CHAPTER FIVE
It's a sad place.
Mr. Mississauga climbs down out of the orange schoolbus, rust raining from the step as he tromps over it. Aglakti follows him out, hops down and snaps a pair of shades over her glasses. "So, this is it," she says.
The landscape is rocky and desolate, yellow lichens clinging to the ground around naked foundations and the vague scars of streets. A windowless abandoned car sags into a pebble-lined crevasse, canted at a rude angle with its front end smashed. A dead streetlamp lies next to it, and further on is a newspaper box with birds living inside of it. The chicks cheep.
Mr. Mississauga lights a cigarette. He toes a pile of trash, revealing some beer bottles and a tarnished fork.
Three dozen tents of various conditions are pitched around them, squatting within the crumbled borders of properties no longer there. Many of them have scorched, blackened pits nearby, evidence of early morning fires. The loose edges of the tents flap in the breeze, zipper ends jingling.
Aglakti joins him, hands jammed in her pockets. "Is it everything you'd hoped, Mr. Miss?"
"Yes."
Together they walk down to the old mine entrance, barricaded with boards and spattered with bilingual warning signs. A mammoth crack in the Earth extends from near the entrance cave and across the site, zigzagging like frozen lightning. Mr. Mississauga peers over the edge carefully. The bottom is swallowed by shadows.
He kicks a small rock into the gorge, listens as it taps and knocks against the sides on its echoey way down. At the end comes a sullen splash.
"Were there any casualties when this fissure opened up?"
Aglakti shakes her head. "Nope."
Over the next hill a narrow river sends its crystal clear waters into a small cove, chortling over rounded rocks. This is the inlet after which the town is named. In the middle of a modest delta by the mouth is another stone-slab Inukshuk figure, solemnly standing watch, slowly sinking into the muck.
"Was this site populated for long before the mine opened?" he asks.
"Sure," says Aglakti. "For a thousand years." She looks around and shrugs. "You don't get much in the way of ruins when you build your houses out of snow."
Mr. Mississauga shades his eyes with his hand as he peers into the distance. "Is that the Edge House?" he asks, pointing to a blue-grey shadow on the horizon.
Aglakti nods.
"The sites are very close together."
"Yeah, well, you can walk it if you have to. But it's a bitch when you're hungover."
They return to the bus and Aglakti sets up an awning while Mr. Mississauga hunts for kindling. Aglakti watches him methodically arrange the wood as she bangs a bent metal stake into the ground to secure the sportily fluorescent fly. "Do you do a lot of camping out, Mr. Miss?" she asks.
"Circumstances have often forced me to improvise," he says, inserting a match into the nest of bramble. A curl of smoke drools out. Twigs sizzle as sap turns to steam.
Once it's flaming Aglakti cooks a hot dog and Mr. Mississauga takes in a can of soup. Afterward he sits back to smoke as Aglakti grabs a guitar from the bus and strums at it idly.
A thick deck of wooly cloud starts rolling in from the west.
She sings, "I once knew a huffer boy, but I wouldn't let him know me..."
She glances over at Mr. Mississauga, but he's in a trance. His cigarette has fallen forgotten on the dirt beside him, turning the pebbles yellow. His eyes are flickering and dancing, his mouth tight and grim.
Her lids grow heavy watching him.
When she wakes up she's shivering. The sky has been blotted out, the setting sun invisible. A rude, cold wind pushes garbage between the empty tents. The birds are hunkered down in their newspaper box, twittering fretfully.
Aglakti gets up, rubs her aching ass, and then fetches a rough blanket from the bus and drapes it around Mr. Mississauga's shoulders. She hefts a bundle of logs from under the driver's seat and tosses one of them on the fire, then carelessly observes Mr. Mississauga's soup can rolling away, touched by wind, clanging on the rocks.
When she looks back again he's awake. "Welcome back," she says.
"I was never gone."
"You were asleep."
"Yes," he says. "So were you."
She sneers sceptically. "How would you know?"
He opens his cigarette case and slips a smoke between his lips, hand whirring. "I'm aware of myself and my surroundings while I sleep."
She frowns. "What -- seriously? How's that even possible?"
"My eyes are open."
"Yeah sure, that's one thing, but it's another thing to say you're conscious when you're unconscious, isn't it?"
Mr. Mississauga draws on his smoke. "I'm always conscious."
"No way."
"Yes."
"That's impossible."
"No."
Aglakti regards him for a moment as she sits down beside the fire and paws at the dirt randomly, letting the fine particles drain between her nail-bitten fingers. "Is that something you...learned, or what?"
"No," says Mr. Mississauga. "I was born this way."
Aglakti looks down, wipes her nose on her sweatered arm. "Does that mean you can remember all your dreams?" she asks, looking up again. "Like, anytime you want?"
Mr. Mississauga's eyes narrow. "Yes," he says seriously.
She grins. "Holy shit, that's so cool."
Mr. Mississauga shakes his head curtly. "No."
"No?"
He sighs, toys with his cigarette in a way Aglakti hasn't seen before, casts his gaze over her head at the wind-ruffling edge of their awning. "Dreams aren't what you think they are, Aglakti. You only remember the fringes -- the bleeding borders as you wake up. The fringes are nothing. The fringes are just fluff."
She thrusts out her lip defiantly, chucks away a small stone. "So, educate me."
"What do you want to know?"
She thinks about it as she reaches into the cooler and pulls out a Coca-Cola. "How do you know what's a dream and what's real? How can you tell?" she asks, cracking the seal and taking a sip. "Do you ever get confused?"
"No," says Mr. Mississauga. "Dreams don't look real. They look like cartoons. Edges and outlines are emphasized, the colours are super-saturated. It's a montage of abstractions -- the global view is fuzzy and shifting while small details stand out starkly, crawling with hyper-definition. It doesn't look real at all."
Aglakti shrugs. "Sometimes my dreams seem real enough."
"They wouldn't if you were awake. Your higher faculties aren't playing along. If you ever saw your dream in the light of day you'd see how it looks more like a painting than a photograph."
Lightning flashes silently out over the bay. A moment later the air shudders. The fire crackles and pops.
She sips from the can again. "So what did you mean when you said your dreams were busy, Mr. Miss? What's that about?"
He smiles faintly, wistfully. "Do you know what your dreams are for, Aglakti?"
"For?"
"Yes."
She squints, rubbing her chin. "...Making contact with the Ghost World?"
"No."
"I give up."
"The dreams you almost remember, Aglakti, are for the purposes of synthesis. You see mixed up images and sensations because your brain is interested in your reaction to them."
"Oh yeah?" she says, covering her mouth as she yawns. "So what's the difference between my brain and me?"
Mr. Mississauga draws on his cigarette. "Your brain is a system of neural hardware, your mind is an emergent property of its operation. Do you understand?" He exhales a plume of smoke, turned orange in the light of the fire. "Parts of the living mind can be...harnessed -- adapted for use in classifying and connecting ideas. Your brain does this -- makes use of parts of your mind -- to help sort memories for long-term storage, to flag related concepts for association and compression. And sometimes the you part of you wakes up enough to observe some of that process."
Aglakti considers this. "But not you -- the you in you is always there?"
"Yes."
"And you watch all your dreams go by?"
"Yes."
"And you...use that somehow?"
"I'm able to identify significant patterns, yes. Think about it: a man wondering about the facts of a case might work through one theory in an hour, but my dreams can scrub through a thousand theories in the same space of time. I'm able to adapt the dream synthesis engine to my own purposes."
"So you wake up with the answer."
He makes another tight little smile. "Sometimes."
Aglakti chuckles and pulls her guitar over again, tuning it absently as she mulls. "So, basically Mr. Miss, you're a slot machine."
Mr. Mississauga licks his lips. "Yes."
She strums aimlessly, gliding her fingers along the strings. "And so that's really what dreams are for, huh? Sorting."
"That's what one kind of dreaming is for, yes. Rendering to long-term memory is one of the functions of REM sleep."
"That's rapid eye movement, right?"
"Yes."
"What other kinds of dreams are there?"
Mr. Mississauga tosses away the end of his smoke and begins the process of fetching and lighting another. Lightning flashes, distant thunder groans. "The kind you never remember. The kind that plays when the you in you is totally disconnected, during slow wave sleep."
"Do you remember those?"
"Yes."
"What are they like?"
Mr. Mississauga makes a sour face. "Did you ever have night terrors, as a child?"
"Like really bad nightmares? Nope, not me."
"Have you ever watched a dog dream?"
"Sure," she says, plucking pizzicato up the neck. "They chase stuff and bark in their throats. I guess they dream about dog things. Cats, and cars, and bones."
Mr. Mississauga shakes his head solemnly. "They're being trained."
A shiver runs along Aglakti's shoulders. "What do you mean? By who?"
Mr. Mississauga looks at her through the fire, his eyes swimming with reflections of its golden spires. "By their brains," he says. "It's the same with any of us. When we go into deep sleep our brain puts us through our paces. It runs training programmes."
Lightning flashes. She whispers, "Training to do what?"
"To survive," says Mr. Mississauga heavily, then pauses as the thunder interrupts him. "Slow wave dreams are a very dark place, Aglakti. There's a reason we're not supposed to remember -- because it's damaging. It's too basic. It's too brutal. It's blood and panic, fight and flee."
"We fight?"
"Yes. We fight, we kill, we die. We rape. We're eviscerated, and we hold our warm, ruined organs in our hands. We jump and run, tear and chew. We are, in that place, nothing but animals."
She sneers and shakes her head. "What's the point?"
"Reflexes are primed, for when they might be called upon in the real world. Your muscles remember, so does your brain. Your mind, thankfully, does not."
Something occurs to Aglakti. She looks up again, her eyes welling with compassion. "...But you remember it all."
Mr. Mississauga nods.
She twitches as if to move around the fire to touch him, to comfort him, but she doesn't get up. He seems too alien viewed through the shifting flames, too unreal. She rubs her hands together anxiously. "Holy shit. Every night?"
"I don't allow myself deep sleep when I'm working. When I get back to the city I'll hole up for five or six days and do it then."
"Why?"
"My apartment is specially insulated against sound, to dampen my screams."
"Jesus fuck, Mr. Miss."
"Indeed."
They both watch the fire crackle for a while. The sky is a low, dark, swiftly moving ceiling above them. Mr. Mississauga holds his watch up to the guttering light: it's one o'clock.
Aglakti gnaws the inside of her cheek thoughtfully, tapping on the side of the guitar in a slow rhythm. "So, Mr. Miss," she says without looking up, "what's the deal with you and the way the water drains?"
Mr. Mississauga makes a sniffing sound that might be a chuckle. "Just a theory."
"From the slot machine?"
"Yes. I theorize that draining water is a litmus test for the unusual."
"What?"
"Every sink in S. Inlet drains counter-clockwise."
"Yeah, so? Isn't that how they're supposed to drain because we're in the Northern Hemisphere? What's it called? The Chlamydia effect?"
"The Coriolis effect. But it applies to hurricanes, not sinks -- things that span miles, not inches. On the small scale the Coriolis effect has a pull over ten million times weaker than gravity. In the turbulence of a draining sink that's statistically irrelevant."
She pauses to polish off her Coke, wagging her opposite hand vaguely to indicate her imminent words as she gulps. "So why does everything drain counter-clockwise, then?" she gasps at last, tossing the can aside.
Mr. Mississauga sighs. "Like I said, it's unusual. The drains are a symptom. They tell me there's an extra spin on the local attractor, a pull along a dimension we can't see but the universe can feel."
They both jump when lightning flashes brilliantly and thunder slaps down immediately afterward, the sky seeming to crack, the air shaking. "What does that mean?" presses Aglakti, her ears ringing.
"It means something weird is going on," says Mr. Mississauga carefully. "And it's deep. It's in the fabric of the world."
Aglakti stares into the blackness around them for a moment, hands hanging limply over her guitar. "You know what it's like, Mr. Miss? It's like a mistake. It's like a clerical error. It's like somebody forgot to check one checkbox when we moved the town, and the town don't know better."
"A clerical error in reality..." echoes Mr. Mississauga, nodding. "It's not the first one I've seen."
Aglakti looks up sharply. "It's not?"
He shakes his head. "I've seen the erotic chess pieces before."
"What do they mean?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know? Some detective!" Aglakti giggles suddenly, then covers her mouth. "Let me pull your arm. Let's see what the slot machine has to say."
Mr. Mississauga smiles, the skin around his bottomless eyes wrinkling. It's gone as quickly as it came, his face wooden again. He says, "I believe an event took place, or will take place, that pierces the universe. These clerical errors, they form a line. S. Inlet is on that line. I believe that line represents a vector of injury through space."
Aglakti frowns. "A what?"
He sniffs. After a moment he says, "Forget about it. It's starting to rain. Why don't you get inside the bus and try to sleep for a few hours?"
Aglakti stands. She hovers uncertainly for a moment, fidgeting with her braids, then blushes and smiles to herself. She takes off her glasses and says, "You want to come with me?"
Mr. Mississauga shakes his head. "No," he says. "I am a homosexual."
Aglakti raises her brow and purses her lips. "That's cool," she says. She folds open the doors and steps up into the bus. "Good night, Mr. Miss," she calls.
"Good night, Aglakti," says Mr. Mississauga softly.
The rain comes. Mr. Mississauga draws his long coat tighter around his shoulders. The fire steams.
When the lightning flashes it looks to Mr. Mississauga as if he is sitting watch over a teepee village with a schoolbus longhouse, the reek of meditative tobacco on his lips and the Ghost World on his mind. He is a chief. He is the head of a nation of one.
(And its torso, too.)
Someone in one of the tents coughs. A young child cries. A zipper sings as someone gets up to take a leak. The town is here.
When the sun comes up the day is grey. Mr. Mississauga watches and listens and, in the bleak hour before the old people rise, he dips into dream.
When he comes back a couple of kids are poking him with a stick.
"Hey, he's alive," cries a boy with a black eye. "Run!"
The morning fires are burning. The women go down to the river for water while the men spit and smoke. Nobody has a Nintendo so the kids play with each other, running in circles, their taunts and songs echoing off the rocks.
Errol finds a bright white beluga beached on the shore. It's barely alive so he finishes it with his knife. He carves off a peal of blubber and sniffs it reverently. "Orsaq!" he bellows, hands cupped around his mouth.
A crowd gathers, gibbering and elbowing for vantage.
Mr. Mississauga is startled to see Aglakti standing at his elbow. "You're wet," she says, yawning.
"It rained."
She closes her eyes and draws air through her nose. "Do I smell orsaq? Oh. My. Shit." Her eyes fly open. "Where is it?"
Mr. Mississauga points. Aglakti runs to the beach.
Some eat it cooked. Some eat it raw. Everybody has shiny faces and dirty fingers, and they laugh loudly. Charlie is chastised for sneaking seconds before his turn. Mr. Mississauga declines to partake, even when Father Gomez assures him that it isn't forbidden by the Bible. He smiles, though. The town's giddy gluttony makes him cheerful.
The throbbing heart of S. Inlet is right here, amid nothing.
In some ways the wound is better for being healed than it ever could've been if uncut.
