“Greg?”
Greg jumps a second time. Grant is touching his elbow, drawing him through the brightly lit office to his desk.
“You alright there, buddy?”
Greg is momentarily confused by the word buddy. He senses the fraudulence first, then something a little deeper, something true.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m OK.”
Grant sits Greg down and leans against the edge of an adjacent desk.
“OK. OK. Good. I’ve got a lot of things for us to cover over the next couple of days. But I gotta ask you something first.”
Greg touches his forehead. I’m sweating. He drops his hand without wiping it off. He nods quickly to Grant, feeling a tiny bead race along his jaw.
“OK. I wanna know, Greg, if anything that’s happened here since you started is, uh, freaking you out.”
Greg responds “No,” rapidly, twice, more to the idea of being freaked out than anything else.
“Good. Good. OK. Before we go on do you have anything you want to ask me?”
Greg feels a light ice cover his perspiring face as an air-conditioned draft passes over him. Question. He suddenly remembers that he does have a question.
“Yeah. Are you gay?”
Grant coughs into a fist and looks away before answering.
“Gay? Uh, you mean because of yesterday?”
Greg feels a curl bounce off his cheek as he nods. He leaves it there to appear innocent, adorable.
“Well, no. I’m not. In fact, I think I’m the only straight person in this newsroom.”
Greg looks at a tall blonde woman striding across to the desk of a familiar sportscaster who is busy clipping a microphone to his lapel.
Grant glides down into his chair and huddles under a desk lamp.
“In fact, I think fuckin’ a fella is sometimes about the most heterosexual thing a young man can do.”
Grant smiles and raises his eyebrows, surprised and impressed by what he’s just said.
“Right?”
Greg shrugs agreeably.
“Eh? Really, I think so.”
“I guess.”
“Right?”
“Right.”
“Oh yes, I think so.”
Grant waves his hand, closing the discussion. He flicks on a tiny television beside his pencil holder. He twists a noisy dial, stopping occasionally, until turning the set off. He raps the top of the television.
“This is the bullshit we’re facing, Greg. The whole goddamn province turning into fuckin’ cannibals. Oh boy.”
Greg feels a now familiar twitch of shame scurry into his heart. It dims the light around Grant’s face.
“We are living in strange times, I guess. A lot of people are going to die before this is over. Steve thinks it’s modern art. Ha. I think it’s evolution. Anyway, we’ll kill them. We always do.”
Greg suddenly wonders if he has less than a month to live. Maybe even a week. A minute.
“I wanna go for a drive, Greg. Out to the country. Check out some of this stuff firsthand.”
“Now?”
Grant reaches over and slaps Greg’s face playfully.
“Yeah, right now, sport.”
The virus that thrives in the brackish pools fed by its own leaking is becoming hot. Until now they have been rubbing each other’s tummy in the words that Greg uses, happy to wait and play in the limited give and take he so rarely opens up onto other people. As Greg lowers himself into the passenger seat, the viruses gather in all the things he might say next, braiding the wheels and filling their cheeks with venom. The car pulls out of the parking lot, and a lone figure, dressed entirely in black, wanders among the empty vehicles. He bends to examine the interior of a Saab. Throwing his hands up into the air when Grant screeches his wheels at the exit, the figure slams a fist into his palm.
16
Blue
The woods around Lake Scugog are a dense, spinach green. The people who drive past its pseudo island on Number Seven look leisurely at its peculiar shoreline. Scugog is different, unlike most lakes in the region. Angrier, maybe. Self-illuminating.
The green that pulls the highway down is interior to black, a green that has yet to distinguish itself as a colour. A nightmare of green. People who drive through its suction are often bored, tired of scenery; and they say, in order to squeeze excitement out of the last leg of their trip, “I bet if you walked in there you’d never come back.” The driver never looks, but nods in agreement, swallowing a backwash of rejected coffee, disappointed that a good argument couldn’t be made. And, finally thrilled by the bristle of invisible hostility, he or she surprises the passenger by speeding up across the bridge. The passenger’s comments aren’t entirely banal. Lake Scugog is different.
Lakes in Ontario were formed by glaciers. They were fed like babies by englacial streams, and when they grew old, shuffling permeable and impermeable stones in their stomachs, soon unable to crush the animals that were invading them, they became what they are today: blue.
Scugog, however, is a mirror. Sometime on or about the date you were born, Scugog was a lowland field, teeming with scabby foxes and country mice. Then one day an artesian well was uncorked, or maybe a ditch was diverted, and the land was drowned. The foxes lay on their backs kicking little paws into the water that covered them. Their scabs flattened into scales and their sun-bit ears shot underwater sparks as they became gills. Soon the fox-fish began to hunt eel and rat-fish.
The surface of the water, like a playing card turned face down, became indistinguishable from other lakes: it too became blue. Beneath this surface, a surface nearly vertical if the passenger were to look closely, there are monsters. Not werewolves or vampires — not the kinds of monsters designed to frighten people — but things monstrous because they live too long. Sunk up to their eyeballs in fish parts, they twist in the dark, lining the shores with a gasket of white vomit.
And around this lake, now, a growing herd of zombies is passing through the underbrush. Cutting across their path in the permanent night are two children who have found each other.
Julie leads her brother by the hand. He stumbles behind her, mute and traumatized. His feet leave the ground as he is pulled along by his stronger sister. They fall farther and farther into forest, stretching out under its slip covers, to where night is held close to the ground, underneath trees, never leaving. Soon boulders begin to glow, caught by an afternoon moon hanging beneath the lowest bower of a distant tree that peeks through a slice ahead of them. Stars hang in funnels from branches, no longer up there, but down here. Julie brushes her shoulder against these wedding veils as she passes, diving into the bottom. She slips her arms into the sleeves of rivers and draws her breath from precisely where Ontario loses its consciousness. When they stop, out of breath, the stars and moons have settled on their skin like pyjamas. They sit apart, hanging their heads between their knees, panting and sniffing at the wetness on their faces.