The man that Mendez is about to cut into has lungs filled with cinders. Like the bodies that surround him in the mountain, this man represents the speed bumps that caught fire at the walls of the suicide compound. In the weeks that the cult was preparing to die, a Native reservation that abutted its property was preparing to take back possession of the land. The Natives banged on drums up and down the wall. Some performed traditional rites and dances, while others sat to the side with dull cloths pulled over their faces and rifles bouncing against their knees to keep time. Within the walls the suicide cult kept postponing the moment they would die. They were offended by the Natives’ crazed defiance of a superficial life. Everyone wanted to die on his or her own land, but the suicide cult believed that they were the only people who understood this land. Its flatness. Its perfect lack of depth. The little pouches of dust and bone that did, in fact, exist beneath the compound floor were beastly fetishes of the world’s terrible love of things beneath the surface. Depth of feeling. Depth of belief. Depth of character. A place built beneath us to hide in. Hateful repositories.
The suicide cult kept putting off the day, until finally they snapped. Filling empty drums with fuel and twist-tying together sticks of dynamite one afternoon, they prepared to die. The same afternoon three groups from the reserve crawled through the hidden entrances of three sweat lodges near the southeast corner outside the compound. Then the explosion punched the sky with a single orange fist that drove upward into a furry black glove. The heat melted the plastic coat of the forest, and the rocks, once cool in their light green pyjamas, broke into blisters. Inside the twiggy domes, the speed bumps of worship, men and women poured cedar tea on glowing boulders that hissed in a pit at their feet. They continued the ritual, oblivious to the flames that were curling in from the roof as they systematically honoured everything in existence. Long before the invisible ash and tiny red pins destroyed them they managed to exceed their bodies enough to miss entirely the moment when they expired. It will be centuries before one of them taps another and says, “I can’t help but notice, but… I think… we have, apparently we’ve been dead for some time.” His companion will look across, in the manner of spirits, and reply, “Good Lord, you’re right. I’ve been so busy…”
When the island exploded Les Reardon was sitting on a tiny peninsula of flat stones. He had given himself over fully to the energy of his creeping delusions. He held his son carefully to his chest and smiled the smile that was, at last, important to him. Looking up into the sky or whatever it was, he said, “So that
Les felt the heat at his back before hearing the crack of the fireball. He tossed his son into the tiny waves of Lake Scugog. As he lay flat, dying of heat on the flat stones, Les saw a tiny form surface and lift his son’s head above the water.
These hands will take the baby who has been borne so hastily by an autobiography and drag him to the bottom of the lake, where he can live out a life that is now so very few pages away.
Mendez folds the flat, wet pillow of poisoned lung back into the man’s chest. He wipes his throat, smearing a juice of connective tissue and cinder across his Adam’s apple. He lifts the back wheels of the table over a bag of broken vertebrae that he’s been collecting and he steers the big man’s body down the path.
“Girls! Girls!”
The change room door is held open by the girl with long black hair. Mendez can see the other two inside, sitting on the smooth wooden benches that line the back wall. They are grinding half-smoked cigarettes out with the tips of their running shoes.
“I think this fellow is my limit for the day. I’m due for a cry now. I suggest you do the same, ladies.”
Mendez nods to the bent cigarettes on the floor and pulls his mouth down in a way that gently suggests that he isn’t quite accepting. As the door closes the girls jump to hide a pack of cigarettes and sweep the butts under the sheet. Mendez swings the door back open in the timing of all adults; without acknowledging the cover-up in progress he says, “I can give you young ladies a ride home if you’d like. It’s getting dark now. I’ll be outside.”
Mendez sits in his car, waiting for the girls. He watches a military vehicle being loaded with corpses in the teachers’ parking lot.
“My heavens, suspicious behaviour looks so pointless today. Go ahead,little army,hide your dirty deeds! You’ll hold the world together with your secrets, I’m sure.”
Mendez notices that the muddy bodies being put in the long van have all been shot in the head. He recognizes the body of a woman being swung like a sack. She is tossed high up into the back of the vehicle.
“That hits hard. Oh dear, why did they shoot poor Ellen Peterson?”
