The Book of Stanley (27 page)

 

SIXTY-SIX

S
tanley inspected a pale-yellow flower that grew on the mossy peak of Tunnel Mountain. The sun had set, but he was able to detect a wash of pink in the yellow of the drooping bloom. Thinking about the flower, the
why
of it, was deeply satisfying. The intricacies of the flower, from its tiniest cells to the clarity of its petals, mocked his ambitions. Its interactions with the soil of the mountain, with nearby shrubs and trees, with the rain and the snow and the bees that pollinated it in the heat of the afternoon, exploded with ungraspable meaning. It was the line of poetry that would never be written.

In Banff, below, a massive crowd had gathered at the high school football field. People in the audience had booed Kal's accordion performance, and now the great majority chanted Stanley's name. When he was in high school, this would have been his most potent fantasy. Now, in the absence of Frieda and Alok, it didn't matter how many gathered in Banff. Millions of needy swimsuit models could fill the Bow Valley and still he would be alone.

Once or twice, Stanley and Frieda had eaten dinner in front of singing competitions like
American Idol
on television. They
were barrages of disappointment, as the attractive young singers bounced around in the latest fashions, massacring songs written and recorded by other people. As they watched, Stanley and Frieda commented on themselves watching. What it
meant
to share this experience with 35 million people. They made sport out of their moods and emotions: embarrassment, disappointment, anger, a rare hop of pleasure. It seemed a potent marker of North American culture, this television format. Unironic youth desperate to be famous, exalting the easy and grotesque songs of the late twentieth century as though they were hymns.

No doubt, these were the moods and emotions of God, if he allowed himself to feel: embarrassment, disappointment, anger, a rare hop of pleasure. Only God didn't have the luxury of feeling detached and superior, like viewers of reality television. He was implicated in every shot fired by every zealot. Every rape and holocaust and starving child was his.

Stanley was ready to accept the role of spiritual liaison and, in Alok's honour, return to human beings the possibility of transcendence. Moral action would be based on individual experience, self-awareness, and mythology in The Stan, not the literal interpretation of ancient books. He would do away with apocalyptic visions and teach his followers to engage with the earth and its mysteries, to seek meaning in the relationships among flowers and sex and death. Stanley didn't want to be a tyrant about it, but he would ask people whether or not
American Idol
allowed them to feel complete.

The roar of the crowd intensified. Nearby, an owl hooted. Maha appeared at the top of the trail, jogging. She stopped and lifted her hand when she saw him, bent over to catch her
breath. Stanley pulled the flower from the soil, placed it in his lapel, and joined Maha. Together, they started down Tunnel Mountain.

Stanley knew she desperately wanted to ask a question. He also knew Maha didn't want to hear, or believe, the answer. A bat flew low overhead and gulped a mosquito. Stanley placed his hand on Maha's shoulder.

“Why didn't you save Alok?” she said.

“I tried, Maha. I'm sorry.”

“What do you mean you tried? You're the Lord.”

“No. I'm not the Lord.”

“Don't say that.”

“It's true and you know it's true.”

“Please. Stop.”

Halfway down, Stanley reached inside his suit jacket for Alok's note. According to the big man's will, written on Mineral Springs Hospital stationery, all of his material possessions went to The Stan. He wanted to be cremated and have the ashes scattered atop Tunnel Mountain. The manager of a funeral home in Canmore had been only too happy to offer inauthentic condolences in muted tones and provide a quote. What had Stanley wanted in an urn?

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

M
aha 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.