Alex Carrick’s Blog

David and Maria made sure to arrive home on a Tuesday evening before 6 p.m. after long hard days at work by both of them. They were a married couple in their mid 40s, with three children – William aged 20, Walter 10 and Wendy 5. Later that evening, they would be meeting with Maria’s younger sister, Lucy, and her acquaintance or boyfriend or common-law husband, Jerry. The exact nature of that relationship remained fuzzy. The occasion was Lucy’s birthday.

The following conversation was conducted between the master bedroom and the adjoining bathroom as David and Maria prepared themselves. Weeknights out were rare in their household.

DAVID: So how’d your day go, sweetheart?

MARIA: The usual. A mad rush. Worked too hard. Would have rather stayed home in bed.

DAVID: Did they say anything at day care when you picked up the kids?

MARIA: Yep. Apparently Walter came out with another one of his beauts. You know they went on a field trip to the art gallery. Our little treasure wanted to see John the Baptist’s head on a platter.

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Hostess Betty Bernard didn’t know what she was letting herself in for when she invited the television producer Mark Gatheral and the newspaper critic Gracie Phitts to the same soirée. Mr. Gatheral was a corpulent, but still handsome, man of 45. Ms. Phitts was an attractive dynamic go-getter in her early 30s. They could both be charming, but they were also career obsessed.

Betty was the socialite widow of an agri-business bio-engineering king. The bottom line, she was overburdened with money and loved inviting her friends and acquaintances to dinner parties. Her gatherings were always a mix of people at the top of their professions. Unfortunately, she didn’t always do background checks or keep up with the latest gossip. While she didn’t have a mean bone in her body, it sometimes transpired that her guest list turned into a virtual setup.

She held court on the 60th floor of a five-star hotel and condo complex just up from the city’s waterfront. One particular evening in early March, 10 well-attired individuals perused, fondled and roamed among the mahogany, chintz, Wedgewood and Limoges of Betty’s home.

The canapés and hors d’oeuvres were served and consumed in the living room as a prelude to the meal that was to come in the dining area. Mark and Gracie were able to keep their distance at first, by circling around opposite sides of the room. Once everyone was seated, however, and the two of them were facing each other across the table, the inevitable happened.

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Pug-nosed Pat and gum-chewing Chris, two long-time Irish cops, were back on the day shift after a month spent on the night rotation. Their patrol area ranged from the entertainment district in the east to the upscale shopping district downtown. Being a cop in these days was quite a different experience than it had been for their family forefathers on the force. The city-state had changed beyond recognition.

At the turn of the 22nd century, the world had changed considerably from what it had been 100 years before. War and most other manifestations of violence had been eliminated. Peace gained a stranglehold. Social media monitored and controlled all economic activity. Women held every managerial and leadership position.

The transformation began slowly in the early years of the preceding century, then exploded. The first big shift came with the founding of the FLYT Corporation. In the same way that the word NEWS is derived from North, East, West and South, FLYT is a combination of the first letters of Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter. FLYT Corp., in a brief period of time, took over all communication on earth – news, messaging, broadcasting and entertainment for starters, then inventory management, data processing and the full range of other business functions stored in the clouds. The resulting paradigm shift was unprecedented.

When FLYT took flight, women finally achieved their full potential. The ladies were far more adept than the men at welcoming and making use of the new tools at their disposal. The sisterhood, through a shared heritage of quilting clubs, book clubs, watching Oprah and The View, coffee klatches, spas, trips to the hairdresser and a willingness to seek advice was much more adept at social networking. Sure, men had their lodges and their drinking buddies, but these were technologically ancient.

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Liz Stuckey’s marriage to her husband, Brian, was not without its rewards. First, there was their daughter Abby who was a delightful child of eight and accounted for much of Liz’ appreciation of life. Then there was her comfortable existence in the suburbs, with a 3,000 square-foot home and a Lexus in the driveway. Of course, it was Brian who drove the Lexus, but the cachet still enveloped the whole family. Liz drove a serviceable but hardly glamorous Dodge Caravan.

Brian, however, was another matter. Most nights, he wasn’t home. He either stayed late at work or he was out with the boys, playing in a house-league game or hanging around a tavern watching one of Toronto’s numerous professional sports teams on TV. Both Liz and Abby felt some sense of betrayal and abandonment, but most of the time, they got by alright.

Liz had her own pre-occupations buried in her family history. There was a matter about which she felt a weighty sense of obligation. Perhaps there was more she could have done. Liz’ older brother Edward had turned into a troubled young man. Throughout his university years, his professors had marked him as brilliant. But he’d been overwhelmed by emotional problems.

Try as they might, the Smith family elders had never been able to rescue him from his demons. Bouts of rehab and mood-altering drugs all came up short. The upshot was that Edward disappeared into the legions of the homeless in the city’s core when Liz was only in her teens. She had been too young to do anything about it then and her sense of loss and impotence had never left her. There was no doubt in her mind that she still had a duty to perform.

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Herb Green was frustrated beyond containment. His toxic mood might not have been impossible to deal with except that he had newly acquired a truly foul vocabulary. He started swearing like Regan in The Exorcist. Furthermore, he lacked the originality to be entertaining in his gross verbiage. No, he was disgusting to listen to. His wife, Wanda, was really fed up with him. She had once dated a rapper and swore that she would never again breathe in that kind of atmosphere.

Under normal circumstances, Herb was a soft-spoken decent man. But these were not normal times. In fact, these were the most difficult economic times ever experienced by someone of Herb’s age. He knew about the Great Depression through what he’d learned in school. Even his father was a child in the Dirty 30s. Herb wasn’t equipped to handle the emotional roller coaster that saw him lose all of his money and go deeply into debt in the latest Great Recession.

Now he swore and cursed about his depleted finances all day long. He turned the air blue with his ranting. Wanda instituted a new rule in the house. Every time Herb cursed, he had to put a one-dollar IOU in a large glass jar. In quick order, Herb was in debt by another $1,000. This distressed and depressed him even further. That is, until he came up with a novel idea.

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It was medieval times in Merry Olde England and tales of knights and dragons, sorcery and witchcraft still held sway over the land. Superstition was rampant and those who could foretell the future were held in high esteem. Revered for being at the top of her profession was Madame Lazonga, a woman who had grown wealthy through necromancy on behalf of the common folk.

Madame Lazonga’s abilities came in visionary snatches from which she was able to deduce logical outcomes. In one such trance, she had even foreseen her own untimely end. She would meet a violent death at the hands of a vicious murderer. This made her more cautious in her everyday dealings. She became overly protective of her private life and turned miserly to a fault. She wouldn’t share her riches with anyone, not even her only child, her daughter Angelina.

Angelina, in the full bloom of youth, was a stunner. She had russet-coloured hair down past her shoulders, hazel-flecked sparkling green eyes and a curvaceous frame that brought many men to kneel at her altar. Unbeknownst to most, however, her sexiest feature was her brain. Also a secret to the world at large was the fact that Angelina had a lover among the nobility, Lord Flatley.

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Now that he was dead, Norman Watts was in possession of certain information that someone in the living world would have given an arm and a leg to discover. Forget Halloween or Dia de los Muertos or any of those other days of the year when the departed are supposed to be revered. They might have been more meaningful in earlier times, but circumstances had changed. Mechanization had come to the afterlife. With respect to sorting out the good from the bad and those to be rewarded from those to be punished, there was a new way of doing things. Everything now happened once per annum. That day was far more obvious from the back side of the curtain than from the front. 

There is a time of year when it becomes nigh on impossible not to think about relatives and friends now departed. It’s a time of great joy but also deep sadness. When the sense of loss can be overwhelming and memories of moments spent with grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, friends and loved ones can sweep one away in a flood of regret for shared occasions no longer accessible.

It’s a time of year when popular music playing everywhere features lyrics that squeeze the heart. The whole season is a setup to remembrances of sunny skies past and nostalgic warmth that can never be repeated. The anthem for this instance is Auld Lange Syne and life centres on thoughts of old acquaintances. In newspapers and on television, respects are paid to celebrities whose glow has been extinguished over the past year. Of course I’m speaking of New Year’s Eve.

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In early September, Leonard Smith covered over his family’s backyard pool and started swimming at the local health club. It wasn’t a fancy club, but it still required a membership fee. This restricted the number of people who had access to the property. Nevertheless, whenever Lenny tried to get a swim in, at lunch or after work, the other members drove him crazy.

The pool always seemed to be spilling over with either an aquasizer class or teenagers playing smurf football. Lenny liked to swim lengths. He saw himself as a power swimmer and fantasized about how he could have been in the Olympics. He did fancy head-over-heels turns that even he found impressive. The crowds weren’t working for him. He quickly learned that the thing to do was to go to the club first thing in the morning and have the pool to himself.

However, that meant getting up at 5:15 am to be there when the doors were unlocked at 6:00 am. He followed this schedule Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he was committed to driving his children to day care. All in all, it was a comfortable schedule.

By following this routine, Lenny could quickly change into his swimming suit, then dip into the pristine water. There was nary a ripple. It was perfection at its most sublime. The smell of the chlorine was intoxicating. The amniotic fluid accepted him into its heated embrace. He cut a perfect straight line up and down for his standard 50 lengths and he could not have been happier.

In early October, however, a significant fly appeared in Lenny’s ointment. Out of the blue, another individual started showing up at the same time as him, disturbing the purity of the moment. The newcomer was a quiet but still upsetting presence in the locker room. He created little waves in the water. He even liked to hum in the shower area. This was not acceptable.

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Gerry Westerfield was the kind of 25- to 30-year-old who disappeared into the background. He grew his mat-black hair long, cultivated a beard and was perpetually attired in denim. He’d studied computer science at Sir Wilfred Laurier University but hadn’t quite earned his degree. Just the same, there was no question that he was a savant when it came to computer languages and programming. It was just that attendance in class was never as interesting as time spent in the coffee shop with friends. He was also kind to old ladies, polite to strangers and a lover of music.

When presented with the opportunity of working on rock concerts at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, he jumped at the chance. No, he wasn’t a backup singer or dancer or anything like that. He was hired as a stage hand to fill the void created when one of his friends left “roadie” employment under orders from his new wife. There were a couple of ways in which Gerry was uniquely qualified for the job and they would play roles in re-shaping the rest of his life. For one thing, he was impervious to decibels of sound that would have stunned almost anyone else.

It was late in the year 2010. The Christmas season was upon the land. The cold was keeping more and more people indoors and cell phone and Internet traffic was multiplying in leaps and bounds, both to keep friends and family in touch with each other and to accomplish year-end business chores before the traditional break for the holiday season. However, in retrospect, most professional analysts place the blame for what happened next on school concerts.

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