Art by Alice Zheng
1.
Cactus Joah had found a comfortable spot to lay his mind in the forested area around the Askunessippi in Londontario. The ghost of his future had led him to a moss-covered rock where he could sit and be pretty – indeed, ever since he was a child he had been mistaken for a girl (‘I think you’re in the wrong group, little lady.’ ‘But I’m a boy.’ ‘No, you’re not.’). Behind him was a giant camphor tree that shaded him with its one-thousand-year-old limbs; in this shadow of eternal life he contemplated his recent decision to drop out of high school. Had he really thrown away his feminine future in a fit of anxiety and attention deficit disorder? Above him the birds were crackling in the leaves like small feathered fires while the random rustling of snakes gave life to the yellowing grass around his rocky seat; thus the sounds of nature mingled with, and consequently muted, all thoughts of city life.
His blond heart was beating in time with the world. The seclusion, smells and sights of the forest were as nostalgic for him as the guitar solo in Europe’s The Final Countdown: If he had been in search of lost time then such sensations would have been the ultimate triggers in finding it. As it was, childhood memories poured through him like rich, hot syrup. He remembered that as a child he would habitually sally forth into exploratory adventures throughout the forest: he had made it a point to crawl through all of the hollow husks of dead trees and climb up all of the sturdy branches of the live ones; to get his toes wet in the shallow sides of the river; to collect various bits of garbage as though it were treasure; and see, and see. By the time little Cactus Joah had returned to his homes – for he had lived in five throughout the years – he was filthier than either of the family dogs had ever been.
Speaking of which, he could never remember the name of the first one – his only clue being that it started with the letter K. It had been a sizeable golden brown anteater forced to live in a tiny townhouse backyard. Altogether his memories of it were shaggy at best; K’s sole feat was probably being traded in for their second dog, Champ.
Champ was a German shepherd that had apparently vanished one day when Cactus came home from school. His parents never gave him a straight answer about it and Cactus eventually dropped the dogged inquisition; his emotional attachment to the canines was either very slim or suppressed in memories. He rarely ever thought about them.
One time Champ had masticated an admittedly delicious art project of Joah’s who, in a fit of rage, scribbled ‘I hate you Champ, I really do’ onto the back of his only known photograph of the animal. When Champ curtailed its appearance in his life he tried using an eraser, but to little effect – he had written the phrase in felt-tip pen. He eventually lost the photo when he moved out of his fourth home.
But we digress. The decision to take a permanent leave of absence from institutional education should come as no surprise to anyone with even secondhand knowledge of his elementary school attendance records, let alone his notorious treatment of secondary school time schedules; for at some muddy point during his stay at Northbrae Public School little Cactus Joah had begun attending it only as whim dictated. From that point on came a never-ending onslaught of sick days.
The first high school that Cactus Joah attended was Herbert Benson Beal. One of the three principals who headed it – the principals being assigned to students depending on the first letter of their last names – was a bitter old hobbit who had filled her office with photographs of grandchildren who looked exactly like her. On several occasions the aging hobbit had threatened to expel Cactus on the grounds of his spotty attendance records, but failed to do so only because he had managed to switch high schools halfway through his third year. It was from this second secondary school that he had dropped out approximately two hours ago.
His inability to consistently attend classes most likely stemmed from the fact that his mind always, always, always sailed into uncharted territories whenever things boiled down to the lessons: While the teacher opened the usual discussions about Sir John A. Macdonald’s legendary battles against calico ensembles of ghosts and typewriter-sidling space invaders, Cactus Joah would look up at the ceiling, deciding which was the best song to play during the end credits of a movie that existed solely in his imagination. You could also consider the fact that he could not stand being forced to do things against his will; that and he was mildly depressed from automatically assuming an objective viewpoint on nearly everything he encountered. It was a veritable cocktail of reasons, really. In any case, we have given enough to go on.
So now then:
Cactus Joah had been seated on his rock for some time now, only ever moving to make slight comfort adjustments as stone statues do when no one is looking. The light fabric of his jacket rippled around him in the dying wheezes of summer’s end; the leaves of the forest were entering that transitional stage where they were beginning to lose their colour – very much as if they were catching a cold – before they could fall into an elegant transformation of oranges and reds.
Cactus sighed an antidote for autumn in the form of dragon’s breath – the steam rose from his parted lips and rode high into the branches above, embarrassing the leaves that costumed the trees surrounding him; and so his stake of the forest became an august masquerade.
He had been sitting on the rock for many months now, caught in a limbo of thought. All the animals of the forest had agreed to stay clear of him, for his patience made them unsure of whether he was a man or a god; they were mostly afraid of the former. At first they thought he might be a tanuki, but on closer inspection his scrotum was not nearly large enough.
It was a hardbound copy of Finnegans Wake that was to snip the cord holding his sustained reverie together, with the tome being walked into the scene by a girl in blue. The girl happened upon the young gargoyle during what looked to be your usual morning stroll, a sense of loss buzzing after her (or perhaps it was a bumblebee).
She circled Cactus with an air of innocent interest that he inhaled with silent relish and exhaled as teenage cynicism. When the book caught his eye, his head tilted.
‘What’s that?’ asked Cactus, his voice covered in mold.
‘Oh! You’re alive.’
‘Which book is that?’
‘Oh, it’s Finnegans Wake. Um. Haven’t you read it?’
‘No, can’t say that I have. What’s it about?’
‘Oh, I think it’s an allegory for the relationship between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Alice Pleasance Liddell. And it might have something to do with the circular nature of time. But I’ve only read it twice.’
‘Interesting. Who are the first two? A dodo and a pleasant little girl? I thought time was a triangle.’
‘Ah! You’re silly. You’re making a joke of it all.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you.’
Joah rose from his perch as every joint in his body popped appreciatively.
‘Wait – that really does sound interesting. Finnegan’s Wake, was it?’
‘Finnegans. You don’t pronounce the apostrophe.’
‘Ah.’
‘It’s clever because it’s plural.’ Beat. ‘I really must be going.’
‘But you only just got here.’
‘Well, I came here to be alone . . . I don’t know why I said that to you. I guess it’s too late to take it back now. Drat, I feel silly! I’m sorry. I—’
‘Don’t; it’s okay. Tell me what’s wrong.’
‘Well, I lost my cat.’
‘Then I’ll help you find it.’
‘Oh . . . well, that’s very sweet of you, but . . . I don’t think you can. It went to kitty heaven.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. I fed her so much that she became a big fatty and suffered eight heart attacks all at once.’
‘Unbelievable! That’s quite the catastrophe. She must have had a strong heart to survive through all that.’
‘No, it was very weak – that’s why she suffered eight of them.’
‘Ah. And they say that cats have nine lives.’
‘Yeah, but it was the piano collapsing on her that killed her.’
It should be noted that outside of the actions, none of the preceding conversation had actually taken place; so Cactus Joah was in fact standing atop his rock, gazing down at the girl who had stopped circling to gaze up at him. Their exchange had been a mere fig leaf of Joah’s imagination; it was a habit of his to dream up such stray strands of dialogue whenever he encountered a personage of interest to him. She gave the impression of being eternally young, like a modern god who had no use for the humility of aging; the light in her eyes was so pure and so bright that it could be mistaken for the one that preceded the creation of the world. Her black hair was hemmed with dedicated curls, her brown skin an unblemished blessing.
They stood staring at each other in silence, tied together by a taut invisible string – once plucked it produced a tone of unfathomable beauty. Cactus Joah then blinked and the girl was suddenly sitting down.
The meaning he took from this passive gesture was one of incorruptibility – it seemed the girl would have been unable to find any reason at all to be intimidated by his presence. There are always poisonous little scenarios playing in the back of your mind every time you meet a strange man alone in a forest, but the girl seemingly did not have such thoughts. Cactus found this to be slightly intimidating. However, he strolled up to her and offered a friendly greeting.
‘Salaam,’ said Cactus as he casually held the back of his head.
The girl opened her book to the middle pages and looked at them intently; Joah knew that she was not reading them because he saw that the book was being held against its will upside-down. At this point Cactus Joah questioned her A) intelligence and B) sanity.
‘You know, your book is –’
He looked away as soon as she looked up at him, for he had found sudden interest in a nearby patch of air; with the careful movement of her fingers the girl went from page 310 to 309.
Cactus Joah wondered at his attempts to engage this bibliofairy, for very rarely did he confront strangers, let alone badger them into conversation; perhaps it was a side effect of being several months out of touch with humanity, or maybe he could just not resist the charm of such a strange and beautiful character. Whatever the case may have been, he wanted to know more about her.
So once again he attempted to make good use of the gifts of voice and language.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Nice day, eh?’
He received nothing but a blank look in response. It was quite frankly more than he had expected.
‘Listen, I just had a conversation with you in my head. I thought it was rather funny. Do you want to act it out with me?’
She shook her head.
‘So you do understand me!’
She paused. Then she finally spoke. ‘I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think I understand you,’ she said. ‘You’re kind of . . . strange. I just wanted to read my book, you know? I mean, I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but I . . . Well, I guess I’m not one to talk, since you probably wanted to do whatever it was you were doing, and then I came along and distracted you. I’m sorry.’
‘No, don’t be. I’m just being silly. I’ve spent such a long time here that I have forgotten how people actually behave; until you showed up, I thought I was the entire universe, like I was the sole memory coil capable of processing information. Everybody that I thought about just seemed like an extension of my self. Really, I think the only things keeping me alive were my memories and regrets – kind of like photosynthesis but using instances of human frailty instead of carbon dioxide and water.’
The girl nodded with a hesitant smile. ‘Well, maybe you’re a god, then.’
Cactus Joah laughed. It felt good to laugh, as if he was using absolute goodness to expel all of the badness from his system. He had forgotten how satisfying that sensation was.
‘Do you know that your book is upside-down?’
‘Yeah. I was hoping you’d go away. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though. This is just the spot I come to in October when I want to read a book. I think the leaves look best here.’
‘Yes, they’re very pretty.’ He wished his problems were like leaves, becoming glorious before going away completely. He knew that whenever he decided to return home he would have to face all of his problems and their inevitable consequences directly. The girl seemed completely free from any such problems, a pure bud of a flower; or perhaps he was simply looking at her through the rose-coloured eyes of a complete and utter failure. In any case, he was calmed by her presence. ‘Do you have a name that I can apply to you?’ he asked. ‘“Girl” is such a universal term.’ He wanted something that would make her more solid, more real to him.
The girl made a ‘You’re so strange’ face, one that seemed to be suppressing a sigh. Then she explained: ‘You’re supposed to introduce yourself first. Didn’t you learn that in school?’
‘I guess I missed that class,’ Cactus said with a tortured smile. ‘Cactus Joah, at your service.’
‘Oh, I have a cousin named Cactus Joah. He’s five years old now.’
‘It’s a common name.’
The girl nodded while fidgeting with her book. ‘Here, I wrote my name on the first page. See?’ She handed him her open copy of Finnegans Wake. Written neatly in pencil in the upper right-hand corner was Pita.
‘It’s nice to meet you, Pita.’
‘It’s nice to meet you, Cactus Joah.’
2.
Great Scott had been Cactus Joah’s best friend since they found themselves sitting together in Grade 9 Science, approximately too many years ago. It was then that they discovered their shared enthusiasm for the underground comic book Sometimes, the fourth issue of which Cactus pulled out during an animated video presentation of fudgsicles melting; depicted on the cover was a confusing red silhouette of three people holding each other, the type of cheesy image that tended to prevent people from picking the book up. The duo could thank Great Scott for sealing their fates with a single whispered line: ‘Which one is that?’ They then proceeded to compare themselves to the book’s characters and discussed the characters’ increasingly complex relationships while cartoon molecules danced on a glowing white canvas in front of them.
From that point on they spent all of their free time together, planning numerous projects that always fell through like starting their own band, writing their own comic and moving into the same apartment. Instead they would bully defenceless first years from a nearby Catholic school into giving them their monies on a random day once per week (though they never actually hit the little guys); spend nights running through the city, pushing through dense throngs of people and grinning at their angry shouts as they kept running, the lights coalescing into a single blur around them; and sometimes write poetry onto concrete slabs in broad daylight.
Cactus Joah had never been one to fall in with the wrong crowd, but there was something so completely ad hoc about Great Scott that Joah could not help but join in on his iconoclastic endeavours; thankfully these were only ever after-school activities, so nobody at Herbert Benson Beal ever suspected them of anything. The world was a lot smaller back then, more easily manageable. Great Scott always knew exactly what he was doing.
When Joah fell behind in his classes, marks and Grades due to severe lack of attendance, Great Scott treaded a path of academic prosperity. Although they were of the same age, Cactus Joah was still technically in high school whilst Great Scott was an Asian dream song currently in his second year at the University of Western Ontario. This was why Cactus Joah referred to his best friend as Great Scott, despite Great Scott having only ever accomplished what was expected of him as a bourgeois citizen.
Although they still considered themselves best friends, they rarely got together in more recent years: Great Scott had quickly given up his esoteric life of faux crime to focus entirely on university, while Cactus Joah mostly slept all day and worked on an unmarketable short story zine called Ziterary Magaline at night. He had written the script for a comic about dropping out of high school before actually dropping out; it had ended very badly on multiple levels.
Cactus knew that he would contact Great Scott whenever he eventually decided to head home from the sanctuary of the forest. His best friend would be the first to know of his ultimate failure, at which point they would become yin and yang; face would behold face; and so on and so forth. There was a fear that it would mean the end of their friendship.
However, when Cactus Joah finally did shuffle on home, he discovered that his house was missing: there was naught but an empty plot of land meekly cowering in the shadows between the towering houses of his former neighbours. He was not particularly impressed. He investigated the wildly growing grass for letters of explanation or farewell from his family but found nothing but stray snails and a dead cardinal. Apparently word had already gotten around that Cactus Joah had given up on his education, and so his family had given up on him, going off to wherever in a huff and taking the house with them. So much for the consolation prize of familial embraces. Perhaps they had traded him in for another dog.
‘At least be humane,’ he said to the deserted lawn.
He headed to the pay-phone beside the nearby Very Convenience Variety Mart. His hands dove into his pockets but almost immediately came up for air once Cactus remembered that his front pockets were a Bermuda Triangle for change, watches and generally anything that he put into them. Already he had lost his favourite watch which he had had since the eighth grade; the toonie, loonie, three quarters and two pennies which he had stashed away in the front right pocket were probably changing hands with the animal spirits back in the forest right now. Now the only thing on his person was the wallet in his back pocket, its only real worth being that it contained various cards proving his identity.
He checked the coin return slot for any abandoned nickels and dimes but found only an inky black substance. He looked around: nobody was around for him to meekly inherit their money. He sighed and gave the building a swift kick in frustration, the pain in his toes politely asking him not to kick it again.
A tiny glimmer of hope caught his eye when he scanned the ground for loose change: he found a burnt American quarter that seemed to be stuck to a piece of gum. Joah rejoiced. He hummed Amazing Grace while depositing the coin into the slot, picking up the greasy bone of the receiver while the machine satisfactorily digested his offering. He barely had enough time to dial Great Scott’s cell number before his best friend answered the phone.
‘I heard you quit, man. What happened? Are you going to find a job?’
‘Well, I quit.’ Beat. ‘How did you know it was me?’
‘What? Because you’re the one who called me. Sheesh. Come on, let’s meet up somewhere; my classes just ended.’
‘Sure, okay. Where do you want to go?’
‘Anywhere; just find a place and I’ll meet you there. Salaam.’
‘Yeah, salaam.’
And:
They ended up meeting outside the first apartment building that Cactus Joah had ever lived in; more specifically, they met in front of the side of the building that had the entirety of Paradise Lost etched into it. The meticulousness of the graffito was simply staggering and always served to inspire awe into the hearts of Joah and Great Scott. It had been the ultimate source of inspiration for their poetic acts of vandalism so many years ago. Now it seemed more like a foreboding monolith.
University had changed Great Scott more than either of them liked to let on, in terms of both appearance and personality. For example, instead of wearing a zippered sweater with a baseball cap, Great Scott now wore a white yakuza jacket and slicked his hair back. Basically, he went from looking perpetually relaxed to perpetually looking like he meant business; if you saw him flipping through CDs in a record shop, you would think that he was in the act of doing the most important thing in the world. You would almost be afraid of him. Most people invariably were. It was impressive how he could do this without even trying.
In terms of personality he had quite simply become a lot more confident than he was as a young teenager, but then again you could say that about a lot of people; Cactus Joah probably just noticed it more because he had become increasingly shy in contrast.
They talked about a lot of things in front of Paradise Lost – weaving through and around the matter of school – and then Great Scott changed the subjects. Only he changed them to something odd.
‘I have something to admit to you, Cactus,’ he began, and there was that mutual beating of hearts that occurs when something embarrassing is about to take place. He flatly continued, flattening the world: ‘I thought you were a girl when I first met you. I flirted/came on to you. I told everyone that you were my girlfriend in our first year.’
A few of the verses fluttered closer so that they could hear more clearly. Cactus tried waving them away, but they were like moths to a flame. He gave what Great Scott said a moment to sink in. Then he gave it another moment. He continued feeding it moments until it was about to explode into pink and white dust.
‘Well, oh,’ he said. ‘That’s not something you should tell another dude.’
Great Scott shrugged his impressive shoulders. ‘Once I found out that you were a guy I halted my advances – not to say that I find the concept of homosexuality disgusting. Your soft voice didn’t help matters. You know, I think some people from our high school still think you’re a girl.’
Cactus Joah closed his eyes and held his face. ‘My name is Cactus Joah,’ he said.
‘Has a kind of androgynous ring to it, don’t you think?’
Children squealed as they ran past them. Cactus thought about Sometimes and how it was no longer the origin of their friendship; the idea distanced him from his past as much as his stay in the Askunessippi had joined him with it. Now he was trapped in the deteriorating present with a future that seemed to be dimming by the minute.
‘Anyway, I was hoping that you would enjoy accompanying me as I collect on a debt for my employer. I imagine that there is a job opportunity in it for you if you find the work appealing.’ Great Scott lifted the aluminium bat that he had been holding onto all this time and rested it against his shoulder.
There was an unspoken agreement that it would beat working at the Forest City Surplus, which was where all of the hopeless and uneducated ended up; in fact, when you apply for welfare they ask if you have tried to get into Forest City first. Part of Cactus Joah thought that his friend might be joking about his nefarious activity but the rest of him knew that this was what Great Scott did on the side. It was frightening and inevitable.
‘I can’t believe you can do something like this but still be a great person because you’re a university student,’ said a very resigned Cactus Joah. He absently touched his back pocket to make sure that his wallet was still there, a compulsive habit that both of them were used to by now due to the untrustworthiness of their pants.
As Great Scott was walking away from the apartment building, Joah noticed that his best friend’s wallet bulge was coming from the back left pocket, the button on the right having fallen off; this familiar pants defect served to rekindle the flame of friendship in Cactus Joah’s heart, as silly as it sounds.
‘Well, I guess we’re off to see the wizard, then.’
‘The wonderful wizard,’ Great Scott agreed. ‘Piñata Wizard.’
Cactus Joah expected them to break into some dingy warehouse on a pearl harbour and set to torturing a carpeted man with layered accents. That seemed to be only fair, given the weight of the revelations.
But:
Great Scott said they should try a shortcut, an idea that Joah was fine with, and they ended up at Herbert Benson Beal. Cactus Joah would have said that he wanted to go home if only he knew of a home to go to.
The feeling the school gave them was that of stepping into an old photograph, eerie yet nostalgic. The face of the building could be considered one of the oldest constructions in Londontario and looked more important now than it did back when it was originally built; its guts had since been renovated countless times and now contained two indoor pools, two gymnasiums, two lower levels and several elevators. Reflecting the interior, the rear of the building had all of the modernity of a fast food play zone, with a massive glass pillar housing the school’s most heavily trafficked stairway.
The pair was heading towards the back of the building when an aging security guard took notice of Great Scott’s bat.
‘He’s not going to do anything,’ Great Scott assured. ‘Look at him, he already forgot about us.’
Indeed, the security guard had gone off to chastise a clique of students for smoking on school property; this gave the boys the perfect chance to sneak to the back of the school, where they found the caged field being used by a class of girls. Despite the gender switch, the sight reminded them of physical education days of long past; they remembered walking the track while everyone else either ran or jogged their laps, discussing Sometimes and what they would do when they got out of high school.
They gazed up at the building, their eyes following all of the black blobs moving up and down the stairs. Undoubtedly all of them were filling the required roles necessary to make the closed society of secondary school work: the toughs, the intellectuals, the outsiders, the insiders, the coquettes. Cactus Joah saw no reason to go back; even if he could find a reason, he was too old to go back now, anyway.
Great Scott started talking to no one at all:
‘Everybody in there is either studying to get a good job, to further their education or they’re slacking off and will end up working in a call centre for the rest of their lives. Really, that about sums it up. All of them will look back on their high school days with fond regret. You could say that that’s a unifier. Yes. Which ones will go to their high school reunion? None of them because we don’t have high school reunions anymore. The outsiders always dream of one day overcoming the toughs, but they’ll end up poor and pregnant while the toughs become corporate and rich and happy; the former will survive because they’re stupid and the latter will survive because they’re smart. When this is all over they’re never going to see each other again.’
Cactus Joah pulled his hand into a tight fist and then quickly loosened his fingers again, as tightening them had actually hurt a little. A ball bounced across the one-way street that divided the school and the caged field, rolling playfully between them; the pair looked to see where it had come from and saw a young girl in a gym uniform climbing over the fence that circled the field. She looked both ways before crossing the street and bounded towards them to retrieve her ball; the closer she came, the more Cactus Joah could see that it was Pita.
They exchanged awkward, nonverbal acknowledgments as Pita clutched the ball to her chest and shyly looked from Joah to Great Scott.
‘We’re here to play baseball.’
Pita gave a slight nod, her chin tapping the ball, and then she headed back to her class.
‘I think it’s time we got out of here,’ Great Scott said, laying a hand on Cactus Joah’s shoulder. ‘Come on, we have some business to take care of. Right?’
Cactus Joah turned his reddened eyes onto Great Scott and nodded. ‘Right,’ he said.
So:
Part Two