laying a piece of deeply charred something or other directly onto Kim’s wife’s extended tongue, as if proffering a communion host. Our wives would come home, often after the sun had set, talking about things like “honouring the whole beast,” marrow smudges at the corners of their mouths.
It cannot be said we didn’t pull out all the stops. We still maintain that “Operation Aphrodisiac” was executed flawlessly. Patel made his Lapsang souchong-smoked duck breast with pomegranate sauce. Kim made dolmades using grape leaves from his own garden. Then there was Karlheinz’s oyster foam- filled agnolotti, Trevor’s quail stuffed with raisins and quinoa, and Stefan’s saffron risotto with truffle oil and mascarpone. Marcus’s silky black cod with Pernod mole sauce (70 percent pure, fair-trade cocoa) filled the role of dessert.
Kim even booked himself a spa treatment. (We’re still curious as to whether he went through with the rumoured “crack wax.”) At the time, we accepted this as further evidence that he was the bravest and most evolved of us all.
[Our notes are sketchy at this point. Accounts vary too widely to be coherent.]
It was shortly after what Patel christened our Failed Feast of the Satyricon that our wives started dressing differently. (“Their slut phase,” Trevor would later call it, reminding us how mutable this thing we call the “personality” really is.) At first we thought it was the dry heat, something none of us were used to. The day Kim’s wife headed out to a pre-trial discovery dressed like Britney Spears’s little sister, her Nunzia briefcase incongruous alongside the terry cloth short shorts and baby-T, we could no longer deny that some kind of deleterious mutation was taking place. For once we were glad we had only sons and no daughters.
We thought at the time that this was all to do with meat. Could too much unmediated animal protein cause a chemical disturbance in the frontal granular cortex, we asked Karlheinz, who simply shrugged. He was as lost by then as the rest of us, science no longer the bulwark against disorder that he had believed it to be. (Karlheinz had, by then, started attending Mass again.)
“I just don’t see why meat has to be the main event!” Kim Fischer detonated one day, seemingly apropos of nothing. We nodded fervently, as if at a Free Methodist revival meeting. Someone, most likely Stefan, added, “Amen, brother!”
No one was yet speaking in tongues.
Then Gido killed Karlheinz’s agoutis. That was the official story. The supposition, anyway. The hutches were open, the agoutis were gone. But,
We inspected the blood-smeared grass, stomachs contracting. We could smell murder. All day long the boys yelped in the ravine edging the backside of the cul-de-sac, something distinctly tribal in their ululations. The women, strangely, weren’t disturbed by the carnage. They didn’t even come by to check out the blood on the grass, which by the evening was thick with flies.
They told our children, “When animals kill each other we don’t call it murder.” Our lovely, brilliant, Darwinian wives.
We determined that the trapped smell, that wilful pong, was a result of a geo-architectural force, like the buffeting wind tunnel downtown created by the arched, open corridor to the Vancouver Public Library’s northeast entrance. Trevor was all for cutting down the Sitka spruce grove that towered over the cedars and silver birches along the ravine. Although a couple of us wavered, we finally came down adamantly against. Those trees were not even our property. “But it’s our stink, right?” Trevor maintained.
What we feared: Trevor, with his refined sense of smell, would go off his nut in the night and take a chainsaw to the trees.
The black-bear signs had been up for weeks. The dry summer caused sporadic wildfires farther up the North Shore Mountains, and no doubt berries were sparse. Whereas other kids learned to dial 911 at an early age, ours had committed to memory 604-990-BEAR. Lucy, as we were calling him by then, scoffed at the signs and the directive:
Helicopters juddered by overhead almost daily. A fugitive was suspected of hiding on Mount Seymour, although he was later found in a tool shed near Indian Arm. A woman tossed her child from the Capilano suspension bridge, but it miraculously survived. Two Japanese exchange students wandered off three-quarters of the way up the Grouse Grind arm in arm and disappeared into the trees.
We no longer communicated with our children except through a kind of sign language. They spoke in coded grunts and shrugs. Stefan’s twins talked to each other in clicks and clacks of the tongue, like the bushmen of the Kalahari. They drew on the garage walls with the charred ends of sticks and charcoal briquettes as if drawing on the insides of caves-of the things they imagined, or the things that had yet to happen, it wasn’t clear then. A small figure emerging from bushes on what looked like an enormous turtle. Men with sharp implements converging on a cowering beast. Tangles of foliage and fire. Rain.
Sightings of our neighbour became rare, his comings and goings much less of a show, perhaps achieved under the cover of darkness, the revving of the Harley less and less frequent, until the bike was permanently dry-docked. Gido had such a disappointed air about him that Karlheinz suggested taking him for a ride on Marcus’s Vespa so he could at least feel the wind in his ears.
Stefan swore he had seen Lucy’s arms swinging along, his knuckles skimming the ground, pelvis tipped backwards as he made his way through the dense overgrowth to his backyard after depositing his garbage container by the curb. (His front door obscured by a tangle of vines.) He was certainly moving more deliberately now whenever we did see him, and wasn’t as quick with the rejoinders as he had been. It was only after he stopped the clowning completely that we realized how much we had enjoyed viewing him as a harmless throwback. Patel, who is intermittently nocturnal and lives adjacent to him, claimed he had seen Lucy on his haunches, eating raw meat straight from the carcass of some small creature. This only made Karlheinz scoff. “Neanderthals cooked meat on hot stones.” We were touchy with each other by then.
Each of us had our own theories. Cro-Magnon!
But why even trouble with taxonomies? They are shifty, after all, and, as we’ve learned, in the end it’s all just words.
It was towards the third week of August that our wives started avoiding us altogether, disappearing into themselves as the sky fell. We tried following them, walking barefoot, careful on the tinder-dry pine needles underfoot, breathing through our mouths slowly and evenly. We knew this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, fire ants pouring from the peonies, keeping watch while our wives grunted among the vines. But they were always home by morning.
Right before the Labour Day weekend, one of the Japanese exchange students came up out of the ravine straddling the back of a giant tortoise. She looked dazed but otherwise unaffected, the tortoise heavy lidded and benign. (Stefan remarked that it looked a little like Sinatra in his later years.) It was Trevor who called 911. Only after the emergency vehicles and media people that converged on the cul-de-sac had gone did we realize that no one had thought to take a photograph. The ones in the newspapers and on SnapTweet, and the footage on the news and on YouTube, didn’t come close to capturing the other-worldliness of what we had witnessed. The aquarium issued a statement that a tortoise recently acquired for its upcoming Galapagos exhibit had indeed gone missing from its transport container. But we still wonder.
The boys had jostled for proximity to the tortoise, prodding it with sticks despite our entreaties. One of them (Marcus’s son?) even poked at the girl. By that point a kind of despair permeated our cul-de-sac. Only our sons seemed oblivious to the smell and the frequent volcanic eruptions that pockmarked our driveways with small craters. We had prided ourselves on raising children with a high emotional IQ, but these little creatures had become alien to us, and we could only watch them from an increasing distance as if from the reverse end of a telescope.
Our wives squatted on their haunches in front of backyard fires they’d built in pits lined with basaltic rock, looking at us with those eyes, waiting for us to do something. Hunt? Gather? Or something else, something beyond
