the truth about the evening’s sexual adventure, which was a few steps below mediocre? According to the sketchy precepts of The Stan, what was a woman to do in such a circumstance?

  For a start, she could stay out of the hotel rooms of married men.

  Tanya debated with herself so long that she forgot to visualize her coming victories. Sleep came midway between completely wrong and almost right.

  SIXTY-THREE

  Kal lurched from hotel to hotel, on and off Banff Avenue, looking for a sympathetic night-desk clerk. Between stops, mightily tired, he contended with disinterested drunks, star-struck pilgrims, and even a university professor from the Greater Boston area devoted to studying “popular delusions.” The woman, who wore black-framed glasses that seemed upside down, insisted they get a coffee to discuss his role in the particular madness of this crowd. She left her business card in Kal’s hand and, as he walked, it seemed to grow heavy, along with his sneakers and accordion and hair. He dropped it in a garbage can on the banks of the Bow.