The Book of Stanley (28 page)

 

SIXTY-EIGHT

T
he 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

A
ccording 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.

“I really want a big animal to eat her,” Maha said to Kal as they followed Tanya. “I wouldn't even turn away.”

“Come on.”

“All right, I'd turn away. But I wouldn't cry.”

Kal shook his head.

“All right, I'd cry.”

At the top of the mountain, they waited for Tanya to finish her phone call. She promised Stanley would be back in town in two days. Stan was seeking wisdom in the wilderness, like all the really top-shelf prophets.

Tanya folded her phone shut and dropped her red cigarette pack on a flat rock.

“Please pick that up,” said Maha.

“The garbage?”

Maha wanted to shove Tanya off the edge. “Yes, the garbage.”

“Go fuck yourself.” Tanya pointed her phone at Maha like a gun. Then, slowly, she picked up the cigarette package and dropped it in her purse. “Satisfied? Everyone satisfied?”

Now that they were up there, it was obvious no one knew what to do. If Stanley was right and God was a
process
, then it did not matter what they said about Alok. As long as they said something. But Maha felt–no, she knew–that Stanley was wrong. It rested in her shoulders, this unhappy certainty, and pounded in the back of her head. She fiddled with the lid of the urn.

The wind blew their hair into their eyes. Tanya opened her cellphone, looked at the screen, and closed it again. She and Maha made quick eye contact with each other and then regarded their footwear and the riverbank below, where Stanley had jumped.

Kal stepped between the women. “Alok, uh, was a super guy. I just want to say I wish I knew him better, and I'll always remember him.” He cleared his throat and nodded, and looked up. “I love you, pal, wherever you are!”

“I love you too.” Maha wiped her eyes and fiddled with the urn some more.

Tanya slipped her cellphone into her pocket and clasped her hands, looked down. “Well, Alok, we went through a lot together, didn't we, old buddy? And–”

The urn popped open and Maha jostled it violently as she attempted to grasp the lid. Alok's ashes twisted out and into the air. Some drifted over the edge and into the valley. Other bits settled on the rock of Tunnel Mountain. The remainder, like a naughty ghost, blew into Tanya's face and hair.

 

SEVENTY

O
n his first visit to Svarga, Stanley had not noticed the diversity of architecture on the town's fringes. Mexican adobes, minimalist Japanese dwellings, sod houses, New York brownstones, twisting two-storey brick houses with bistros on the street level. He also had not noticed the sasquatches' dark eyes. Up close, there was a distinct sadness in them, and something like wisdom.

The sasquatches led Stanley down a long white stone road surrounded by plane trees. They came to a white château, with two turrets, built as a bridge across the river. Several men and women in matching uniforms tended its gardens.

“What is this place?” Stanley asked, breathing in the Svarga air hesitantly. He couldn't help wondering if it might revert to water.

The sasquatches did not answer. Standing between two of them, Stanley found they smelled like the hair of a seven-year-old boy with neglectful parents. At the entrance of the château, the sasquatches stopped and bowed, and a woman in a tattered man's business suit appeared in the murky sunshine of the inner castle.

“Welcome to Chenonceau,” she said, with a strong French accent. “Have you been here before, or to the original in the Loire?”

“No.”

“My name is Aurore.” The woman in the suit offered her hand in such a way that Stanley did not know whether to
shake it or kiss it. So he kissed it, and the woman laughed. “We are curious about you.”

“Do the sasquatches talk?”

Aurore ignored his question and led Stanley deeper into the castle and up a set of stone stairs. “Underneath the castle, you may have noticed the River Cher.”

“Yes.” Stanley waited for a pertinent piece of information about the River Cher, but there was none.

“The gardens outside are reproductions of those enjoyed by Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de' Medici. Are they not beautiful?”

“I didn't get a good look at them, to be honest. The sasquatches–”

“After Versailles, this is certainly the most beautiful château in France.”

Stanley decided it was futile to attempt anything like a conversation with Aurore. As she walked, her legs made a clicking sound. Walking behind her, Stanley could see through a hole in her neck.

On the second floor of the château, Aurore stood outside a darkened room. “When Catherine de' Medici died, she left Chenonceau to Louise de Lorraine, wife of Catherine's son Henry
III
. Of course, King Henry
III
was homosexual.”

“Of course.”

“But Louise de Lorraine was completely devoted to him. When Henry was assassinated in Saint-Cloud, she had this room designed as the site of her grieving, and a great darkness settled over Chenonceau.” Aurore waved him inside with a curtsy. “Please.”

“Thank you.”

Mary Schäffer stood in a window. She was not wearing
her characteristic clothing. Instead, she wore a pair of baby-blue yoga pants and a white T-shirt. Mary Schäffer turned and smiled. “I've been waiting for you.”

The ceiling of the room was black and decorated with silver tears and adorned crosses. In a corner of the room, a four-poster bed with blue sheets and a green tapestry.

“Queen Louise did nothing but pray after her husband died. She surrounded herself with woe.”

Stanley admired the room, the window, the view of the gardens, and the river from the window. “I didn't leave the Bow Valley.”

“No, you didn't. And you weren't kind to those lunatics I sent after you. By the way, it wasn't easy to return to them the power of speech. I had to erase their memories!”

“What did you ask them to do?”

“To capture and kill you, obviously. It would be much simpler and much more pleasant if you were dead, as you're attracting even more idiots to the valley. I trust you'll make another public appearance and send them away, this time without any of your magic tricks.” Mary Schäffer rearranged a couple of the flowers in the bouquet before her. “Get things back to normal.”

“What is normal?”

“You know what normal is.”

“I don't.”

“If you start a new religion, it will only make things worse. They aren't interested in an
actual religion
, you must know that. It's an insult, what you're doing.”

“To whom?”

“Shut up, immediately. For you, that is an unanswerable question.” Mary Schäffer did not make eye contact with Stanley. She continued to fuss with the bouquet.

Stanley waited for Mary Schäffer to answer his unanswerable question. Svarga made him feel dizzy and he wasn't sure how long he would last there. Time did not seem to be an issue for Mary Schäffer. So Stanley picked up the vase and tossed it out the window.

“Now then.”

“You're a madman, Mr. Moss.”

“If I stay here much longer, I will be.”

Mary Schäffer swallowed and shook her head. It took some time for her to recover her smile. She turned to the door. “Aurore, would you please fetch us some tea? Nothing with caffeine?”

“
Oui
,
madame
.”

Mary Schäffer sat across from Stanley, at a wooden table. When Aurore was gone, Mary Schäffer pounded the table. “Some discretion, Mr. Moss, please. What do you think this is?”

“I don't know. That's why I'm asking you.”

“It's very painful for us, Mr. Moss. Like you up there, we endeavour to forget painful realities we cannot change. We create diversions. Soccer matches, bullfights, Chinese operas. Once a year, Shakespeare comes and directs one of his plays using the original London cast. Unlike you up there, we don't have death as a balm. Things being as they are, we know we will be here in Svarga forever.”

“Things being as they are?”

“God has abandoned us.”