The Book of Stanley Read online

  Stanley passed the note to Maha and she read it by moonlight.

  “The crowd, down there, they don’t deserve you. If Alok died for this, for them, well–”

  “He didn’t die for anything, Maha. He just died.”

  She shook her head in disagreement and put the note in her pocket. Even in a pair of poorly fitting jeans and an old sweatshirt, Maha was beautiful. “What are you going to do? Can you fix them?”

  “I don’t think it works that way. What I plan to do is explain what I’ve been thinking. If they don’t go for it, I guess I’ll go home.”

  “Do you think Frieda’ll see you on TV?”

  Stanley tried to imagine Frieda in front of their television, but he couldn’t see it. In what part of the house did they keep the television? He couldn’t see the television or the house. “She’s probably watching a musical.”

  They reached the bottom of the mountain and walked through the neighbourhoods. The chanting became louder and louder.

  “What are you going to tell them?”

  “I’m going to tell them about the flower on the mountain.”

  Maha nodded and said, “Oh, good,” but she wasn’t thrilled with that answer.

  Black smoke rose up from the environs of Banff Avenue. People screamed. It looked and sounded like a hockey riot. A block away from the high school, Stanley passed three youths in the midst of overturning a car.

  This was Stanley’s fault, so he did not punish the teenagers. Politely, he asked them to stop. They did, and followed him. Outside the fence, there was a scuffle. One of the combatants, a large and angry man who had removed his shirt, knocked out a protester with a single punch. The victim lay unconscious on the sidewalk, in the midst of a seizure, protected from further harm by friends while the assailant hurled biblical invective upon them.

  The shirtless man recognized Stanley.

  “He’s here. Oh, he’s here, he’s here, great God almighty he’s finally–!”

  Stanley blinded him. The man screamed and fell to his knees.

  Quickly, word spread that Stanley had arrived. The people conversed in whispers. Stanley hopped the chain-link fence and made his way along the outer wall of the high school until he reached the stage.

  “Finally.” Tanya’s eyes were red and fierce. Her smile was monstrously artificial. The sound from the crowd was nearly deafening, and there were two camera operators behind her, so she had to speak directly into his ear. “Get your ass on that stage.”

  Stanley ignored her and took Maha’s hand. “Are we ready?”

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Maha could not go five seconds without coughing. It felt as though she had swallowed an ant colony of doubt, and its citizens were biting their way out of her.

  The night had turned cold, and her sweatshirt reeked of stale beer. The jog up Tunnel Mountain had made her too hot, but now she shivered with chilly anxiety. A number of people in the audience, impatient and possibly crazy, had broken limbs and bloody faces. And the Lord was going to tell them about a flower?

  Onstage, Kal sat slouched in a dark corner. The Lord embraced him, and whispered in his ear. Kal stood straight up and plugged his accordion back into the public address system. A hollow whine sounded as the Lord approached the microphone. The blue and green lights of cellular phones, held aloft to take photographs and short movies, made it difficult to see the audience.

  A shot, and its echo. Maha had never heard a gunshot before, so she had no instinctual response. She didn’t duck or cover her ears. There was a second bang, and a third. A series of screams rose up from the audience. The people in front of Maha, in the first rows, were pressed against the iron barricades in front of the little stage.

  “Stop,” said the Lord. “Stop moving. Please, relax.”

  The Lord dropped what appeared to be three bullets on the stage. He then raised his arms. Two men, one on the Lord’s right and the other on the Lord’s left, rose up out of the audience. They held guns. As he floated up, one of the men fired his gun into the air. The other dropped his weapon and merely flailed and screamed.

  Maha wondered if the Lord would drop the men to their deaths, but they continued to rise up. The schoolyard went quiet again, and those in the front rows breathed normally, as everyone watched the two men rise up, and up, and up until they were two spots in the blackness–obscuring the stars, and then, with a final gunshot, disappearing.

  Chanting began anew. The flashes from cameras and cellphones had a strobe effect. Maha was compelled to run up onstage and apologize to the Lord for the way she had been feeling on the walk down the mountain. Millions of people died every day, and it would have been indulgent and iniquitous to single out Alok. It had been a lesson.

  From every direction, people clamoured and called out for miracles. They screamed for cancer, for global warming, for animal rights, for tougher drug laws, for weaker drug laws, for revolution and partition, for lottery winnings, for their dead loved ones, for the Prime Minister, for police brutality, urban sprawl, poverty, abortion, Palestine, water supplies, Sunnis, air pollution, Trisomy 18, sex tourism, the end of the world.

  Those who had come to denounce the Lord as the Devil exploded in anger. They jumped up and down with their signs, and Maha could see their spit silhouetted in the floodlights, along with the bugs. The Lord took several steps back from the microphone and watched, in apparent fascination.

  She climbed up onstage. “Do something.”

  The Lord turned to her and blinked. He nodded, cleared his throat, and grasped the microphone. “I want you to know that your religions, your prophets, will be welcome in The Stan. So will your experiences and opinions. I’m not here to tell you what to do, or give you a set of rules.”

  With the sound of his voice, the crowd quieted. “For most of my life, I was a florist. I want you to calm yourselves and think, for a moment, about a simple flower.” The Lord pulled the microphone off the stand and walked to the front of the stage. “A simple flower that is inconceivably complex.”

  Maha walked back off the stage and down the small set of stairs. There were shouts from the audience again, taunts and demands.

  “My daughter has leukemia!”

  “Affordable housing!”

  “Cure my acne!”

  “Save us!”

  The Lord said nothing for a while. The requests from the audience became a general roar. Finally, he interrupted. “Please, stop. I can’t give you these things. God cannot give you these things. That’s not what He’s here for, if He’s here at all. Now, please, consider a flower, the tiniest part of the tiniest flower in the most unnoticed corner of your garden.”

  He continued speaking, but the cries from the audience overwhelmed him. Next to Maha, the gentleman from 60 Minutes, in jeans and a blazer, crossed his arms and smiled. Someone threw a cup of coffee and it splashed onstage before the Lord. Coffee splattered his grey slacks below the knees.

  “They don’t give a shit about flowers!” said Tanya, and the camera operators laughed.

  Kal stood at the back of the stage. His accordion was still plugged into the public address system, though he hadn’t played a note. Maha stood on the bottom step. “It’s not working,” she said. “Go tell him to do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “He’s the Lord.”

  Kal approached him and they spoke, near the microphone. The noise from the crowd became louder than ever, and a number of items landed on the stage. Coins, Slurpees, baseball caps, empty bottles. Amid the chaos, Kal started to play his accordion. It was a deep, slow, and simple waltz.

  The Lord began to sway. A few notes into the song, the crowd fell eerily quiet. From where Maha stood on the first step, it was difficult to see. She assumed the Lord had quieted them, so he could explain more fully the nature of the religion. For a better view, she climbed up two more metal stairs. And at first, she didn’t believe it. Everyone on the football field–the young, the old, the sick, the angry–had partnered up, and they
were dancing a Viennese waltz, in absolute synchronicity.

  Both camera operators climbed the stage scaffolding to get shots of the crowd from above. The waltz was soothing to Maha, after the deafening selfishness and malice of the crowd. The Lord turned to Kal and winked, and he transitioned from a waltz to a jolly, old-time jazz song. The people broke away from their partners and began to tap dance on the grass. Again, the Lord choreographed it so that each dancer was in time with the next. Children and the elderly tap danced with equal skill and enthusiasm, with beatific smiles on their faces. The ground shook. Again, Kal switched the tempo, slower this time, and the audience formed an enormous, moving pinwheel. The pinwheel transformed itself, like the beads in a kaleidoscope, into other complex, symmetrical patterns. All the while, the dancers smiled.

  In time with the music, which Maha recognized from long-ago violin lessons as Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” the dancers formed giant concentric circles in the middle of the field. The two outside lines moved one way, the next two lines moved the opposite way, and so on, like a spinning target. Then, gradually, the circle rose up from the centre, level by level. The four dancers in the middle floated at the top, while the outside lines remained on the grass. It was an enormous human wedding cake.

  Finally, Kal began to play a triumphant song. It reminded Maha of a national anthem, but she couldn’t place the nation. In groups of six, the dancers flew into the air, holding hands, spinning like fireworks. It sounded like the finale, and it was the finale. As the song eased toward its conclusion, the dancers eased down to the grass. And then, for a moment, silence. Kal wiped his hands on his jeans and the people looked at one another, and up at the Lord.

  “You have to think of yourselves as part of something grand and holy. There is no man, or Lord, who can save you.” Stanley pulled a flower from his lapel. “This is God.” He pointed at Kal. “This is God.” He pointed to Tunnel Mountain and, presumably, the sky. “That is God.” And, finally, he pointed at the audience. “You are God. Take one of these away, and there is no God. The pursuit of God is God.”

  For a moment, it seemed the Lord had them. It seemed they understood, or were at least willing to try. And then, like an erupting volcano, it started again: requests, demands, prayers, cries of desperation. The Lord turned off the microphone and jumped off the stage, into the crowd. He disappeared into the darkness.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  The morning after the big dance number on the football field, Tanya argued with a bearded man in a corner of the Banff Springs Hotel parking lot. They interrupted each other. She tried to finish a phrase beginning with, “Francis, I’m not responsible for…” while Francis said, again and again, “But you’re the flack. How else are we supposed to…”

  Several paces away, Kal and the gentleman from 60 Minutes sipped coffee. They had already talked about the weather, twice. To Kal’s surprise, the gentleman from 60 Minutes–whose name was Mr. Safer–was a Canadian.

  “The mountains used to be colder in August,” said Mr. Safer. “Didn’t they?”

  Kal shrugged. “I’m twenty-four.”

  “Not nostalgic for a better time yet?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Kal. “I was nine years old once, like everyone else.”

  Mr. Safer nodded and sipped his coffee.

  The bearded man and Tanya approached. It didn’t seem possible that they could have agreed, but something had been decided. “Let’s go,” said the bearded man.

  In the grey SUV, similar to his ex-wife’s, Kal sat next to Tanya in the back seat. “What’s happening?”

  “Stanley disappeared. I received his consent, set it all up, and now he’s gone.” Tanya punched the back of the seat in front of her. “I am going to sue his ass, and I mean it. What does he think this is?” She whispered in Kal’s ear, so the two men up front wouldn’t hear. “After last night, we have an opportunity to engage the world here. That’s a market of 6 billion people. Do you understand how much money comes with this sort of attention? He’s the number-one search term on Google.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  Tanya stopped whispering. “Jesus, Kal. Wake the hell up.”

  The accordion was on the floor at his feet. Kal was careful not to get the soles of his shoes anywhere near it. The longer it stayed clean, the better. Tanya’s breath smelled of coffee and mint. He wished Tanya had sat up front, or walked.

  Stanley had left a small urn containing Alok’s ashes in the motel room, along with a note. The following morning, they were to scatter his ashes from the top of Tunnel Mountain. Maha was supposed to carry it, according to the note. Kal wished she were next to him in the SUV, instead of Tanya. But Maha was out looking for Stanley.

  “I promised these guys an exclusive.” Tanya resumed whispering. “Do you know what that means? The ramifications of it? Now that Stanley’s pulling a diva routine on me, they have nothing.”

  “But last night–”

  “Everyone got that footage. It’s everywhere.”

  Kal understood, but when he searched his heart he discovered he didn’t care. In fact, television interviews and money and markets and the sound of the word “exclusive” infuriated him. They were only a few blocks away from the burned house on Grizzly Street and Kal realized he didn’t want money and Google–because Stanley wouldn’t. Alok wouldn’t.

  “Let me out, please.”

  “What?” said Tanya.

  Kal leaned forward and tapped the bearded man on the shoulder. “Stop the truck, please. I’m gonna help Maha look for Stanley.”

  “Imbeciles!” Tanya clutched his jacket. “If Stanley doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be found.”

  With a chuckle devoid of glee, the bearded man pulled over. Kal unfastened his seatbelt, removed Tanya’s long white fingers from his jacket, picked up his accordion, and opened the door.

  “This is so bush,” said Tanya. “Are you choosing to be a loser?”

  Kal slammed the door shut. The SUV idled for a moment. Inside, Tanya and the bearded man screamed at one another. Mr. Safer waved at Kal through the passenger window as the rear wheels spun gravel and they took off up the hill.

  SIXTY-NINE

  According to Islam, to incinerate a corpse is abhorrent. It is like laying a body out in the summertime to be devoured by crows and raccoons. Maha felt somewhat disgusted by the shiny pot of ashes in her hands. It was not a sacred privilege for her, as Stanley had assumed it would be.

  In his absence, she had come to believe the awful words he had said. Stanley was someone but he was not the Lord. Maha still loved him, of course, and basked in his power like the heat of the sun, but if the Lord was not the Lord, who was he? What was his mission, and what was her role? She needed clarification.

  For the last two nights, lying in a bed three feet from Kal’s, she’d hardly slept. Stanley’s disappearance, the void of comfort and meaning, was like hunger. In bed, the words came back: The Lord is God, the one and only. Allah, the Eternal, the Absolute, the Self-Sufficient master. He begetteth not, nor is He begotten. And there is none like unto Him.

  Maha wanted to be alone on the hike up Tunnel Mountain, but Kal would not leave her side. Neither of them wanted Tanya to be there, but it was Alok’s funeral, they couldn’t command Tanya to smoke cigarettes and talk on her cellphone somewhere else. Kal rubbed Maha’s back and said, again and again, “How you doing? Any better?”

  “The same as five minutes ago.”

  “Cool,” said Kal. “Cool.”

  The urn was a small aluminum jar with a lid that did not quite fit. There was a sticker on the side advertising the funeral home, and another sticker on the bottom of the jar identifying its origin in China.

  It was somewhere between warm and chilly, this day in late August. A new contingent of the curious was beginning to arrive in Banff. There were fewer Canadians and more Europeans and Asians now, attracted by the dance number broadcast around the world. If Banff was at full capacity before, now it was
ludicrous. The mayor had declared a state of emergency. There was a new noise about the town, a city noise: a constant rumble of vehicles and voices.

  Maha had overheard a newspaper reporter ask one of the new arrivals, a pretty American woman, why she had come the morning after Stanley’s speech.

  “If this is the start of the next great religion, I want to be part of it,” she had said. “You can be on The Amazing Race, but people forget you by the next season. Religions last a really long time.”

  A middle-aged couple descended and Kal stepped back so they could pass on the trail. The man wore a cowboy hat. He started to pass and then stopped. “You people are with The Stan.”

  “Yep,” said Kal.

  “We flew up from Portland to see him.” The man smiled. His teeth were yellow and crooked, as were his wife’s. They wore new hiking boots and jackets. It occurred to Maha that they would die soon. So would she and so would Kal. “When’s his next big to-do?”

  “You’re wasting your time and money,” Maha told them. “Stanley isn’t coming back.”

  Tanya, in the middle of a phone conversation, jogged down to them. But she had gained too much speed, so she crashed into Kal. “Don’t listen to her,” said Tanya. “She’s suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, like so many of your brave troops in Iraq. The truth is, Stanley will have another public address very soon.”

  “No, he won’t,” said Maha.

  The man and woman continued to smile, though an aspect of discomfort had sneaked into their facial muscles. “Can we join you?” said the woman.

  Maha displayed the urn. “Scattering ashes, sorta private.”

  “Next time!” said Tanya, with a fake laugh. “Keep watching for news. It’s coming soon, bigger and better than last time.”

  The couple continued down the mountain, slowly, as the man suffered from a limp. Maha felt sorry for him and for his wife, sorry for infecting them with Tanya, who resumed her phone conversation.