The Intoxication of Thought

By Brian Panhuyzen

"What did you do in the summer?" asked the Ant.
"I played and sang," groaned the Grasshopper.
Aesop's Fables, "The Grasshopper and the Ant"

Brady winces each time Helen uses the microwave oven. She is precise about it, knows the times well, fifty seconds to warm a coffee, a minute forty for hot chocolate, three twenty for a bowl of pasta. Brady thinks that she may be using it more often than usual, then retracts the thought guiltily. He is being oversensitive because of the contest. He and Henry are competing to achieve the lowest electric bill.

Helen reheats a coffee she doesn't want because it annoys Brady. She can see him from the corner of her eye, sees his vexed stare as she takes the coffee out of the oven and sniffs it, frowning.

Brady's head follows her around the kitchen. She sits down at the table, letting her eyes fall on the newspaper's front page. It's a local paper, full of gossip and outrage at events that would be trivial in the city. A convenience store is going to offer adult videos; the bridge is to be painted green. Brady stands paralyzed, trapped in an equilibrium of desires. He wants to avoid conflict with Helen; he wants to go back to the hockey game; he wants to win the contest. For a moment he can feel these forces distinctly, like wires, suspending him at the kitchen door. Then one force overcomes the others and he reels forward barking, Make a new one! Make a new one! The candles cast shadows on his unshaven face, deepen the craters of his eyes. He turns fast and stomps into the livingroom where he has been listening to the game on a tiny pocket radio. In the light of a single candle he clamps his eyes shut and escapes into the battery-powered hiss.

Helen boils the kettle, smiling. The steam rolls up, homemade clouds, fiery gold in the candlelight, and she inhales, feeling them glaze her dry throat. The wood stove is a desert sun, roasting the air so that it crackles when she moves. They should run the Bionaire. She pours water through the coffee basket, her face in the steam and fragrance, and is overwhelmed by a deep euphoria, like a helium balloon suddenly liberated.

This is Helen's ESP. She cannot predict the future but she can sense, over a great distance, one aspect of the present: she knows when someone dear to her is dying. The knowledge affects her as a contradiction, a period of intense euphoria, a wave of well-being and elation.

Three summers ago Brady's grandmother died. She was an ancient, thin-boned woman, and a great fan of science fiction. She had read nothing outside the genre in thirty years, and passed away the day she began reading The Grapes of Wrath.

Helen and Brady were at the cottage. Helen was sitting on the dock, legs dangling in the lake, the sun near zenith and Brady thirty metres out in the rowboat, gazing at the end of his fishing rod as if at a sophisticated machine that had ceased to function. A sense of exaltation filled her belly like warm liquor. She gasped at first, surprised at its intensity, then slipped into the water until her feet touched the sand and the surface was just beneath her nose. The aromatic water pressed against her, accepting her slow dance, limbs untangling like the tendrils of an aquatic plant.

That night the phone's ring cut through the evening murmur, silencing the cricket hidden in the magazine rack. Brady answered, and Helen could hear the frantic chipmunk chatter of his sister, broken by his chirped replies: Yep. Nope. Yep.

Last year Helen's brother died of a massive heart attack while performing a coronary bypass. Helen was on the highway, and when the ecstasy overcame her she had to pull onto the shoulder and rest her head on the steering wheel while trucks thundered past, shaking the car with their giant breath.

This clairvoyant rapture accompanied the death of her father an ocean away. After that another episode sent her to the obituaries, where she learned of the passing of a favourite professor. She finally experienced it directly as the veterinarian withdrew the needle and Lupo sighed beneath her palms.

Was it their spirits, suddenly liberated, passing through her, reassuring her?

Now, as she runs her hand through the kettle's steam, the feeling billows through her like a cloud, inflating her with euphoria. For several seconds she savours the drunkenness, this warm glow, while dread throbs in the background, until in a sudden fit of desperation she throws open the kitchen door and pitches herself into the snow.

It is thirty-one degrees below zero Celsius. Helen lies face down, cold stabbing at her skin but evaded by the delight in her gut. She rolls onto her back, the air stinging her face, and gazes up at the little cottage, the curve of a snowdrift as elegant as a swan's neck against the log wall. There is no wind, and fat snowflakes fall in slow motion through the rectangle of light cast by the open door. The air is silent, gagged by the cold.

Brady appears at the open door, draws back.

-Helen? he calls, then, Jesus! and hauls her limp body up the steps and into the livingroom. He coils her onto the sofa and rushes back to shut the kitchen door. Helen is panting, feeling the snow in her hair becoming pearls of water.

-What were you . . . I mean why did you . . . ? Brady was once very articulate.

Helen lies on her side and doesn't look up, knows that she looks possessed, staring unblinking at the coasters on the coffee table. The radio is hissing. It is in the kitchen where Brady dropped it. He strains to hear it, takes a step towards the kitchen door. Helen watches him. She notes his sense of duty wrestling with his desire to investigate the excitement, and decides to release him. -I think I'll go to bed, she whispers, then rises unsteadily and heads upstairs.

-You're okay? Helen, you're okay, right? I'll be up pretty soon. He follows her to the bottom of the stairs, watches her climb a few steps before retreating to the kitchen.

Helen lights the candle at the top of the stairs, tucks it beneath the glass shade. She moves to the bathroom, her shadow rippling across black-and-white photographs of Brady's family, 1922, 1936, 1943, a chronology of summer vacations and Christmas visits, of the cottage's changing facade, of the generations of his family that have vacationed here. The silence outside permeates the walls, mingles with the dry air. The wooden floors creak under he feet, muffled here and there by a throw rug.

She closes the bathroom door and splashes her face with hot water. Her skin stings and she wonders about frostbite.

The bedroom is cozy, antique wood, the brass bed arching like a fat loaf of bread beneath its down quilt. Helen undresses slowly and moves naked through the room, enjoying the view of her candlelit body in the mirror. The euphoric feeling is there but muted; she touches her belly and breasts, the mane of red hair, her bottom lip, then backs towards the bed, reaches behind her and clutches the white quilt with each hand, makes a little dance of pulling it back, continuing to face her reflection.

A tiny blade of cold air cuts across her shoulder and she recoils, pressing her skin there. The cottage shudders as a gust of wind flings off the frozen lake. Helen blows out the candle and buries herself in the quilt. There is a leak in the room, a split in the window frame through which the wind sometimes trespasses.

Lying in a fetal curl she listens for more wind, but it is gone; the cold has resumed its grip. Intoxication coils around her like a vapour, spreads her flat on the bed. She feels the texture of the linen pressing against her skin, on her shoulders and nipples and hips; she pushes her hands into her hair and squirms to feel the sheets' caress.

Sometime in the night Brady arrives, groggy and grumpy, and climbs under the covers, his feet like cold steel. Helen rolls out of bed and goes to the bathroom, finding the route through touch. It is utterly silent beyond the stream of urine and the toilet's flush. She goes downstairs to sit at the kitchen table. Her breathing is deep and even. She puts on trackpants and a sweater, climbs into her snowmobile suit, collects her helmet, and slips outside.

It is moonless and overcast, but snow blue-bright, the trees a jagged cage in every direction but one: on the east spreads the lake, an enormous plain of blue fenced in by pine. Helen brushes off the snowmobile's vinyl cover and peels it back, watches the flakes as they salt the black seat. She mounts the machine and glances once at the bedroom window before starting the engine. It is like a great voice, the man of the land clearing his throat, but she knows that Brady has been drinking beer and his sleep is as thick as the night. She twists the throttle and the machine lurches forward. A wedge of light cuts before her and as she accelerates onto the lake's white surface she imagines the sound as heard in the cottage, a burst fading rapidly into a distant drone, smothered by the falling snow.

The snowflakes are stars, illuminated by the halogen beam, the snowmobile a spacecraft carrying her away from this world. The throttle twists under her palm; she knows the danger of buckled ice and phantom ridges but cannot resist. The wind coils under her chin and bites through her scarf.

She must circle the island, now just an outcropping of rock and vegetation in an otherwise flat land, to get to the level area on its north side. A black crater in the snow, the rolling waves of snowmobile prints muted by the fresh fall, three rough logs, two metres long each, arranged around the meeting pit. Embers, still warm from the party, extinguish the falling flakes and burn a gaping wound in the snow. A little steam still rises in the headlamp.

Helen steps off the machine and shuts it down. The headlamp fades with the engine but the expected silence and darkness don't come. Helen, her senses vivified by the night, hears the whisper of falling snow and sees the gentle radiation glow of the landscape. She sits on one of the logs with her ankles crossed, as she sat here with the others just seven hours ago. . . .

***

Across the fire Gail and Beck, who have been married thirteen years, are separated by centimetres, by thoughts, as they stare into the flames. There is a telepathic link there, and Helen imagines it as a crisscross of light between them, shafts connecting their brains and bodies. Henry is there, talking as usual.

-The Red Delicious is the weakest apple of all. There are the Spartans, the Ida Reds, the McIntoshes. All much stronger, tastier. But marketing has made the Red Delicious a big seller. Red Delicious are red, yes, that's obvious from their appearance. Well, people think, "delicious" is also in their name, so they must be.

-But why make such a fuss? Brady asks, leaning forward, his breath an orange fog around his face. -If people want to buy Red Delicious, let 'em.

-Think of all the other apples that could be grown. The good ones. The Empires, Henry replies. -Think! He touches his temple with the mouth of the mickey, drinks.

Henry's rants irritate Helen. He tries to catch her eye during them; she looks away, sees the fire, her mitten, a snowflake. He wants to gauge her reaction but she gives him none. She has examined her expressions in the mirror, knows how each feels, has exquisite control over them. She gives him nothing.

He watches the flames and is inspired by a new topic. -Earth has always been saturated with background radiation, whether cosmic or domestic in nature. When the Earth was young everything exuded a lethal glow of radioactivity. This had to subside before life could evolve, before primordial organisms would hold together. That radiation has been dropping ever since, but it's important to note its positive effects. Ionizing radiation causes mutation, which is the cornerstone of evolution. Without it we would never have evolved.

-Creativity is like evolution. It is caused by mutation, by imperfections in the thought process. Neuroses of various kinds are the source of this mutation, whether they are generated by chemical or emotional imbalance. Why are so many artists crazy? Van Gogh and Mozart? It's the background radiation. What makes them nuts makes them creative. The artist's brain is like a young Earth, gamma rays saturating its surface, bringing new organisms into being. . . .

This theory excites Helen, reminds her of the kinds of things Brady used to say, the way he once was: cerebral, contemplative.

Now she looks at Henry, but he has his head tilted back, the mouth of the bottle at his chin, and is studying the waves and contours of the overcast sky. Brady is usually silent after these diatribes. Helen wonders, wants to ask him if he still has such thoughts, but she knows his answer to such things. A snicker, then, Why? Do you? Always turning it back to her. He hasn't answered a question in years.

-Has either of yous guys looked at your hydro meters lately? Beck asks. -I got some cash riding on you, Henry.

-Mmm. I haven't looked yet.

-Brady checks every hour, Helen reports. -He would drag a deck chair up to it and sit there with a beer if it were warmer.

-I'd never let Beck play along. I love my electric blanket, Gail says. -Well, Brady gets mad if I get a bright idea! Helen cries. Everyone laughs, including Brady. It reminds Helen of the trio of them at university: Henry the Geographer, Brady the Anthropologist, Helen the Psychologist. None pursued their interest after graduation. Brady became a schoolteacher. Helen took a job as a veterinarian's assistant. Helen and Brady married. Henry moved two hours north to the rickety cabin he still occupies.

On the ice there in the middle of a lake, with her friends packed into the warmth of snowsuits and Scotch, Helen stares into the fire's heart and tries to trace the path of her life. It was once a thread that banked around obstacles, bent and twisted where necessary, the lifeline of Theseus after slaying the Minotaur, the way to freedom. Now it is fragments, useless bits of string, unrelated instances split by tiny disasters, insignificant occurrences that conspire to ravage the path, leave it unnavigable.

She wonders why Brady changed, then considers the possibility that it wasn't him at all. She has always been self-critical to a fault. She knows this, has read about it in the psychology texts, has decided it is the best way to be.

Two years ago there was an opportunity to change paths. . . .

***

She was driving him to town. Late August, autumn a tiny kindling of fire in the tips of the trees. Henry was and always would be poor.

-This year I will have a warm winter, he said. -I'm going to seal every wall with plastic. Then I'm going to put up some fibreglass insulation. Then inside walls. If you yuppies ever give up on woodburning stoves I might be able to afford one myself. Instead of the exorbitant cost of electric heat. But first, the walls. It'll be a huge improvement.

-Over what?

-Over what I have now. I will be a warmer person.

-I thought you liked being cold.

-Being cold or feeling cold?

-Yes.

He was silent, watching the highway roll under the car. He twisted and sat sideways in his seat to face Helen and said, Do you remember in university, you used to insist that you never lie. Is that still true?

-Yes. I don't lie. Why should I?

-I have a theory. Now, don't roll your eyes. Just listen. Let the thought intoxicate you for once. There's this depth. The depth of lies.

-Look, Henry, you won't be able to impress me with any of your tall tales. I have worked with emotionally disturbed people, some who haven't told the truth in a decade. They lie about everything. Their name. Age. The time of day.

-Truth is the opposite of lies. Truth is what is. But think about what isn't. Your car is blue, but what isn't it? Red. Green. Brown. Purple. There is a dimension to lies. The truth is planar, a featureless two-dimensional landscape. But untruth. That is everywhere else. How can you limit yourself to such a tiny range of experience?

-So you're saying lies will enrich my life? Make me a better person?

-Better person. Why does everyone want to be a better person? It's not like the pay goes up. He pulled a tape from his breast pocket, slid it into the tape machine. -Voodoo drums, he said, adjusting the volume, sending the thundering rhythm through the car, beating away at the wind from the windows. -Turn here.

She signalled the left, still a kilometre from the exit to town. They entered the provincial park; she drove dangerously fast on the winding road cut between birch and aspen. At the park office she bought a day pass; it was midweek and the park was empty. She drove deep into the park, past the open sites, into one on a secluded roadway. When she pulled the car in she turned off the engine. The drums cut out briefly and her eyelids fluttered, the spell subsiding. His hand was on hers, turning the key backwards. The drums exploded again, then his hands were on her shoulders, she gripped his head, pulled his mouth towards hers, and they fell into a struggle to possess the other's body, the kiss and lick and bite of flesh, the flutter of sunlight on skin.

On the drive home he insisted on preserving the drums, flipped the tape. They reached his cabin; with its sinking roof and sad windows it looked as if it were melting in the afternoon sun. After a kiss, after a squeeze of her breast, the music was the last thing he took.

As she was heading back along the gravel road to her own cottage, left with a distant country music station bitten by static, a fox darted out from the foliage leaning in from the shoulder of the single-lane road. There was a thump and she stomped on the brake. She got out and stood, listening to the mumbling of the engine and the hiss of the wind through the tall trees, then walked around the vehicle, looked cautiously underneath, and finally tried to peer into the thick underbrush. Nothing. Satisfied that the noise had come from a bump on the rough road, she climbed back in the car and drove on, but couldn't help the nagging thought that the animal may have been mortally injured and crawled off to die somewhere in the forest.

By the time she returned to the cottage the guilt of her liaison had obscured the incident.

-Did Henry get his insulation? Brady asked.

-No, he forgot his wallet, she responded.

The world expanded and for a week it held new dimensions. In Brady's universe she was the sullen thinker, setting out each dawn in the canoe for a secluded bay across the lake. In her own she became the ecstatic lover who filled Henry's cabin with the creak of the door, the floorboards, the bed.

***

Motion startles her. Silhouettes of dogs scamper around her, maintaining a radius of curiosity. Long legs, thick coats, they trot past, turn, pass again. Wolves. Helen watches them, doesn't move. How many are there? She takes two swift steps, straddles the snowmobile, and guns the engine. The sound slams across the lake and the headlight casts a beam on a grey wolf that is standing directly in front of the machine. The wolf's eyes turn into the light and its retinas erupt in gold. Helen looks into the animal's eyes and they stare at each other for several seconds before the wolf swings a great jaw skyward and howls. The other wolves cease their pacing and join in. As a chorus of voices ignites the air Helen wrenches the throttle and swerves around the lead wolf, heading for home.

Suddenly they are all around her, seven or eight of them, running beside the snowmobile. They cut in front of her so she has to bank away. She thinks she will run one down if necessary, but cannot, continues to turn the machine as they race before her, until she is on a new bearing that will take her directly across the lake. Towards Henry's cabin. Once she is aligned, once she recognizes the hill on which his cabin hunches, the animals dissolve into the night.

The snowmobile bites its way up the slope towards the cottage, and as she pulls in beside Henry's own rusting machine and turns off the engine, the silence, undamaged by the scream of her journey, flows in like water. She can see slits of light between the cabin's cracks. He must be reading.

The creak of her snowsuit, her boots through the drifts. There is a telephone pole with a blue mercury lamp, white-blue like actinic snow. Her eyes follow the conduit from the pole to the side of the cabin. She veers away from the door, walks to where the power line and the cabin meet, at the hydro meter. The disk that spins to reflect power consumption is still. There must be candles or a hurricane lamp inside.

She stands before the frozen meter, knows that Henry has won the contest. Brady, unscrewing lightbulbs and shutting down the water heater at night, never stood a chance. Henry has turned off his electricity.

Helen knows that Henry would appreciate the two worlds that exist for her in this moment.

In the first he is alive.

A silence deeper than the air and snow, deeper than this night, seeps out through the cracks of his cabin.

Brian Panhuyzen is a writer of fiction and avant garde poetry. His book The Death of the Moon was published in the Spring of 1999 by Cormorant Books. He is currently applying a floor buffer to the first draft of his first novel. He also designs books and flies airplanes.

THIS WORK IS COPYRIGHT OF THE AUTHOR.