Hellgoing Stories Part 7

CLEAR SKIES.

People were laughing, afterwards. They laughed during, too, before anyone knew what was going on or what might happen. The thing to do upon landing was tell the story and make jokes. When Sara was up there, seconds after the boom, she imagined doing just that. She'd even rehea.r.s.ed it a bit for future audiences.

I was so scared. I thought an engine had exploded. I thought: well, this is it.

At the airport, Terry was carrying a copy of Sara's book for identification purposes. She saw him from a distance, peering down at the author's photo every time a new arrival emerged through the sliding doors. His eyes went from her face on the book, to her face in real life, and still they pa.s.sed right by her. She had to come and tap him on the shoulder.

"It's me," she said, pointing to the book. It was her first book. The person in the photograph was nineteen years old. Sara's tap had surprised him and he gave her an instinctive, hostile look. "What a tiny airport!" she added.

"Oh!" yelled Terry, grabbing her hand. He asked how her flight had been.

"The plane was struck by lightning," Sara said. She told her little story for him, watched his blue eyes widen. It was a good way to kick things off.

They had to wait for Herb, the fiction guy, before making their way to the monastery, but his flight was not due for another twenty minutes. Sara went to the bathroom as Terry studied the back of Herb's book, which was stamped with a gilded reminder of his nomination for a major book award the previous year.

Everywhere she went in the airport, there were posters - on practically every wall. It was almost ridiculous, the number of posters. She saw such posters in her grocery store, and the post office. But here it was the same poster over and over again, the same pudgy, uncute face.

"What's with all the posters?" she asked Terry.

He jumped again at the sound of her voice. I will get a little bell to wear around the retreat, Sara decided.

"Oh," he said, looking around. "Marie." As if the girl in the posters were related to him or something, a colleague maybe. "She's been gone a month now. Everyone's desperate. Sad."

"But why -" Sara didn't know how to ask the question without sounding callous. "I mean - there's only one missing kid in the entire province?"

Terry shrugged. He was supposedly a playwright, but Sara had never seen any of his work. "It's one of those things - mysterious. You know, her parents are still together, so it's not like one of them nabbed her. Just disappeared out of the blue."

Sara felt what she knew was a prissy twinge of annoyance, because the phrase was inappropriate. You didn't disappear out of the blue. You appeared out of it, suddenly, like a holy bolt of lightning.

It was a year in the world where people seemed to be dying explosively or else disappearing without so much as a bleat. She wanted to leave it behind, which was why she'd said yes to the retreat. She'd liked the sound of it: a prairie retreat. The brochure Terry'd sent her showed photographs like abstract paintings: one thick, vertical band of brilliant green topped by a second, thicker band of glaring blue. Your view, the brochure promised.

On TV there was nothing but explosions anymore. In her city, in the past year, an abrupt slew of people had blanked from existence as if culled by hungry aliens. Pictures of people who had recently failed to exist were always on the front page of the paper. It was not like she ever bought the paper - front page after front page accosted her whenever she walked up and down the street. There was no avoiding anything.

She had a brother in Duncan who, like her, was no longer in the family. They argued on the phone. Wayne always seemed to think it was natural and okay for he himself to have left, but scandalous and obscene for her. Plus, he didn't mind the bombs. "It's about time they started bombing something," he opined. He called Sara a hippie, since he couldn't convincingly use words like harlot and jezebel now that they were equally d.a.m.ned.

They rolled along in Terry's big white van. The landscape was just like the abstract painting in the brochure, only endless and on every side. Just when she was starting to feel panicky about it, hills appeared on either side of the highway, and then they were descending into a picturesque - there was no other word for it - valley. Terry gestured to one of the hills, and she and Herb looked. A crucifix loomed; a sprawling, one-storey building crouched behind it as if for protection.

"There it is," said Terry.

"Oh no," said Sara.

Herb was sitting in the front seat. He had talked all the way from the airport, which would have bothered her if he wasn't so likeable and engaging. A publisher's dream - that's the kind of writer Herb was. Now he turned and flashed his teeth at her.

"Everything all right?"

In the rear-view mirror, Terry glanced and squinted. He was thinking - Ten days with this person, morning, noon and night - and so she laughed.

"I forgot about the G.o.d thing," she explained. "The crucifix up there." She grimaced and shuddered comically for them. Terry and Herb both knew about Sara - how she had made her name. She had been briefly famous, as a teenager. They laughed and nodded.

THE FIRST MORNING of the retreat, her toilet backed up. It was the worst thing that could happen. She had used it, was the problem. She had used it right after breakfast.

She flushed the thing as many times as she dared before slinking to Terry's office. At the grim look on her face, he jerked himself to his feet and pulled the door shut - expecting maybe news of an unwanted grope from Herb, a veiled threat from a born-again student.

"No, no, nothing bad," Sara a.s.sured him. Cringing, she explained.

"We'll just call in the maintenance man," Terry told her, managing to wink and look jolly.

I s.h.i.t, she had basically walked up to Terry and announced. h.e.l.lo, strange man. There is something I'd like you to know about me and here it is. Sara floundered at the thought of the maintenance man. Would she have to encounter this maintenance man at any point? Look him in the eye afterward?

"I don't know what you were planning on doing this morning," said Terry. "The groups don't meet until after lunch. You could go for a little walk maybe, while he's working."

Sara had been planning on having a shower - she hadn't bothered when she arrived the night before. Her hair was pulled back tight and neat so that none of its greasy strands would be noted.

She went for a walk. She went to see the labyrinth. Last night Terry told them how much visitors enjoyed walking the labyrinth, and she and Herb and Betty, the poet, and Marguerite, the children's writer, were welcome to do the same. It helped the students move forward with their writing, he said. Helped them to commit, to let go of whatever might be holding them back. They carried some object into the labyrinth with them that was meant to represent their problem, their block. They meditated as they walked and once they got to the middle, left the object there on the makeshift pedestal. Sara had walked straight through the labyrinth, stepping over its stone borders, to examine the pile of c.r.a.p left on the pedestal, while everyone else remained outside, as if in respect. There were pebbles and sticks and small birds' feathers - but also single earrings, grocery receipts and a tube of lip gloss.

Now she circled the labyrinth, feeling resentful of it, the way she felt resentful of the crucifix. Last night at dinner she had said that she didn't know much about Catholicism, but a labyrinth seemed, to her, sort of pagan for a monastery. She understood ritual was a big deal in the Catholic church - on the plane, Sara's seatmate had yanked a rosary out of her purse after the boom, closed her eyes, fingered it bead by bead, whispering frantically. Still it seemed wrong to her, like Terry had led them through the bush to a golden calf.

From the opposite end of the table, Marguerite the children's writer contradicted her. She told Sara about the Catholic labyrinths at Chartres and Amiens, and how old they were, and Sara felt, as she often felt, the limits of her education. Still, she also felt like she was right and Marguerite was wrong. It was how she was raised. Christian or pagan, she wanted to say - pick one. It was like the photo in the brochure - a single slash of sky above a single slash of land.

When she returned to her room, a man was crouched over her toilet, cursing. She smoothed her hair and left without disturbing him.

AT LUNCH, THE instructors sat together shyly, having not had time to bond with their group members as yet, which it was clear they were expected to do. It seemed to Sara that Marguerite and Betty had the wrong jobs. Marguerite the children's writer was serious, highly educated and dressed in prim, greyish woolies despite the fact that it was August. She looked, in short, like a poet. Betty was twenty-eight and wore a black minidress and a clattery sequence of bangles on either wrist. You could see the children's writers yearned for Betty. Whereas the poets - many of whom had ten years or more on their mentor - raised eyebrows at each other every time the cafeteria shook with Betty's overloud laughter. This happened so much that Sara started to worry about Betty. Betty laughed at everything she - Betty - or anyone else, for that matter, said. It seemed compulsive after a while.

They spoke about the missing girl, Marie. Marguerite and Terry both lived in the province, and it seemed residents of the province could think of little else - just as people in Sara's city were preoccupied by the same phenomena, only in greater numbers. Here it was only Marie at the centre of the mystery. The mystery was Marie herself. In Sara's city the mystery was Absence - here Absence was Marie.

"Disappeared out of the blue," said Terry again. Betty laughed. Sara wondered if she had picked up on Terry's mistaken usage and was being indiscreet.

"Well - the weather has improved at least," remarked Marguerite.

Betty laughed, and then asked, "Sorry - was that a joke?"

Marguerite didn't smile, but rolled her eyes in a gesture, perhaps, of self-deprecation.

"No, I mean no more cloud cover," Marguerite explained. "Clear skies. It makes searching easier."

Sara glanced up, confused. "Why?" she said before she had time to think and stop herself. "Do they think she's up there somewhere?"

Betty laughed, vibrating the water in Sara's gla.s.s. At a table nearby, the poets drew themselves together.

"FIRST OF ALL," she said to her group after lunch. "I don't know what I'm doing here. You guys could just as well have applied to Herb's group. There is no difference between fiction and memoir as far as I'm concerned."

n.o.body wanted to contradict her so early in the meeting, but she could see the scepticism behind their eyes. They were smiling at her but they were formulating objections.

"I mean, okay, what - right off the bat - what would you say is the difference between the two forms?"

Everyone knew, but no one wanted to say something so obvious. Also because it was clear Sara was planning to contradict the person who did. She waited them out until finally a woman her own age named Alison spoke.

"One's true, one's made up," Alison sighed.

"True, false; good, bad; black, white," Sara shot back - keyed up on nervous adrenalin and feeling as if she was barely making sense. "No. It's an imaginary distinction."

"But," the only man in the room leaned forward, brow pinching. He was in an awkward position already, and knew it. Even sitting down, he hulked over the women.

"But," the man repeated. His name was Mac. "Surely there are differences."

"No, there are no differences," Sara insisted. She didn't know why she was being so adamant - of course there were differences. Maybe it had to do with establishing authority - forcing them to agree to a patent untruth right off the bat. Two plus two is five, repeat after me.

"Even," persisted Mac, "att.i.tudinally speaking. Att.i.tudinally, wouldn't you have to take a completely different approach to writing a work of fiction than you would a personal memoir?"

Mac ducked his head and raised his eyes to her then. A gesture of deference that was almost dog-like.

Sara pretended to think about it but really she was trying to calm her nerves.

"But you are talking about," she said, "the kind of differences that exist between any two projects. I write . . . I want to write, say, a whimsical story from the point of view of a dog. The next day, I want to write some kind of - I don't know - something weighty. Something from the point of view of a, of a rape victim or something."

Everyone was suddenly watching her with their mouths shut. She glared back at them.

"There will always be att.i.tudinal differences - from one story to the next - is what I'm saying," she continued, the jolt of annoyance having cleared her head. "My point is, they're all still going to be stories, no matter what category we choose to put them in - fiction or non."

Sara sat back in her chair, satisfied she had finally said something teacherly, and ready to suggest a coffee break. But when she glanced at her watch she saw they had only been together in the meeting room for ten minutes or so. She suggested one anyway.

THE LAST TIME she spoke with her brother Wayne, he explained to her why it didn't matter that people were disappearing from the street. He said it was part of G.o.d's plan.

"I don't think it's part of G.o.d's plan," she replied.

"Well, what would you know about G.o.d's plan," said Wayne.

This is how they talked to each other. There were no particularly nuanced arguments, no fine points to be made.

"What do you know about G.o.d's plan," Sara jeered back at him.

"More than you," Wayne answered. Wayne had a blackboard in his apartment, Sara imagined, like a football coach would have. There was a line drawn down the middle in chalk. On one side of the blackboard was written The Wayner and on the other side, Stupid Hippie. And every time Wayne came back with a zinger like "more than you," a mark went under The Wayner and then he sat back, satisfied, licking the chalk from his fingers.

"It's G.o.d's plan," Sara exclaimed, like she was starting to understand. "I get it, I get it, the women are the chosen ones! It's been them all along! They've been called! They've left us all behind!"

Wayne sighed his disgust. "You pretend," he said, "to be stupid, and say stupid things when you know the truth as well as I do. I've never understood why you do that. It doesn't make you seem smart, if that's what you think."

"They're wh.o.r.es," said Sara. She stood and carried the phone with her to look out the window at her pansies.

"Yes."

"G.o.d is cleansing us of them."

"Yes."

"Just like the bombs. On the heathen cities. Right?"

"That's right."

"But all women on the outside are wh.o.r.es." Sara was babbling again, almost gleeful. "Yes? Right? And everyone outside Eden is a heathen. So why aren't we all disappearing? Why isn't the city burning around me? Where is the angry hand, reaching down to smite?"

She was leaning forward, grinning hard, as if Wayne were there in the apartment with her. But if Wayne were there, she knew she'd never talk like this.

He waited an insolent moment before answering.

"I left - and you know I left - because I didn't believe all that bulls.h.i.t. I'm not a fanatic."

Shriek. She could almost hear the chalk against the board.

MAC CAME UP to her at the book table, where Sara was noting which of her books Terry had ordered to sell at the retreat. There were about twenty copies of her teenage memoir stacked there, and he had used it as a display copy too - Escaping Eden - the book that was to represent her as an author. Tucked behind the stack of memoirs were five copies of her second novel, and no copies of her first or her collection of stories.

She was standing there thinking that talking to her brother Wayne was like talking to G.o.d. Maybe this was the reason she still stayed in contact with Wayne, despite the futility of their conversations: the acid frustration it provoked. It was like talking to G.o.d - pointless, maddening and compulsive. Wayne didn't make sense; he didn't have to make sense. He didn't bow to the logic of Man. Wayne's wisdom was his unfathomable own - undreamt of in her philosophy. The Wayner was what The Wayner was.

"I loved it," Mac told her.

She swivelled and blinked. He smiled and reached to tap the stack of Edens with a hirsute finger.

"Oh - thanks, Mac."

"It's the reason I came here. I hope you don't - I mean I think you're a brilliant memoirist."

"Thanks," she said. They stared together at the pile of books. "Did you think I was going to be nineteen?"

"What?" said Mac.

"Everybody thinks I'm going to be nineteen. Because I was nineteen when I published the book, and it was such a big deal. Oh my G.o.d, she's nineteen! And they still make a big deal of it on the cover - see?" She picked up one of the copies, which was the newest edition, and showed him. She held the photo of the nineteen-year-old up beside her face.

Mac laughed a little. "I didn't think you'd be nineteen. But I did - you know, I read the book and I thought - I want to learn from the person who wrote this book. I want to tell my story with the same kind of honesty."

"I don't even remember writing it," Sara told him.

BETTY AND HERB were to read at the beginning of the retreat, and she and Marguerite were to read at the end. Herb, charismatic and engaging, was also a wonderful reader, but his prize-winning book was about a middle-aged male university professor having a torrid, forbidden affair with one of his undergraduate female students. Sara had read somewhere that the "twist" in Herb's novel, the thing that elevated it from hackneyed s.m.u.t, was the fact that even though the s.e.xual relationship starts out fuelled by nothing but goatish l.u.s.t (with the typical mid-life crisis and dash of misogyny thrown in), it unexpectedly evolves into a profound and tender love. Not even love affair, but love. The couple take up arms, philosophically speaking, against their numerous inquisitors instead of slinking away and apart as anyone would have expected. On the contrary, they vigorously defend their love, repudiating shame and defying censure - be it official or otherwise. The review Sara read claimed this aspect of the novel was what made it startling and brave. What made it brilliant, the reviewer added, was that, for most of the novel, the reader found herself taking the part of the inquisitors, feeling the very same contempt and moral outrage, only to be ambushed and chastened by the sudden purity of the love story.

For this particular reading, however, Herb eschewed the love story altogether in favour of the s.e.x scenes. He strung them together, flipping from one marked page to the next so that the descriptions of the professor and student's couplings were relentless and all seemed to blur into one endless, gross encounter. Sara wondered if Herb was just getting a kick out of reading these words aloud in a monastery, out of the fact that celibate holy men slept and studied only a few feet away. Maybe he imagined his resonant stage-actor's voice carrying all the way into their wing, slipping like a tongue into hairy Franciscan ears.

She pictured her brother Wayne sitting in the back with his Chevron cap perched on the crown of his head, lips obliterated under his moustache, meaty arms folded.

Betty got up to read next. She wore a somewhat more revealing but less stretchy minidress than the one she'd been wearing all day, with long satin gloves and big crucifix earrings. She made some prefatory, self-deprecating jokes about herself and shrieked laughter into the microphone.

"This is a poem about my mother," she told everyone a moment later, wiping her eyes. She read the t.i.tle - a sad, solemn t.i.tle - and laughed again like it was a private, uproarious joke.