The Days Read online

  Nearby, eighty elephants stand inside a large cumulous cloud, holding it up. Eighty elephants is how much a large cumulous cloud weighs. The elephants are made of condensed water vapour. They are not lighter than air but they stay afloat because of convection currents from the sun-warmed ground.

  Soon enough the elephants will change into something else, a flying saucer, a slew of running nuns.

  I am on the ground thinking how clouds are like people locked in a time machine, bluffing their way from one adventure to the next, something I do about every ten minutes.

  Day When Thoughts Became Audible

  It was caused by something David Suzuki said in a lecture: “I am in the death zone now.”

  Some of us were waiting in cars at traffic lights or in lineups at grocery stores when we read his words on our phones. Some were at ball games or outdoor festivals. Many of us were at home with a glass of wine, but all of us were reeling.

  Like a bad new virus, David Suzuki’s remark caused panic.

  Even though he later apologized and said it was taken out of context, that he was speaking solely about himself and not the planet, no one believed him.

  As an antidote to the panic some of us tried speaking words of bland observation like: An old man with a gnarled right hand crossing the street. A large woman in a car fixing her hair in the rear-view mirror. But it was useless. The quiet and ordinary world had disappeared. As a result, some of us got drunk and drove our minivans into concrete walls.

  Vibe

  It was so special to see the endangered and beautiful coral in their aquariums.

  Viewing them helped us disentangle our minds from ruminative thoughts, destructive emotions, and impulsive and addictive behaviours. It also made us want to own a hat decorated with coral. And a coral-coloured scarf, a coral shade of lipstick, a pair of coral-coloured pyjamas.

  We hadn’t realized the degree of fandom there would be for endangered coral. Honestly, we don’t think we have ever been so excited!

  The Chorus at 3:00 A.M.

  —I’d be curious to see who’s still around in 2034.

  —You’re going to see all the beloved characters. There’s going to be Vera and Gladys and Kate and Betty and, of course, Brenda.

  —I like the new gal. She’s smart, funny, surfs, sings.

  —Beloved characters are not magical, you know. They take a lot of work. Hearts are broken along the way.

  —It’s today and tomorrow, and don’t get cranky.

  —And then you try to do better and you never do better.

  —Well, you can’t pawn a tattoo.

  —I once pawned my wedding ring.

  —I once tried to honour soldiers by placing a flag on every grave, but I ran out of flags.

  —You might actually do what you think is the best thing in your life and nobody notices.

  —It’s not all naked women and pastries, you know.

  —All I care about is playing the trombone.

  —I thought I was going to be Mr. Universe and start my own vitamin line.

  —If Shakespeare walked in here right now, would he feel at home?

  —What is one sausage’s quest to discover the truth about his own existence?

  —My favourite part of the whole thing is the little groupies standing out there.

  —Personally, I like to sit back, smoke a cigarette, and laugh for six minutes.

  —Well, it’s certain we’ll be thanked forever with regards to inventing the igloo.

  Vibe

  I decided it was too expensive for me to go to the grocery store – a luxury. I was focused on surviving so I ate stuff from the Dollar Store – mayonnaise, soup base, vegetable oil, chick peas, cinnamon hearts.

  I was never sick. I never felt bad. I never went to the hospital.

  That’s not what I expected.

  Today’s Mystery

  I said to Banksy, “Let us pause for a moment to consider the deeper meaning of your work.”

  We paused.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s long enough.”

  The Marilyn Statue

  “I feel stretched and pulled and chewed and spat and trodden on,” she says.

  We can barely hear her because her mouth is twenty-six feet above our heads. She’s wearing her flying-up dress from the movie The Seven Year Itch, and everyone’s taking pictures of her underpants, which are white with lace trim. A person stands between her legs and points the camera upward. The question still being asked is, Will we catch a glimpse of her giant vulva, or will we not?

  Manny Moss takes a shot of her underpants and the answer remains no. Then he climbs onto her high-heeled foot, the left one, and hugs her leg. I snap and snap. The red paint on her big toe is chipped.

  All day tour buses filled with bejewelled seniors from Los Angeles come to gaze at her concrete immensity. At night she’s lit with red floodlights. She’s a big girl, weighing thirty thousand pounds. From close-up, she appears to tower above the surrounding mountains.

  “I’m this town’s strip mall,” she says, but no one is listening.

  In the afternoons, the Palm Springs high school choir sings the national anthem on the lawn where she stands. Then Pastor Fred in a black track suit climbs onto a picnic table and blesses the shutter-clicking crowd.

  The Finish Line

  Just moments away from becoming an eighty-five-year-old former superhero resting in peace, the Lone Ranger gallops towards the finish line, an arc of red, yellow, blue, and green balloons strung across Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs, California.

  The waiting crowd wants one last encounter with the Lone Ranger’s textured and sensational and fantastic world.

  What a day! It’s unbelievable to see all these celebrities arriving in helicopters.

  The high school band is playing the William Tell Overture, the Lone Ranger’s personal theme, and cheerleaders are standing on each other’s shoulders chanting his name. And there’s Tonto looking adorable with the couple’s twin poodles, Brad and Bianca. And there’s the animal rescue people with the crane. If Trigger survives the ride it’ll be a miracle, they say.

  The day’s a hot one, thirty-two degrees Celsius. Volunteers are handing out free Gatorade.

  We’re on the sidewalk watching the scene from webbed lawn chairs, flags and drinks in hand.

  We couldn’t love the Lone Ranger more.

  When you cross the finish line you drop dead.

  The Space Station Astronaut Speaks

  It gets pretty insane up here talking about our T-Zones. T for taste, that is. “Am I eating a melon or a lamb chop? Oatmeal or gravy?” The humour is definitely not the multi-cam sit-com variety. More of a one-two punch.

  Mostly, we just fumble around. We don’t do anything spectacular, which is kind of funny, considering. At one point someone punches Robin, which is not an easy thing to do when you’re floating, and his head hits the control panel. Randy says, “What’s the sound of one head hitting a control panel?” and this cracks us up because it’s kind of an accidental-Buddhist thing to say.

  Our favourite game is called “Trap the other guy with a crazy old gal who never stops talking.” Obviously, crazy old gals are in short supply up here so we take turns dressing up like one and hanging, literally, in the shower stall, the idea being, who can entertain the other person for the longest period of time?

  Come evening, we broadcast the day’s events back home. Everyone there thinks we’re pretty cool because we genuinely like each other, love each other, and I think that translates.

  Then just before bed Randy pulls out his guitar and sings something spiritual about the big emptiness we’re rolling through. It gets cozy, then, like the last two days of camp when you haven’t done the water skiing yet, or the archery, and you don’t want to leave.

  We’ve Been in This Position for Decades

  “Did you see what the dog threw up this morning? A bit of bone she got out of the garbage.”

  “I’m leaving in five min
utes. For my credit-counselling appointment.”

  “What did you do with the broom? I want to get at those cobwebs.”

  “I am leaving.”

  “You know, I’m getting sick of the colour red.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “Is Boyd going to trim the tops of the cedars or just the sides?”

  “I don’t know. Look! There’s a hummingbird at the feeder.”

  “There’s a mouse on the living-room rug. The cat must have brought it in last night. I thought I heard something.”

  “I am leaving now. I am going into the closet. Maybe this time I’ll find the exit.”

  “Watch out for Jay in there. He’ll pop out even though he’s supposed to be dead. He’ll be standing beside you and he’ll have the axe.”

  “I know. I have the gun.”

  Vibe

  Bucket list? The only thing left is to see how long we can run the string.

  Today’s Letter

  Life is pleasant here in Oz, apart from people stabbing and shooting each other, as they are in other countries.

  Lots of people are on welfare. But restaurants, coffee shops, and clothing stores are doing well. Wages are high. Bethany made eight hundred dollars one weekend while on hols from uni.

  And Steve made some money in the stock market so everyone’s treating him like surfing royalty.

  Patricia’s in a shut-down phase. Bob is dead.

  There’s always something.

  It’s usually the weather for us. We seem to attract torrential downpours, wildfires, or flash floods. This time one of our trailer’s wheels is wobbling in a really abnormal way.

  There Are Times When You Are Forced to Respond to Things

  You’ve invested your family’s savings in cocoa-bark mulch, a garden mulch that’s been described as “mouth watering” because of its chocolate smell. You believe you can make good money importing and selling this product locally. But your ultimate plan is to funnel whatever money you make into the non-profit organization you have just created and which you are calling Arrows for Loving Kindness.

  While waiting for your first shipment of cocoa-bark mulch from Central America, you’ve launched a crowdfunding appeal for start-up donations in support of the Arrows for Loving Kindness campaign. You’ve included a proviso that whatever money you collect must come from a place that connects with your spiritual aim.

  You are not exactly sure what Arrows for Loving Kindness is meant to do, but you have faith that the universe will soon tell you.

  Little Person

  Don’t make eye contact with a baby. They’re like cats. They know who doesn’t like them. I made that mistake at Emily’s tea and soon enough her baby was hanging onto my leg. So I had to pick it up and hold it while it squirmed and drooled and everyone made cooing sounds. It was awful.

  “There you go,” I said, after exactly one minute, and handed it back to its mother. But it returned for another assault, dragging itself across the carpet like a demented seal.

  “Nope,” I told it this time. “I am off-off-off.”

  I’d made a point not to sit anywhere Kyle and Emily might have had sex, choosing a rickety three-legged stool, reasoning, probably not here.

  Mainly, I wanted to shout at Emily, “You had sex with Kyle, like, fifty times before he left me?”

  But instead, I said, “Pass the cookies,” and hated their baby.

  The Uncomfortable Zone

  I was driving fast around a hairpin mountain turn and naturally a wheel hit the shoulder and the car plunged over the cliff and landed upside down in a ravine. When I crawled out I didn’t recognize a thing. There was mist that could have been drifty people, and there was jungle music going thump thump thump. I thought these things made sense because my middle name is Alice and I had just gone down a hole of sorts.

  I was unhurt but the music was getting on my nerves. I now had a mission. Find the volume control and turn it off. It was when I was thinking this that help arrived in the form of the writer, J.G. Ballard. April 19 is the anniversary of his death and since this was April 19, his appearance was another thing that made sense.

  J.G. Ballard told me to breathe deeply. He said the thumping sound was my beating heart and that I should think very carefully about wanting to turn it off.

  Adrift

  “The moon and the sun are travellers of a hundred generations,” wrote Haiku master Matuso Basho in his seventeenth-century travelogue Narrow Road to the Deep North.

  “The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth – for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.”

  Memo to self: Find a horse’s mouth.

  Green Water

  I was searching for a day that would feel like, Welcome to the party! For years I’d heard I’d find one if I crossed the Great Water. All I had to do was close my eyes and click my heels together three times. So I did that. My shoes were rubber boots, but suddenly they had wings. When I opened my eyes I was standing on a beach before a large tropical fish tank. Several fish cruised in the green-coloured water.

  Then I noticed an old man lying curled up and sleeping at the bottom of the tank. I could tell he was sleeping and not drowned because air bubbles rose from his mouth and broke the water’s surface.

  I knocked on the glass and the old man woke up, looked at me, and climbed out of the tank. A small, wet Oriental man. He squeezed water from his jacket and said, “Well?”

  “Not very,” I said.

  He squeezed more water into a cup and gave it to me to drink. Soon after I saw pink birds perched in a blossoming cherry tree. The old man grinned and climbed back into the tank.

  And here I am, gawking at the pink birds, still not knowing what it all means.

  Day Off

  The external world is offering much today, including a day off from your self and its necessities.

  So step outside with the dog. You’re going for an afternoon walk, one where you will soon become aware of the March sun. It’s weak this time of the year but not so weak that it won’t light up the daffodils from within. You’ll notice this, and also that the air smells like wet dirt.

  Outside, you’ll soon discover, is where all kinds of things are happening.

  In your neighbour’s yard, for example, there’s a display of bronze statues that he made himself. Wolf, bear, eagle, fish, and a four-foot pelican about to take flight.

  Along a side road you’ll see leaf buds, hear birdsong, watch as sparrows chase one another through tree-top branches.

  You’ll look down and notice the many pink-grey worms on the road’s surface. The worms are there because of the heavy rain last night, which has caused the dirt where they live to become flooded. You’ll understand this. The worms are flood victims searching for drier ground.

  Immediately, you will know what to do. Finding a strong twig, you’ll carefully transport the worms, one by one, to the side of the road.

  Save as many worms as you can before a car comes.

  The Complicated Solo

  Last Saturday you left Pam, your wife of forty-two years, for Donna, the woman you met at the bowling alley last winter. Donna is nineteen years younger than you. You’ve been seeing her at the Emerald Isle Motel on the highway for some time now.

  It’s Pam’s fault that you’re leaving, you think. Pam had said, “For God’s sake, Richard, find something to do!” So you joined the bowling league.

  Now you’re telling Pam, “You don’t have to be young and handsome and thin to have good things happen to you.”

  It’s like you are speaking to her from behind a podium. You’re feeling spirited and wise.

  “Every person, man and woman, has to be prepared to dance a long and complicated solo at the end of their lives,” you say.

  Within weeks your house will be sold and the assets divided. Pam will buy a condo, new furniture, up her bridg
e games, get the kids and grandkids onside, and register for ballet and flamenco lessons in the fall.

  Then time will pass.

  You and Donna will take many trips together, including ones to Mexico, California, and Hawaii. There’ll be an Alaskan cruise and a train trip across Canada. One summer you will drive to Halifax to see Donna’s mother. All the while you will be happy. The sex will stay good.

  When, a few years later, you are put in a home, try not to worry. A certain Margaret there will like the look in your eye – the way you smile at her when she passes your private room.

  Vibe

  I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that everything is normal. This is because spring this year is phenomenal and breathtaking, much better than we’d expected. There’s the sense that we’re masters, we’re special, we’re in growth-mode. Hopefully, we will share feelings about this with our loved ones, and also the joy of eating.

  Other than the fact that people don’t stay here forever, and even with sickness and murder and getting old and strange weather, there really is no downside to life.

  The champagne is in the fridge, you say?

  Here’s me in my tuxedo, jumping up and down.

  French Connection

  When you reach the two-hundred-and-eighth day of the year it will be July 27. On this day, in 1890, painter Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. He did this in one of the French wheat fields he frequently painted. He was thirty-seven years old and died two days later. His last words were, “The sadness will last forever.”