Eighteen Bridges - Winter 2015 by Venture Publishing

WINTER 2015

Stories That Connect

GOING BACK What do we think weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll find?

Wherever you’re writing from... Then I did some of my best writing. A house on stilts on Marajó island, where the Amazon meets the sea. There was a rubber tree inside the house, and the waves were red at high tide. Ayahuasca had something to do with it. - Samuel Veissiere

When the weather’s polite, I write from a garden shed in our back yard affectionately known as the Paperback Shack. It’s less than 8’ by 10’, wired for light, with the inside painted the blue of a blind pony’s eye. - Katherin Edwards

I write a lot on the subway using my iPhone, on the A-train between West 4th and Lincoln Center, listening to a man in a tinfoil hat expound on the joys of no longer having to hear the aliens. - Chris Tarry

UBC Creative Writing Multiple Genres Of Study | On-Campus or Online | Flexible, Comprehensive, Challenging Write and learn on our breathtaking campus in Vancouver, Canada, one of the world’s most livable cities. Or participate in a vibrant online community from wherever you live. UBC offers world-class creative writing programs at the BFA and MFA level, on-campus and by Distance Education. Join us.

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Faculty Alison Acheson Deborah Campbell Kevin Chong Maggie de Vries Charles Demers Steven Galloway Sara Graefe

Wayne Grady Nancy Lee Annabel Lyon Keith Maillard Maureen Medved Susan Musgrave Andreas Schroeder

Linda Svendsen Timothy Taylor Peggy Thompson Rhea Tregebov John Vigna Bryan Wade

ISSUE 9

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WINTER 2015

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. – E. M. FORSTER, HOWARDS END

FEATURES THE MEMOIR BANK

Lisa Gregoire

14 Breathing Holes The Story. Of you ARTS AND CULTURE

Scot Morison

24 In a Dark Theatre

Hope against hope in Palestinian cinema ON THE RECORD

Virgil Grandfield

30 The Cage

What really happened in post-tsunami Indonesia?

COVER ILLUSTRATION ROBERT CARTER EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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FICTION

Laura Trunkey

42 On Crowsnest Mountain SPAN

Alissa York Steve Neufeld Richard Haigh

07 Soft Core

You’re cut off

09 Pink in the Needle

The HIV epidemic in northern Saskatchewan

12 It’s the Law

A pint-sized debate MISCELLANY

Clive Holden

20 Can•Icons: Women 28 Can•Icons: Water

POETRY

Liam Coady Kayla Czaga Barry Dempster Alice Major

11 16 38 47

Burning Theatres Part 1 The Newspapers Our Lives and Nothing Else The Hat SOUNDINGS

Scott Messenger

49 Three-ring Meal

The grasping novelty of modern dining

51 Too Swift?

The meaning of covering someone else’s songs

Elizabeth Withey

53 Writing the Land

Paul Matwychuk

55 Hero or Villeneuve

Bookmarking Canadian literature What is Denis Villeneuve really trying to say? BRIDGES

Craille Maguire Gillies

58 Love Lockdown

A bridge, a lock, a solo wanderer

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ILLUSTRATION JENNIFER MADOLE

Jennifer Cockrall-King

WHY WRITE? ISSUE 9

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WINTER 2015

EDITOR & PUBLISHER Curtis Gillespie SENIOR EDITOR Scott Messenger FEATURES EDITOR Craille Maguire Gillies CONSULTING EDITORS Lynn Coady (co-founder) Paul Wilson SUBMISSIONS EDITOR Matthew Stepanic GUEST POETRY EDITOR Alice Major CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jennifer Cockrall-King, Marcello Di Cintio, Lisa Gregoire, Bruce Grierson, Marni Jackson, Don Gillmor, Lisa Moore, Timothy Taylor, Chris Turner COPY EDITING Patricia Gillies, Michel Proulx CONSULTING PUBLISHER Ruth Kelly ART DIRECTOR Kim Larson WEBSITE Linn Øyen Farley Craille Maguire Gillies UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA LIAISON Marie Carrière CIRCULATION & NEW MEDIA COORDINATOR Jason Purcell BUSINESS MANAGER Tiiu Vuorensola Eighteen Bridges ISSN 1927-9868 is a not-for-profit magazine published through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, 3-5 Humanities, University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 Canada. The production and design of Eighteen Bridges, along with publishing consultation, is provided by Venture Publishing Inc. Occasionally, Eighteen Bridges makes its subscriber list available to like-minded magazines for one-time mailings. Please contact us if you would not like to receive these mailings. Subscriptions are four issues for $25.95 plus GST. To inquire about advertising, subscriptions and back issues, contact ebmag@ualberta.ca or visit eighteenbridges.com All contents copyright 2015 and may not be reproduced without the permission of Eighteen Bridges. PM #42968512

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he Eighteen Bridges team was putting this issue to bed in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks. That horrific and sobering series of events reminded us all, yet again, that violence and bloodshed are too often the result of our collective inability to accept ‘the other.’ The attacks also caused us to see this issue’s stories in a new light, in that they speak to gaps between what we hope might happen and what does happen, and the damage that can result when the gap between the two is too vast to make sense of. A return to an Arctic town to confront one’s past. A glimpse into the reality of human trafficking in the wake of the Sumatran tsunami. An examination of how Palestinian reality has shaped its film industry. These stories are troubling in their own ways, and, especially in light of what happened in Paris, they reaffirm that, depending on the context, we are all ‘the other.’ Context is everything, and understanding context takes energy and compassion and will. Which is why the stories in this issue leave me

hopeful and optimistic. These writers and the stories they tell speak to how to pull the best from the worst, how to locate hope amid pain, how to believe that we possess individual and collective value when the world is telling us otherwise. I’m always in awe of great and courageous writing. Given what happened in Paris, this kind of activity—writing of insight and power and empathy—seems to me the perfect response. Acknowledge the complexity, tell the truth, scour the land for what might unite. And then write about it, meaning share it. “Only connect,” wrote E. M. Forster, in the quote from Howards End that we use as our inspiration. I’m not always sure about the “only” part, but “connect” seems like an awfully good place to start. – Curtis Gillespie

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CONTRIBUTORS

A FEW OF OUR CONTRIBUTORS…

14 LISA GREGOIRE National Magazine award-winning journalist and managing editor of Nunatsiaq News, as well as a contributing editor at Eighteen Bridges. She lives in Ottawa with a writer husband and their twin daughters.

VIRGIL GRANDFIELD is an

Alberta writer and former overseas delegate for the Red Cross. He is currently doing graduate work in Social Justice and Literary Non-fiction at the University of Lethbridge and is writing a book about Red Cross tsunami reconstruction labour trafficking in Indonesia.

42 LAURA TRUNKEY lives

and writes in Victoria, BC. On Crownest Mountain is included in her collection Double Dutch, forthcoming from House of Anansi in spring, 2016.

AND THE REST OF THEM… LIAM COADY is an Edmonton-based poet. This poem is in remembrance of the Roxy Theatre. JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING is a food culture writer. Her next book, Food Artisans of the Okanagan, will be published by TouchWood Editions in April 2016. KAYLA CZAGA’S first collection of poetry, For Your Safety Please Hold On, won the Gerald Lampert prize for best first book and was nominated for a 2015 Governor General’s Award. BARRY DEMPSTER, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award, is the author of fourteen poetry collections, two volumes of short stories, a children’s book and two novels. RICHARD HAIGH is a professor at Osgoode Hall law school. He researches and writes in the area of constitutional law. CLIVE HOLDEN works on the Eighteen Bridges loading dock. He’s lived in five Canadian provinces and has driven through the rest, except for Newfoundland. He loves them all equally, but some more equally than others. 6

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CRAILLE MAGUIRE GILLIES is a National Magazine award-winning writer, features editor for Eighteen Bridges, and freelance editor at the Guardian. ALICE MAJOR’S 10th poetry collection, Standard candles, has been released by the University of Alberta Press. She served as Edmonton’s first poet laureate. PAUL MATWYCHUK is the general manager of the independent Edmonton publishing house NeWest Press. He is also an award-winning actor and playwright, and the resident pop culture columnist for Edmonton AM on CBC Radio. SCOTT MESSENGER is the senior editor of Eighteen Bridges. He lives in Edmonton, where he’s a full-time writer and communications specialist, and amateur musician. SCOT MORISON writes mostly for film and television. He lives in Edmonton.

STEVE NEUFELD is a screenwriter and story editor based in North Vancouver. Before graduating with an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC in 2013 he taught high school English in Sylvan Lake, Alberta. ELIZABETH WITHEY is a writer, journalist and artist, and the Edmonton Public Library’s 2015 Writer-In-Residence. She is currently wearing the same black dress for a year and blogging about it at frockaroundtheclock.tumblr.com. ALISSA YORK’S internationally acclaimed novels include Mercy, Effigy (short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize) and, most recently, Fauna. Her award-winning short fiction and essays have appeared in Eighteen Bridges, The Guardian, Canadian Geographic and elsewhere. York has lived all over Canada and now makes her home in Toronto. Her new novel, The Naturalist, is due out in April 2016.

SPAN REPORTING BACK

SOFT CORE By ALISSA YORK

IT WAS VANITY THAT KEPT ME GOING BACK to him. For much of my life, I’d endured haircuts worthy of their own humiliating nicknames: the Mushroom, the Pyramid, the Cougar (John, that is—remember that sweaty wedge of bangs?). Then came a man . . . let’s call him Aldous. And this Aldous, he knew how to cut my hair.

When we met, he was working out of an irritatingly hip salon. He showed me to his chair, confronted my months- overdue mop without judgement and picked up his shears. His patter was refreshing—light on the holidays and condo prices, heavy on the underground Super Colliders. Aldous was weird, but in a good way.

More to the point, I walked out of there with the best haircut I’d ever had. Of course, I went back. For two, three years, I braved the bored girl at the desk and the thudding house music for the knowledge that lay in those hands. Then one day Aldous announced he was leaving. Stylist no more, he was taking over the barbershop where he’d been moonlighting on his days off. The old devil who owned the place had finally decided to retire. “But Aldous,” I whined, “what about me?” “Oh, you can still come. I’ll do appointments a couple of days a week.” The idea appealed. I’d darkened more than one barbershop door in my youth—the pixie-cut years, the occasional Sinéad free-for-all fuzz cut—but a barber who could finesse a bevelled bob? Jackpot. I’d be back among the Barbicide jars and philodendrons where I belonged. Or so I thought. It turned out the barbershop’s previous owner really was an old devil. I arrived for my first appointment to find Aldous kitted out in a white barber’s smock, surrounded by pictures of naked girls. He brought up the decor before I could, invoking his wife’s name as a clumsy post-feminist shield. “Katy helped me decide what to keep—you know, the retro stuff, the kitsch. Here, take a seat.” He gave the chair a couple of swift pumps. “You should’ve seen the place before.” I nodded, my eyes travelling the walls. I’d never realized the “soft” in soft porn was descriptive: hands lay like feather-fans across crotches; nipples peaked in a pinkish blur. A few EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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scantily clad icons rubbed shoulders with the nameless farm girls and biker babes—Bettie Page and Rita Hayworth, the incomparable Marilyn, so sexy she even offed herself in the nude. While Aldous worked his magic, I lifted my gaze to take in an illustration of a chesty Anime girl. Pink frilled panties, curlers in her white-blonde hair. She was a mess, raccoon-eyed from weeping, crawling on her belly as though she would escape the frame. The curlers made it clear she wasn’t going anywhere. She’d put on those panties to please someone, and clearly, he wasn’t pleased. It turned out the hard stuff was there, too. I didn’t notice the magazines until my second visit, though they lay in plain sight among the Sports Illustrateds and the Times. There were copies in the cramped bathroom as well—the idea being, I guess, that while a guy waits for his short-back-and-sides he might feel moved to let off a little steam. “Aldous,” I said, pointing to a Penthouse, “what the hell?” Again, he directed me to the devil who came before. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I got rid of.” He let out a low whistle. “Stacks and stacks of it in the john. You couldn’t put it out with the recycling. I filled a couple of garbage bags, and even those I drove out to the dump.” For weeks I turned the matter ove r i n m y m i nd . A l do u s h a d downgraded the place from X to R, and maybe that was enough. Porn is normal, after all; the regular, redblooded stuff has been mainstream for years. So what if increasing numbers of men and teenage boys require screen- lit stimulation to keep up their end of the bargain. (Impotence? Teenage boys?) Who cares if porn-inspired surgeries including breast implants and labiaplasty are on the rise. 8

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A friend rolled her eyes when I brought up these and darker concerns. “Good grief,” she said. “It’s not as though he’s nailed up a bunch of crotch shots. It’s kitsch.”

walls, I will burn this fucking trailer to the ground.” “Chin up,” Aldous said, circling around to check my sides were even. I did as he said, meeting my own gaze in

Bettie Page and Rita Hayworth, the incomparable Marilyn, so sexy she even offed herself in the nude. There was that word again—a term I associated with lawn flamingos and dewy-eyed Christs. Was I missing something? “ R e l a x ,” m y f r i e n d a d d e d . “Where’s the harm?” By my third visit I was starting to relax. I was sitting with my chin tucked down, Aldous working the clipper at my nape, when Bonnie Scott popped into my mind. Short and muscular with bright blue eyes, she was a long-time driver for a local bus company. I’d only met her the once, at a dinner party years before, but she’d left a lasting mark. I was her junior by a couple of decades, which might have been why she told me the story she did. “I was your age when I got hired on,” she said, meeting my gaze across the table. “My first day on the lot, I go into the drivers’ trailer to grab a coffee and you know what I see?” She shook her head. “ Women. Naked women. The whole place was papered with porn.” There were other drivers in the trailer, but Bonnie didn’t greet them, didn’t even nod. Five-foot-four and twenty-some years old, she reached up and began ripping pictures from the walls. When the men protested, she paid them no mind. She went on tearing, making her way around the trailer until every one of its walls was bare. Only then did she address her fellow drivers. “If I ever,” she said, “see so much as a single tit on these

the mirror, and with it a wave of shame. Believe it or not, I went back. Not until I’d suffered another lamentable haircut from another pretender, but I went back. Aldous was neatening up my bangs when the cops stepped into his shop. They were a pair of clichés in uniform—a young Dudley Do-Right and an old bruiser with a bulldog’s grin. Dudley was the one in search of a haircut; his partner was just along for the ride. “Hey,” the older one said, gesturing to a blonde on a hay bale, “isn’t that your mom?” Dudley’s laugh was strained. “Forgive my partner, he’s old school.” It was the wrong thing to say. The bulldog, ugly to begin with, became ugly with something to prove. He stooped over the magazines, snatching one up for a closer look. “This one scratch-and-sniff?” He caught my eye in the mirror and held it. Dragging a finger over the page, he brought the model’s bare crotch to his nose. I considered breaking it off in person, but in the end I fell back on the written word. I’m sure you remember the cops who came in the last time I was there. You laughed at the older one’s joke—maybe in discomfort, I don’t know. What I do know is how I felt. Offended doesn’t begin to cover it. Aldous, I felt unsafe. I expected no reply and I got none. I told myself writing the email was what mattered, yet I couldn’t help

returning to the incident, wondering what more I could have done. What Bonnie Scott would have done. The first female hire, shop steward by the time I met her, steel-grey hair and those eyes as clear as a 12-year-old girl’s. Not what I did, that’s for sure. Which was to fish a couple of bills out of my wallet with trembling fingers, pay for my haircut and bolt. In my mind I begin with the weeping girl in her curlers. Paying the men no mind, I stand up on the barber chair and lift her down. From there I make my way around the room,

gathering up redheads, brunettes, blondes—Marilyn and her unbeatable cleavage, and behind it, her faltering heart. Even in fantasy, I stop short of threatening arson, which isn’t to say there’s no fire. I carry the pinups out into the street. I carry the cover girls and the centrefolds, making sure to go back for the stragglers in the john. No need for a lighter— these are hot women, their collective presence enough to generate sparks. One after another, they curl up into the carbon they came from. One after another, they rise. EB

PINK IN THE NEEDLE By STEVE NEUFELD

ADELE COOK PACED THE WHITE TILE WHILE a fluorescent light stuttered overhead. Her smile, the biggest part of her slight five-foot frame, pulled tight. Public speaking was difficult, not only because of what she had come to talk about, but because an old beating had left her with a speech impediment. Rows of people crammed into folding chairs leaned forward. They were

here in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, 390 kilometres north of Prince Albert, at Scattered Sites—a communitybased organization that supports people dealing with HIV infection and drug addiction—to celebrate Adele’s journey. She settled herself and began. Adele told the crowd that her first addiction came suddenly. Her husband gave her morphine for knee pain.

After three doses she was hooked. Then he gave her cocaine. After a house fire, Adele discovered that her husband had been buying coke instead of insurance. Left with nothing, she went to Saskatoon where she did drugs with a relative who had been diagnosed with HIV two years earlier and, overcome w ith bit ter ness, actively tried to infect others. One day she came to Adele with a rig set up with crystal meth, her drug of choice. It looked a little pink, but Adele shot it anyway. “The moment I pulled the needle out, I knew I was infected.” Between 1998 and 2008, Saskatchewan went from having one of the lowest HIV infection rates in Canada to the highest. In 2009, while the number of new HIV cases was dropping nationwide, 199 new cases were reported in Saskatchewan, the largest number ever. In 2011, according to the most recent Public Health Agency of Canada study, the HIV infection rate in Canada was approximately 208 per 100,000 population. Yet in La Ronge, a town of about 2,700, there were 52 people infected with HIV in 2013, a rate of roughly 2,000 per 100,000 population—10 times the national average. And when you factor in that most sources estimate unreported cases are twice the reported number, it means La Ronge was, and is, in the middle of a genuine epidemic. The isolation in La Ronge means clean needles are hard to come by, which is devastating because the intravenous drug of choice in La Ronge is cocaine. A heroin user might fix once or twice a day, but a person shooting cocaine will often inject 10 or 15 times. The math is frightening. Adele walked back and forth in front of her audience. In the weeks after using the tainted needle, she had most of the flu-like symptoms typical of early HIV infection. But since she wasn’t sweating—the only symptom EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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on the list she didn’t have—she retreated into denial. When she finally got tested, the words, “You’re positive” fell like a hammer. Two years after that, her son, suffering from diabetes and AIDS, died at 22. “I was mad at God. I tried everything to numb the pain.” During this effort to escape, Adele was attacked on the street and suffered blows to her head so severe that they caused her brain to bleed. She had lost her home, her son, and now her mobility and ability to speak. Instead of giving up, she went to physiotherapy and speech therapy, and began to walk and talk again. When she moved around La Ronge, she saw others falling into the rut she was crawling out of. She wanted to do something, but her speech issues held her back and the anti-retroviral drug cocktail she took to keep her AIDS under control was so hard on her system that some days she couldn’t eat. It was in this state that she wandered into Scattered Sites. She had heard that Jacki Ballantyne, an old friend, worked there. Jacki, like Adele, is Cree, but that’s where the similarities ended. Jacki is tall, with tree-limb arms, granite don’t-fuck-with-me eyes and a booming voice. Jacki and Scattered Sites director Julie Baschuk brought Adele into the fold. Scattered Sites provides education, hot meals, and a place to wash clothes and shower. It’s also a social hub for people who are addicted or HIV-positive in a community that does not always understand or accept them. Wrapping up, Adele told her audience that she was off methadone, served on the board of the Food Bank and worked at Scattered Sites as the local Aids Saskatoon representative. She had finally found herself in a moment worth staying in. “If I can get one family to stay off the path I was on, it’s worth it.” 10

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The room sniffled. People called out, “You give us hope,” and “Thank you.” “Can I go now?” Adele asked. The laughs shook a few last tears loose; Julie and Jacki gave her hugs and flowers.

THE NEXT MORNING, LA RONGE WAS DROWSY. The sun dragged itself over the trees, smearing frozen Lac La Ronge with pink and orange. Snowmobile tracks made criss-cross hems across the snow. Adele, Julie and Jacki picked me up in an ancient Suburban so I could see some of the social factors that lead to addiction and infection. We pulled into a trailer park. It looked more like a refugee camp. Some of the trailers were torn apart. Plastic sheeting for windows. Oil or propane heaters to stave off the cold. Even if there weren’t holes in the floors or missing windows, mould would set in. “There’s this idea that we have the knowledge to take care of ourselves, our children,” Jacki said. “We’re five, six generations chemically dependent. We’ve had five, six generations of residential school bullshit. I was in care. And now I’m still helping my daughter raise my grandson. If you don’t have the skills to take care of you, how are you going to take care of a house? They need a place that’s safe and decent, where they can build skills so they can build themselves.” On the way back, we crossed the Montreal River. Lac La Ronge was frozen and snow covered, but where the river flowed under the highway and poured into the lake the water was still open, the black swells bucking the cold and carving out an open swath perhaps 40 metres long. Back at Scattered Sites, Jason walked in, single braid tucked into his sweatshirt, his wide smile revealing a chipped tooth. He had just received his latest blood work. “My HIV is un-

detectable. That’s a huge weight off my shoulders.” Jason’s viral load was down to nothing, which meant he was in no immediate danger of developing AIDS, and his chances of passing on the virus were virtually nil. “If I just keep up with the meds and keep clean…” He hesitated. “I’m mostly clean. I still drink. I still use sometimes, but not every day.” Jason g rew up in Va ncouver with adoptive parents. His older brother got him into crack, forcing him into the fabled East Hastings neighbourhood for his daily quarter ounce. After going through a youth detox program, Jason moved to La Ronge to live with his biological family. His sister introduced him to intravenous cocaine. “La Ronge is where I stuck a needle for the first time.” One day he decided to share his sister’s rig to shoot cocaine. “The coke would have made me use the rig, even if I knew it was infected.” Three years later he found out he was HIV-positive. “It didn’t really fizz me right away,” he told me. “It really hit me when I went to an HIV doctor in Saskatoon. I went on a self-pity trip, a suicide mission.” Jason’s despair-fuelled binges resulted in his own children being taken into custody by the Indian Child Services Federation. “I’ve given up on myself three times since then,” he said. “But I keep digging myself out.” Later that day, Jason took me to the Umbrella Tree, a towering spruce near the hospital. It was -20 C and La Ronge was under several feet of snow, but Jason still found a few needles and carefully picked them up so he could drop them in a sharps box. “I wish more people would take advantage of Scattered Sites in a positive way,” he said. “It’s a stepping stone.” Jason is determined to face his challenges, and the women at Scattered Sites are a big support. Julie helps him prepare

BURNING THEATRES PART 1 This place still smells of smoke. When it rains, The coals remember their part in the pyro. They remember the smoldering. They remember the roar. The ocean thunder boom clack crack burst That bustled that morning. The water breathes the fire back into them And they burn again. My hands are charred from tender touching. This place latches onto the living Singing “It’s been a while” or “Take me with you” I do. My elbows glisten ash black From leaning on walls left standing, The excavation of this place Gets my unturned things turning. Leaving me longing. I’m still belonging To the league of loudmouth laughers And quiet mourners. We whistle in the rain While walking on dirt and ash remembrance, Reminiscing the hot lights, The overstocked beer fridges, The flooding basement drainage sessions, The perfectly cooked pancakes, The packed memorials, The laughter from the rafters, The prayer to Dionysus, The opening night rooftop talk-backs, The sky stretching over and beyond our knowing. How this place remembers. And the smell of smoke still stings in my nostrils. A stifled laugh with a full mouth of beer. Wasn’t that something. – Liam Coady a resume every time one of the local mining companies is hiring. Before we parted ways, he said he was heading to the liquor store. “Would you like to contribute to the cause?” he asked. I

froze and wondered which response made me more of an asshole. We were standing in the cold; he had to get going and I needed to get back in the car.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think so.” Jason smiled and raised his mitten. “That’s okay,” he said. We shook hands and he walked off.

JUST INSIDE THE DOOR OF SCATTERED SITES is the Remembrance Wall. There is a page for every client who has died since Julie started Scattered Sites seven years ago. She wants to remind everyone how easy it is to end up there. To Julie, there’s a small gap between the people on the wall and those, like Adele, who make full recoveries. “A ll these people on our wall had it within them; they just didn’t get that far down their journey.” A province-wide push to halt the exploding HIV problem has begun to work. In 2013, the latest year for which figures are available, the province recorded 129 new cases, down 35 per cent from the 2009 high water mark of 199. Still, the latest numbers show that intravenous drug use is responsible for 55 per cent of the new HI V cases in Saskatchewan and that 68 per cent of those new cases were people of aboriginal ethnicity. As I was leaving, I asked Julie why she worked for peanuts at an extremely difficult vocation. She thought about it for a moment. “I get to go home to a warm bed and food,” she said. “I have a pretty cozy life. For me to look away, what does that make of me as a person?” I asked her how hopeful she was. “I’m going to win the lottery on Friday. I’m hopeful.” We both laughed. It was a hope that bordered on irrationality, but it was beautiful and it took me in. It made me think of crossing the Montreal R iver earlier that day. I had asked her when the river would freeze over and give in to the inevitable. She smiled. “Never.” EB EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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A PINT IS A PINT IS A PINT By RICHARD HAIGH

IT HAPPENS TO ME ALL THE TIME: I’M IN A coffee shop looking to order a simple caffè latte or flat white but I’m stumped by the listing of “tall” as one of the available sizes. Without fail, I have to ask the baristas to show me what “tall” is. Invariably, they produce a sample cup for my inspection. Why does this have to happen? Why does the menu have to be so vague? Why can’t it simply list an eight-ounce latte or a 10-ounce flat white? I don’t know about you, but I would appreciate some certainty and predictability. At least give me something close to an objective standard. Humans are blessed with having invented fixed measures. “Tall” is not one of them. While fretting over the sizing of a cup of coffee is a relatively recent phenomenon, our pursuit of immutable standards goes back a ways. 12

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In Bent Hamer’s 2014 film 1001 Grams, a Norwegian scientist named Marie travels to Paris with her country’s precious kilogram weight locked in her briefcase. There she attends a gathering of scientists from around Europe—all keepers of their own official kilogram standards. The film is a fiction, but the kilogram is a fixed and established measure. It is defined as the weight of a platinum-iridium cylinder, manufactured in 1889 and stored in a bunker outside Paris with six sister copies. Three independently controlled keys are required to gain access to them. In the scientists’ world, the kilogram is akin to the Hope diamond. Any change in the cylinder’s weight could have serious repercussions. If, say, it collects a speck of dust, then the official kilo changes too. (A beautiful line in the film occurs when Pi,

ILLUSTRATION BEN RUDE

IT’S THE LAW

France’s keeper of the kilogram, asks Marie, “Do you support washing or not washing the kilo?”) Hamer’s film is an existential exploration of our deep-seated human desire for constants and references. His theme is based on the idea that fixed measurements help us cope with our fear of death. In interviews about the film, Hamer said that things like the official kilo pacify and comfort us; by giving us a sense of understanding the quotidian world, they free up the imagination to contemplate eternity. Hamer wasn’t concerned with the law, but his idea reminds me of certain legal constructs we’ve created. In Canada, we live by a legal maxim termed the rule of law; it means that no one is above the law. It also ensures that everything done by government is authorized by law. Most of us know this to be intuitively true, at least for the more obvious things: a senator who tries to avoid paying appropriate taxes (a legal rule) is not entitled to claim immunity from the law because of his or her position (again, nobody is above the law). The senator is, however, entitled to show that another law allows certain expenditures to be validly deducted from income. Although it has evolved over time, in the Anglo- Canadian world, this seemingly simple concept can be traced back to the Magna Carta of 1215. What may be surprising to some is how this idea permeates the tiniest details of our lives. You can see it in what I call “hidden laws.” Take the Fairness at the Pumps Act passed in 2011. It resembles what lawyers call an omnibus law, in that it covers a multitude of practices and sins. Gas station pumps are now more closely regulated to ensure that when you buy a litre of gas, you receive a genuine litre. Sellers of cords of firewood have to be more careful that their face cords, half cords and quarter cords

give you your wood’s worth. In fact, under the act, sellers of wood are strongly discouraged from using the “cord” as a measurement because it is too subjective a standard and therefore easily abused. Buried further in the act is a new governmental crackdown on improperly poured (presumably undersized) pints. The size of a pint was first regulated in England in 1842. At that time the British Parliament replaced a chaotic bartending regime with a new law that established the imperial gallon as 10 pounds of distilled water at 62F, and the pint as 1/8th of that amount. Until 2011, a bartender in Canada could serve you a pint that was simply an approximation of the English imperial pint. No longer. As of 2011, a bartender must, when serving a pint of beer, ensure that it is 20 fluid ounces,

plus or minus half an ounce as a margin of error—foam not included. Otherwise, the bartender is acting contrary to the rule of law (a national rule at that) and he or she could face repercussions. Call this heretofore-unrecognized nationwide plague, “The Pint That Dare Not Speak its Name.” I’m all for the federal government keeping watch on our most cherished measurements. Why should we be subject to 17th century English ambiguities? Back then, merchants chose between three differently sized gallons (making a pint of beer a fluid concept) and butchers needn’t even put a thumb on the scale to fleece a consumer (no one was quite sure what a pound really was anyway). We could leave the market to police itself, of course, trusting consumer choice to reform cheaters. But

if we did, it may take quite some time to uncover unscrupulous bartenders, butchers or gasoline sellers. The hidden laws that govern measurements regulate our daily activities. They allow us, as does a fixed kilogram, to fix our gaze on bigger issues and arguably more important laws, like ones on assisted suicide, prostitution or what to do with a refugee claimant. Laws about quantities of beer and firewood are the poor cousin in our legal system: unremarkable, unheralded and largely unknown. Yet, we couldn’t do without them. Now if only the new government would just pay some attention to the correct size for that “tall” latte. EB

EB WEB

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Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond in the small town of Seep during a dugoutclearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a visiting team of barnstorming Cuban All-Stars. Decades later, Dwight returns to town only to witness his childhood home being moved down the highway on the back of a huge flatbed truck. Seep is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. Seep portrays the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada. www.anvilpress.com Represented by PGC/Raincoast

THE MEMOIR BANK

BREATHING

HOLES

As a reporter in Iqaluit, I wrote countless stories about sexual assault and domestic violence. Then it happened to me. Here’s what I found when I went back, 20 years later. By LISA GREGOIRE / Illustration ROBERT CARTER

HEN I WAS IN IQALUIT

last spr ing, I went back to the apartment where it happened— the suicide, the assault. It took about a week to work up to that visit. I had spent hours ahead of time walking along the beach and on plush tundra with a 20-year-old playlist in my ears, sometimes crying, sometimes playing air drums to Green Day. I was looking for things to pick apart. Ghostbusting. It was spring and light all night; I didn’t sleep much. The courthouse and the RCMP station had moved to new buildings. I found no spirits there. It’s funny. I thought I could go to Iqaluit and—as if firing up some cosmic identity collider—synthesize the incompatible parts of me. Lots of things I had expected to happen just didn’t. I eventually found myself at the Iqaluit House apartments one Saturday afternoon. I snuck in on the heels of a tenant and spent an hour stalking the halls, heart beating out of my chest like a backseat woofer. I dragged my fingertips along dingy walls and sat in stairwells trying to breathe. Twenty years on, it smelled the same. Is that even possible? After walking past it many times, I stopped at my old apartment, put my left ear to the door, and listened. I raised my fist to knock but couldn’t. There I was, knuckles poised an inch from the wood for so long that eventually it felt easier to stay still than break the pose. What would I say if someone answered? 14

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EVEN YEARS EARLIER, I

was near the top of the world in Canada’s most northern community. One night I took an ass-flattening snowmobile ride over rutted sea ice to a magical place between Ellesmere and Devon islands. There’s a spot there on the frozen Arctic Ocean that is frequently open water, even in winter. Polynyas, as they’re called, result from prevailing warm currents. A pod of belugas had come to feast. Nothing is certain in the North, however. The polynya was freezing over, and the liquid highway back to Baffin Bay was now solid ice. It was too far for the belugas to swim in one breath, and so they were tethered to a breathing hole about two metres long and a half metre wide—and shrinking by the hour. Everyone in Grise Fiord had been talking about the entrapment. A local family decided to go see for themselves, maybe harvest a whale, and they invited a few visitors, including me, to join them on a frigid, twohour voyage into the sunlit spring night. It was kind of them because we were soft southerners who would likely complain about the cold, and did. But they were generous and patient, maybe because they knew that a favour given is one owed, and that’s important in a place like this. We were keen to take pictures to brag about later. Our Inuit companions were hungry for muktuk, beluga skin— Inuit sushi. We juggled cameras and frozen batteries with mittened fists. They prepared guns and harpoons methodically, with bare hands. We jumped up and down in comically oversized boots to keep blood flowing to our stiff feet. They sat and smoked, sharpened knives, spoke in Inuktitut and glanced at us, bemused. At one point, we were all standing around the indigo pool. It was 3 a.m. and light as noon, silent but for the blip and bloop of water licking ice. Ten minutes passed. Blip-blip. Bloop. Then we saw them: pale bodies undulating like mermaids. The pool erupted in bubbles and jostling and spray. We lost count of how many there were. The older white whales were breaching into the brittle edges of the ice to keep the aperture from closing. One had claw marks from a polar bear down the length of its body. They were pushing and gasping, blowholes clenching and wheezing, the tiny space churning in an orgy of desperate, communal respiration. I was overcome. I found myself also gasping, heart racing, panic rising in my chest, tears forming. When the whales dove down again and disappeared, I turned away to collect myself 16

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THE NEWSPAPERS Before unlocking the café, I lift the newspapers off the curb and hug them to my chest like they are the first children born today. They smell like the final lumps of grey snow in April, the undersides of semi trailers—they smell like 5AM. 5AM smells like hugging them while locking myself inside a café that doesn’t open for another half hour. I roll their rubber bands off, stack them on wire racks, brew coffee, unwrap and arrange banana bread, lemon loaf, shift from foot to foot testing balance and consciousness. I love these brief moments with the blueberry muffins, the coffee grinder clearing its throat, before anyone enters demanding coffee. On my break, I’ll twist the rubber bands onto my rubber band ball, working its diameter above two inches and wonder how early the postal worker wakes to throw the day’s news at our door, if she too delights in her work, the grey bundles of papers arcing through pre-dawn dark, their cold thump onto the curb. – Kayla Czaga and thought, Yeah, exactly: Sometimes it’s hard just to breathe here.

HIS PAST JUNE, I MET A

woman at the Iqaluit women’s shelter. She told me stories, none of them pleasant. She mostly talked; I mostly listened. Here are some things she said: In the beginning, he was very nice, romantic even. He once put his hand down her pants to search for evidence of infidelity. “Love has patience, love is blind,” she said. “I saw his potential.” One night, after he almost killed her, she waited until he passed out, and she escaped. “He’ll finish me off if I let him.” As she spoke, it felt as if the room was shrinking. I fought the urge to break a window, bust open the door. I thought, how could our stories overlap like that? And also, what happened to the air in here? But then she said other things that made it clear we were different.

As an infant, she was abandoned, outdoors, in a garbage can. Someone heard her crying and saved her. A man raped her when she was nine. Afterward, he gave her $20 to shut her up. When she was 15, she was married off to a man twice her age. Within a year, she gave birth to her first of 11 children. One time, after her marriage ended, a man had cut her so badly on the head that she needed 15 stitches. He called her from jail and told her she’d better lie in court. She did; she told the judge she couldn’t remember anything. We spoke for an hour and were so drained in the end that we just held each other and cried for a long time, she clutching me and moaning as though grieving a death and me, as always, shifting into reporter mode—detaching, contextualizing. Abandoned in a garbage can? Who was I kidding? I grew up loved. I’m a tourist here, slumming. Poor little white girl. Get over it. It was the same thing I’d told myself 20 years ago.

N 1994, WHEN I WAS 26, I

moved to Iqaluit to work for the weekly Nunatsiaq News as Canada was giving birth to a new territory. It was pre-Internet, when phones were attached to walls, and hashtag still meant number sign, and fax machines were miraculous but annoying because of the screechy dial-up sound. Weather permitting, the newspaper was delivered every Friday by plane from the South, where it was printed. We used to wait for the news. I’m an experience junkie, which is good for a reporter. I fancied myself a conduit through which complex things would be made plain. What better place to hone my skills than with a people rooted in oral culture and mostly ignored by mainstream media. Storytellers! Adventure! I’d find things out, I thought. I’d change people’s minds. I’d make them angry or embarrassed, or at the very least, better informed. Young reporters tell themselves these things. A few old(er) reporters, too. It wasn’t quite Nunavut then. When I moved north, only 3,600 people lived in Iqaluit. It was half its current size and the capital of nothing—a mangy frontier town on the world’s fifth-largest island in what was then the Northwest Territories, more than 2,000 kilometres from the centre of political power in Yellowknife. There was no music store in Iqaluit. No decent underwear for sale. No shawarma. Nunatsiaq News was run out of a small green portable that’s not there anymore. It was located at what is now called the Four Corners, Iqaluit’s busiest intersection. In the early 1990s, there were fewer vehicles—most people

walked. Most people were Inuit or Caucasian. Most of the Inuit were there to live and work and raise families. Most of the whiteys were there to make money, ride snowmobiles and leave when they tired of the cold. Each week I wrote half a dozen stories on everything from art to murder. There were frequent junkets and land claim meetings to attend across the territory. You could jump on a plane and find yourself in a dark, coastal town eating raw caribou and drinking strong tea on a cardboard- covered floor with generous strangers who spoke through their English-speaking children. You could invent yourself in a place like that. I fell for a young Inuk who loved Patrick Roy. He gave me Roy’s rookie card. I still have it. He was a single dad living with his mother, who shared the parenting. He was smart and funny, a handsome boy from a big family. He drank a lot, but then so did everyone around him. Booze orders would arrive at the house, and everyone would be happy until they weren’t happy at all but angry instead, or sad. He was a jealous man. I was flattered at first because I mistook his jealousy for devotion. It progressed to accusations and rage, then tearful apologies and remorse. It stopped being flattering. One night, I was sitting with him at the Royal Canadian Legion, a table of rum and cokes between us, watching the pinched look of disapproval overtake his face. I convinced him to leave before he got too drunk, and we returned to my apartment at Iqaluit House. Once there, he pulled the phone from the wall, started yelling, breaking dishes, throwing things. I don’t remember everything clearly here. Memories get recorded in fragments during trauma. Your brain’s too busy preparing your muscles to punch or run. I remember he was pushing or shaking me. My dress got ripped. I remember thinking, “Dammit, I really like this dress,” and “Holy shit, I gotta get out of here.” And then I heard “boom-boom-boom” on the door, and suddenly big cops were in the room because the neighbours must have called. I remember feeling enormous relief, and I remember handcuffs and glass on the floor, and I remember being trapped in a corner in bare feet. I wonder what he remembers. Then I was at the police station, chain-smoking and writing a statement. I remember feeling hyper-sensitive, like a hare near a predator. Everything was slow and supercharged. The scratch of pencil on paper was deafening. I remember the officer coming in to check on me. So kind he was. So safe I felt. He told me I was doing the right thing, but I didn’t understand what he meant. And then he asked me a question that might have saved my life, because everything changed after that. EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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“Has this ever happened before?” “Yes.” “You want to tell me about it?” “OK.” Week after week, I wrote stories about how Inuit society had been messed up by residential schools and pedophile priests and child sexual abuse and family violence and the Indian Act and how all the “Eskimos” were given government dog tags starting in the 1940s so Ottawa could track them and give them welfare. I wrote about rum and rape and racism, about southern laws suddenly imposed on the North and forced High Arctic relocations and the slaughter of Inuit sled dogs by RCMP in the 1950s and the European sealskin ban, which decimated entire communities. I wrote about a society upended, largely because of southerners, some of them good-intentioned but also arrogant, careless, poorly informed. My boyfriend was a product of all this, I’d concluded. I would be sympathetic and forgiving. I’d fix him with love. The assumption that I could “fix” anything in a complex, ancient culture in transition was naïve and offensive and, in retrospect, made me guilty of the superiority I had shunned. I figured that out later, in therapy. This too: Maybe I felt like I deserved it. Southerners had scattered plenty of reckless disregard over the decades. Wasn’t it time someone with privilege suffered a little? Felt what it was like to be powerless? Christ, for real? Did I think that? My therapist thinks I thought that. Deep down, I might have thought that. Anyway, I was frying small potatoes compared to what so many women around me, all of them Inuit, had endured for years. My hockey mates showing up to games with black eyes. Me sitting in court hearing about a woman getting beaten or stabbed. My pain didn’t fit anywhere. I ignored it, and that worked for a while, until a cop sat me down in a police station where people take these things seriously by assigning them numbers from the Criminal Code. When the officer asked that night if there had been other incidents, I told him about a time, four months earlier, when my boyfriend wanted to have sex with me in an apartment where I was house-sitting, but it had been a bad night, and I resisted, and he was astride me in bed, and he put his hands on my throat, and I couldn’t breathe or scream. I remember his tanned forearms. We struggled. I blacked out. When I came to, he was on his side, turned away from me. I lay still, disoriented. Eventually, I slid off the bed, ran to the bathroom and locked the door. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw bruises pooling on my chest and 18

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neck. I didn’t recognize the reflection—something weird about my eyes. The thing that makes me me wasn’t there. I felt eerily detached and weightless, and for a split second I thought: My God, maybe I’m not actually here. Maybe I’m dead. What do you do with a memory like that, a near-death experience you blame, at least partly, on yourself? How do you reconcile a foolish girl with the one who replaced her? The one who you think is smarter than that. For years, I’d tried to knit those people together. There was her, and now there’s me, and they are not the same. It’s not like I sat around idly contemplating my evolving identity. This is what happened: days, months, years. Some of them memorable, most of them not. I moved back south, worked for daily newspapers, got married, had twins, bought and sold houses and cars. Suddenly, a bunch of my life was behind me, including a person I’d left there. I didn’t acknowledge her because she was weak. Because I’m not. Because I’m ashamed of her. Theo Fleury said shame is the glue that keeps you stuck. But eventually, your body rebels, tries to get unstuck. Like that time with the belugas. When I saw them gasping and the hole closing and the ocean’s deep darkness and the triggers of snow and tundra, a tiny projector started rolling in my head, silent but for the tickticktickticktick of film being drawn through knobs and levers and then coiling underneath where the take-up reel should be. Truth is, I couldn’t forgive her. She broke the cardinal rule in journalism: She became the story. She was a reporter who should have been interviewing people, but instead, they were interviewing her, and she had her name attached to that familiar introduction: “On or about the twelfth day of February A.D.1994 at or near the Town of Iqaluit …” Truth is, I had to find a way to forgive her. I had to stop calling her her and start calling her me.

WENTY YEARS LATER,

now living in Ottawa, I ended up back at Nunatsiaq News. It was 2013, and I was writing and editing stories about murder and sexual violence again. Some party gone awry. Some jealous revenge. Some adolescent raped while her mother was passed out. Some dead man face down in the snow. Spellcheck-headline-hyperlinksupload-retweet-tsk-tsk. Nunavut Normal. I regularly travelled north, and during one trip I saw him at the Northmart in Iqaluit. Walls started closing in. I followed at a distance, heart racing. Was it even him?

It didn’t matter. I had to get out before I threw up, so I set my basket down, marched out the door and walked around town for a long time. Months later, I saw his name on a court docket next to charges of incest, assault, sexual assault, uttering threats. The breathing holes were closing over again. And then one night in Ottawa, I was hanging out with a Nunatsiaq colleague, having a few drinks, talking about the North. He was a young reporter in Iqaluit on a brief southern visit, and he was about the age I was when I lived there 20 years ago. He was curious and motivated. He liked writing about crime and politics. He reminded me of me. I decided on the spot that I needed to talk about what happened to me, and he was going to bear witness whether he wanted to or not. It all came out, in sobs and whispers. And it felt easy because he understood the context. I didn’t have to explain how embarrassing it had been for me, as a reporter and how typically Iqaluit. He got it. There’s a part of the brain that handles speech, and it gets disabled when you’re threatened, making it so hard later to assign words to those events. The night I told my friend about my life in 1994 was the first time in almost two decades that I’d managed to form a verbal narrative. It was a such a relief. But then it was as if I’d poured water on dehydrated things. The memories plumped up. They didn’t recede back like normal memories do. They felt fresh. They demanded attention. Sometimes you don’t live your life so much as get yanked forward by it, in painful jerks. You can resist, which I did. And this is what happened. I drank bourbon, which is expensive. I invented something called “yoguit,” a combination of yoga and guitar. I did it consecutively, because the physical release of yoga often made me want to play guitar, but I eventually started to do it simultaneously because, well, think about it: Warrior two? High lunge? That’s classic open crotch, rock guitar stance. That’s Pete Townshend, folks. That’s Slash. It was an amusing and necessary distraction. I exercised a lot, because it made me feel good and offset the bourbon and because you can fool yourself into equating physical with mental health and also because it made me feel in control. I gave a wheelbarrow of money to an able psychologist, whose well-meaning receptionist always said, before I emptied the wheelbarrow, “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” I always wanted to say, “Hey, how about making this one on the house?” The therapy helped, but that’s because most of it was based on Buddhist principles, which I already knew. And I had a revelation: I’d spent years telling other peo-

ple’s stories and ignoring my own. Maybe I could report on my own story.

Y MOTHER DIDN’T LIKE

bugs. Her fears became my own. I had vowed not to pass on those irrational bug fears to my own children, so when I was offered the opportunity to write interpretive panels for a museum exhibit on live creatures, I agreed. An enthusiastic entomologist put cockroaches and spiders on my palms, told me it was safe and distracted me with engaging facts while I tried not to flinch. When you examine something up close and look at the different parts, he said, it’s less scary. I hatched a plan to dismantle my own past, to examine the dark parts and understand them, to figure out why I stayed with a man who nearly killed me. If I could do that, I thought, maybe I might forgive myself and start acting cocky again, as is my nature. I ordered police reports and court documents. I tracked down people who knew me back then, and interviewed them. I went to Iqaluit and poked at thick scars. I listened to old songs from 1994 because music dislodges my emotions like a spade in the ground. I read through my old Nunatsiaq stories. I found photos of me in Iqaluit, 10 pounds heavier, with a perm and pleated teal corduroys. I was convinced it would work—the investigation, not the perm-and-cords combo. I started by interviewing my old editor, Todd. We scheduled a phone call. I was nervous about what he might say and messaged my reporter friend online about it beforehand. “Don’t know what to ask. I have too much to ask, right?” I wrote. “There’s a lot,” he wrote back. “Just maybe let him tell you the story—of you.” So I did. I’d forgotten half of it. Because people remember different things. I would hang out at the Legion with a bunch of Inuit friends, he said. When he would suggest I adopt some discretion, considering I was a reporter in a small town, I would bust out an Irish accent and call him Father Phillips and tell him to save the sanctimony. To my chagrin, I remembered doing that. Todd and I had lived together for a while in a two-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend. I asked him if he noticed me spiralling down. He said he knew my boyfriend was bad news, but he didn’t know how bad. I hid that part EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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of my life from him and our mutual friends, he told me. I eventually stopped talking about my relationship and, after I moved across the street to my own apartment in Iqaluit House, became even more estranged. He told me about a time when, in a fit of suspicion and jealousy, my boyfriend had poured water onto Todd’s computer and melted his Nintendo console with a lighter. Todd called the police, and the case got referred to a court diversion program. We had been writing about the new program and had been awaiting the first test case. Turned out, we were it. My boyfriend, accompanied by an elder, had come to our apartment. The elder spoke only Inuktitut, so my boyfriend had to interpret Todd’s testimony to the elder and then the elder’s responses back to Todd, which was ludicrous. Todd had to explain to the elder that his computer was an important tool for work. “The elder was saying, ‘OK, I understand, it was a tool,’” Todd told me. “So the elder reprimanded your boyfriend, who sheepishly put his head down and took a scolding in Inuktitut, which I didn’t understand. And that was it.” I felt compelled to apologize over the phone, but Todd told me not to feel bad. He said I had a kind heart, and that was part of the problem. “You’d say afterwards, ‘He was remorseful. He was crying.’ You’d want to take him back. I remember now. You’d say he was like a little boy,” Todd told me. “That’s the whole psychology of people who are trapped in an abusive relationship; there’s that period where the power shifts. And if you have a soft side, you’re going to want to see the good in people.”

ARLETON UNIVERSITY’S

library has issues of Nunatsiaq News going back to 1976. This past summer, I went for a visit. Classes had ended. The library was deserted. I was alone in the basement with a stack of old memories on dry, brittle pages. The first thing I read was a two-part series on suicide that I had written. I remember how those stories came about. An Iqaluit RCMP officer had sat me in a room and let me examine police files from the 15 suicides in Iqaluit from the previous year. Police did that kind of thing for reporters back then. I’ll never forget that afternoon: mournful suicide notes and photos of dead teenagers and guns. My stories ran in consecutive issues. The night after the second story was published, I got choked unconscious at my friend’s place in Iqaluit House—in the same apartment, it turned out, where a young man had removed his head with 20

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CAN.ICONS WOMEN In 1875, at Sackville’s Mount Allison University, Grace Lockhart became the first woman in the British Empire to earn a university degree. In 2013, Alice Munro was the first resident Canadian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Between these two milestones, the road for Canadian women has been as long and tortuous as the Trans-Canada Highway. Canadian women were legally recognized as “persons” in 1929 as a result of a petition by a group of Alberta women now known as The Famous Five. In 1976, this time in response to lobbying by 32 women’s groups, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada made crucial recommendations on issues such as birth control, day care, equal pay for equal work, maternity leave, pensions, and part-time work. Today, women hold leadership roles in every sector of Canadian society. Yet recently, the only Canadian woman ever to make it onto our banknotes was replaced with an icebreaker. The dark side of Canadian women’s history includes the 1989 tragedy now known as The Montreal Massacre, when a man shot and killed 14 female engineering students at École Polytechnique. The Canadian government set up the Panel on Violence Against Women, but the resulting gun registry has since been dismantled. On average, every six days a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. Any given day finds more than 3,300 Canadian women (along with their 3,000 children) forced to sleep in an emergency shelter to escape domestic violence. In 2012, an ongoing protest movement called Idle No More was formed in part to demand an official inquiry into hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women. Idle No More is a grassroots movement founded and led by the First Nations, Inuit and Métis women of Canada—part of a proud Canadian history of women demanding justice for women. – Clive Holden

a shotgun blast months earlier. When I had returned to that apartment to water my friend’s plants—days after that story came out, with my bruises hidden beneath a turtleneck—it hit me. I was in the hallway, key in hand, when the police photo of the apartment door flashed in my mind, along with a photo of the bullet in the bedroom wall with hairs stuck to

it. Once inside, I went straight to the bedroom. You could see that the walls were freshly painted. A fter that gruesome coincidence, I remember feeling profoundly hopeless. Everything was mingling. One time, walking the frozen shore at night in 1994, I remember thinking: I know where guns are. I know sheds that aren’t locked. You think those things when it’s dark all the time. Back at the library, I read another story I wrote in 1994 about a family violence workshop in which researchers said men who hurt their spouses are usually childhood victims or witnesses of physical or sexual trauma. Comparing the date of the story with my police files, I realized that two days after I covered that workshop, my partner was ripping my dress and police were pounding on my door. Life imitating work imitating life. My self-examination included a chat with my dad. He’s 84 now, retired from the Air Force, but his memory is vivid, and he likes telling stories; it runs in the family. He said he blamed himself for sending me his military documents, which allowed me to get a Legion membership and which clearly led to my “downfall.” I reassured him my “downfall” was entirely self-written. He said he had worried about me, but he also remembers feeling discouraged for me because I’d worked so hard to get an education and become a journalist. For a working-class kid, the youngest of six who got all the attention, squandering your potential is almost unforgivable. Then he told me about his brief military posting to Churchill, Manitoba, in 1956. My mother and my two sisters were in New Brunswick at the time, awaiting his return. He worked at a bar part time and would drink and gamble after hours, when the bar shut down. At one point, he owed some people a lot of money. When you’re in an isolated place with no family or friends, he said, you do things you might not normally do. No one calls you out. “There was a time when I was wondering, ‘Who the hell am I? I’m not the same guy who was in New Brunswick with two nice little girls and a good wife. I’m up here in Churchill drinking, and I’m up here gambling.’” He remembered going into his room one night and crying, so ashamed of what he’d become. He paid his debts, swore off gambling and left that life behind. “But some people don’t,” he said. “They linger there.” So, I thought, I’m not the only one who lost her way. But dad didn’t linger there, and neither did I. All this time, I’d been berating myself for falling down when I should have celebrated standing back up. After I spoke with my dad, I realized that I didn’t remember the standing up part. 22

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HERE WERE TWO COURT

proceedings in 1995. T he first one dealt with the June assault, the second with the more serious event four months prior. They both happened before Nunavut was established, so when I requested the records the court clerks had to locate typewritten files in NWT archives and scan them. They arrived by email in July 2015, almost exactly 20 years later. He’d pleaded guilty to the June assault and was sentenced to four months probation and 30 hours of community service. I remember none of it. After poring over the pale photocopies in the second set of documents, a scene formed in my head that I recognized. I felt vindicated—I remember this one. I was in a room. Neil Sharkey had come in. He’s a Nunavut judge now, but back then he was a lawyer representing my boyfriend. We knew each other because I covered courts for the paper. He was gracious and swift, but it was still awkward. We didn’t make eye contact much, but when we did, I sensed his concern. I thought, he’s probably seen more important people in more uncomfortable situations. We were similar that way. We were privy to secrets because of our jobs. Sharkey said my boyfriend would plead guilty to sexual assault if a forcible confinement charge was dropped. I agreed to the plea bargain because it meant not testifying in public. He got 90 days in the Baffin jail in Iqaluit, served intermittently from seven at night until seven the next morning, because he had a job, at a bank, which happened to be located in the building where I lived. I saw him daily, often on his way to or from jail. Soon after his sentence was up, I was gone. I talked to my friend Shirley-Anne, with whom I lived immediately after leaving Iqaluit. I don’t remember a lot about that time. I recently asked her what I’d been like back then. She said I was guarded and lived recklessly for a while—a lot of stumbling through the door late at night. She never saw me as weak, though. She thought I was fearless to a fault, wanting to live what other people lived to truly feel their experiences, and sometimes that got me into trouble. She said I never called myself a victim though she tried, at the time, to help me see that I was. I was too busy blaming myself for not recognizing harm and getting out of the way. Already distancing myself from her. Earlier this year, I sought out my police statements. I wanted to see what I’d written at the time and to find out who the RCMP officer was so I could track him down and thank him for maybe saving my life and to tell him he fundamentally changed the way I thought about police officers. It didn’t work out.

“A search for records was conducted in Nunavut. Unfortunately, we were unable to locate records which respond to your request,” came a letter from the RCMP last May. “It is likely that any RCMP record that may have existed has been purged.” Of course, that’s likely. According to Statistics Canada, there were 2,713 assaults and 581 sexual assaults in 1994 alone in the Northwest Territories and roughly the same for each year until Nunavut split off in 1999. There would be nowhere to store all that paper. Purged. Any record that may have existed has been purged. There’s a word in Inuktitut that is often said at the end of a conversation instead of goodbye: taima. It means that’s all, there’s no more. I had to tell myself just that. It was time to stop. Buddhism teaches you not to cling to anything because everything is constantly changing. But we hold so firmly to our opinions, especially about ourselves. Some of us form a snapshot of who we are at a fixed point in time. We get used to that image because we’ve modified our memories to prove it and because familiar stories are comforting, even the ones that hurt. But we don’t usually show other people that picture.

Truth is, she didn’t make poor choices. I did. So what? And she stayed because she loved that guy. So did I. Truth is, I am a privileged white girl. It still hurt.

N MAY 30, 2015, IN IQALUIT

House, I was standing in front of my old apartment door, poised to knock. Why was I even there? Curious to see what would happen, I guess. Exposure therapy. Face the fear and vanquish it. I summoned and then discarded a dozen non-threatening opening lines designed to reassure a stranger in an awkward situation while endearing myself in a self-deprecating way so I could somehow insinuate myself into the entrance of the apartment and gain a view to the living room—and my old life. I shook my head and loosened up. It’s OK, I said to myself. I’m a reporter. I’ll think of something. And finally, finally, I forced myself to knock. There was no one home. Taima. EB

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A SCENE FROM A FILM BY ALA’ ABU GHOUSH, A PALESTINIAN FILMMAKER

ARTS & CULTURE

IN A

DARK THEATRE CAN HOPE BE FOUND IN PALESTINIAN CINEMA? By SCOT MORISON

PHOTOGRAPH ALA’ ABU GHOUSH

It was the fate of a goldfish that finally impressed upon me how differently I see the world than a Palestinian. The fish and

its owner, a little boy who received it as an Eid gift at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, were the fictional creations of a young filmmaker named Ala’ Abu Ghoush. He told me about them over a cup of muddy Turkish coffee in a small café in Jerusalem one day in May 2008. I had come to the West Bank that spring with a video camera and intentions of making a triptych of short films that reflected my take on the 60th anniversary of Israeli statehood, an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, Arabic for “the catastrophe.” Abu Ghoush had offered to help with some filming I wanted to do in the crowded and boisterous souk behind the high walls of the Old City. In his tale, which he was writing for a short drama he planned to direct, the boy feels guilty about keeping the goldfish in a plastic container, resolves to set it free and sets out across the countryside to reach the sea. Unfortunately, his destination is the Dead Sea, the oily and toxic mineral bath that overlaps the West Bank’s border with Jordan.

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Charmed by the premise of his story but depressed by its ending, I asked Abu Ghoush if he’d ever considered having the boy undertake a more complicated but affirming journey to the Mediterranean Sea, where his liberated fish might survive. Abu Ghoush took a sip of coffee and looked at me with a weary half-smile through his cigarette smoke. He said nothing, and in that moment, I understood. For most Palestinians on the West Bank, the Dead Sea, eerily beautiful but unable to sustain life, is the only body of water they will ever visit. Israel won’t allow them to cross to the Mediterranean, just as it won’t allow them to build homes where they choose or drive on many roads in their own territory. For Palestinians living under occupation, life is filled with frustration, disappointment and heartache. Abu Ghoush couldn’t tell the story I wanted because for him it would be false. I returned to the West Bank and Israel in the spring of 2015 to look at the recent emergence of Palestinian cinema as a potent contributor to the international dialogue around the region’s intractable and divisive conflict. I had a personal thesis to test: that Palestinian films are getting better and attracting a bigger, more appreciative audience around the world, but they deliver no happy endings because in the imaginations of Palestinian storytellers there are no happy endings. This thesis emerged from my complicated feelings about two successful Palestinian movies, Paradise Now and Omar, finalists for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006 and 2014 respectively. Both films, directed and written or co-written by Hany Abu-Assad, look as good as anything coming out of Hollywood, feature strong performances by Arab actors, and offer absorbing storylines. But also, like most every Palestinian movie I’ve ever seen, they end hopelessly for their protagonists. In Paradise Now (which won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 2006), Khaled and Said, a pair of childhood friends from the West Bank city of Nablus, grow tired of their empty, jobless lives under occupation and join a terror group with the intention of becoming martyrs. Both young men wrestle with conscience, but by the film’s end it appears certain that Said will go through with his mission as he sits on a bus among an unsuspecting group of Israeli soldiers, stone-faced and wearing an explosive belt around his waist. In Omar, the title character is a youth with an honest job as a baker who regularly risks arrest or worse to scale the West Bank separation barrier, or the Wall as it is commonly known, to visit Nadia, the high school girl he loves who lives on the Israeli side. Following the killing of an Israel Defence Forces soldier by a friend of his one 26

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night, Omar is captured and then coerced by a cagey Shin Bet intelligence agent named Rami into collaborating. In spite of Omar’s efforts to avoid the blackmail, his situation deteriorates. The movie’s climax, a tense final meeting in an orchard between Rami and a distraught (and armed) Omar, feels crushingly inevitable.

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I ENVISIONED DIFFERENT ENDINGS IN THE Holy Land. From the summer of 1999 to the summer of 2000, my family and I lived 10 kilometres north of Jerusalem in Ramallah, a city of 60,000 that serves as the de facto administrative centre of Palestine. My wife worked with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross), and our three children, then seven, nine and 12 years old, attended a school full of tough-skinned Palestinian-American kids whose families had moved to Ramallah in the afterglow of the first Oslo Accord signed on the White House lawn in 1993. I arrived with my own project, an adaptation of Noble Sanctuary, a novel I had published a decade earlier about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the infamous massacre of several thousand Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in West Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by right-wing militiamen operating with impunity under Israel’s watch. I had a director in mind: Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi. Masharawi, who’d grown up in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, was a largely self-taught auteur with several feature films to his credit, including Curfew, about a Palestinian family struggling with the domestic tensions caused by an Israeli-imposed curfew in their village. It won the UNESCO Award at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Masharawi offered me use of a small office in the Cinema Production Center, which he operated out of a century-old stone house just around the corner from the building where we lived off al-Tireh Street at the old end of Ramallah. I spent 10 months working there as the only foreign member of Rashid’s little conclave of committed creative people. There was a café-bar in the renovated basement of the house (originally used to house livestock) that doubled as a cultural salon for poetry readings, concerts, visual art exhibitions and film screenings. That year was also the last time there was any real belief the Oslo Accords might eventually lead to peace for Israelis, justice for the Palestinians and a route to tranquility and shared prosperity for both peoples in two states. There were warning signs it was a fantasy, such as the aggressive Israeli settlement-building program on the West Bank. Ignoring the signs that the Accords were doomed, I was distracted instead by minor successes, like the proud if short-lived Palestinian national airline with service

between Gaza City and Cairo, which we flew to take the kids to see the Nile and the pyramids during their Christmas and New Year’s school break. But as our year abroad wound down, it became ever clearer peace was not close at hand. Nothing came of the July 2000 Camp David Summit between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak except criticism of Arafat for refusing to budge on existential Palestinian issues such as the Right of Return (formal acknowledgement of and provision for compensation for their dispossession by Israel) and the status of East Jerusalem (as capital of the Palestinian state). This led to Ariel Sharon’s provocative stroll across the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City with a group of right-wing supporters and hundreds of heavily armed Israeli riot police in late September 2000, an act that triggered the Second Intifada. The violence that followed, from both sides, over the next five years resulted in the death of more than 3,000 Palestinians and close to 1,000 Israelis, and extinguished what little optimism remained. The decade and a half since has settled into a cold war punctuated by bursts of bloodshed, a conflict that appears insoluble to most of the world. I have returned to Ramallah several times since 2000. On each occasion, my wanderings through this hilly West Bank city have included a sentimentalist’s pilgrimage down al-Tireh Street to the walk-up apartment building where we lived. Last spring, my wife Karen joined me in Ramallah. We visited old haunts in the centre of the city around Al-Manara Square, and we stopped to take a few photos in front of the Cinema Production Centre. Rashid Masharawi gave up and locked the doors to the place in 2002, during some of the blackest days of the Intifada, and decamped for Paris to develop and produce his films. He now splits his time between France and the West Bank, but the creative hub he founded remains closed and deserted, its stone walls rimmed with trash, its windows broken. Knowing the idealism with which the centre was established, it was sad to see it this way, and it reminded me of how Masharawi and I had made progress with my film script before the Intifada broke out. It was a melancholy recollection. Just as we were about to turn and leave, Karen and I noticed a woman headed our way up the uneven sidewalk, a young child in tow. She wore a hijab and the large, loose-fitting cotton day dress favoured by religious and conservative Muslim women in the Arab world. I assumed she was Palestinian until she stopped to say hello in a friendly southern American drawl. Her name, I learned, was Buffy and she’d grown up in Tennessee. Married to a Palestinian she’d met at college in the U.S., Buffy and her family resided in Ramallah

but had lived in Gaza until the summer of 2014. That was when eight of her husband’s relatives were killed by Israeli bombs during the Israel Defence Forces’ seven-week assault known as Operation Protective Edge. More than 2,000 Palestinians were killed and over 10,000 wounded— the overwhelming majority civilians and many of them children. After Buffy told us her story, in a tone so detached I could only assume it was a form of self-protection, there didn’t seem much left to say. We quietly wished Buffy and her family well and parted ways. It was minutes before Karen and I could even speak to one another. Rashid Masharawi’s Cinema Production Center may have been in ruins, but some legacies remain. Hany Abu-Assad, the director of Paradise Now and Omar, began his movie career as a production assistant for Masharawi in the early 1990s, after several years working as an aviation engineer in Belgium where he’d attended university. Abu-Assad is now arguably the best-known Palestinian filmmaker in the world. Last June, when I drove a couple of hours north from Jerusalem and out of the West Bank to visit him in Nazareth, he was hunkered down in his childhood home, a second-floor flat in a building on this predominantly Arab Israeli city’s main street, working with his trusted editor Eyas Salman on a rough cut of his latest movie, The Idol. Abu-Assad’s new film, partly shot in Gaza a few months after the 2014 Israeli bombardment of the Strip, is unlike anything he’s done before—it’s a feel-good piece. It is inspired by the story of Mohammed Assaf, a 22-yearold wedding singer from the Khan Yunis Refugee Camp in Gaza. In 2013, Assaf managed to cross the sealed border to Egypt, then charm his way into already-closed auditions for Season Two of the Arab Idol in Cairo, in which he won the top prize with a stirring performance of Aali el Keffiyeh (Raise Your Keffiyeh), an Iraqi song adopted by the Palestinian national struggle. His victory, broadcast live across the Arab world from an MBC TV studio in Beirut, brought hundreds of thousands of joyful, cheering Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Arab centres in Israel pouring into the streets in celebration. He had people across the Arab world rooting for him. At the time, Abu-Assad had just arrived home from the Cannes Film Festival, where Omar won the Special Jury Prize. It was a career highlight, but there was something missing. “It was nice what happened in Cannes, but somehow I wasn’t happy,” he told me later. He went on to tell me that the Palestinians are living through the worst period in a bleak national history. A moribund peace process, the disaster in Gaza, the relentless expropriation of Palestinian homes and land, the expansion of Jewish settlements on EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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the West Bank, the tightening strictures and almost daily humiliations at Israeli army checkpoints—these have all been deeply demoralizing. But somehow, at least for a few moments on TV, Mohammed Assaf brought his compatriots some light. “When he won,” Abu-Assad said, “I was celebrating on the street like everyone else. It was as if he had liberated Palestine! It was for a lot of Palestinians, in that moment, the first time in their lives that they were really happy.” There hasn’t been much happiness for Palestinians since. Reinforcing the gloom is the rhetoric of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who got re-elected last March on the strength of his eleventh hour declaration that there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch. Reflecting on this, Abu-Assad surprised me by drawing a parallel between The Idol and Castaway, in which Tom Hanks plays a FedEx employee who ends up spending four years on a deserted island after a plane crash, his only companion a volleyball named Wilson. “In Castaway, Tom Hanks is this very rational guy who doesn’t believe in this kind of nonsense, but necessity makes him believe this ball is his only friend,” Abu- Assad explained. “In the same way, we have this happiness of the Palestinians hanging on a singer. It’s pathetic but I realized we needed somebody like this. We were dying for it. It’s pathetic but crucial to survival, and that is why I made this movie.” The Idol had its world premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. With three sold-out screenings it garnered positive reviews. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “Toronto could have another Slumdog Millionaire on its hands,” while Variety called The Idol “a picture that deserves an audience well beyond its natural Arab fan base.” The Idol didn’t exactly validate my thesis about the absence of hope in Palestinian cinema. It was in the end a small and personal film by writer/director Dima Abu Ghoush (sister of the goldfish killer Ala’ Abu Ghoush) that presented the most profound challenge to my ideas on the subject. Dima Abu Ghoush had worked closely with Rashid Masharawi at the Cinema Production Center, and we had become friends when I was there working with Masharawi. Her latest project (she has written and directed several documentaries and short dramas) is a feature-length documentary called Emwas. The film is about Abu Ghoush’s painstaking efforts to research and rebuild an accurate, tabletop model of Emwas, the village of 2,000 people along the Green Line (the 1948 armistice border) on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where she was born two years before the Six-Day War. 28

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CAN.ICONS WATER Canada is defined by its abundance of water. Bounded by three oceans, our country contains or shares half of the world’s 30 largest lakes, not to mention untold glaciers, wetlands, and rivers. The iconic St. Lawrence alone is over 3,000 kilometres long, and its drainage area comprises the world’s largest system of freshwater lakes. To the north and west lie the mighty Mackenzie and Yukon, the Saskatchewan, the Columbia and the Fraser. Together these great waterways have determined where the bulk of Canadians have lived for thousands of years. With over 243,000 km of ocean coastline, Canada values its saltwater as highly as its fresh. Thousands of Canadian communities look to the sea for their livelihoods. Over 80,000 of us are directly employed in fisheries, aquaculture, or fish processing, and the marine eco-tourism industry grows in importance every year. From the legendary Grand Banks in the east to the rich salmon spawning grounds of the west, Canadians depend on water and the life it sustains. But, despite being home to one-fifth of the world’s freshwater, Canada also has over one hundred First Nation communities living with long-term boil water advisories. A recent United Nations resolution enshrined access to water as a fundamental human right. This issue will only grow in importance as reports talk of a looming water shortage in parts of southern Canada. Even water-wealthy Canada is waking up to its complex issues surrounding large-scale water exportation, over-fishing, melting glaciers, and the danger to coastal ecosystems posed by oil tanker spills. As proud as we Canadians are of our bogs and beaches, our use of water has often been unsustainable in the past. Thankfully, this is changing. Canadians are stepping forward to act as stewards rather than owners, pushing for sustainable management of, and equal access to, this huge natural wealth that’s central to our country’s identity. – Clive Holden

Captured by the Israeli army in June 1967 and then forcibly evacuated, Emwas was erased from the map a few days later. On orders from Yitzhak Rabin, future prime minister (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) but then the chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, the village was simply bulldozed into blankness, along with the neighbouring villages of Yalo and Beit Nuba. The land of the three lost Palestinian villages is now part of a pine forest called Canada Park, a pleasant picnic spot for

Israelis largely paid for by donations from prominent Jewish Canadians to the Jewish National Fund. For the past half-dozen years, Abu Ghoush has been tracking down and interviewing former residents of Emwas, scattered across the West Bank, Jordan and elsewhere, to collect their memories and family photographs and use them to piece together a map of the homes, other buildings, fields and orchards in the village for use in a topographical scale model she has been building in a back room at her production office in Ramallah. Where’s the hope in this story? It’s embodied in Abu Ghoush’s sumud, an Arabic term of particular resonance for the Palestinian cause that translates as “steadfast perseverance.” In building her model of Emwas and making a documentary about the process, she is both reclaiming and proclaiming her history. “According to the UN, that land should belong to the Palestinians so there is hope that at some point a kind of agreement can be reached, especially since the people of Emwas don’t really care under whose control it is,” Abu Ghoush said. “It’s not going to be the same houses or the same people, but to have the right to go back there I think at some point is possible.” Once completed, Emwas will be submitted to film festivals and screened in different parts of the world. Along with Paradise Now, Omar, The Idol and other films by Palestinians, it will become part of the emerging cinematic catalogue of Palestinian nationhood. Given everything that has happened and failed to happen since 1948, since 1967 and since 1993, ordinary Palestinians like Abu Ghoush are extraordinarily resilient. Living half a century under the thumb of another people, they continue to make films, write books, create and grow businesses, construct homes (often rebuilding them after Israel knocks them down for lacking the building permits that it almost never grants to Palestinians), raise children who go to school, pursue higher education and reach out with aspirations of their own. Moreover, when the Palestinians resist occupation, they do so for the most part, in spite of what the occupiers will say, non-violently. Why? “Most of us are working within a state of mind that says our cause is a just one,” Palestinian producer and film historian George Khleifi told me as we sat chatting in front of Abu Ghoush’s model of Emwas in that backroom at her office one morning. “We are convinced that a just cause will triumph in the end.” In saying this, Khleifi was referencing the famous Martin Luther King line, itself borrowed from the 19th century American theologian and abolitionist Theodore Parker, who wrote that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it tilts towards justice.

In researching Emwas, Abu Ghoush learned of a documentary called Censored Voices, directed by young Israeli filmmaker Mor Loushy. Premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and released in the spring of 2015, Loushy’s film is built around archival footage from the Six-Day War and interviews with Israeli soldiers, including acclaimed author Amos Oz. These men are now grey and wrinkled, and most are filled with deep regret about their participation in taking Palestinian land, destroying villages like Emwas and in some cases killing civilians. I went to see the film with Abu Ghoush during its run at the Cinematique, a popular repertory theatre in West Jerusalem. The film is powerful and moving, but what struck me even more than what I saw and heard on the screen was the reaction of the large and predominantly Jewish audience. At several points in the film, as former soldiers confessed to what they did in 1967 and how deeply regretful they now felt, Israelis in the audience gasped in dismay. When the film was over, I stood in the silent theatre and watched as many of them walked out with drawn faces, shaking their heads in disbelief. I looked to Abu Ghoush, and she seemed nearly as stricken, given such a revealing glimpse into the troubled hearts on the other side of a conflict that has framed and informed her life and the lives of millions. Near the end of our last visit to Ramallah, we stayed in a guest house on the outskirts of the city, overlooking the Al-Amari refugee camp, which was still largely populated by Palestinian families displaced in 1948. Like all the camps in Palestine and the diaspora, the original tents set up by the UN to accommodate people who 67 years ago believed they were only temporary refugees have long since been replaced by small homes built of cinderblock and tin, sometimes two or more storeys tall to accommodate the multiple generations now living there. Al-Amari is overcrowded and poor, but life proceeds; what other choice is there? On the Saturday shortly before the start of Ramadan, there was a wedding in the camp. The star of the show was the wedding singer. I never did find out his name, but his voice was deep, loud and passionate—the Tom Jones of Palestinian wedding singers, although it’s unlikely any panties were flung his way. He belted out song after song until well after midnight, his voice reaching far beyond the wedding guests. We heard it in the guest house and undoubtedly it was heard up in Psagot, the fortified Jewish settlement on the hillside overlooking Ramallah. As I lay there in the dark, I thought of The Idol and of Mohammed Assaf singing his heart out for a happy ending, but these thoughts did not help me fall asleep. EB EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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ON THE RECORD

Worker abuse and human trafficking were a factor in the reconstruction efforts that followed the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Aceh province in Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004. Because these events are still under active investigation, many of the names of people in this story have been changed to protect their identities. The photo series that accompanies this story depicts many of those affected.

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The Cage GOOD WORKS GONE BAD By VIRGIL GRANDFIELD

Eva met me for breakfast at my hotel in Medan, the sprawling capital of north Sumatra in Indonesia, in the summer of 2015. Almost before we sat down, she said, “Are you ready to die today?” “Yes,” I said. “I think so.” “I am not afraid to die,” she said.

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She meant it. Eva was a former schoolteacher who had been helping me on the investigation for years and was now working full time as my assistant. After breakfast, we went to my room to grab my daypack and make a plan. Even though we had decided we were going to follow the lead to the end, we still thought it wise to have some kind of backup. We had decided we needed backup because we were not sure yet if we could trust Mulyo, the labour agent who a few weeks earlier had told Eva, “I have a story about tsunami workers that you could make a movie about.” For backup, we called Lae, my old friend from the Indonesian Red Cross, to see if he would come with us. Lae was a wide-smiling, back-slapping Batak man. He had been fired a couple of times by the Red Cross for charges of corruption, and I had guessed that it wasn’t completely without cause. The Yamaha he rode around Medan still had a decal on it from the Saudi Red Crescent; he’d “borrowed” the bike from a relief operation I had run on Nias, an island just off the Sumatran west coast, after an earthquake had destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed thousands in March 2005. Mulyo had told Eva he took 160 of his men to work on an American Red Cross tsunami reconstruction project in late 2008, and that the men, along with hundreds of others, were made to work as slaves. One of them, a man named Otong, had been beaten to death by the guards. One of the reasons we weren’t sure we could trust Mulyo was that labour agents often doubled as human traffickers, which meant he would have good reason to not want the story told. When he offered to take us to a place called Stabat to meet the men who had witnessed the fatal beating, we hesitated. If Mulyo meant to kill the story, meaning, to kill us, a day trip out of the city to a remote village would be the ideal opportunity. But it seemed there was no other way to get the story, so we agreed to go. Lae answered my call, and I explained what I wanted. He was one of just a few of my Red Cross colleagues brave enough to remain a friend after I had blown the whistle over the post-tsunami reconstruction human trafficking I had discovered while working as an overseas delegate for the Canadian Red Cross in Aceh province, Indonesia, in December 2007. Lae was not a big man, nor armed. Having another person along might make Mulyo think twice. Three would be harder to disappear than two. But Lae told me he could not come. He didn’t say why. He did say that he could stay in touch by mobile phone throughout the day, to keep tabs on us. Eva and I could let Mulyo know that Lae was tracking us, if the need arose. We met Mulyo later that day and spent an uneventful night at his house in his village on the outskirts of Medan. 32

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The next morning, Mulyo, Eva and I got into a black SUV and left for Stabat.

+ +

“ I have a story about tsunami workers that you could make a movie about. ”

THE ROAD HAD POTHOLES IN IT THE SIZE OF BUFFALO wallows. Locals said they were not potholes but village wells. Some stretches of the twolane highway up the flat, coastal plain where upper Sumatra meets the Malacca Straits were as cratered as a carpet-bombed supply route. It was hard to believe that even in Indonesia a road could be so hopelessly ruined. According to the map on my cell phone, Stabat was supposed to be on the main road north from Medan, which was the last major stop for labour agents before shuttling ethnic Javanese construction workers—at least a half million of them—into war-torn and tsunami-wrecked Aceh province during the tsunami “reconstruction.” Indonesia’s Outsourcing Law of 2003 had turned all construction workers into simply another supplied commodity with no more enforceable rights than shipments of wood or brick. After bringing such human cargo to Red Cross, UN and other projects in Aceh—the spot worst hit by the tsunami—the contractors and subcontractors and agents stole most of the money meant for the workers. They recruited the workers with lies and kept them working with false hope. They promised the workers that tomorrow, next week, next month, they would be paid. Some of us in the Red Cross knew that our partners in the reconstruction were traffickers. And by ambition and negligence and our own lies and cover ups about the problem, we were also guilty of trafficking. We were no different. Ucok, a local man who had driven me in from the airport a few weeks earlier, had said a lot of donor money ended up here after the tsunami. Medan was the first stop on the way out of Aceh. The contractors bought land and homes and more businesses with the money. The subcons bought more wives. The agents, or mandors, blew the workers’ money in fancy hotels, discos, massage parlours and brothels in the city: ones with “Bali” or “Eden” in their names. Medan was “The Texas of Asia,” Ucok had said. The Wild West of the East. I began to wonder if there was a better

road north out of Medan than this one. This could not be a major route. Was Mulyo taking us on a detour, a goose chase? Was he trying to keep us off our bearings? I was surprised he had not made us wear blindfolds. The land of the tree-shorn plain we were riding through seemed as ruined and hopeless as the road. This was where the preman gangster death squads had assassinated tens of thousands of peasant farmers (and elsewhere at least two million others accused of being communists). Every part of the land now had been turned to some desperate use or lay smouldering or decaying. Cemeteries—both Muslim and Christian—stood jumbled in or beside the fields, in and around the villages. Like other places that used to be jungle, everything—even human life—seemed to grow out of death. Mulyo talked non-stop as he eased the SUV around and through the ruins of the road. He told us some young hoodlums had been trying to extort money from him on some of his projects, and said the older premans had built a factory on his own land without paying him. I was not surprised he owned land. Only the night before, Mulyo had told us that he was a very poor man, but I had long suspected he was hiding things. He kept other secrets, too. The location of the grave and surviving family of the dead man, Otong, for example, and contact with the men who had witnessed the fatal beating. Just beyond one of the worst of the potholes, where the SUV had bottomed out with an ugly bang, Mulyo pointed to another road to the right. “That way goes to Otong’s village,” he said. “But the road is so bad, we would have to get out and walk.” A lead to follow later, I thought. I pulled out my cell phone and, pretending to photograph a nearby house, used the phone’s camera to geo-tag the intersection. Maybe I could use the coordinates to find my own way to Otong’s village someday. “You know, Otong only complained of being tired,” Mulyo said. “We did not know he would die from the beating.” Mulyo then started telling us the story again, sometimes with himself on the outside as a subcon, other times on the inside as if he were one of the workers. He could be unreliable, my gut said. Which was why we needed to find other witnesses. “My men were working on an American Red Cross sewer project in Calang on the west coast of Aceh,” he said. “The GAM guards on the project watched us. The former rebels were everywhere. Even in the coffee shop, they carried guns. They used them to keep the workers from trying to escape.” The separatist guerrilla army of the Gerakan Aceh

Merdeka (GAM)—or Free Aceh Movement—had agreed to a peace agreement with the Indonesia government in 2006 in order to be able to participate in the reconstruction of Aceh after the tsunami. They saw it as their chance to make new lives after having lived in the jungle for up to two decades. As part of the peace agreement, the government set up an ex-combatant “re-integration” agency which stipulated that the Red Cross and other agencies hire the GAM as contractors, security guards and drivers, among other roles, despite the fact that they had no construction experience. The GAM subcontracted projects, taking their cut, but human trafficking was one of the results, though the GAM were not alone in this. There was abuse piled on abuse. “The GAM men would sit at the café table with their arms folded with one hand under their shirt on a gun,” said Mulyo, as we drove. “Sometimes one of the guards would pull the gun a little bit from his coat, just so you could see it.” He folded his arms to show us. “The others would put the guns under the table. The tables had hooks under them to hang the guns.” Mulyo told us he tried to help his men escape when the Red Cross contractor would not pay. “Workers had to get permission to leave the town from the Datuk, the big boss EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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of the GAM. He would not let them go. My workers asked to go home, even if it meant no money at all for their work.” It sounded like a good excuse for Mulyo to not pay his men. Who knew? The tsunami fund was almost too huge to spend, but the Red Cross still awarded contracts to the lowest bidders, who typically did not properly calculate in labour costs or ignored them altogether to get the bids down. Even for the less corrupt subcons and mandors, with the GAM and others taking their cuts, profits could only come from one place: the workers’ pay. Other mandors and subcons had told us that already. The problem was systemic and cultural. Mulyo continued: “I would tell my workers, ‘Today after work, we will go fishing until night. Then if we see any van passing on the road, we will flag it down and you can get in and go home. Tell the driver to take them to my house in Medan.’ Someone there would pay him. I told them not to bring clothes. Nothing else but what they were wearing.” We finally left the main road, such as it was, and turned onto a dirt road running through cane fields. Near a bridge, we stopped to pick up an old woman hitchhiking. Mulyo asked the woman where she needed to go and then continued his story. 34

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“I helped about seventy per cent of my men escape that way,” Mulyo said. “We smuggled them out and back to Medan.” “How did they know if the drivers would help them?” I asked. “The drivers were all Bataknese. The Bataks were anti-GAM because the GAM had terrorized them during the war. So, it was mainly the Bataknese who helped rescue my workers.” We left the old woman at a small bridge over a muddy stream. A few minutes later, we came to another one of Mulyo’s secrets, in a quiet village surrounded by sugar cane fields. It was a small house under a stand of trees, the home of Mulyo’s istri muda, his “young wife,” the fourth and latest. The house was small and pretty and modern. A furniture suite of carved wood and hand-woven upholstery dominated the living room. The wires and boxes of a large TV and karaoke machine and stereo system lined the walls. Gold-framed photos crowded the spaces above. Mulyo disappeared through a curtained door. A teenage girl entered the room from another door and brought a tray of sweet tea in glasses to a table between the heavy furniture. Mulyo reappeared from the

curtained room. “The girl’s mother is staying in her bedroom,” he said. “She does not feel well.” I asked to use the washroom. When I returned, Eva whispered to me that Mulyo had just told her we would not be meeting any of his own workers, the ones who had worked on the American Red Cross project in Aceh. I was stunned. Had we come all this way for nothing? I pressed Mulyo as politely as I could. “I thought you said your workers would be here in Stabat. From the American Red Cross tsunami project. The ones who saw what happened to Otong.” Mulyo jumped from the couch, fast for a man of his girth. “I am trying,” he barked, no longer smiling. “If you had come five years ago, it would have been very easy!” He walked out of the room and returned a moment later. He sat back on the couch, smiling again. “Now it is time for us to relax. I am going to cook duck for you.” He left the house and came back with a bulging burlap sack. There were a few wisps of duck down at the mouth of the sack. Blood pinked through the weave of the fabric and dripped from the bottom corners. He went into the kitchen but returned a moment later and sat back on the couch. Perhaps to make up for lying about meeting his workers, he started to tell the story of Otong again. “The night Otong was attacked, it was raining. Like many workers at that time, Otong was sick with diarrhea. He needed to go to the toilet. There was no toilet at the barracks. So he had to go out to an outdoor toilet. Because it was raining, Otong took a sarong to cover his head and body from the rain. He held the sarong over his head. This made the GAM suspect that he was trying to escape.” He paused, as if interrupting himself. “We don’t know for sure it was GAM, of course. We know that it was Acehnese men with guns.” A rooster crowed. It began to rain, and the rain soon dripped from the tin edge of the roof and sheeted the patio. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the room, balking against the new cool of the rain, clinging at the doorposts like a child before school.

“ One of the GAM— the one we called Bule— put his machine gun to my head. ” + +

“Otong went to the toilet,” said Mulyo. “He started going at around ten p.m. and had to go out every hour after that, because of the diarrhea. The distance was about thirty or forty metres. Otong went from house to house, trying to hide from the rain under the roof overhangs. On the way back to the barracks, he was attacked.” I interrupted Mulyo to ask if he knew exactly who did the beating. Mulyo said it was probably the GAM hired as “guards” on the project. “They worked for Doctor Niko, the contractor.” Mulyo said he had seen Doctor Niko make payoffs to the GAM commander right in the American Red Cross headquarters. He said one night after he had confronted Doctor Niko about the workers pay, about half a dozen of the GAM guards took him up onto a hill overlooking the project. “One of the GAM—the one we called Bule—put his machine gun to my head. He said, ‘You talk too much about money. We gave you rice for the men. Isn’t that enough? Do you know what I had to eat during the war? Snake, wild pig and leaves. Or nothing.’” This part of his story made me recall what Mulyo had told me when I’d first met him in Medan weeks before. “The GAM told me they considered my workers ‘volunteers.’ ” Outside the house, the rain had stopped and there was a sound of chess pieces being scrambled and set up for a match somewhere on the veranda. I didn’t know who was out there. Mulyo said Otong spent three nights in hospital. When he was released, the GAM commander allowed him to leave Calang. He died a week later, back at his home, here in Stabat. I imagined the grave was somewhere along the narrow road we passed on the way to Mulyo’s. I had the GPS coordinates on the geo-tagged photo. Mulyo did not know that. It would be important to go there, to find the family, to find someone to verify the story. Through the doorway, I saw an untroubled boy driving sheep on the wet, red clay of the road in front of the house. The smell of the ducks cooking was making me hungry. Two men arrived at the door. Mulyo introduced them. “These are the men I called to meet you today,” he said. “They are victims from a Canadian Red Cross project.” I was surprised. I had never expected to find Canadian victims here near Medan. I thought they had all been recruited in faraway Java. I had not come here to look for Canadian victims. Mulyo said he needed to take his istri muda to see a doctor. He left us to speak with the two men from the Canadian Red Cross project. Sariono was 34, from a nearby village. He had short hair and looked directly into our EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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+ faces. His friend, Budiman, was 28, from the same village. His hair was a little longer, and he was too shy to look directly at anyone. They had both worked in Aceh. Sariono said he went there in 2007 with a busload of workers from nearby villages. “A mandor came to my friend, and then my friend recruited me, too. The mandor gave fifty dollars to my family, and offered us five dollars per day for our work. They split us up. They took twenty for a different project. They told us we could all go home after three months.” Sariono’s fingernails were long and curling, like those of the GAM soldier I had met years ago who told me of adopting a tiger cub while he was hiding and fighting in the jungle. Sariono said he had become dizzy with headaches all the time because of the long hours and extra work. “The mandor promised us more money if we would work overtime. We worked straight through for a stretch of five months with no Sundays. We could not escape.” He hesitated. His face went red with anger. “We went six and a half months without pay, except for the hundred dollars paid out in bits here and there for food, plus the little advance we had left with our families at the beginning.” I asked him if someone from the Canadian Red Cross staff ever checked on their welfare, or ever asked if they were getting paid. “The whole time we were working, the Red Cross only talked to the contractors and mandors,” he said. “They did not talk with us workers.” “So no one from the Red Cross ever tried to help?” I asked. “No. Never.” Sariono said on the day the project finished, the mandor told the men to wait for him for one day. “‘I will go to the office to arrange pay for all of you,’ he said. ‘I need to go back to the office to get the money.’ Until today, we have never seen him again.” I caught the implication. Rain started to fall hard again on the metal roof. “We know it was the Canadian Red Cross because of the emblem on the white people’s shirts and the symbol on their vehicle. We worked for them in Khaju.” Khaju, a small suburb of Banda Aceh, just north across the big bridge over the Aceh River, was one of our Canadian Red Cross tsunami projects. It was far from Stabat. Not a place two unschooled construction workers from hundreds of kilometres away would know about. Not unless they had been there. “The woman from the Canadian Red Cross came to the project once and gave us t-shirts,” Sariono said. “Do you still have the shirt?” I asked. 36

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“ So no one from the Red Cross ever tried to help?” I asked. “No. Never. ” +

“No,” he said. “We sold the t-shirts later for food money, before we started walking home from the project. We were starving.” I had heard stories from other trafficked tsunami-reconstruction workers about selling their belongings and clothing for food money on Red Cross projects. A Canadian Red Cross t-shirt traded for food didn’t surprise me, but it did sicken me all over again. “She had red or blonde hair,” Sariono said. “She was thin. There was a man with short hair, too. Tall, not too old.” Probably a high-level visit, I mused. Someone from HQ in Banda Aceh, or from Ottawa, on a quick tour of tsunami projects on the north and west coasts of Aceh. A Canadian Santa riding down the sunscorched road, tossing inedible goodies from an air-conditioned sleigh. “We never knew her name,” said Sariono. “We only knew our mandor’s name. All thirty of us were not paid. We got nothing.” I was familiar with that part of the story before Sariono began. It was too common. In fact, it was and is the rule. In all the times we had been tracking down construction workers from among the tens of thousands that labour agents trafficked to Red Cross tsunami projects in Aceh, I had yet to meet one who had been paid what he was promised. Most were not paid at all. Some had never gone home and never will go home. In the months that followed, Eva and I heard contradictory versions of various survival narratives. Budiman, by way of example, later told us that he and other workers did not sell their Red Cross t-shirts. We also heard varying accounts of Mulyo’s role in helping workers escape, as well as differing versions of Otong’s killing. These stories, we knew, were altered or edited depending on the teller’s sense of what might get him or her out of or into trouble. These were often life and death matters. An hour passed as we listened to Sariono tell the story. Eventually, Mulyo returned. He pulled up a chair while the teenage daughter finished cooking the duck in the kitchen. Mulyo took over answering, as if he had been present throughout the

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conversation, as if he had been a victim himself. He knew a lot about both ends of things. He explained more about how the trafficking worked on Red Cross projects. As he spoke I was taken with the feeling that he was offering us a kind of confession. Budiman said very little. He only nodded at the things Sariono and Mulyo were saying. We paused our conversation for dinner and sat in a circle on the floor around a large bowl of rice and smaller bowls with the portions of two stewed ducks and other bowls of onion pickles and boiled greens. There were also glasses already filled with hot sweet tea. After supper, Eva and I decided that we should return to Medan that night. While we waited for our food to digest, I told Mulyo the rest of my story. I told him how I had been the spokesperson for the Red Cross/Red Crescent tsunami operation in Aceh, the biggest ever to that point, for the first year of its multi-billion dollar operation. I told him how I had discovered slave labour on projects during a later mission for the Canadian Red Cross. I told him how I had fought with my bosses over the trafficking and had resigned and finally took the fight public. I told him how the workers and their families and I had lost that fight. And so, I had come back. To try again. When I finished, Mulyo half-closed his eyes. “But I also know that you, Virgil … you do not want to do anything to hurt the reputation of the Red Cross.” It is hard to say why, but I didn’t tell Mulyo what I was thinking: What is an organization’s reputation compared to the suffering of thousands of workers and their families? After supper, Mulyo said he was ready to drive us back. He briefly disappeared outside before returning with a wooden cage with two large ducks inside. We got in his SUV and he loaded the cage behind my seat. I could see the confusion and fear in the ducks’ eyes. They were the same species I had eaten an hour before. It was suddenly disorienting to be so close to animals we’d caged for our use. Feathers for our beds. Meat for our plates. Whatever we wanted. Whatever our purpose. Mulyo started the engine. We drove off about the same time as Sariono and Budiman left, two workers who had gained little but misery on a Canadian Red Cross project. Misery and a t-shirt they had to trade for food. WE DROVE OUT THROUGH THE SUGAR CANE, THICKER THAN A FORest, and with the tropic light failing quickly. Rather than taking us back out onto the main road, Mulyo made a detour. He drove fast and would not explain where we were going. Ten minutes later, we pulled into the driveway of an empty house. Three men stepped out of the 38

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OUR LIVES AND NOTHING ELSE No more white asparagus or Boursin cheese now that cash is huddling, Dow Jones dropping like a gored matador. Cheap Canadian beer. The latest Lucinda downloaded illegally. Bills shrivel in my pocket like kleenex fingered so long it’s turned to lint. There goes Italy next summer. Amazing how much squeezes down the drain with a little pressure – grapes, crusts, gristle. No more takeout three times a week, no more Friday nights. Soon I’ll have to sell myself in Value Village. I used to be worth a fortune, dashed hope exclaims. My father still leaving me his cache of anxieties, signing them over one by one. The whole history of the dead is wallowing in interest never paid – our lives and nothing less: pickpocket crows and mean peacocks, diamonds wriggling from gold restraints, champagne watered down with melting ice. On the way back from the loan shark’s, I stop at a wheat field where sooty clouds hang like a charcoal drawing of tragedy. I can almost touch their weight, their sag. That pressure again, the entire sky on the verge of a crash. I lean against a scratchy bale, inhale the scent of what one day could be bread, a bit of butter the next field over, dragging its udder through three-leaf clovers. – Barry Dempster

darkness. My heart skipped. We’d been careless. I slipped my cell phone out of its case and snapped a GPS photo of the empty house. I hurriedly sent the photo to Lae back in Medan and texted him: “Here now. Will check back in 30 min.” I looked at the dark, vacant house. Was this where Lae was going to find our bodies? But instead of taking us into the empty house, Mulyo and his men had us follow them across the road

to a general store closed for the night. A man opened the door, and we filed into a room next to a counter shrouded by a hanging garden of foil-packaged snack foods. Mulyo asked us to sit on the bare concrete floor. We sat. The floor was warm. The air was still. As we arranged ourselves on the floor, I received a text back from Lae: “Tebar Emas.” Mulyo was distracted in talking with his men, so I had a quick peek at an online dictionary, which told me that tebar meant to share and emas was gold. What did that mean? Share the wealth? Was Lae negotiating a rescue price? Mulyo introduced us to the other men. One was the village chief. From their deference, it seemed the rest of the men worked for Mulyo. Three sat across from us and two others who had appeared out of nowhere stayed up at the counter, like guards. After the introductions, Mulyo started to make a speech. I could pick out that it was about Aceh and NGOs and ethics and responsibilities. He spoke in even longer and more confusing circles than usual. Finally, one of the men across from me, 40-yearold Toha, was able to speak. Toha said he had worked on an NGO tsunami project in Aceh. “Our contractor and his men were GAM. They did not try to hide that fact,” said Toha. “And the subcon, he 40

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always brought a gun to the jobsite.” Toha said he worked on the project to rebuild a school. “We weren’t being paid. And sometimes they made us work twenty-four hour shifts.” Toha said he asked the subcon for permission to leave. The subcon only offered to pay him $20 or three months of work. The subcon said he would send it to Toha later with one of his friends. Toha had no choice but to agree if he wanted permission to leave. His friends never received his pay or their own. “Most of the workers never got paid in Aceh,” Toha said. “Thousands even from around here. You don’t even have to go as far as Medan to look for them. Just go to any village around here. None of them got paid.” Again, heavy rain began to pound the world outside. A big man in a striped green shirt got up to close the shutters and doors. I realized we had been sitting there over half an hour and I had forgotten to contact Lae. I texted him that everything seemed fine. Mulyo again began preaching about ethics and responsibilities to the dead, shouting over the rain. When the twin storms of rain and Mulyo’s voice subsided a little, one of the other men began to talk. He spoke of a relative who worked in Aceh and then died when he came home. It sounded like Otong. Mulyo interrupted him,

almost with a pounce. “They are not here for that one!” he shouted. ON THE BONE-JARRING RIDE BACK TO MEDAN, I SHOWED EVA THE TEXT message I had received from Lae about “sharing gold.” I asked her if it meant Lae had been demanding money to rescue us. “Oh, no,” she said, laughing. “Tebar Emas is the name of the village where you sent the GPS coordinates from. Lae was only verifying our location.” Mulyo started rambling about sin and how helping us would make everything right again. “I am a guilty man! A guilty man!” he suddenly shouted, swerving the SUV sharply around another giant pothole. “Maybe I am a sinner!” We finally turned off the cratered highway onto a street leading the last kilometre or so towards Mulyo’s neighbourhood. As we passed through an intersection, Mulyo said, “That is where we would pick up most of the men who we took to Aceh for the American Red Cross project. Many of them lived right near here.” He said more but too quickly for me to understand it all. I poked Eva. “Is he saying they lived here?”

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“Yes,” she said. “He says that the men we are looking for live right here, in this neighbourhood.” “But we passed through here this morning. We could have…” “Yes.” “Why didn’t he bring us here today?” “He says we cannot stop here to talk to any of them.” “Why not?” “Because they are angry with him about their pay.” “Mulyo didn’t pay them?” “He says he told them he is also poor. But they are still blaming him, saying he kept their money. So he will not take us to talk with them.” He did not slow down (though months later he helped us interview the workers who’d been enslaved, starved, and who witnessed the killing of Otong). We soon arrived back at Mulyo’s village. He parked the SU V beside the main road. W hen we got out, he fetched the cage of ducks from the back and handed it to me. The ducks had been so quiet, I had forgotten all about them. They stared at me through the bars of the cage. They did not move and did not make a sound. EB

FICTION

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Air: The Molecular Chorus WE ARE CARBON DIOXIDE, NITROGEN, AND OXYGEN.

Argon. We are whispers of trace elements: elementary helium, iodine, krypton, neon. We are ozone. We are nitrogen dioxide, ammonia and xenon, methane and iodine, nitrous oxide. We are carbon monoxide. We are carriers of waves. Of light and sound. We are harvesters harvesting: pollen, spores, sea spray, and smoke. Dust. And we are gatherers of vapour, skimming across water, gliding over grass. Creators of clouds. We are still. Or we are storming, with charged solar particles sent down to strike, flaring ribbons. Ripping night. And we are surging through the veins of the living. Predator and prey, we are carried in their blood. We fill lungs. We are breath. Echoes we recall, always. A gauze of thoughts and memories. On Crowsnest Mountain stand a man and a woman. Him breathing steadily, to still his speeding pulse. And her, fast and quick, she is gasping. She is summoning. So we hurl ourselves towards them, those mouths wide open. We go gusting, in.

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Part I: The Father THERE ARE SOME WORDS IT’S BEST NOT TO think about. Which is why I elect to think of only one: rock. Like the ones piled underfoot, a goddamn avalanche waiting to happen. Every lunge forward accompanied by a backwards roll, gravity directing its attention to my ass. Is this scree, then? And are we adding a dimension to the boy’s epic adventure stories, experiencing it for ourselves? The boy and his stories. The boy. Like a fucking minefield, this train of thought. Erica is oblivious to the inherent danger of the situation. The hazards involved. Middle-aged bodies tumbling and cracking open. Blind to the obvious, because she sees a point to us being here. A reason! As if reason is anything but a faulty construct. Reasoning. Reasonable. “It is reasonable to feel this way given the circumstances.” From now on, reason will be banished to that writhing snakepit of things best left unspoken and unthought. Replaced with this: lichen. Germanic-sounding, no? Spoken by a man in leather breeches pulling goats towards the market. Lichen being the staple of a goat’s diet. Licked off rocks with its scrub brush of a tongue. Mountain goats survive primarily, predominantly, on papery plants. Recalling the source of this fact is a risk not worth taking, so instead I will contemplate the amount of lichen one goat must lick in a lifetime. And whether lichen’s hue is related to nutritional value. Or flavour. Is it safe to assume that kids, like human children, consider white more edible than green? And does the abundance of orange lichen suggest it is consumed as a last resort? And since when is lichen orange? Or black? Could it be that lichen is the only existing black vegetation? Besides the blackberry. Which might not be considered vegetation 44

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to begin with, and for which black is a misnomer anyway, the berry being as purple as Erica’s tam. The infamous tam-o’-shanter, most hideous of head coverings. Do Scots even wear such things anymore, or are tams for tourists only? This tam purchased by Erica in the Glasgow airport a decade ago. Though the Glasgow airport, and all memories related to the summer the boy was twelve, will not be called up. Period. Whether or not they are triggered by tam-wearing. A tam, if reflected upon without sentimentality, is nothing more than a Scottish beret. Authentic berets being just as obsolete as authentic tamo’-shanters, worn solely by the sort of affected American expats who lug their easels daily to the banks of the Seine. I have just snorted aloud. Must have, because Erica has turned to face me, blocking my ascent, and because the low-level buzzing that has thus far accompanied the climb has ended. The buzzing in question being Erica herself. Or more precisely, her monologue about what we are looking for. About whom we are looking for. I shake my head. “Go on.” And on she goes. And on and on. Not that I can decipher meaning. I have learned to block out the dangerous wound-ripping words of my wife. Except. She’s not moving, still facing me and trying to create that thing she always declared to the boy was allimportant: eye contact. I am practically powerless against this. “Huh?” I say. And I really am listening now. “You know what I’m thinking?” Erica asks. Oh. Yes, I could say, I know precisely. Excuse me as I plumb the depths of my subconscious. We’ll haul everything up, then watch it expand to grotesque proportions, gather up noisemakers and form a parade. “Do you know what I’m thinking?”

I say instead. And Erica takes a deep breath as though she’s been waiting for this all day. Like the students who come to review classes at the end of the semester, expecting I’ll reveal the secrets of the final exam. But I’m not the kind of man to satisfy expectations. Erica, of all people, should know this. “What?” she says quietly. Memories are standing on each other’s shoulders, straining to break through to the surface. “I’m thinking about this,” I say, expanding my arms to encompass everything: the rock pile called mountain, the gathering clouds, Erica, myself. She’s almost trembling now. Leaning forward so far she might tip over. “I’m thinking how useless it is to be here.” She just looks at me. Tenderly she looks, like the snake charmer that she is. The memories slip past their mesmerized captors. The loss of our son to weeks at summer camp, to trips to his grandparents, to the cluttered confines of the basement in his teenage years, to his parallel universe of priorities, to his friends, to a city that was too far away. What can I do to stop them? What can I say? “You look ridiculous in that fucking hat,” is what I come up with. And with this, she does turn from me. She starts climbing again. “I’m finished,” I say to her back. A nd I sit and stare at the ground beside me, trying to fill my head with only what is there. Rock, I whisper. Rock, rock, rock, like I’m meditating on the sound of it. Like a rock, rock hard, hard rock, rock on. Am I doing this correctly? Rock solid. Solid as rock. Don’t rock the boat. Sinking like a stone. Stones in the pocket of goddamn Virginia Woolf. Enough! Rock. My Rock. Erica. Erica. Erica. She’s far ahead now, near the sheer limestone chimney. She shouldn’t be alone up there. She shouldn’t be here

to begin with. It’s not safe. It’s not right. And it’s not going to change anything. But try saying that to Erica. Same for him, try talking sense into that boy. Nothing doing. Can you ever rein in a person like that? Can you save them from themselves? You can’t, is the answer. So don’t even try.

Part II: The Mother I’M FINISHED, SAM SAYS, AND MAYBE HE only means he’s finished climbing, that he will go no farther, but it’s also clear that he’s finished playing along. He’s not given up faith, just his show of faith. Real faith he didn’t have to begin with. But there are a host of reasons our son would abandon his tent, his car, a pot caked with macaroni and swarmed by flies. And why he would walk to Chinook Lake and throw his hiking boots into the water. And his pants. There are reasons why our son would turn from the lake then, and go elsewhere. Into the forest, or up a mountain. Away. Why he would not wade into the water until he was well beyond his depth, exhausted, his inhaler forgotten in his glovebox, this boy of ours who could barely swim. That Nicola had just moved from their apartment was a devastation, but our son was not desolate. To the Lighthouse, pressed open on his sleeping bag, means nothing. An assigned text for school. The discarded pants (is there anyone to identify that these were pants he was actually wearing?): Carhartts patched with duct tape and containing, in their pockets, not stones, but the Ford’s key threaded onto a twisttie. Also a water-wrecked photograph folded in half then half again, and two yellow guitar picks. Also a phone card imprinted with Nicola’s name. Also his wallet. But this is not evidence enough. Sam may maintain that the only possibility is the one that is most realistic,

but Sam is not a mother, and does not feel the heart of his child beating in his gut. They’ve been searching since yesterday and haven’t found a body in that lake. I can feel Derek here. Crowsnest was what he talked about the last time he called, from the pay phone in Blairmore City Campground—two hours on the highway all it took for his great escape. He was camping, but promised he’d be back in Lethbridge when we arrived. This call made the day before we left Victoria with the intention of driving eight hundred kilometres to help him fill his empty apartment. The first time he called to talk about Crowsnest, he was seventeen and I thought he had met a girl. His voice lilting on the telephone, those breathy pauses. Guess what I just did? he asked. And I was almost certain that I didn’t want to know. This was after he spent his first summer away with his friend Carl. Roughing it for two months in the Kananaskis— herding kids up hills, onto horses, out of trouble. Driving home through Crowsnest Pass, the boys had been pulled from the highway and up the dirt road to the mountain’s base, transfixed. Derek didn’t make it to the top that first time. The ascent started too late, the wind was high, the rock cairns blended with their surroundings so that they were almost imperceptible. The boys couldn’t find the route, and so they tried to cross the scree to the other face. It wasn’t until they were halfway that they understood the impossibility of that feat. And by that time, to quote our son, they were scared shitless. When he told me all this, I thought about Sam. Or more precisely, I thought about going AWOL from a

high school dance, then parking on the edge of town in that rusted pickup of his and expecting my father’s face to appear, pressed to the glass, at any moment. I thought about how fear has a way of marking the beginning of a love affair. Crowsnest was never a phase. Even Sam realized it, because he didn’t tease the way he did about everything else. How are those violin lessons? When the instrument had for weeks served no more than a decorative purpose. When are we going to have something to hang in the hall? While fiddling with the still-sealed tubes of oil paint Derek requested for his birthday. Even when the spark was still alive, Sam didn’t let up: What? Every dinnertime our son came to the table with microwaved slabs of nut loaf. A vegetarian, still? But when Derek talked about the mountain, we both just listened. In that sense, we were a united front. We both, though hesitantly, supported the Lethbridge move, Derek going to school in Arthur Erickson’s dungeon masterwork: a slab of cement dug into a coulee. And all, it seemed, so he could be closer to Crowsnest. Romantic, Sam snorted, though only to me. He can drive there at night so its face is the first thing he sees when the sun rises. We did that ourselves. Drove yesterday from Creston to Chinook Lake, and then slept in the car at the base. To be closer, I said. Maybe Sam agreed because he thought I meant closer to the searchers. Now, there sits Sam against a boulder, his arms crossed tight over his chest. The backdrop like one of Derek’s photographs: the Seven Sisters in a row, a wash of greens and greys. Some things need to be seen to be proved real. And other things are even more unbelievable close up than the story of them ever can be. EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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Like this mountain, and that our son climbed to the top. How many times? I understand the draw. Everything is sharper up here. The smell is like scorched dust lodged in my throat, and the clouds throw jagged shadows that ripple towards me over the rocks, then bite the warmth from my skin. My pulse throbs wildly. But I won’t be deterred. Because if I reach the top, I’ll find Derek alive. The day before we slept at the trailhead parking lot, we slept in the Creston Valley Motel. This was after some fellow hikers found Derek’s clothes. I lay on the floral bedspread watching Olympic highlights, and Sam sat beside me, alternately holding his head in his hands and staring at the side of my face. My body was aching from a day in the passenger seat, the air conditioner broken just outside Osoyoos and Sam fiddling with the knob, refusing to open the windows as the desert sun beat through the glass. Not an actual desert, he had said as the licorice at my feet melted, as my skin baked, as my temper flared. After the police called, he had given up and opened the windows wide. Ha l f way t h rough a M ichael Phelps montage, Sam switched off the set. “What do we do next?” “Find Derek.” It was that simple. “Erica!” he said—he shouted. And then he started to cry. For a while I tried to come up with something to say, but there was nothing. I closed my eyes. I fell asleep. And when I woke, it was to Derek. The smell of him at least: warm and thick, like damp wool. A sign we were close. The bedside phone was on the floor, its cord stretched into the bathroom. “Denial,” I heard Sam say. “How long do I let this last?” But the next morning, when I told him I wanted to climb Crowsnest, that I wanted us to search for Derek our46

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selves, he only pressed his fingertips against his eyelids for a moment. Derek is on the mountaintop; in my mind, I see him clearly. T here’s his hiking hat—that pilled orange toque with the pompom on top. Also the Scarpa boots, with the bells I made him tie to his laces to scare off wildlife. But the Scarpas were found in the lake. Because Derek had taken them off, wanting to let his feet breathe. He’s in his sneakers, his camera swung over his shoulder on that threadbare Guatemalan cord. Except that the camera was in the tent, beneath his pillow, the searchers said. And the toque too. The filthy hat that I threatened for years to make disappear, I had buried my face in yesterday, inhaling the scent of my son. And so I have to disassemble that picture, to pull away the pieces that don’t fit. When I see what little I’m left with, I ask myself: is this really what I believe? Yes! I respond, aloud, at once. No comes the echo from deep within me, from the part that is collapsing. Why would Derek’s clothes be in Chinook Lake if he didn’t go in there himself? And why would Derek go into the water when he can’t swim? Is it possible that Derek is where everyone believes he is: tangled in the weeds at the bottom of that lake? I shut my mind to the answer, keep climbing to the place that holds on to my son. But here, at the base of the towering chimney, the rocks are too steep to climb on their own and the chain fixed to them is slack. The missing bolt becomes apparent when my foot slips from its hold. And then I’m sliding down scree, slamming to a stop against a large rock. This pain I feel isn’t from the fall, it’s from the picture expanding to fill my head. It’s

from the realization that Derek is never coming home. And the possibility that he wanted it that way. A nd there is nothing I can do about it. Nothing for me to do at all except to lie here, until I am desiccated by the sun, turned papery as lichen. Until I am caught by a gust of wind and blown away. Until I see it, standing at the top of the chimney like an apparition. A young, lone goat.

Part III: The Witness GRAZING ON THE RIDGE, I WATCH THE climbers. Careful, Mother says. Be the rocks, be the air, be not there. Afraid of humans? the old ones say, as I duck away. They do not hide, so why should I? Humans are dangerous, Mother says. They carry sticks that call to death. Shoot fire. And the old ones agree. Be fearful of humans, but not of these two. Come out from your hiding place. Look. But Mother says no. Who can be sure a human is safe? The old ones can. The old ones know. Go, says Mother. Go away. The old ones tell Mother these humans are lost. But Mother says no. They are going the way the others go. Up. Yes, up, the old ones laugh. To the top to see the view. But that’s not all they’re looking for. No? I ask. Away, Mother tells me. Go away. She stays on the ridge to watch the man below. And I watch the woman, who climbs on alone. Streams of scree slide with her every step, in rivulets. Rocks can become rivers, the old ones say, a crest of rubble rushing. A crust of rubble covering. Everything. And silence folding into it all that crashes and collapses.

THE HAT There is not another like it in the whole known universe – and yet it’s here in this chain-franchised coffee shop, on the head of a squat, lace-collared woman, her hair fair, fine and fraying, graying. The hat is an explosion of crochet – woolly loops of rust and pumpkin puffing upwards like the crust of a soufflé or the pelt of an alien animal from a distant galaxy. It conforms to no known pattern. The bows and bobbles with which it is adorned will never be repeated in the wildly multiplying combinations of the world. The sullen young snigger nearby, a tattooed chorus of conventional rebellion with stapled lips and ear-lobes. They’d never wear That Hat. They wouldn’t be caught dead. They want, intensely, to stand apart, to make their fashioned selves unique. But not with that thing on their head! – Alice Major

A cloud of dust obscuring any light that endures. The sunrise grey as dusk as the humans went on dreaming. An endless dream in an endless night under Turtle Mountain. In the town of Frank. On that mountain that gave way, the old ones say, our relatives were grazing and gazing at the sky. They were caught in the current. They were carried with the river. Collapsing. And crashing. Everywhere. This happened long ago. But the old ones hold the story in their bodies. They have breathed it. How? Not fleet-footed as you, child. But we are wiser. They speak to the dead, Mother says, and the old ones concur. To ghosts. Ghosts of whom? Not whom, but what, the old ones laugh.

What, then? Everything. Everything breathing and everything not. Every place. Every happening and happened. We find their traces in the air. It’s all still there. Mother hasn’t seen these ghosts, but she believes: the old know everything.

But I know things too. Things that gather like storm clouds in my head. A word: dead. And the face of a man I’ve seen before. What does this mean? Then more: a grizzly and her cub on the shore of Chinook L a ke. A nd h i m c aught between them, plunging in to escape, kicking boots, shucking pants in his wake. Fear. As the sun sets, and the bears pace. And he tires of treading water. And then a floating fullness takes its place. I clutch it close. But the old ones interrupt. In a procession, they arrive at my side. Do you know why the woman is here? they ask. Her son, I say. And how can you tell? I know. Everything flaps loosely, unfurled in the air. Fleet-footed and wise, they say, can it be so? I need to see her closer up. Yes, child. Go. When I climb, I collect. I take what is waiting, hanging there ripe and ready to pluck. I spin a story out of sky. I hold it tight. Is this right? When I reach the chimney, she’s there below. Look up, I demand. A silent call, but still she stands. Her eyes find mine. What do I do? Hello, she says, then looks away.

No! Stay! But what comes next? I’ve forgot. I climb down towards her, and when I’m close, I see it on her face. Part of the story; all she knows. Oh. Listen, I say, a mute command. Is there a way to show the rest? The story sits frozen, curled on my tongue. I take a breath. The air floods out fast, thick with the soaring fullness of a son. A man. The woman gasps, deep and low. But how can I tell if she sees what I know?

Epilogue: Air: The Molecular Chorus WHEN THE WOMAN PARTS HER LIPS, WE rush through mouth to trachea, to bronchi, bronchioles, alveoli, lungs. And we are held there. Oxygen diffuses into blood, and with it comes a story. For we are carriers: of the keening of a grizzly cub, its mother on her haunches. Growling. Charging. And a boy treading water who cannot see the shore. Who can stay afloat no longer. There’s a beat without breath as everything’s absorbed, and then we’re exhaled. With a wail, we’re sent outwards, rushing free. And we’re whirling, spinning, turning, we are forcing, gusting, pressing, pushing past: a silent hoofed messenger, his herd still and watching. Pushing past: a man who is standing, to climb towards his wife. Pushing past: a small group of searchers who have gathered on a lakeshore. They have gathered by a body of a boy. But what they’ve found is no more than a vessel, empty. His spirit isn’t lost, but flows everywhere, just like us. Is part of everything, just like us. He’s joined our chorus of the infinite. EB

EB WEB

FROM THE ARCHIVES THE LAST PLEASURE: ORIGINAL SHORT FICTION BY ROMESH GUNESEKERA eighteenbridges.com

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SOUNDINGS TAKING THE MEASURE

CONSUMPTION

Three-ring Meal // By JENNIFER COCKRALL-KING

ILLUSTRATION JENNIFER MADOLE

sat frozen, wanting to reach for my wine. My extremities had long ago been numbed by the cold but the syrah was icing over. With two layers of thermal underwear, a parka, and wearing my puffiest down-filled winter mittens, every manoeuver required precision. I reached out, formed my hand into a claw, advanced it toward the glass. It was like dining using the Canadarm. I slowly brought it back towards me towards my lips, tipped it up, and took a generous glug. Mission accomplished. There we were, a collection of extreme diners, doing our best to manipulate knives and forks in subzero weather. It was January and we were in a farmer’s field, hours away from any city, near the aptly named town of Viking, Alberta. (Those who weren’t dressed in Everest-mountaineer outfits were swaddled in animal pelts.) Here, Blair Lebsack of Edmonton’s RGE RD

restaurant had built a walled enclosure with giant hay bales and was serving a six-course meal of hay-smoked pork hocks, beet “caviar” and local whisky hot toddies. We dined away under a Ted Harrison sky while coyotes yipped in the distance. Dining outdoors in January on the Canadian prairies might be carrying things a bit far, but it demonstrates the lengths diners and chefs alike are going to in order to create alt-dining experiences. And rather than a one-off oddity, it’s part of the growing enthusiasm that has been building for some time now for the anarchic category of plein air longtable dinners (albeit usually in the summer), pop-up restaurants, food truck rallies, and underground supper clubs. Epicureans in the new Experience Economy—the term coined by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore in 1998 to describe the shift from a service economy to an economy in which customers buy experiences rather than goods—are clearly chasing moments as much as flavours. Surprise and novelty are practically the main course. We want a tasting menu while skydiving. (Not a real thing). We want a 20-course audio-visual extravaganza known as a gastro-opera. (Which is a real thing, courtesy of Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet, a restaurant in Shanghai.) We want to drink and dine on a Plexiglas platform, suspended above or beside a major world monument. (Real, as well, for a price, through dinnerinthesky.com.) Of course, dining suspended above a world monument and gastro-opera are clearly on the outer edges of this trend, but the gastronomical destination is changing. Even my dining calendar is studded with “one night only” chef collaborations, community hall culinary takeovers, and invitation-only dinners where the destination is revealed at the last moment. There has been enough of a trickle-down effect that I’ve been wondering whether tastemakers and tastebreakers are growing bored with brick-and-mortar, stationary, make-a-reservationfor-7-p.m.-on-a-Friday-night restaurants. And yes, I do acknowledge that this feeling might be confined to a jaded, mercurial lot of overfed food writers and globetrotting frequent diners. I have many friends who are still thrilled by a night away from the kids in a dimly lit restaurant. EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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I recently posed this question—whether fine dining has been replaced by extreme dining—to Irish restaurateur and chef J. P. McMahon. His restaurant, Aniar, in Galway, Ireland, has had a Michelin star since 2013, the very symbol of this tradition. Even so, McMahon trucks with a group of avant-garde chefs who are changing perceptions of what Europe’s top dining experiences can and should be. Aniar’s menus change daily, and are sourced from ingredients fished, grown or foraged from West Ireland land and sea. Burnt kale ash stands in for black pepper. Tea is steeped from wild plants. “Fine dining is often not viable on its own,” replied McMahon, reinforcing that the market is speaking loudly and clearly. He told me that his tapas bar, Cava Bodega, “pays for the fine dining [of Aniar].” He and his wife Drigìn Gaffey also own a gastropub called EAT. Without these two businesses, there would be no Michelin starred Aniar. He told me about Bubbledogs, a popular Champagne and hotdog joint in London, the profit of which supports an adjacent 19-seat upscale space with a multicourse prix-fixe menu for £88 per person. “And the owner, Albert, just opened a fine dining restaurant and a taquería in the same space in Barcelona!” Albert is Albert Adrià, of the Adrià brothers’ culinar y fame. At the turn of the millennium, their groundbreaking el Bulli restaurant in Spain pioneered molecular gastronomy, a culinary pursuit in which chefs doubled as scientists to reshape the presentation of ingredients. Until it closed down in 2014, it was untouchable as the world’s most inventive restaurant. But even before closing el Bulli, the brothers were moving ahead, envisioning a collection of Barcelona-based restaurants in which nary a single white tablecloth would be spotted. Their stated objective from the outset was to create the world’s first culinary amusement park. Currently, their park includes Bodega 1900, a vermutería (a neighbourhood bar that specializes in vermouth-based drinks, cold cuts and potato chips). There’s Tickets tapas bar, and 41° cocktail bar, both casual. Pakta is a Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant. Add to that the aforementioned taquerìa, Niño Viejo. Albert Adrià has been blunt in discussing the business model—the casual (and profitable) sites make the upscale restaurants possible. I met Albert Adrià in October 2015, in Calgary of all places. He was travel-weary from weekly commutes between Barcelona and Ibiza (apparently, their culinary amusement park has an outpost on the Mediterranean island). It was an entirely new concept, he told me, switching between Spanish and English mid-sentence. Heart Ibiza wants to combine theatre, live music, dance 50

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performances and culinary experiences as you wander the various spaces of this hedonistic nightclub. You might be thinking that it’s as if the Adrià brothers went into the restaurant business with Cirque du Soleil’s founder Guy Laliberté. But wait, they did go into this business together. And who does experience better than Cirque du Soleil? That said, I’m not sure that I want an actual circus in my face while I’m trying to eat. It’s enough to make me pre-nostalgic (in that I haven’t visited Heart Ibiza yet) for those expansive, baroque dining rooms where waiters glide phantom-like between a sequestered kitchen and your very own table, at which you dine with your very own friends or family, and eat food that’s actually about the food. Ah, the good old days. I found myself wondering, not for the first or last time I suspect, where the fickle winds of food trends were blowing this past July as my skin prickled in 38 C Okanagan heat. I was lined up with some friends, waiting to board a yellow school bus. We were schlepping our own chairs, our own small table, our own food. We were, as dictated by a set of rules, dressed hat-to-heels in white. Not beige. Not ivory. Not eggshell. But bright, stark, white. We didn’t know where the bus would take us—that’s part of the fun. More than a thousand of us arrived in concert and were herded into a public park overlooking a beach, an invasion of white that was probably visible from space. It was my third Diner en Blanc, a flashmob dining event that bills itself as a “secret posh picnic” in multiple locations around the world on a set day. Despite the hassle, the rules, the rigid dress code and that it’s by invitation only, the event is wildly popular. In 2015, there were white dinners in 65 cities such as Kigali, Mexico City and Paris (where the registered trademark event originated). Our group’s leader marched us to our designated spot on the lawn. We were instructed to set up our chairs and tables. Dinner would commence in less than 10 minutes with the waving of our white cloth napkins above our heads. Soon enough, we uncorked our one allotted bottle of wine, ate our dinner (which we’d made ourselves earlier that day) and danced barefoot on the grass. On cue—and on schedule—we decamped as quickly as we came. It was fun, but it was an awful lot of effort. The effort did make me begin to wonder what is there to do when both diners and chefs have moved, strange as it may seem, beyond the food and habits of traditional fine dining? Is ‘experience’ the only thing left? Diners sweat through a regulation all-white outfit at a secret group picnic. Restaurateurs serve pub food and tapas to pay for their more creative impulses. And if you’re the Adrià brothers, you literally send in the clowns. Cheque please. EB

MUSIC

Too Swift? // By SCOTT MESSENGER

BIG MACHINE/GETTYIMAGES

hen Ryan Adams released 1989 this fall, Esquire magazine dealt him what to me seemed a backhanded compliment, calling it his “most relevant work in years.” He walked into it, though, because the album wasn’t exactly his own. Taylor Swift’s first pop effort, 1989, wasn’t a year old when Adams covered it from start to finish. The original is a future classic— with five million copies sold by this summer—but a bit fresh for reinterpretion. Yet that’s what Adams did, translating 1989 into the type of indie rock-alt country offering that has defined the highpoints of his career. For the effort—despite being one of the most prolific musicians of our time—he risked seeming better at pop-culture piggybacking than real songwriting. I prefer Adams’ version but wasn’t sure I saw its point at first. I’ve often struggled to understand why covering

a song should pass as true artistic expression. I’m not concerned with the one-man band churning through All Along the Watchtower over in the shadowy corner of the bar. Nor with the baritone who (much further along the talent spectrum) commands an unquestioned respect for nailing the nearly impossible aria, Largo al Factotum, from The Barber of Seville. Instead, I wonder about the real impact of that place in between: the countless pop remakes by established artists of songs like Hallelujah and Yesterday and anything by Tom Waits or Bruce Springsteen. What good did Adams think would come of reimagining 1989, and so soon? Such feelings owe partly to my shortcomings as a musician. Songs we love are doorways to the craft, at once inspirational and aspirational. They can be frustrating, too. Learning to play bass in high school, I’d skip over EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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notes in the tougher Rush songs, my fingers too short and slow to achieve the full geek ecstasy of the deep cuts from albums like 2112 or Moving Pictures. With guitar, two extra strings only increased the possible permutations of failure. Songwriting was the way to quit trying to measure up to unreachable standards. It also sidestepped another problem: my inability to empathize with people I don’t know. Covering a song has always felt to me like trying on shoes that have travelled miles that you have not. The fit will never be right. The most profound and affecting songs are, like most art, distillations of the human condition. They reflect the mindset and emotional states of their writers. How can we just slip them on like our own?

Covering a song has always felt to me like trying on shoes that have travelled miles that you have not. At risk, Walter Benjamin might say, is authenticity. In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German-Jewish philosopher examined the impact of modern forms of copying on art, focusing his argument on cinema. But his concept of “aura” and how it “withers” in reproduction could apply to music. He was dealing in a hazy, know-it-when-you-see-it concept. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Art is informed by its era and place; the reaction to each gives a work that sense of originality that lodges it in both head and heart. A cover strikes me as a reaction to the reaction, the photocopy that gets fainter each time it’s run through the machine. But then there’s also this from Benjamin: “In permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object.” In that, it brings Figaro! to a new generation. Of course, the value of that reproduction isn’t limited to high art. It also applies to the likes of the Bailey Buckaroos, and to guitarist and vocalist Cory Vanderjagt. These days Vanderjagt (who is, full disclosure, my brother-in-law) plays nothing but covers. He has for years. “The first motivation to learn cover songs was girls,” he said when I asked him why. “It isn’t anymore.” You won’t find Vanderjagt knocking off top 40 pop in local bars, but he kills on the wedding circuit where he does personalized playlists with a full band. More 52

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notably, Vanderjagt played the Bailey Theatre, a century-old, art deco venue on main-street Camrose, a small city with rural Alberta roots about an hour southeast of Edmonton. Before a recent move to Calgary, he helped front the Buckaroos, a house band (featuring one septuagenarian on fiddle and another on lap-steel) that covered classic country for sell-out crowds. Dwight Yoakam might have been thrown in for the kids, otherwise the Buckaroos focused on the back catalogues of George Jones, Ray Price, Buck Owens, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Impressing girls (at least any under, say, 65) wasn’t the point. “The big payoff was filling the theatre with two hundred and fifty people in walkers and canes coming in to hear songs that they only hear on CFCW [the local AM radio country station]. They’re not getting up and dancing but you have this idea that maybe they’re rekindling memories or just feeling good, feeling romantic.” Objects were being reactivated. The way Vanderjagt saw the music, he was “breathing life into it again.” He’s still playing it on his own, digging deeper into the country canon. “I really feel like I’m on to something I can call my own.” Through borrowed songs, he’s developing his artistic identity, and as far as identity goes, he’s like any music lover. Few art forms are internalized so easily, and none are as commonly held up as representing who we are and how we want to be perceived. (Who would wear a t-shirt from, say, a book tour?) Vanderjagt inhabits his songs like fans do, as artistic squatters. Alessia Cara, a 19-year-old touted as Canada’s next pop sensation (her first album came out this fall), already gets it. “Once you put your songs out, they’re not yours anymore,” she told the Globe and Mail in October. “They’re everyone else’s.” Sometimes, they’re Ryan Adams’. Its aura might be dimmed but 1989 redux serves an unexpected purpose. Vanderjagt helped return crowds at the Bailey to a time that defined them, a time soundtracked by the strum and twang of Nashville and Texas. Adams, in contrast, has anchored us when the rate of cultural change (or of the consumption that spurs on that change) moves at the speed of broadband. He’s invited us to take a second look at a particular reaction to our times—a job art does—and pointed out that current pop culture is never as disposible as we might think, just as The Barber of Seville wasn’t, despite being booed at its premiere. And that may be the true relevance of Adams’ work. One day people with walkers and canes will hum along to the old Swift standards— her own or as interpreted by Adams. 1989 will still mean something to them, in one form or another. EB

BOOKS

Writing the Land ILLUSTRATION SHELBY JOHNSON

s a reader and writer, I’ve always been drawn to the notion of literary landmarks: spots we can visit that connect us with the writers who share our spaces, who filled those spaces with imagined narratives and their make- believe characters. Such landmarks enrich our identity—as children, as adults, as a nation— knowing we’ve cultivated this creativity, knowing our spaces are worth writing about. Worth borrowing as a setting and mining for metaphor. Worth a writer calling home because it nourishes and inspires.

// By ELIZABETH WITHEY

Which is where Project Bookmark Canada comes in, a CanLit connect-the-dots that’s ambitiously mapping the literary geography of this country and building our identity as Canadians along the way. Using excerpts from books set in real locations, the initiative creates exhibits, or “bookmarks,” as they’re called, that people can tour or happen upon accidentally. Each plaque features up to 500 words from a story or poem and is installed in the precise spot where the literary scene is set. You stand before the bookmark in a character’s fictional footsteps, read the EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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excerpt and take in the view, imagining the action unfold. “When you say plaque, people think Government of Canada, historical bronze plaques, but this has a very different intent. This is the anti-historical plaque. It’s what didn’t happen here,” Project Bookmark founder and executive director Miranda Hill explains from her home in Hamilton, Ontario. The aim, of course, is to nudge readers towards the books themselves. Hill, a writer of fiction and poetry who won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for short fiction in 2011, plunged into this monster of a wordmapping idea 16 years ago, as a young mom and writer living in Toronto. Whenever her small children slept, Hill would read, and when they were awake, she’d take them on outings—but didn’t own a car. “I was always walking, walking, walking with these kids,” she recalls. “And I started walking through some of the scenes I was reading.” In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. Even The Cat and the Wizard by children’s writer Dennis Lee. “It just seemed to keep happening. And my experience of the story is so much deeper having been to the location. And my experience of the space is so enhanced, having read the book.”

The map on Project Bookmark’s website is part document, part dream.

Hill later chose an excerpt from In the Skin of the Lion as Project Bookmark’s first plaque, unveiled at a ceremony in 2009 at Toronto’s Bloor Street Viaduct. The funding was largely “mom and pop,” says Hill, meaning friends, family and credit cards. Since then, the project has expanded into a charitable organization with two part-time staff (including Hill), more than 70 volunteers and a board that decides the location of the bookmarks and their content. Funding is one of the biggest obstacles to expanding. Each bookmark costs between $10,000 and $15,000 (which includes an estimated gift-in-kind of $3,000 for the land). So far, much of that has come from Hill’s home province. Without setting up chapters across Canada, Hill has trouble accessing provincial funding elsewhere. This is why only four of the 15 bookmarks are located 54

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outside Ontario. In October 2015, Port Hastings on Cape Breton got one celebrating Alistair MacLeod’s epic novel No Small Mischief. And thanks to funding from the Metcalfe Foundation, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park each have one, too. The map on Project Bookmark’s website is part document, part dream. Black icons mark established sites, the newest of which, in Oakville, celebrates her husband Lawrence Hill’s novel Any Known Blood. Grey icons symbolize potential future sites (none is confirmed yet, but the initiative hopes for bookmarks in Alberta, St. John’s, Halifax, northern Ontario and other spots). Some might consider the map misleading, but it’s a reflection of Hill’s optimism. Hill always had a Canadian map in mind. Why dream small? How is that even possible in this vast land of storytelling? “We took [the future sites] out and it was like, it’s so not complete. Plus it looks like a project based in Ontario,” she explains. To call Hill ambitious would be an understatement. She’s writing a novel, to be published by Knopf in 2017. She and her husband have five children between the ages of 16 and 25. Constantly, she’s torn between bookmark time and book-writing time. While Hill’s ultimate vision is profoundly beautiful and worthy, selling the idea isn’t always easy. Getting permission to put a landmark in a city or town is even harder than getting money to build it, she tells me. The bookmarks belong to all of Canada, she explains, but the host city or town must agree to play caretaker. Upon not-so-subtly suggesting a bookmark in Edmonton, where I live, I was surprised to learn some communities have said no thanks (Hill prefers not to divulge where). “Sometimes it’s absolute and instant: ‘Yes, yes we want this!’ Sometimes it’s a delicate conversation. That’s been an ongoing frustration for me. I was hoping it would be more instant by this point. It’s a challenge to keep things moving forward, and it’s a challenge to keep our spirits up.” Hill wants the literary landmarks to encourage readers to visit a place they’ve experienced in the written world, but she wants visitors to investigate the books, too. It’s about community building, she says. Standing in a spot you think of as familiar—that sidewalk you rush along on your way to work, or the corner where you had a fight with your girlfriend or boyfriend—and having a totally different experience is the point of Project Bookmark. “It makes us look at each other in a different way,” says Hill, “as people who each have their own story.” And as a people who has its own national story. EB

FILM

Hero or Villeneuve // By PAUL MATWYCHUK

O.CANADA.COM

ne of the favourite pastimes in the world of film criticism is sussing out the next hotbed of directorial talent. For a few years it was Iran. Then it was South Korea. Then attention drifted to Romanian endurance-testers. Today, there is a strong case to be made that the next wave of break-out filmmakers are right under our noses, in Quebec. The French-Canadian charge is led by a trio of directors, all of whom have made major international breakthroughs. It’s easy to understand the appeal Xavier Dolan holds for the Cannes crowd: he is a young, prolific, openly gay, highly photogenic provocateur who had five features to his credit before he turned 25. Jean-Marc Vallée has taken a bit longer to make his mark outside Quebec, but thanks to Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, he’s earned a reputation in Hollywood as a director with a nose for quality material rich with Oscar-bait roles. And then there’s Denis Villeneuve, who may be the most successful of them all. Three of Villeneuve’s films—Maelström, Polytechnique and Incendie—won Genie Awards for best picture and best director, but he’s not merely a success at home. Internet Movie Database users rank Incendies 164 on the site’s list of the 250 greatest films ever made— dead even with There Will Be Blood, The Maltese Falcon, Network, 12 Years a Slave and The Princess Bride. Villeneuve’s 2013 film Prisoners made more than $120 million worldwide— pretty good for a relentlessly grim

and punishing two-and-a-half-hour revenge drama. His latest, the morally murky war-on-drugs action drama Sicario, is also performing well. The trajectory of Villeneuve’s career is even more remarkable given that he has shunned many of the ingredients directors traditionally rely upon to achieve box-office success. His films are set in violent and unglamorous locations: the Middle East, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, working-class Pennsylvania. With few exceptions, they are empty of levity or humour. They are “dark” and “political” and tend to avoid unambiguously happy endings. As a Canadian filmgoer, I ought to welcome the emergence of an ambitious, serious-minded talent like Villeneuve. But with each successive film he’s released (and with each uptick in his international reputation), I have found myself resisting his style more and more. I fear my distrust of Villeneuve resembles the doubts conservative pundits like to cast on Justin Trudeau: sure, he’s young and glossy and handsome and expresses all the correct social messages, but is there really anything of substance going on inside that pretty head?

LET’S GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING. IT IS STARTLING TO LOOK back at Villeneuve’s early work, including August 32nd on Earth and Maelström and his award-winning short film Next Floor. This director, who now seems like such a dyed-in-the-wool miserablist, once seemed like Canada’s answer to Jean-Pierre Jeunet: a maestro of stylized, grotesque whimsy. The bizarre opening sequence of Maelström even looks like it could have been filmed on a location from Jeunet’s City of Lost Children: a dimly lit subterranean slaughterhouse, where a hulking brute in an apron takes a cleaver to a series of talking catfish, each of whom addresses Villeneuve’s camera in turn and wheezes out a sentence or two of narration before the butcher impassively severs its head. This may be the only successful attempt at humour in Villeneuve’s movies. (Not that he tries all that often, nor should he. Later in Maelström, he punctuates a gruesome abortion sequence with a sick-joke rendition of Good Morning Starshine, the cheery pop hit from Hair.) Viewed in 2015, the most notable thing about Maelström and August 32nd on Earth is that, for films by a male director, they take an unusual and genuine interest in female protagonists who have complicated relationships with career EIGHTEENBRIDGES.COM

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and motherhood. In one story, a woman gives up her modelling/acting job to conceive a child in the desert. In the other, a woman abandons the upscale clothing store she owns as she deals with her guilt over having an abortion. And while both films are ultimately more concerned with visuals than theme or character, they seemed to mark Villeneuve as a nascent feminist. That impression was, on the surface, confirmed by Villeneuve’s decision to follow up Maelström with Polytechnique, a studious re-creation of the 1999 rampage at École Polytechnique in Montreal, during which 14 women died as part of a shooter’s deluded campaign of vengeance against feminism. The film’s black-and-white cinematography, full of floating tracking shots reminiscent of Wim Wenders’ angel-eyes point-of-view ones in Wings of Desire, is exquisite—assuming you have no problem savouring beautiful simulations of 14 actual murders. In Polytechnique, Villeneuve is understandably afraid of seeming to exploit its subject matter. But by refusing to deeply probe the killer’s motivations, or to identify him by name, or to present the violence in the gaucheness of full colour, or to interpret the meaning of the carnage in any personal or artistic way, Villeneuve offers little to viewers but meticulous, high-end production. Even the film’s feminism seems muted; oddly, the character whose suffering the director appears to identify with most is a male student loosely based on survivor Sarto Blais who killed himself months after the shooting, wracked with guilt over his inability to halt the killing. The torment of this character is obviously rooted in a legitimately nightmarish psychological experience, but I’d argue its narrative prominence unbalances the film’s impact, turning the story of a crime against women (and womanhood) into a meditation on male power and powerlessness. For his next film, Incendies, Villeneuve selected another tale of female victimhood, this one based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad and set against the backdrop of strife in an unnamed nation in the Middle East (but which closely resembles Lebanon). The plot is a sort of globetrotting riff on Oedipus Rex, in which a pair of twins whose dead mother, in her will, tasks them with locating the father they never know and the brother they never knew they had—an assignment that forces them to confront the shocking hidden truth of their origins. If part of the power of Polytechnique comes from its meticulous recreation of a real-life tragedy, Incendies shows Villeneuve working in the more allegorical mode that he would continue to employ in Prisoners and Sicario, films in which melodramatic plots are grafted onto contemporary political settings and issues: torture of political prisoners, the international war on the drug trade. 56

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Perhaps this tactic, more than any other, is what makes Villeneuve’s films seem so morally queasy to me. Let’s take Incendies as an example. Mouawad and Villeneuve’s central artistic decision not to set the action in a specific country may be the key to my discomfort. It’s a feint that enables Villeneuve to craft a story full of garish violence—multiple rapes, an exploding bus, children separated from their parents—without having to engage any of the politics of the region, one portrayed here, xenophobically, as A Place Where Only Terrible Things Happen. By the time it reaches its climax, Incendies reveals itself not as a film about Middle East politics, but a screenwriter’s perverse thought experiment: what’s the most plausible scenario you can devise for a man to repeatedly rape his mother? Maelström, similarly, feels as if Villeneuve had challenged himself to come up with a scenario that would result in a man unknowingly falling in love with the woman who killed his brother. I much prefer Maelström to Incendies, if only because it doesn’t employ an ongoing international tragedy to prop up its small dramatic ends.

Exquisite—assuming you have no problem savouring beautiful simulations of 14 actual murders. In an essay about the film for the online journal The Dissolve, critic Nathan Rabin speculated why Incendies ranks so high on IMDb’s list. “Incendies is a gorgeously filmed, impeccably acted melodrama that proudly broadcasts its seriousness and solemnity … It feels like an important film and a great film, even if it’s ultimately just really good.” That line tidily sums up Villeneuve’s work: he is too talented a technician and has too original an eye to be dismissed as an artistic fraud (his images of concrete buildings obscured by smog-yellow skies in his 2013 film Enemy now come to mind whenever I picture Toronto). Yet I question whether a director who is as capable of treating the lurid plot elements of Prisoners—including a complicated child-abduction scheme, underground mazes, snake traps and a jittery tattooed cop portentously named Inspector Loki—as solemnly as Villeneuve did can be trusted as a serious political thinker. In early 2015, Warner Bros. hired Villeneuve to direct the long-awaited sequel to Blade Runner, the modern scifi classic. The film is about humanoid robots who are so artfully designed and constructed, they are indistinguishable from the real thing. I think Villeneuve is going to knock this one out of the park. EB

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BRIDGES

Love Lockdown // By CRAILLE MAGUIRE GILLIES

lost count how many times I crossed the Tiber River during my five days in Rome. I went from ancient site to ancient site, over footbridges and hulking stone viaducts— always walking, sometimes in the rain, often under an autumn sun. On the way to St. Peter’s Basilica, I crossed Ponte Sant’Angelo, built for Hadrian in AD134 and many centuries later a popular execution site. I trudged over Ponte Sisto after leaving Trastevere, soaked to the toes from an afternoon storm. I was not quite lost, although not exactly sure where I was going. The Tiber zigged and zagged, as if drawn by a drunken cartographer, but there always seemed to be a way to get to the other side. If I missed this bridge, I knew there would be another nearby. I came to realize that Rome can be a difficult place for a single person to visit. Everywhere you encounter couples strolling along, shopping bags slung over their linked arms, couples taking selfies in front of Trevi fountain, couples gazing up at one stunning ruin or another. Was the City of Love not enough for these amorous travellers? Must they have the Eternal City, too? Soon I discovered I couldn’t escape them, even at the outer reaches of town. I’d heard about a bridge called Ponte Milvio, Rome’s oldest and a destination for the lovesick. In 2006, Federico Moccia published a novel in which a young couple fasten a padlock to this very bridge and throw the key into the Tiber below. The book, Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You), sold more than two million copies and was made into a film. Couples inspired by the story began to visit Ponte Milvio, fastening lock upon lock—so many that they broke two lampposts and threatened the bridge’s structural integrity. This ancient edifice—which had stood in one form or another for more than two millennia—was being assaulted by love. I couldn’t deny the symbolic power of attaching small charms to a bridge, that feat of human engineering that provides safe passage, that unites two people. But wasn’t this whimsical form of vandalism a misguided public 58

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display of affection, like having a lover’s name tattooed on your arm where it would fade and warp with time? The locks would weather badly, I thought. If a relationship ended, the evidence would remain, rusted from the rain and there for all to see. Wanting to see it for myself, I boarded Tram 2 near Piazza del Popolo and headed north. We creaked along, an arthritic metal caterpillar winding up a crooked road. The tourists grew fewer, the gelato shops vanished. I alighted near a park and got my bearings. Ponte Milvio is wedged between an unremarkable residential area and a four-lane thoroughfare. It is possibly the most unromantic spot in the entire city. City officials, concerned for the integrity of the bridge, had cut away the locks and declared the practice illegal in 2007, yet people still made the pilgrimage north. Not surprising, perhaps, given the bridge’s lascivious history: Nero once came to Ponte Milvio “for his debaucheries” and the historian Tacitus said it was “famous for its nocturnal attractions.” The day I visited was sunny and warm, and there appeared to be no gauche activities taking place. A young couple necked atop a gangway; teenagers gathered in the middle of the bridge to shoot the breeze. There was evidence, however, of recent activity. Padlocks ringed some of the lampposts, forming a kind of oversized charm bracelet, and hung from the base of the lanterns. Some people had purchased red heart-shaped locks and had them engraved. They were tacky, but charming. Last year, I briefly dated a friend and, anxious to know where it was going, I’d asked: What if this happens? What if that happens? What if we end up hating each other? He calmly said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” Now here I was on a bridge covered by expressions of love. Someone had drawn a large cartoon heart with K + Z inside. Another had written, “Ti amo da impazzire [I love you crazy], L & C, 12/06/14.” And on a small blue door leading to a tower, I made out the very simple Marion ♥ Sacopo. Who was Marion and where had she found her Sacopo? Did she still love him? What had happened? Had they made it across other bridges since? Despite the graffiti and the locks, Ponte Milvio itself seemed no worse for wear. If Garibaldi couldn’t destroy it, then how could something as innocent as love? I crossed Ponte Milvio alone, the sun still bright, and came across a man at the foot of the bridge singing karaoke to old pop tunes that he blasted out of a large speaker. He too was alone and he didn’t seem at all unhappy. EB

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an inventive romp through the nature of humanity.”

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