I: Shit Hawk Island

The seagulls are back: a white, squabbling cacophony on the gravel spit just downriver from the pump house. Dexter Horace Berrywell, who hates his name and who has accompanied this planet on 38 and 47/365ths of its rotations so far, dating from April 4, 1963, has paused across from them, contemplating one of the petty oddities of this planet: What are the factors that render seagulls not only not beautiful, but contemptible?

Objectively considered, seagulls are not unaesthetic creatures. These ones are the short-billed, ball-headed kind; little round heads immaculately white, the wings a dusky grey, swept back, cantilevered in flight. Skimming low over the Yukon River, predating on a spring run of grayling probably, they could be mistaken for elegant. Even beautiful. But there is something about them that makes you contemn them. Well, two things: there are lots of them and they never shut up. Their numerousness makes them common. Their vociferousness makes them annoying.

Dexter Horace Berrywell, though he thinks such thoughts, is not a natural philosopher. He is just a fat white guy on holiday, ambulating to lose weight, and thinking the random, epiphenominal thoughts of a stroller. 38 years and 47 days old, he is situated on the northern rondure of Planet Earth, along the banks of the Yukon (or, alternately Lewes) River, approximately North 60:42.36; West 135:04.06. Or just south of that imaginary point by approximately two miles. Without a GPS, it is difficult to be more precise, and precision is pointless, anyway, when you are on holiday. It is Queen Victoria Day in the Royal Dominion of Canada, of which the Yukon is a moderately self-governing dependant territory. There are political fictions all over the place, here: The fiction that the British royal family governs a country about which it knows little and cares less; and the fiction that the federal government in Ottawa governs the Yukon, about which they know nothing and care not at all… Still, it adds up to a day off, so who’s arguing?

It’s a bright, blue May morning. The sun warms the portions of you it hits directly. The cool in the air chills the parts out of its immediate purview. The contrast is vaguely stimulating. It stimulates in him more thought.

Dexter Horace Berrywell works for the Yukon Territorial Government. He is a Systems Administrator for the Information Services Branch of the Department of Highways and Public Works. He is also 225 pounds, which is his problem, right now. He makes his living with his head and that has led to this lardy, unattractive ass. He’s headed for the footbridge that goes over a little bog on the Millennium Trail. This is a nice, new, asphalted walkway by the river, leading up to the town’s power dam.

Dexter Homer Berrywell, as a specimen of homo computens, is stereotypically stereotypical. He is, as someone said of him recently, a “man of many devices”, most of them portable.

To whit: A cheap, but capacious Cassio digital watch, which doubles as a calculator once you master manipulating its impossible little keys (you can do that with the stylus of a Palm Pilot), and which can be programmed to display current times in all twenty-four time zones. Dexter, being a programmer, has of course programmed it, but only so that it displays current local time (UTC –7:00, PST, DST) as well as UTC +10:00, no DST, which happens to be the current time in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Dexter wears this watch on his right wrist because, contrary to his name, he is left-handed. This incongruity has been the source of all the predictable jibes from his university-educated acquaintances (few) and friends (fewer).

Also to whit: In the left-hand pocket of his windbreaker, a Palm Pilot IIIc. Ancient at four years old, it has a full-colour display which turns into a grey, obmutescent slab in any conditions of natural lighting other than pitch night. It comes with a handy slot for mounting the eminently losable and expensive silver-and-black styli he is always losing. He has, in fact (though he does not know it, yet) lost yet another one; but that is no big deal, since he buys them in lots of five packages of four each at something like $12 a pack, which means that he still has three of them left ($9 worth) at home.

Further to whit: In the right-hand pocket of his windbreaker, a cell phone in a leather sheath with a belt clip on it. Dexter has learned to avoid using this belt clip because he developed the bad habit of wearing it over the left cheek of his fat ass, the rondure of which would dislodge it, over time, as he sat in the bar at the T&M. This became such a common event, and his cell phone so known to the barmaids, that they would phone him on it (for a joke—and it cost him money) to tell him to come on down and pick it up. This cell phone is also programmable and, therefore, programmed. He has programmed it with many business-related phone numbers he calls frequently, and other numbers (like those of his mother and sister) he never activates. Also, it has games on it he has never played.

Even further to whit: In his left-hand pants pocket, a set of home and office keys on a key chain with a plastic fob, which fob features a Rubik’s-Cube-style puzzle he has long given up trying to solve. And, in his right-hand pants pocket, an identical set of home and office keys, this one with a fob featuring a small and unreliable pocket compass from which he compulsively draws bearings. He has this device in hand at the moment, as he studies what he believes to be mew gulls on the gravel bar in the river and the clay cliffs of the Great Bend on the far side of that gravel and cacophony. He is apparently facing almost exactly (though inaccurately) southwest. Or southwest –10 degrees east, taking into account local magnetic declination.

Final to whit: Also in his left windbreaker pocket, eight sheets of printer paper, medium grade, folded folio, seven containing a chat transcript he printed out this morning and one bearing a printout of a JPG image, run out in black and white on his laser printer some days ago. These are in reserve for due consideration further upstream. Also a pack of cigarettes, half empty. In the emptied half of the pack he has wrapped a burnt-out cigarette he wanted to put into the black-lacquered, forward-canted waste bin by the bench, but it is apparently still locked up for the season, so Dexter (who despises litter and litterers) is carrying it with him until he can find a proper disposal site.

Extra-bonus to whit: A black, plastic, child-proofed butane lighter, which he is fumbling with in his left hand, trying to light the cigarette in his mouth. There is a push-and-click mechanism to this device which is child’s play, once you get the hang of it, but Dexter bought this at Riverside Grocery on his way here this morning and has yet to get the hang of it, because he is not deft. He had to buy it because it looks like he left his lighter in the bar again, last night. He had to light his smokes off the kitchen range this morning, and carefully, too, because he was still a little beer-groggy, having almost shut the place down again, drinking copiously and talking aimlessly with an ephemeral, altering concatenation of other boozy regulars.

Being drunk in the T&M is not an unusual event for Dexter, who has a drinking problem he has acknowledged, so far, only to himself. He goes there pretty much every day after work, and often closes the place on weekends. All that beer (and he drinks only beer) does not do much good for a congenital fatty like him, and he has resolved to cut back a bit—a lot—this month, now that he is on a diet and exercising and all that. Oh, and he is supposed to quit smoking come June.

The truth (if there is such a thing) is that Dexter, objectively considered, is a drunken, fat fuck. Objectively considered. Subjectively considered, he is a weight-challenged individual with a dependency problem. Biologically considered, he is just a maladapted but functional conflux of misassociated DNA; a victim of an historical circumstance called WWII, which blew the wheels off the Natural Selection wagon. His mother was a fatty and his father was a drunk. So he is doomed, in terms of Darwinian gene theory, to be the drunken fat fuck he is today; though this does not preclude the possibility that he may diet, drink less, and quit smoking.

Dexter still has a sister and a mother. Both numbers are programmed into his Nokia cell phone, though he never activates them. His sister, Louise, is 17 years his senior. His mother is now 76 and living in Closeleigh Manor, where old people go before they get so feeble they have to die. She does not get out much because she is still so fat and her old bones are so weak now. This is the result of calcium depletion, which comes with menopause and was not much understood when she entered that phase of biological depletion, because in those days nobody took women seriously and the doctors really did not give a shit.

It does not help Dexter’s ego that he was told, at an early age, that he was a “mistake” made at the end of a flailing and failing marriage, some ten years before the onset of menopause. She was 38—his age, now—when she birthed him. His dad was 55 or so and headed into some kind of post-midlife crisis, abandonment of family, and death from liver cancer eight years later. Dexter’s mother was, and remains, in accent at least, English: A War Bride from Dover, brought back, with some Nazi memorabilia, to Vancouver in 1945.

Dexter’s bad genes and, worse, his really lousy name, are a war crime committed by Adolf Hitler. His father fought Hitler by driving trucks in the Canadian army. Once, and for the only time, his convoy came under fire. This was just outside of Bremen. Killed in that fall of mortar fire were Ryan Berrywell’s drinking buddies and fellow truckers, Dexter [Somebody] and Homer [Somebody]—the latter, Dexter knows by chance, was 19 at the time and from Moose Jaw. So Dexter, as the only, and obviously the last, male spawn of this unholy and mistaken alliance which made everyone miserable, wears in legacy the names of these buddies and bon vivants long ago shredded by shrapnel and incinerated by bursting gas tanks. They were delivering Spam to the front ranks at the time. Dexter still eats Spam and eggs, some mornings, like Mom Used To Make. It is a vaguely nauseating comfort food for him, now disallowed by his new roots-and-berries diet. He gets recipes sent to him by e-mail, telling him how to make some inedible grass and weed dinner with olive oil dressing. He calls it “eating dirt”. One recipe called for something called “cilantro” and he had to do a web search to find out what the heck that was. It turned out to be a weed, kind of. And tasted like one, too.

“Jesus,” he’s thinking as the lighter erupts with a high blaze that almost scorches his nose, “And I’m supposed to lose weight and give up smoking all at the same time. I’m asking for an effing medical miracle.”

Dexter inspects the bench beside him. It is a wood and metal affair, the wooden slats bolted to the frame with strait nuts and bolts. Dexter is not sure that is such a good idea. Anyone with a pocket wrench could knock down the structure and make off with the wood. The frame is made of what looks to be aluminum, lacquered black, but calling itself, in an inscription that goes down the right side with its pseudo-faux-Victorian cornices, “Blue Imp”. The seat itself is made of what looks to Dexter (who knows little about carpentry) to be slats of yellow spruce. Or blonde spruce. Whatever they call it. This one has been assailed by graffiti artists. It may be vandalism, but graffiti has always had a special fascination for Dexter. The kind of graffiti where the letters that are not quite identifiable as letters cluster together into words that are not quite identifiable as words. Almost a kind of encryption. An unreadable plain text unreadable in plain sight. But one of the not-so-gifted has resorted to bald obscenity. Using one slat each on the seat of the bench, he has written S-H-I-T. A plain text that means nothing at all.

Dexter ponders space and time. South 27.30, East 153.00. That’s Brisbane, Australia. He is, allowing for inevitable and irrelevant human error, North 60:41 North, West 135:08. Whitehorse, Yukon. About 40 miles or so off the coast of Brisbane is a place called Moreton Island, where you can pet wild dolphins. He has checked on the web and the distance between Whitehorse and Brisbane, “as the crow flies”, is 11,716 kilometers on a heading of West Southwest 241.2 degrees. That is a little more than 25% of the circumference of the earth which, from pole to pole, is about 40,000 kilometers (a little more at the equator, because old Mother Earth has a bit of an ass on her). And of course, you can’t get there that way; you have to fly Whitehorse-Vancouver-Honolulu-Brisbane, so you add a lot of extra air miles that way. So it’s not half a world away, but it is still a long way from here to the dolphins. But petting dolphins would be a very cool thing to do.

All this thinking about distant distances has made Dexter curious about distances more proximate: How far is it from the middle of this bench to the start of the bridge? At a glance, he would say fifty meters or so. But he also knows he is a terrible judge of horizontal distances. And, like many Canadians, he is metrically challenged. He thinks in a hybrid mish-mash of feet and meters. He is a product of his generation, of two systems of measurement coexisting. In Australia, it is simpler. They are what is called “Imperial”. Feet and inches. In Canada they are what is called “fucked up”. Imperial and metric. This has something to do with history. He has read about it.

Dexter knows his own height, and the height of others, in feet and inches. He is, for instance, 5’10”. He has no idea what that is in centimeters. People are in feet, distances in meters. So he decides he will pace it. He finds the approximate centre of the concrete slab under this bench, Blue Imp II. He draws a mental line to the middle of the horizontal centre of the wooden footbridge. The paved path makes a bend going there, but he wants the shortest distance between two points, because that is how you measure distance. He begins to pace.

Shit. He forgot. He paces in feet. He knows a good, normal stride for him is 2.5 feet. It would be longer if he were not fat and out of shape, and could take longer steps. But that is irrelevant, here. You work with what you have, and if you have a lard ass and a short step, you can still measure things. He looks behind him, first, to see if anyone is coming up the path. There is no one. He will not look stupid to people he does not know. So he starts to pace. In an approximate straight line, from the approximate centre of the proximate Blue Imp, to the approximate centre of the approximate y-axis of the blonde spruce footbridge, he counts 57 steps.

Crap. He was hoping for an even number. So 57×2.5=… Okay, hard math. Algorithm. 60×2.5=150. Now you take away 3×2.5 =7.5 feet. (Because there are three extra paces, right? Right.) So now you have 142.5 feet. Right.

He gets distracted, for a minute, by the pattern of light and shadow on the footbridge. The sun, at this hour, strikes low through the just-budding willows, poplars and buck brush (this a boggy part, that is why the bridge), and casts a pattern of luminescent gold squares on the blonde spruce footboard, intersected by soft gray lines of shade. It brings to mind an ethereal tartan, like those Scots guys have. The Clan MacCrocosmic, from Lough Ethereal. Or maybe one of those paintings from the French guy. Mondarin or somebody. It’s just pattern and light, and chance. Painters would paint it. Physicists would write out the math to explain how it happens, right now, at this moment, in the Larger Scheme of Things. But it’s pretty.

Right, so 142.5 feet, from mid-point of bench to mid-point of bridge. Now, what is the conversion of feet to meters? Crap. He forgets. Three point zero something… He has it in that “FastFacts” program on his Palm Top, and could look it up if it would work under these (or any other) light conditions. Hopeless of success, he produces the device and flips up the plastic protective screen. It is gray, uninformative, obmutescent. He turns his body more or less westerly, hoping to throw his body’s shadow against this darkness. He also notices that he has lost his stylus again. He sighs and thinks the Eff Word, just before he jumps.

Fat men do not jump well; but they do, a little, if you go “whoosh” by their fat asses at high speed, like this cyclist just did. Dexter hates cyclists. They do that. He has been distracted by Math and Beauty and did not hear this coming. He turns to see some guy on a mountain bike, all lean-body and spandex, with a bright yellow crash helmet, riding briskly over the footbridge and making a rumbling sound. He has gone around the turn before Dexter can properly fix his look of contempt on him, the effing Body Nazi.

So, call it 143 feet (close enough). So feet to meters is… He has it! He remembers! He spent two seasons as a highway surveyor when he was a university student uselessly studying geography. Yes, it is 3.281. Dexter (because he has no stylus) fishes one set of keys out of his pocket. The one with the plastic puzzle on the key chain. He takes the mail key and punches on the impossibly small numbers on his Cassio watch. So 143 feet (he hits the keys carefully, because they are very small and you can eff up) divided by 3.281 equals… 43.58 and a bunch of irrelevant numbers meters. Dexter makes a mental frowny face: Wrong by more than ten percent. He despairs of ever taking the proper measure of things. Without adequate instrumentation.

II: Not-Wandering Rocks

Having, as they say in government, crossed a bridge when he came to it, Dexter now charts course for the power dam. Not that there is much of a course to chart. Over the past six days, since he introduced this walk into his daily schedule to help him lose weight, he has always taken the same path. Only once before as far as the dam, though. That takes longer, and on workdays he does not have the time. But on all days he holds, whenever possible, to the riverside walk. The paved path weaves and bends, usually more inland. The old paths of unreconstructed dirt are more solitary and scenic, and more littoral, too.

On the south side of the bridge, Dexter sees a stand of youngish poplar to his right, some of them just coming into bud, and the city pumphouse compound to his left: a chain-link fence engirding a motley cluster of stumpy little buildings, all Regulation Industrial Ugly: cinderblocks, aluminum siding, decaying plaster. Normally, at this point, he holds to the pavement path, past the rock piles ahead. But this morning he notices a dirt path passing before those young poplars. Today, he decides, he is to be as littoral as possible, so he will deviate from his normal course and take this pathway. Then back to the normal way of things. What was it that one guy said? That old American Naturalist guy, John Burroughs? “If you want to see something new, take the path you walked yesterday”? Something like that. True enough, but sometimes you need a little “fresh fields and pastures new.” That’s a quote from somebody, too. He will ask, later this afternoon.

So he strikes to the right, along the dirt path. Something he sees there jogs an old memory in him: an orange metal post with a small metal plate atop it. That’s a Canadian Geodetic Survey monument! More stuff from the old days. He knows these things. He is even a little excited. See? You deviate even a little from the norm and you see new stuff.

The post is up close against a sapling poplar, also in bud now. That is probably why he did not notice it before, as he passed it on the asphalt path. And, sure enough, the plate reads “Survey Monument, Do Not Destroy”. There is a little hollow at its foot, filled in by leaves and loose dirt. Dexter brushes away this detritus and the brass cap is just visible, covered in a film of more compacted earth. He can see the X in the middle, where you set up your transit with your fish-eye lens. He needs a digging tool. The Rubik’s Cube key chain comes back into service. He uses the front door key, this time scratching, sweeping debris, scratching again, till he sees the cap more cleanly. It is a little scarred and beaten, but he can read it pretty well: 63G11[7?]. The last digit is scarred over. It could be a seven or a one with a scar on top. He’s betting he can find a site online where all these monuments are recorded, by number and location. That will give you the exact northings and eastings and elevation of this cap. Right down to the millimeter. Those Geodetic surveyors don’t screw around. On the highway surveys, they had a saying, “We ain’t building the fucking Taj Mahal, here.” Well, these guys were. These guys had to be very, very good.

He wants to write this identifier down, so he can look it up when he gets home. But all he has is that Palm Pilot and this key chain. And he can’t read the Palm Pilot’s screen in this light. He improvises. He fishes out the Palm Pilot and flips up the plastic shield again. He positions himself, kneeling, as best he can to throw his body’s shadow over the screen. There is a button he can push for “Notepad”. He pushes it. He strains to see the “new” button, hits its approximate area with his mail key, and sees what appears to be a blank page. He is so habituated to the Palm Pilot and its specialized angular script that he sometimes slips into it when he actually is writing on paper. So he scratches in the two numbers on the right side of the entry pad, the letter on the left, the other numbers (making it a seven, because he thinks that is what it is) on the right again. He can’t see his handiwork when he’s done, but he takes it on faith it will be close enough, at least for a mnemonic, when he gets home.

He stands up, brushing off the knees of his exercise pants and contemplating immortality. The first two digits, 63, are the year in which this monument was placed and measured. Forty years ago. Two years longer than he has been on Planet Earth. It was placed here in the spring, summer or fall of that year, because the geodetic guys don’t work up here in the winters. The tolerances you need for a survey that accurate don’t allow for much inclement weather. Especially not in the old days. All kinds of chainage corrections for temperature, all that kind of stuff. Those geodetic guys are Masters of the Art. And to be a good one, back before computers and Electronic Distance Measurement, you had to be one ace guy. Dexter was never more than a duffer. A “tail chainman”. Just the lump of weight at the dumb end of the chain, while the smart guys did all the real thinking and working. He didn’t last long enough to get better. He left Simon Fraser after two years in the geography program because he had landed a job at a local computer store—the job that changed his life and lead him into the hollow, empty existence he enjoys today.

But those little plates seem to work. He should have one on his chest, too: “Monument to Human Stupidity, Do Not Destroy”. Maybe Father Time would leave him alone. For a while, anyway.

The new path leads him, like the old one did, to the rocks. These are three heaps of boulders piled into the river to generate a little white water in the portals between them. The rocks are granite, so they must have been trucked in, at some effort and expense, from somewhere else; because the rock in this area, all the way up to Miles Canyon, is pretty much basaltic. And the middle pile has a kind of cap-stone on it: a flat-topped rock broader at the top than at the base. And on it, this morning, a bigger gull, probably a herring gull, like a sentinel on a castle wall. These rocks apparently demark a boundary of some kind: the little mew gulls are all downstream, about a hundred meters, on Shit Hawk Island; the larger turf, all the way upstream to the dam, is the demesne of the more powerful herring gulls. He sees how the mew gulls, arcing overhead, turn back at the rock wall, cheating at the boundary but never crossing it.

When he came here last summer with Louise and his mom, kayakers were disporting themselves in the white water, practicing barrel rolls or whatever they are called. But the water is too low now to generate much turbulence, and maybe it is too early—in the day and in the year—to be of interest to kayakers, anyway.

He keeps looking at the guardian gull on the top rock. He thinks of the advertisement he saw in Friday’s paper: an employment opportunity with the Government of Yukon for a database administrator, starting pay scale ST17. Man, that bugged him. Bugged him all weekend. He groused about it at the T&M last night. An ST17 to start with! And he, Dexter Homer Berrywell, with fifteen years in the government, with a diploma in programming from the college, with the responsibility for the firewalls that stand between nerdy, nit-picky DBA’s and the pustulant, pimply, purposely predatory world of the kitty-hackers—he rates an ST16. He has root/admin privs on every machine in the government network; he is, with a few keystrokes, God in the Machine in every effing one of them; and he rates lower than the meanest newbie DBA nerd. And nobody understands or appreciates what he does. They think he’s just a pain in the ass. They want a hole here, a hole there, for that legacy application, for that program they wrote the sloppy code for—hole after hole in the wall, all “special exceptions”. So you end up with a bunch of burbling little holes-in-the-wall, with just enough white water to recreate the kitty-hackers. Why build a wall at all if you are going to make it entirely out of unlocked doors?

Screw it, he’s on holiday. And he has passed up promotion possibilities, he admits it. Because he does not like all the paperwork crap and the pointless meetings, what he and the guys call “cluster fucks”. Dexter has never really wanted power. His dad was a powerful man and a drunk, and an abandoner, and an asshole. Dexter has no memories of physical abuse, but he does remember nights when his dad was home from the highway (he drove a truck for years for the White Pass and Yukon Route), and his mother would take Dexter to the back bedroom to read with him, or play “fish” with him, while Ryan Berrywell got slowly and truculently loaded in the living room watching any old thing on the television and yelling, at intervals, for his wife to come out and get him something. Life actually got better when the old man disappeared, when Dexter was about eight. Well for him, anyway. Louise had to step in and help out a lot, in those days, because his mom could really do nothing but take in children for babysitting. She had never had a job since she came to Canada.

There are several large, squared blocks of granite along the shore, here, too, laid out for people to sit and sun on as they watch the waters play. Last year, he and Louise lifted their mom up onto one of them for a rest, because her old legs were weary and her depleted old bones were hurting. Truth was, Dexter was about ten pounds heavier back then, too, and he also needed a rest. So they sat here, watching the kayakers in their bright helmets and wet suits rolling over and over in the water, shooting the current, getting their chops down. This time, he notices, he is not so tired. He’s turning into a rugged customer. He can now walk hundreds of meters without getting all sweaty and puffed out. When he takes it easy, and when the air is nice and cool.

There is another fork in the trail: The asphalt pathway taking an in-land S-turn, a narrow dirt path with an eroded bank skirting the riverbank. True to his convictions, Dexter takes the bend to the right, to the littoral path, seeking out brave new worlds, strange new civilizations. Whatever. What he arrives at, after a short distance, is a steep little slope down onto river gravel. There is a kind of bay here, eroded by a small stream up ahead. The water is so low that the bed of loose, round rock is exposed and the stream itself is not yet flowing. There is a litter of larger basaltic boulders ahead, too; and, beyond them, a rise again, and a little clearing behind a pair of trees. The one on the left is a bifurcated poplar, the lower, smaller branch just starting to bud, the upper, larger branch still bare. The one on the right is a grumpy-looking spruce of undistinguished appearance. Since it is to the right, relative to his current position, he calls it Dexter. The poplar, which, when he saw it last summer was in full greenery, he calls Jess.

III: Love’s Grotto

Dexter is starting to think, as he reads over the printout of the chat session with Jess last night, that these things should all begin with some variant of the Miranda warning: “Anything you say may be printed out and ultimately held against you.”

05/15/2003 10:07 p.m. DingoGirl61 So you are off tomorrow?

05/15/2003 10:07 p.m SinisterPenguin Yeah. Queen Victoria’s Day.

05/15/2003 10:08 p.m DingoGirl61 The Queen’s Birthday? That’s June 20 down here. You will keep up with the walks, though?

05/15/2003 10:09 p.m SinisterPenguin: That’s weird. How can she have two birthdays? One of them must be wrong. I wonder which one.

05/15/2003 10:09 p.m SinisterPenguin Unless they are different birthdays for different queens. But that’s not likely. Yours is for Queen Victoria too, right?

05/15/2003 10:10 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ). Lumpkin…Does it really matter?

05/15/2003 10:12 p.m SinisterPenguin Running a quick search here, on Google. queen victoria biography birthday.

05/15/2003 10:13 DingoGirl61 Okay, go ahead. :- (  I will just sit here. To thy high requiem become an S.O.B. :- (

05/15/2003 10:14 p.m SinisterPenguin Say what?

05/15/2003 10:14 p.m DingoGirl61 Keats, you ninny. :- ( You said you took English 100. They didn’t teach you ‘Ode to a Nightingale?’

05/15/2003 10:16 p.m SinisterPenguin Yes, actually they did. I get it now. And you are playing around again. S.O.B. for sod.

05/15/2003 10:16 p.m SinisterPenguin Very clever, you. :- ( You make me feel like an illiterate sometimes, know that?

05/15/2003 10:19 p.m SinisterPenguin May 24

05/15/2003 10:18 p.m DingoGirl61 Queen Victoria’s birthday? And you are not an illiterate. You are surprisingly well-read for a computer nerd, Lumpkin. :- ) That is one of the first things I liked about you: Good manners and good English.

05/15/2003 10:19 p.m SinisterPenguin Yep, may 24 1819. She kicked off in 1901. Doesn’t say what day, here. And thank you. You are pretty cute, yourself.

05/15/2003 10:20 p.m DingoGirl61 Why, thank you ever so. * k *

05/15/2003 10:20 p.m SinisterPenguin *k *

[Dexter still feels funny about that *k * business. Jess started that about a month ago. He knows what the guys would say, if they ever saw that. He’d get a Royal-ass-point-and-laughing-at. But he kind of likes it, too. He is practicing to become more spontaneous at it.]

05/15/2003 10:21 p.m DingoGirlf61 *k * Speaking of that, I don’t think I will be able to see you much around then. June 20, I mean. Rodney will be home for the long weekend.

05/15/2003 10:22 p.m SinisterPenguin How’s Rod? I think I still have that old poetry anthology. In a box in the basement.

05/15/2003 10:25 p.m DingoGirl61 Do you keep your whole life in a box, you? :- ) You are always on about something you have in a box! And Rodney’s a bit of a worry, these days. I called him last weekend, and he sounded a little drunk. I think he is drinking a lot. I think he is having some troubles with that girl he has been seeing.

05/15/2003 10:27 4 p.m SinisterPenguin Woman trouble? :- ) I know all about it! And I move a lot, that’s why all the boxes.

05/15/2003 10:30 p.m DingoGirl61 He doesn’t tell me much. He is very much an Aussie male, you know. He doesn’t say much about his feelings or worries.:- ) But a mother knows. :- ( I do worry about his drinking.

05/15/2003 10:31 p.m Sinister Penguin “The obmustescent male”. Not like us Canadian guys. We are just emotional active volcanoes, us.

05/15/2003 10:32 DingoGirl61 But you aren’t moving anymore, correct? You’ve invested in that house, now…

05/15/2003 10:34 p.m SinisterPenguin You know that “obmutescent” word doesn’t exist in any online dictionary I’ve checked? You sure you didn’t make it up?

05/15/2003 10:35 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ) That really disturbed you, didn’t it, Lumpkin, when I called you that?

05/15/2003 10:36 p.m SinisterPenguin Well, I didn’t even know what it meant. I felt illiterate again. And, no, I’m not planning on any future moves.

05/15/2003 10:37 p.m DingoGirl61 And I do believe I am beating the “obmutescentness” out of you. :- )

05/15/2003 10:39 p.m SinisterPenguin Beating something out of me, anyway. :- )

05/15/2003 10:39 p.m SinisterPenguin And, yeah, I’m going to keep up the walks. I’ll go tomorrow morning, early.

05/15/2003 10 40 p.m DingoGirl61 Go all the way. Not just ‘Our Cove,’ this time. All the way. *k * Promise? :- )

05/15/2003 10:41 p.m SinisterPenguin Okay. I’ll have the time to do that. It gets too tight for time on workdays.

05/15/2003 10:43 p.m DingoGirl61 I’m thinking about that picture you sent me of ‘Our Cove.’ It looks like a little grotto, really, a little Love Grotto.

05/15/2003 10:44 p.m SinisterPenguin Where the nymphs do play? :- P

05/15/2003 10:45 p.m DingoGirl61 ‘Where nymphs desport in garland array.’

05/15/2003 10:45 p.m DingoGirl61 And that’s nymphs, not nymphos, you randy little devil. You had better know the distinction, Mate! :- )

05/15/2003 10:46 p.m SinisterPenguin Is that a quote, too? The garland array stuff?

05/15/2003 10:47 p.m DingoGirl61 No, I just made that up.

05/15/2003 10:48 p.m SinisterPenguin It sucks. :- )

05/15/2003 10:48 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ( I am hurt.

05/15/2003 10:49 p.m SinisterPenguin *k *

05/15/2003 10:49 p.m SinisterPenguin Bare with me. I’m still trying to get the hang of this cute thing.

05/15/2003 10:50 p.m DingoGirl61 BEAR with me…That’s BEAR with me. :- )

05/15/2003 10:51 p.m SinisterPenguin I stand corrected. BARE with me, I am an illiterate. So you stand corrected, too.

05/15/2003 10:52 p.m DingoGirl61 Oh, so you’re going to be the Clever One now… :- )

05/15/2003 10:53 p.m SinisterPenguin Is clever cute?

05/15/2003 10:54 p.m DingoGirl61 Yes, it is. And maybe that “bare with me” was a Freudian Slip? :- )

05/15/2003 10:55 p.m SinisterPenguin Freudean slips… Those things are hot. You should buy one of those.

05/15/2003 10:56 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ) And who, pray tell, would wear it?

05/15/2003 10:57 p.m SinisterPenguin Not me. I don’t think they come in XXL.

05/15/2003 11:00 p.m DingoGirl61 Dexter, can you be serious for a moment? :- )

05/15/2003 11:00 p.m SinisterPenguin Is being serious cute?

05/15/2003 11:02 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ) You stop it! :- ) I have a question to ask you. You said you are taking holidays this July?

05/15/2003 11:02 p.m SinisterPenguin Five weeks. Yes. Why?

05/15/2003 11:06 p.m DingoGirl61 I was talking with Arlo the other day. You remember, I have mentioned him before. He is the brother of my ex-husband.

05/15/2003 11:08 p.m SinisterPenguin I remember. I’ve always found it kind of weird you still hang around with him.

05/15/2003 11:09 p.m DingoGirl61 Arlo is not like Jeremy. He is not a drinker. He is a successful travel agent. He and I have always been very good friends.

05/15/2003 11:10 p.m SinisterPenguin Maybe he is sweet on you?

05/15/2003 11:12 p.m DingoGirl61 Arlo is that very rare item, a happily married man. :- )

05/15/2003 11:13 p.m SinisterPenguin I thought that species was listed as extinct. I will check. Happily married man extinction status.

05/15/2003 11:15 p.m DingoGirl61 Don’t be cynical, Dexter. Cynical is not cute. :- (

05/15/2003 11:15 p.m SinisterPenguin More data for the database. Serious=cute. Cynical=not cute. Got it.

05/15/2003 11:16 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ( Be serious. Just for a moment? Arlo tells me he can secure a very, very good rate on an airfare from Vancouver, British Columbia to Brisbane… :- ( Please do not think I am “pressuring” you. I just thought I should let you know…

05/15/2003 11:20 p.m SinisterPenguin Wow….

05/15/2003 11:22 p.m SinisterPenguin I can’t say I haven’t thought of this. But this is the first time we’ve talked about this.

05/15/2003 11:26 p.m SinisterPenguin Wow….

05/15/2003 11:29 p.m DingoGirl61 :- (

05/15/2003 11:33 p.m SinisterPenguin Did he mention what kind of price?

05/15/2003 11:33 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ( Around $2,000. That is still quite a lot of money, isn’t it?

05/15/2003 11:35 p.m SinisterPenguin Those are Australian dollars, right?

05/15/2003 11:35 p.m DingoGirl61 Australian dollars, yes. :- ( Maybe I should not have mentioned this?

05/15/2003 11:38 p.m SinisterPenguin At a conversion page here….

05/15/2003 11:40 p.m SinisterPenguin $1781.96. Conversion is .89 and a bunch of useless numbers.

05/15/2003 11:41 p.m DingoGirl61 Please understand. I know it is a lot of money. I am not REQUIRING or even asking you to come. I just thought I should tell you, because it is a very good price, actually. Perhaps two thirds of the normal price…:- (

05/15/2003 11:44 p.m SinisterPenguin This price would be good for July?

05/15/2003 11:44 p.m DingoGirl61 I believe so. If you’d like, I could ask Arlo again.

05/15/2003 11:47 p.m SinisterPenguin Running some test pricings online, here… This is a very good price. But I should know the arrival and departure dates, to make it more accurate. Which airline?

05/15/2003 11:48 p.m DingoGirl61 I’m not quite sure….

05/15/2003 11:50 p.m SinisterPenguin I should know the dates, though. Let me work this out. If I’m going to do this, I should know what day I’m arriving and what day I’m departing.

05/15/2003 11:53 p.m DingoGirl61 :- ( You feel pressured, Lumpkin? I should not have said this…

05/15/2003 11:54 p.m SinisterPenguin I’m cool with it. Like I said, I was thinking of this. You just brought it up first. You always beat me to the draw…

05/15/2003 11:54 p.m SinisterPenguin What are prices like down there? :- ) How much is a can of Fosters?

Dexter, standing in the shadow of Jess and Dexter, remembers a Saturday afternoon comedy show on C.B.C. radio. It played back when he was a teenager. He does not remember the name of the show. For a while, they ran a mock-western series, a take-off on “Rawhide”. It was called “Lardass”. Starring Sheriff Lardass. He remembers one skit in particular, set in the town saloon, with this young, dumb whippersnapper talking to the sheriff.

Young Whippersnapper: Sheriff, why do they call you “Lardass?”
Sheriff Lardass: Well, son, you see these two bar stools I’m a-sittin’ on?
Young Whippersnapper: Nope.
Sheriff Lardass: Well, there ya go….

That was pretty funny, actually. Even to a fatty like him. And that was probably when some of the guys started calling him “Lardass” at school. But he could be imagining things. It’s a common phrase, after all. It could have been sooner.

When you are born defective (and many people are, and most grow that way later), you learn early about the power of naming. Names are what you impose on other things and other people, and what other people impose on you. It starts with your mom and dad; then everybody else gets into the act. Anyone who ever tells you words can’t hurt you has never had them used against him. Some kind of hyper-aerobic Body Nazi, probably. Normal people know what words can do. That is why some get obsessed about achieving power over language. Because language has power over them. These people are called “readers”, and he and Jess are “readers”. But readers never win much more than Pyrrhic victories, really. Nobody can really control language. It is what controls everything. It is the real Dam of Ultimate Power.

He wonders if Jess went through something similar in her past, and if that’s maybe why she’s an English teacher now. He leafs through the pages, from the chat-script to the picture. She’s a chesty woman. Dexter is learning to like that. The X axis of this creased picture runs almost directly through the sun-dappled cleavage she shows here, shadowed and freckled (though she is freckled to begin with) by that wide-weave, straw hat. Was she, like “Betsy Bigtits” in high school? Australian men are a pretty crude and rude bunch, right? He has noticed she has not much to say about them, and she seems to have made some pretty bad choices in the past. She’s very, very smart, but maybe she doesn’t know how to pick ‘em? And maybe the current case in point is further evidence of same?

Dexter turns from laser copy to reality: His own feet. And, yes, folks, that is just a joke: Most fat people can, in fact, see their feet. Dexter can. What he sees is a pair of cracked, greyed old running shoes, once so fleet (in potential, at least) and new, now soiled and neglected into “comfiness”. Poor little shits who never got to realize their potential. And he sees his grey sweat pants, baggy, comfy, too, with their elastic waist band around his tubacious gut. And his T-shirt, one of his favorites, worn a little thread-bare under the armpits, but otherwise still presentable: a white T-shirt with a Linux penguin on it, his Badge of Honour, and above it the words “Fear the Penguin”, and below it “Total, World Domination”. Okay, that’s a comma fault, that last part, but you get the idea, anyway. An idea he, in his weaker or drunker moments, actually espouses to himself and others: open source software, no power cabals of Secret Knowledge; just a shared and democratic dedication to doing the Right Thing the Right Way, together. A meritocracy of the meritorious, not of the privileged. And he, of course, very much one of the meritorious, and democratically empowered…

It’s all bunk. He spends most of his working day patrolling walls against his very Brothers in Linux—most of them kitty-hackers, these days: pimple-faced, unknowing little nerds downloading not-understood open source hackware. He, if anybody, should get real. There is nothing inherently good about being open and free to all. He is part of one cabal, they part of another, though the two cabals grey into each other from time to time. If he’s going to be honest with himself, he has to admit that he likes this meritocracy because he thinks he merits something in it. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t pay attention to it. And if he’s going to be honest about himself, too, he has to ask the right questions. Like, who would ever want a body like this? To inhabit or to accommodate? It’s not a lot of fun to move around in, and no fun at all to look at. And does Jess really need a fat, cynical Canadian piss-tank to help turn her life around? Oh, okay, a fat, cynical Canadian piss-tank who has Thoughts, when he’s sober, and high ideals when he’s drunk? Not bloody likely.

Don’t be cynical, Dexter. Cynical is not cute.

Right. And if he’s looking for total, world domination, he’d better get about it. It is another half hour or so to the Dam of Ultimate Power. Also, he only has enough smokes for another hour and a half or so.

IV: The Very Reverend Somebody

And thus did Dexter, Scion of Ryan, depart from that Arbour of Ease, where the nymphs of the River Yukon [alternately, Lewes] did disport, in their glad garlands. And, when he had betaken himself from that place, he betook himself to the Path Through the Trackless Wilderwilde, saying, “Thus shall I seek out the Dam of Ultimate Power, and smite it, and it shall perish.”

How you can have a path through a trackless wilderwilde is a good question, but there you go. Also, is “wilderwilde” a real world? Even a defunct one? He will have to do a search to find out.

There is an arboreal feel to this riverside pathway, though, with its over-arching poplars and, here and there, a mature, big-bowled spruce of a size not often seen in this area of town. To his immediate right, and immediately as he begins to walk again, he sees some gnawed stumps of poplar, their tops chewed away into irregular, pointed cones, browned with old exposure. The work of some defunct beaver, for a beaver dam also long defunct. Things die quickly in the Yukon, but take forever to decay.

The feel will be more arboreal in a week or two, when the leaves finally erupt from bud. Right now, the light still strikes through bare branches studded with waxy green buds, throwing gnarled grey veins of shadow over the dirt pathway. This is the way he came before, on his first trip to the Dam of Ultimate Power. He likes it here, by the river. He can hear it flow now, and he will see the river more broadly, just ahead.

There is some obscurity in the name of this river. The cartographers of old marked it on their maps as the Lewes, starting at Lake Bennett. It was a tributary to the Yukon, flowing into that river’s headwaters at Lake Laberge. But the beginning of things is always debatable (though less often the end), and the locals all called this river the Yukon. And the locals, through sheer cussedness and inattention, bested, in the passage of time, the Powers That Were. The name “Lewes” is now all but unknown and subsiding into oblivion as new maps replace old. The Lewes will soon be The River That Never Was.

The Yukon is still too new and green for the names of things to have much certainty or authority. And there is the clash of cultures, too: Indian names for things and the white man’s names. Arkel became Kusawa Lake (Indian for something or other), for instance, within living memory, and the change took. The locals did not seem to notice or resist. And what the locals call poplar trees are not called poplars by people down south, but something else he cannot remember. And Grey Mountain over there is not officially called Grey Mountain on the maps, but neither he nor any other local can tell you what The Powers That Think They Are think it is called.

And now Dexter’s own government, which ought to know better, is messing with the name of the Yukon itself. Being a slave to the will of the government, he must now speak of the “The Government of Yukon”, not “The Government of the Yukon”, anymore. He hates that. All the locals know that this is the Yukon Territory and therefore “the Yukon”. But some Powers That Wish They Were have delusions of provincehood and want to lose the “the” business. And they may prevail, because local government wage-slaves like him will let them prevail. A cheque from the Government of Yukon is as cashable as a cheque from the Government of the Yukon, so you shut up and cash it. To your eternal shame and eventual damnation.

On the banks of this bi-nominal river, then, Dexter proceeds. The path widens into a clearing, and he can see ahead the institutional ugliness of the turbine building on the far side. Also, a radio tower, maybe forty feet high, higher than the trees, that has him puzzled. It stands near the administration building (neo-industrial-not-so-ugly in its blue vinyl siding with garish red trim). What do they bring in off that tower? Wireless Internet maybe? He should ask somebody, someday, if he ever meets anybody from the Power Company. Which God forbid.

A cluster of gulls, all very vocal and excited, is swirling around a stand of spruce across the river, near the radio tower. Some swing across to his side, turning in wide arcs back to the target zone. A few pass almost directly overhead, and Dexter looks up, trying to make sure these really are herring gulls. They are larger, and their heads are not round and cute, and their bills are longer and hooked down. But he is looking for what the information plaque up at the observation platform told him to look for: the distinctive pink legs. But they are moving too quickly for him to get a good look, and in this light their bellies are in shadow as they fly. But, because they are large and noticeably not as cute as the ones on Shit Hawk Island, Dexter decides they must be herring gulls. And whatever they are, what are they up to over there? Why all this ruckus? Is there a dead body over there or something? A dead something?

Then he sees it: an eruption of broad, brown wings and a white head: an eagle. A bald-headed eagle. They are chasing off an eagle. This one must have a wing span of, say, four feet or more. It takes heavily into the air, the gulls still swirling, squalling, pursuing from the sides and back. It crosses the river just downstream from him and disappears over the trees. Eagles get a lot better press than shit hawks. Even he is stirred to a pre-conditioned admiration at the sight of this one: the familiar, idiot thrill of “It’s an eagle!” But, objectively considered, they are just a bunch of baby snatchers and carrion munchers, like shit hawks. It is their size that gives them all that cachet. When it comes to birds, size matters. With people, there is an optimum size, after which it matters in a reverse relation to your deviation from optimum. Plus, there are not so many of them and they do not make such a racket.

And on which hand did it pass, the eagle? This is a very Homeric moment. Jess will ask him about it, because he is sure to tell her, “I saw an eagle, I saw an eagle!” Dexter or sinister? Dexter, over the over-arching power lines, sinister, just downstream, with their suspended warning cones, white and then red, white and then red. He thinks with bird omens it is those passing on the right that are auspicious. The left hand is always the “bad” hand, right? So he suspects this is a Good Omen. It means something positive. Zeus is telling him that his journey is auspicious and that the loud, annoying, unglamorous little shit hawks of his imagination will prevail over, and drive away, the Lowering Impediment in his life. Whatever that might be: inertia, fear, excess body fat.

So Dexter re-commences this auspicious anabasis. Out of the clearing, down into another little arboreal cluster crossing a dry stream bed, then up a grade again, a grade topped by a large, squarish basalt boulder which splits the path into two channels. As he ascends, an oddity on one of the trees he is passing—a cottonwood, he thinks—catches his always wandering eye: numbers. Enigmatic numbers carved with some care into the bowl of the tree:
4

..

20

And someone has taken some care to actually mark inside the carved numbers with a black grease pencil, too. Like a time notation: 4:20 p.m. Or like a northing and easting: 4 degrees north 20 East… What is this? Co-ordinates are right out and time makes no sense. An angle? In hours and minutes? An angle from what? Very odd, very strange. And probably totally without explanation, now. These markings could be years old, the way things grow here. Whatever they meant to somebody once, they mean nothing to anyone anymore. Still, he wonders how many people, passing here, have even noticed this vestige of empty precision about something.

When he crests the rise, passes the boulder and reaches the bench, the gulls are gone silent, more or less. The situation subsides to normalcy. Just the churn and thrum of the generators humming their wordless, sub-aqueous hymn to power. Dexter, alert for all things, now looks about him. He looks first at the bench itself, with its accompanying black-lacquered, forward-sloping aluminum garbage bin, each on its own concrete bed. These two items are more or less identical to the ones across from Shit Hawk Island, with subtle differences. For one thing, the bench here is on the inland side of the path, with the bin right beside it, to the north. At Shit Hawk Island, the Blue Nymph bench (or Blue Imp, rather) is on the littoral side and the waste bin is across the path, abaft and to port. Dexter establishes an immediate similarity, though, when he tries to lift the lid on the bin to get rid of the now two stinky cigarette butts he has wrapped in foil in his pack. It, too, is locked. Just like at the first Blue Nymph. Or Blue Imp, rather.

Dexter pauses to think bad thoughts about city workers and their cushy jobs. They apparently cannot be bothered to maintain these bins at this time of year, though the path is clearly in growing use, what with all this fine weather. Dexter feels the tickle in his brain that bodes another of his little rants in his inimitable faux-Swiftian style. He will point out how these bins, though not in and of themselves devoid of a certain utilitarian splendour in their design, might best realize the full scope of that splendour in actual utility: to whit, as receptacles for the doggy-doo, cigarette butts, beer cans and various other forms of detritus which, as matters stand, end up on the path itself and cluster around these innocent Blue Nymphs.

Like any self-respecting Internet nerd, Dexter has his own web site and his own domain name: sinisterpenquin.ca. He hosts it himself on his DSL connection. It runs on a legacy Pentium III on the far side of his firewall, the box stripped down to basics and running Linux in his preferred Free BSD distribution. It is a stereotypically stereotypical Nerd Vanity site, with links to quirky URL’s, odd and humorous pictures culled from nights of pointless and indolent web browsing, and a message board which occasionally ignites into flame wars between himself and people he has never met. It also has a semi-regular “PenguinCries” page, in which he posts his caustic little micro-essays, all designedly politically incorrect and usually venting a designedly unwarranted volume of spleen on the trivial annoyances of daily life. The site is not much visited, but it is his self-vindication, his liberation from all the compromises and circumspection he is compelled to by his work as a government-paid-and-regulated Sys Admin. It is also how he met Jess.

Almost a year ago, the government had flown in another murder of consulting crows, for a database project. Dexter worked with them for several weeks, his purview being the system security end of things. One of these consulting crows happened to be a displaced Australian named Jack, and Jack, like all good Australians, was a powerful consumer of beer, so he and Dexter overcame their language difficulty and buddied up. In a scientific vindication of the six-degrees-of-separation hypothesis, Jack knew Jill, who knew Tom, who knew Dick, who in turn knew Harry, who lived somewhere back Down Under, and who was actually vaguely related in some way to Jack, and who visited sinisterpenguin.ca, and saw Dexter’s micro-essay lampooning Jack’s Australianisms, and who duly notified a tart-tongued female school teacher he knew named Jess, who then posted a tart and caustic comment on Dexter’s message board, to which Dexter responded caustically and to which she responded in turn. This exchange of jovial unpleasantries led first to e-mail exchanges, then chat sessions, then exchange of digital photographs of self and places, and, like a lily-pad coming to bloom on an acidic pond, romance turned its pale face to the sun…

Dexter scanned and e-mailed her the picture of his mother and him sitting on that big rock by the kayaker’s waters. Louise took the picture with her own camera and gave it to him later. It had lain moribund in a drawer in his desk at home until Jess asked for a picture of him. The grotto, with the paired black spruce and poplar tree, were visible in the background, and it was Jess who had remarked on them and suggested that he go try out that spot. It is, now, in fact, the turn-around point on his work-day morning walks. And in return Jess scanned and sent him that picture of her in cleavage and a straw hat, in the bright sunlight of Moreton Island, where she had gone with Rodney last year to pet dolphins. It’s a much more attractive picture in True Colour (24-bit) 1024×768 resolution on his 17″ monitor.

Now Dexter turns his wavering attention to a significant difference between this Blue Nymph and the previous one: this one has a small brass plaque mounted on its backrest. It is the only one of the Blue Nymphs to have one. It reads:

THE VERY REVEREND
DESMOND CARROLL
->->->-> o <-<-<-<- CHAPLAIN FOR THE R.C.M. POLICE

VETERANS ASSOCIATION/R.C.M. POLICE

2002

Dexter reads this as a reader reading. And there is much to learn here, though little to read. This is a pretty bare-bones memorial, this one, but it tells you some things. Like that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have chaplains; or had them, anyway. He never knew that. Maybe they had them back in the old days, when they were still a kind of mounted paramilitary force with cannons and everything. Maybe they don’t have them anymore, now that they are just another bunch of cops in prowl cars; doughnut addicts and traffic ticketers. He should ask a cop about this, some day. Except that he does not talk to cops.

The second thing this tells you is that this plaque, and the words it is imposing on you, are the utterance of a Power That Is. It is, fittingly, in authoritarian all-caps, with some caps being more equal than others. And that “R.C.M. Police” tips you that Power Itself is speaking, because it is not speaking your language. No Canadian anywhere says “R.C.M. Police”. They call it what it is: the R.C.M.P. Only retired cops and toffee-nosed bureaucrats say “R.C.M. Police”. And even they would probably never say it. They would just write it. It is scribal, not colloquial English. So you know a lot about the speaker here long before you see that laconic by-line, with its paramilitary, subordinating foreslash: “Veterans Association/R.C.M. Police, 2002”—kind of demi-human, corporate equivalent of “James Joyce, Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921”.

You can also tell this is Power Language because it speaks loudly and says very little. Who was this Desmond Carroll guy? When was he born? When did he live, thrive, chaplain, die? What did he do to impress his buddies or successors enough for them to set up this obscure little plaque for him, on this disused little bench, facing on to the power generators? He was “Very Reverend”, but that’s an honorific, not a description; like “The Right Honourable Joe X, Premier of Yukon”. It’s bunk. Was Des just a regular guy? Did he hang with the drunks and ne’er do wells, maybe slop down some whisky with the boys after duty? Or was he some belly-punching spiritual hero who could quote you some apposite chapter and verse as he body-slammed your turpitudinous, malefactor ass into the confession seat? The Very Reverend Hardass?

Reading is a lot like code-cracking, when you stop to think of it. He stops to think of it. He will communicate this thought to Jess today, if there is time. For one thing, you can learn a lot from traffic analysis, ignoring the meaning of the data, watching how it flows, just watching the structure of the flow itself. You don’t have to know exactly what your victim is saying to learn a lot about his character and corporate behavior. Also, you can use side-channel attacks to gain information: font usage, punctuation, diction. These can tell you more about your suspect than the suspect knows about himself.

This little sign, for instance, says little and signifies a lot: It signifies that a bunch of very conventional, very obmutescent guys wanted to memorialize one of their own, and they didn’t know how to do it. They meant well, but they were old ex-cops, gone to drink and memories, and they are not good with words without power. So here, on this ill-placed little monument on a disused bench, they have blazoned to immortality the name of their old confrere and drinking bud, Desmond [No Middle Name, they can’t remember it] Carroll. His name shall shine forth, unsullied by the wear of human backs, unto moderate eternity, while his face, his character, his history all write slowly to /dev/null. Even the one decorative touch to this bare utterance says as much: ->->->->o<-<-<-<-.

That is the vector of Des’s past and the vector of his future remembrance, both collapsing into the little white, black hole of that pressure-flattened little zero, through which poor old Des has been sucked in and has made his chaplinesque disappearance forever.

“Your search—reverend carroll yukon r.c.m. police biography—did not match any documents.”

Okay, Jess might read this whole thing differently. Different readers, different readings. Dexter admits he is influenced by the fact that he does not like the R.C.M. Police. Not since they busted him for D.U.I. last August and he lost his license for a year. Yes, he was guilty as Hell, but a man more sinned against than sinning. He had not driven drunk for years. The Other Guys made him do it. The other nerds at the T&M that night, when he still lived in Riverdale. They kept standing rounds and he didn’t want to look like a wussy-boy. But they all got away home scot-free. He apparently scraped the outside of the handrail on the bridge walk on his way home, and some pedestrian with a cell phone got his plate number and called the cops. They were waiting for him in front of his driveway when he got home. Good, strong database work, that. A guy cop and a girl cop in a white prowler. Their blues and reds started flashing when he approached, not knowing what he had done yet, but knowing he was shit-faced and fubared ad infinitum. He was 1.4, which is a lot. Community service, some weekends in the slammer, and licence gone for a year.

All this happened just a month or two before he met Jess and he has never mentioned this to her. She has seen pictures of his place with the car out front and probably assumes he drives it around. She may even be expecting him to get himself an international driver’s license. This is going to be touchy, very touchy.

Then, as a reader, reading, Dexter notices something on the waste bin: printed instructions on the lid, in English and French. To open the lid, you are supposed to push a little lever under the handle. Dexter tries this and it works. And there is a black plastic garbage bag in there, with some waxed-cardboard coffee cups and plastic juice bottles already in there. Crap. He forgot to RTFM—Read The Fucking Manual. So he has lost a PenguinCry, but avoided being exposed as a numb-nutz. So Dexter can at last get rid of the smelly butts in his cigarette package: one stinky legacy gone now, anyway.

V: Danger Zone

And all that is all behind him now, as is the bench of the Very Reverend Desmond Carroll. He has decided again on the riverside branch of the trail, following an eroded bank about ten or twelve feet above the river. It runs only a short distance, then rejoins the asphalt path again. As it does, and Dexter does, too, two joggers appear around a bend. A couple, man and wife, or significant others or some such thing. She in pony tail, wearing a windbreaker, dark blue spandex pants. He is in red shorts, a grey sleeveless body shirt. The woman, Dexter notices as she passes without greeting, is probably late ‘thirties, with hair like dry straw but a nice ass on her. The guy, who makes eye contact but makes no greeting, is a little shorter than her and heavy. Your average brick shithouse build. And he should not wear body shirts because he’s got a serious jiggle-tit problem. He has more up front than his lady-friend does. Not that Dexter is one to be giving advice about fashion and appearance, mind you.

A few meters down the paved path, there is a branching again, a rather steep slope leading down to the right, close to the river. Dexter’s practiced eye makes it about a three to one slope, about the same grade as a standard highway embankment. The ground is bony, with protruding, rounded stones. He picks his way down it and emerges into another arboreal way, this one with the water rushing more closely and turbulently to his right. He notices two rock walls down here, on his side of the river, constructed out of native basaltics; side by side, about thirty meters between them, they form a Weir of Enigmatic Purpose. Maybe they built this thing so the salmon could have a bit of a rest after going through the fish ladder or something? He has no idea. The world is full of things you have to learn. And if you want to see something new, you should go walking where you were walking yesterday. Or something like that.

This path, too, is brief. It re-ascends to the asphalt again, and as you breach the top you get a good, flush-on view of the dam itself. It looks like they have opened the dam gates a bit. That must have just happened, though, because he notices the water is suddenly much more in flux than it was even a few minutes ago. Out in the middle of the river, where the rocks catch the flow and swirl it, there are areas gone to a kind of wine-dark purple. Dexter stands looking at this turbulence, wishing he had been here at the right moment, to see the dam gates open, the spume start to spray, the mist rise, the river acquire new energy.

Then he ducks. He ducks because something just went “whoosh” right over his head and squawked an ugly squawk. He sees a gull arcing out over the river, low overhead. It is a herring gull, but smaller, obviously a female. And she’s attacking him, the dumb bitch. Like he was some kind of 225-pound eagle baby-snatcher. She circles back at him, coming at him head-on. He can see her pointy little bill open as she squawks at him again and swoops, again, probably just inches over his head. He instinctively ducks. This shit hawk is starting to seriously piss him off. What does she think she is, some kind of harpy? She’s an effing shit hawk. Dexter picks up a small rock and stands square to the river as she circles again. He lobs the rock as she starts to turn back at him. But he throws rocks like a girl. He has never been any good with rocks. The thing just tumbles in the air like… well, like a lame duck, and plops into the river, feet short of even being close to the gull. And the gull comes on again.

Dexter runs, head down. Fat men do not run well, but they do run when under attack. And why, he reasons, should he be any braver than an American eagle? Maybe that business down there before the Very Reverend’s seat was a warning, not an omen.

When he hits the paved path again, the gull decides he is out of predation range and leaves him alone. Dexter realizes his heart rate has gone up. Either that little shit-head shit hawk scared him a bit or he needs a lot more cardiovascular. To assist in the latter, he lights another smoke, struggling again like an idiot with that idiot-proofed lighter. He will keep the smelly butt in his package until he gets back to the Very Reverend Bench.

And he sees the last bench up ahead, then the observation platform just past that, not more than a hundred meters or so. There are no side-paths now. He is on the home stretch.

He notices, as he approaches, that this bench is not a Blue Nymph like the other two. It lacks the faux-Victorian whirly-gigs in its metalwork. It’s made of bare metal tubes, with tin slats for the seat and back, painted brown. It is close to the embankment and looks out onto the power generator building (industrial ugly yellow aluminum siding, industrial thrum coming out of it) and up to the spillway, where the water flows in a little waterfall when the dam is open, as it is now. He stops to read the name on the plaque he noticed on this bench before, when he sat on it for a rest.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF
DEBORA DORIS DUNGEY
May 8, 1953 – May 20, 1994

Then, in faux handwriting: “With the love of her many friends, the river flows out to the sea ~ your spirit is everywhere.”

That’s bad grammar, and worse poetry. Jess would notice the comma-splice. The river does not flow out to the sea, carrying the love of Deb’s many friends. Unless they were dead in the river, in which case it would. But that’s what the sentence says. If you’re an asshole, that is. Otherwise, you know it means to mean something nice, even if it doesn’t get there. He wonders, though, why they used the tilde there. It’s supposed to be a stylized dash, he guesses. But computer people are going to think tilde. Maybe he’s not the right audience for this thing. Because he’s one of those assholes who notices comma-splices and tildes.

Stop being cynical, Dexter. Cynical is not cute.

He also notices how worn down this little plate is. A lot of backs have rubbed against it. Deb is being expunged by “the love of her many friends”. Somebody should buff it up. And she died young. Just 41 and 12/365 rotations on Planet Earth. A year younger than Jess is now. And there is a long-dead tree here, too. The corpse of a pine tree, probably, because the other four around here are all pines. It was quite young when the wind took it. Not more than, say, eight inches thick. It lies parallel to the bank, prone behind the bench it used to throw shade on, before the wind toppled it. It got knocked over at the root. The mangled root-work is still there, just back and to the left of the Dungey Seat.

There is a little too much mortality going on around here, Dexter decides. Time to go make some final observations and head for home. He checks his Cassio. It is 9:00 a.m. He has been the better part of an hour covering not much ground. Well, counting fifteen minutes or so at the grotto.

From the mid-point of the Dungey Seat to the mid-point of the observation platform, or rather the point at which you turn a right angle to approach the mid-point of the observation platform, is thirty paces exactly: 75 Feet. A quick calculation on the watch renders 75×3.281=27.7 and an infinite row of irrelevant numbers meters. Call it 28 meters.

And, as he approaches the observation platform, he has notices, for the first time, the sign on it, on the left, upstream face, toward the dam. It says “SAFETY ALERT!” in large yellow letters against a blue background. Below that is a picture of the dam with yellow dots in various places and yellow lines coming down from the dots to little patches of text. He approaches to read these things. Danger zones for “Dog Walkers and Climbers”, “People Who Walk and Fish on These Rocks”. Stuff like that. And now he notices another sign, a small yellow sign on the head end of the deck. It has “Caution” on it and an Indian-style drawing of a fish, and it says “SALMON AT WORK”. Right, a kind of joke, thing. “This stream supports salmon. Please protect your resource.” From the Kwanlin Dun First Nation. Hmmm. The Indians are here, too. Then he looks across the pathway, through the willows and young poplar, all of them just budding today, just like the poplar and willows down by the footbridge, and he sees the sign “DANGER”. In big, red letters on a white background. The letters have that same “stencil” style as the “SAFETY ALERT!” sign. (The question pops into his head: sign makers don’t still use stencils, do they? Surely they do everything with computer fonts now? So this “stencil” look is just kind of a tradition thing, probably?) That’s a warning not to “contaminate the city’s water supply”. Then he looks back down the path. There is a smaller sign, like a road sign, down there. It says, in red letters, “CAUTION ERODING BANK”.

Wow. It doesn’t look like it—it’s pretty, here, actually, in a Commie-industrial kind of way—but this platform is a perilous place. Danger and warning signs all around him. He’s got his key chain compass out again, taking his bearings: DANGER to the north, the water supply; SAFETY ALERT! to the west, the Dangers of the Dam; CAUTION to the south and east: the salmon, the eroding bank. Yep, here he is, between Scylla and Charybdis and a rock and a hard place. But he, Dexter Homer Berrywell, laughs in the face of danger. He points and giggles at Death Stars, blows raspberries at Morlocks, hang-glides with a case of beer over the Tower of Mordor, strangles shit hawks with his bare, brawny hands. He is Dex Danger, Private iGuy. The word of “fear” does not exist in his spell-checker. He has run a “find” on all such words and written them to /dev/null. He is The Dexterous Dukester and he holds no truck with the trepidatious. And he’s off to Australia to kick-box with kangaroos and wrestle down a koala bear (and that’s no joke, that, because Jess has told him they can be vicious little bastards, those guys). Also to pet dolphins.

Then he jumps again. He jumps because his cell phone has startled him. It is chortling and vibrating in his windbreaker pocket. It chortles and vibrates again in his hand as he fumbles with the key combination to unlock it, thinking, “Oh Christ, it’s Victoria Day, I’m on holiday, and this is not the time for some effing system crisis.”

But it’s not a crisis; it’s his sister, Louise. He knows that as soon as she responds to his formal, professional “Dexter here.” He has to press the phone close to his ear because of the dull roar of the dam which has its gates maybe one quarter open, emitting a small white spume, and because of the cacophony of the gulls.

There is a grey spume of smoke off in the distance, too, up the hill and across the South Access Road. That is the batch plant, up by Ear Lake, making asphalt. A move is afoot, this time by the Petty Powers That Wish They Were, to re-christen the South Access “Robert Service Way”. But the locals, through sheer cussedness and inattention, persist in calling it the South Access and will, in the obmustescent but ineluctable democracy of Time, prevail.

“Are you free for [something]?” she says. He hears a “D” in there, so he interpolates “dinner”. That’s what she usually calls about, anyway. Dinner with Mom.

“Yeah, well I could be. What time?” He is yelling a bit, because of the noise, probably annoying her at the other end. It makes no sense to yell just because you are having a hard time hearing, but he does it anyway.

“I’ve got some vegi[tarian] lasagna, a new recipe, it’s really [good]. I’m going to have Mom over. At around 6:00.”

Dexter thinks: “Great, more Dirt Food.” And he hasn’t even told Louise about his diet. He’s doing some quick head math again. He’s been a little addled since daylight saving time came on. Brisbane is now GMT + 7, not GMT +8. So 6:00 p.m. his time is (6:00 a.m. plus seven hours…) 1:00 p.m. her time. She’s on line at 5:00 p.m. her time, which is four hours after 6:00 p.m. his time, which is 10:00 p.m. And his mom always goes to bed at 9:00 p.m., so he’ll be back home by 4:30 p.m. her time latest, which is lots of time. He can do this. He is Dex Danger, Lord of All Time.

“Yeah, sure,” he bellows. “Sounds good.” He decides not to mention the diet, yet. That would lead to a conversation and he hates talking on the cell phone. “I can do that.”

“I’ll pick you up at 5[:30],” Louise says. He interpolates that half hour bit, because of the noise. She always picks him up at 5:30, when he comes for supper. Since he got his licence suspended, that is. Which is over in August. Which is when he’ll be back. For a while, anyway.

And he should start early tomorrow, before work, and make the same trip up here tomorrow, too. Skipping that part with the harpy shit hawk, of course. “To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.” Right? Right. He’s got it, now.