CHAPTER THREE

Drinking in the Georgia meant letting a wonderful warm buzz accumulate near the floor until it rose gradually up over your elbows, came over your table and up your arms and crawled up over your ears, leaving you honking happily in a brown sea of possibility and friendliness. Maybe even romance, either finding or losing the mysterious M. Likely enough, though it would just be suds and song, something from the shiny tin Reddi-Hot oven behind the bar, then off hiking and babbling across the bridge with those old standbys, rudeboys, and walkhomewiths, D and G. Nothing special had happened to M this night in the Georgia, nothing except something on the bridge that looked like it might be the beginning of the end of the world seen at a very slight distance.

In M's night of dreams, two episodes clamoured with special resonance. The first was a hockey forum, The Forum (Vancouver? Montreal?), more likely the Kerrisdale Arena or just a generic hockey forum. Dreams won't quibble; they want to flow. It was between periods, and it was most likely Montreal and Toronto, the NHL teams whose games he heard on the radio in the forties when he was half asleep nearing nine o'clock bedtime, not yet asleep, not dreaming. In this dream there was a star with an unpronounceable and unspellable Czech or Hungarian surname. The star played for M's team, which meant, surely, the Canadiens. The prospect was to see this star lead his team back onto the ice from the tunnel leading to the dressing room. The star, then his team-mates would burst from this darkness to subdued or racketing cheers, depending on whether the game was at home or away. M had the impression that the Canadiens were in their red road sweaters, the same red sweater that he himself wore for ankle-wobbling hockey on the pond behind his house.

Yet somehow it was not to the Canadiens' tunnel that M directed his attention, but to that of the visiting team. For it was realized, as in dreams things are ever only realized, never spoken, only announced by ghostly presences, realizers, announcers of the psychic world where pictures, words, plans, feelings, and philosophies are all one thing, that this was to be the final game ever in the NHL of Syl Apps, the legendary centre of the Maple Leafs. He was, it seemed, retiring, and at the height of his career. That was the only way M, who followed hockey but very slenderly, knew Apps, who'd finished his pro career in the forties, so it was natural that in his dream Apps would be at the top of his powers and fame. The arena was filled with expectancy and drama that M felt pushing down on his shoulders and neck; in fact he felt almost that he shared the pressure of these moments with the great Apps himself, felt that most intimate bond of fervid fandom. M understood that he was extraordinarily lucky to be present, and to be seated directly across the ice, opposite the tunnel, three or four rows up. He stared into the darkness of the tunnel and saw only men in dark pants and light shirts.

Then Apps skated out, with strong thrusts, but loose and easy. He dipped his shoulder to the left (he was carrying his stick on that side, M perhaps making Apps, of whom he'd seen few photographs, a southpaw). His face was pale and he shared with Mandrake the Magician and with Rip Kirby that single curling lick of black hair up and back over his probably brilliantined pate, and his blue eyes were down. There was just the slightest modest little grin of acknowledgment to the cheers. He knew that this was a great moment of adulation, one in which he was more a privileged participant than he was the subject of the commotion. Apps skated off in a businesslike way, and after a pause, the other team members spilled from the tunnel.

The mind's film did a quick fade here, and there was a feeling of conclusion and finish. It was a satisfying episode, rare in dreams, where too often he'd found he could hardly hook one vivid moment to the next one.

Later in that session of sweet silent unthinking came the flash, fully as sudden and vivid as it had been in actuality. The three of them were about in the middle of the bridge, and the flash threw light over the shoulders of the mountains and on parts of the city, casting the B.C. Electric building, for one, into monstrous silhouette. M, D, and G registered the event, but so did a fourth presence, though that presence seemed to be no definite person. This fourth was alarmed, and he spread alarm or he wanted to spread alarm. He at any rate wanted the three friends to take full and concerned note of the phenomenon, and not to try to shrug it off. "If you try to ignore this," the fourth presence said, "you will put yourselves, and everyone else, in even more danger than we are in from the nuclear blast itself." M was impressed by this statement, and suspected it to be a truth delivered from a moral realm frighteningly beyond his comprehension or his alteration. He felt silly and unhappy, and he knew that the message of light and menace was meant for him more than for any other person in the city.

Next day, though, there he was, pubbound again, this time in the passenger seat, ripped and squamous, of the Hillman convertible of the Gallant and Evil McMannic, Lord in Languishment of the Liquor Control Board, student sempiternal, lout, lothario, and honest lover. Teacher-in-training and actor in reserve. Unreserved bad actor and champion mocker.

"Fee!" cried M. "Last night they tried to blow me and D and G off the Burrard Bridge with an atomic bomb detonated somewhere up beyond and behind Lynn Valley! And then they projected Assyrian-ancient Assyrian, mind you-gibberish on the wall of the Capilano brewery! D thinks that it's a message of doom!"

A giggling gurgle from McMannic. Followed by a snorting, aspirated laugh which somehow fed on itself as a source of humour, a condensation or distillation of humour, a turbo version of standard humour whereby McMannic indicated that yes, the world is turning out to be just as funny as he thought it was. Or that the world is turning out to be even more richly ridiculous than he thought it was.

"Not Assyrians, M!" he shouts. "It's the tribes of Israel! They're after our young D, all in an unholy lather to get him, grind him up, bones and cartilage! They know him," Fee continued more quietly, "for an enemy of the hook-nosed race, for a Church-of-England man." At this point McMannic turned from Hastings into Carrall street and pretty much transported a man in a khaki gabardine overcoat carrying a bottle-shaped bag the same colour into a nicer world. But not quite. McMannic's head spun in his neck-socket as he darted back over his shoulder a glance of savagely businesslike and curt inquiry. The effect, with the narrowed eyes and the long face and the hair swept back behind the ears in a sort of side-pompadour, was of an osprey or a kingfisher checking for prey. Then McMannic directed at M a more human glance.

"Now look here, M," he hissed in one of his many patented stagy voices, "we've all got to face up to some ugly truths. And I know more than I've hitherto let on in these matters." The stagey utterance was not really conscious, but purely habitual. McMannic simply found words too pallid without quotation marks around them. G did this too, but less obviously, and perhaps there was a hint of quotation in the speech of all M's friends.

McMannic continued, "The fact is I've made a little sortie past the brewery already this A.M., and I caught sight of these curious characters. They were not made by Christian hand, M! Nor did he who grasps the curved steel of Islam inscribe the fateful sign! It is the fell forces of Judah that we have to thank for this work! Who do ya think," he croaked a little lower and softer, "ordered those letters plastered over, anyway?"

Interpretation of the letters on the brewery wall continued in the West Hotel beer parlour, Ladies and Escorts section. McMannic was not the only one of M's acquaintance to see the words that morning, and not the craziest to interpret them. Janey the Red and Bora Dora were hostages to their presence on the ladies' side of the pub, or rather all were invited in there so that jangling Janey, grinding away in her monstrous monotone, could give her conspiracy theories. She also conducted some small hand operations. She kept her beer hand raised, though she seldom drank. The forefinger of her left hand went up the back of the beer glass like a small spine, and there seemed to be something important about to be found in that glass, though that important thing was never her mouth. With her other hand she smoked, though no more often than she sipped her beer. Her Salem menthol was kept in her fingers, it seemed, for the sake of the growing of an ever-threatening ash which it inexorably produced, an ash as long and grey and deadly and maddening and stupid as her mishmush Marxist diatribe. Her other job, given to either hand as available, was to plink or plonk on the table one or several fingers to emphasize...well, not emphasize. Accent, a little counter-strike, to keep attention and ears to the revolving grindstone drone of her theories. It's all goofy. And the goofier it is the more Janey seems pleased with it. She has heard all about the white flash in the night, and she knows who is behind it, who is in front of it, who is trying to cover it up, and where in the U.S. it is being financed from. She knows who and how the connections are in the Bennett government, where the nuclear device was triggered from (a mile-deep mineshaft near Shalalth). She knows the end of all endeavours (insurrection, planned, pieced, plotted, plausible) and the origin of species (Our kind comes with twisted brain/ Thus subterfuge it must contain. Saith Jane.)

M huddles briefly with the redoubtable Peaches Dobell, a sometimes partner in verse, and they compose lines to celebrate the recent independence of Ceylon, which has become Sri Lanka:

A Sestina for Sri Lanka
The sestina began
Uncomfortably dark
about Sri Lanka, green
and slow, the water
idling away
and red at the finish

How to finish
something so dark,
so far away,
disappearing like water
although it began
so new, so green.

The lizards in the grass are green
and bring poisons from far away
posons to make a complete finish,
a throat gurgling in the dark,
seeking air, as when the world began,
and finding only water.

The solution is water,
where we all began,
millenia ago and away
where the world was green
from start to finish
and the water shone light on the dark

But it was all water in the dark.
Dark was always fighting green,
ever since we came across the water
from Sri Lanka where it perhaps began
with no thought ever of a finish
in bird-filled waters far away.

How shall we fare away?
In a world that is no more green,
in Sri Lanka, where the world grows dark?
Away across the water?
Knowing how the dark will finish,
remembering how the green began.

In a corner of the Men's side of the West, hidden but audible, someone is softly warping "Sinner Man" on a mouth organ:

Oh, sinner man
Where you gonna run to
All on that day?

Larry Koerner, boy pornographer, sits in another corner on the Men's side. He too can be heard but not seen. He is planning and boasting about making another movie, a further exploration of middle-class liberal angst He learned this word in a creative writing class, and he learned to underline it. In truth, though, he's German enough, an Afrikaaner, so he might use it plain. He doesn't do anything plain, though; it's all fancy for this boy except for the actual work with the camera, which Larry uses as a blunt instrument. His second movie will be an unholy compound of gritty realism (rainy city streets, a boy actor wearing what looks like G's Air Force trench coat - probably borrowed from G; it was always too short for him anyway - cigarette in the corner of the mouth, James Dean hardly cold in his grave), sentimentality (simulated sex, tears on the girl's face), and social meaning (tears on the boy's face). Like his first movie.

Run to the sun
Sun won't you hide me?
Sun won't you hide me
All on that day?