Mousetrap

by Matthew Shepherd

MOUSETRAP

ALBERT

I suppose it has a lot to do with how I feel about things.

But I mean everything does really, right? How you feel about things. Jesus. This couldn't be more ... let me start over. I'll start over. This isn't making any sense. It's too broad. I'm trying to address this thing, and it's just ... I'll start over.

I guess it begins with the garden.

Which is an okay garden, really, it's all right. Nothing wrong with it, but that's sort of what's wrong with it. It's just all right. A couple rows of geraniums, some of those pricky flowers with the white shoots, and some purple stuff that keeps low to the ground. I don't know what it's called. I call it “purple stuff.” Flowers, yeah, purple flowers. Not the leaves. The leaves are green. But it has a lot of flowers. It sort of looks like somebody dropped one of those kitchen sponges, a purple kitchen sponge, and it just started growing there. Expanding like those dinosaurs you drop in water. Remember those?

So anyway, there's some geraniums and that pricky flower – echinacea? Like the stuff when you have a cold? I think it's echinacea. I can't remember the name of it. Might have started with a syn... syntrillium. Synthentium. Can't remember. And the purple stuff, and oh yeah, there's these white flowers with brown eyes in the middle. They look like daisies but they're not daisies. They're something fancier than daisies, but they look just like them anyway. I got some of those in there too. And I get out there and I weed every weekend, and I have a little white fence thing around it, and some battery-powered gubbins in the middle looks like a fat little farmer and is supposed to make a noise that keeps the mice away. It doesn't really work. I see mice in the garden all the time, little hopping grass mice. They don't seem to hurt the flowers, though, so I pretty much leave them be.

I keep everything in rows and try to keep every flower two or three inches away from the next; try to keep a clean eyeline down between every section, where the geraniums are grouped and the ekkywhatever and the daisies and the purple stuff. The purple stuff keeps crossing the rows and I have to hack it back, and that every morning sometimes when there's a lot of sun out.

You remember those dinosaurs? They came in these eggs, and you'd put a dollar in at the grocery store and this egg would come out, you'd drop it in water and later this thing would grow to about six inches from something the size of your thumb, stunk sort of like piss. This real acid smell. And then sometimes, if you didn't get it out of the water and left it in overnight, it would grow too big. The lines around it would get indistinct, sort of. It would get fuzzy and bits of it would start drifting off, and later you'd just have this blob of goo, this part of a dinosaur, floating in like the amniotic purple fluid of dinosaurness. Like you're looking inside an egg that something has died inside, died and rotten inside its egg, but the egg is still full of it, full of the stuff it needs to keep the baby alive. The purple stuff grows like that. It's like it was once a neat little patch of flowers but it broke its lines, it was soaking too long and now it's just spreading everywhere, thin and trickling. That's what it's like.

And it's all right. It's okay.

But it's supposed to be my mom's garden, you know? And I know what she'd say if she saw it.

FOREST

The dinosaurs? What?

Oh, shit. The dinosaurs. Yeah. Look, I don't talk about that stuff any more. It's all in the past now. It... ah, look, let's move on. I didn't know we were going to talk about the dinosaurs. I don't talk about that stuff.

Because the lawyers said so.

The lawyers said I'd be better off not talking about it, not until it's all settled, and I believe them. So I don't talk about the dinosaurs.

Seriously. Drop it. I've done a lot of good work since the dinosaurs. Like the crawlnuggets. Remember those? No? Well, they were these little fuzzballs that came in a tube, and I'd designed them to register ambient humidity at any rate above a certain percentage. So you'd roll them out of the tube, there were four or five in a tube, you'd roll them out on the floor and they'd just sort of lie there and you'd think what's the deal with these? Little balls of fur.

So here's the thing: you'd get down close to these things, and you'd breathe on them. Just open your mouth as wide as you can and exhale, gently exhale. Haaaaaaaaaa...hhhhhhhh... yeah, like that. Haaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh and the moisture, the moisture in your breath, it would get into the little fuckers and they'd unroll, right? They'd like expand out of that little ball and then theyd be lying there like four little caterpillars. Five little caterpillars. Whatever. The point is they'd just look like balls of lint and haaaaaaahhhhhhhh and there you go, a caterpillar.

I can't believe you never heard of them. I mean you're here, and you never heard of crawlnuggets. They'd sort of unfurl on the ground and this – this is the best part – I'd designed them so they'd leach different moistures from their bodies, like at different rates, see, so certain parts of their bodies would contract as the moisture leached out into the air, and that would cause the moisture above to get squeezed down and – look at my hands. See that? That's what they did. The wriggling. They'd sort of wriggle, and more often than not they'd inch forward. Like a real caterpillar. It was something.

Crawlnuggets. You never heard of them. I'm not surprised, not really that much. Mason never put much behind them. Bill Mason. I'm not supposed to talk about him either. Bill Mason. You want to know something about Bill Mason, something I'm allowed to say, you want to know something about Bill Mason? Socks with sandals. Socks with sandals. Yeah. Right there under his granola-eating shitty Birkinstocks, wool socks. Winter and summer, socks with sandals. That tells you everything you need to know about Bill Mason. Get me?

So whaddawe got. We got the crawlnuggets, you'd roll them out and breathe on them and you'd get these crawling things. Caterpillars. Fucking brilliant. I can't believe I didn't – there were these major awards, right, the Toy Maven Industry Awards? Named after this magazine about toys. And I didn't even get nominated that year. Lightyears ahead of that dog thing with the microphone, but it got nominated. I made this little membrane, this microscopic membrane, made – well, I signed an NDO, so I can't get into the details, I was working for the company for the time, for Mister Socks-and-Sandals, so I can't talk about it too much, but trust me, it was brilliant. And there was this dog, this big pile of plastic crap, coloured shit blue, which believe me you would know is a colour if you saw this dog, and it had this microphone and the kid, your kid, a kid makes a barking noise into this microphone and the dog barks back at varying pitches with the same bark and this is somehow an innovation. I'm like “hey, I have a Casio keyboard from 1998, you morons!”

Morons.

So the morons at Toy Maven, I don't even get nominated for an award and this dog, this dog thing, it's up for an award. I make the crawlnuggets, which are light years – I mean NASA is looking at these things, did you know that? I can't talk about it. NDO. But NASA is, let's just say “crawlnuggets on Mars” and leave it at that, okay?

I don't even get nominated. It's like I'm invisible. Like I could come up with a toy where you put a little pie in the oven and the little light goes on and the pie cures cancer and I wouldn't even get mentioned in the trade pubs.

So you understand, I'm sure. Legal... legal matters aside. You understand why I don't want to talk about the dinosaurs.

JANINE

He's always been a dreamer. People ask me “then why did you marry him,” and all I can say is “it's sort of why I married him and it's sort of the best reason to leave him.” It's a big thing with Barry. There's real Barry and there's dream Barry, and real Barry doesn't always know where dream Barry ends. Like his idea of himself, he knows it's all b.s. most of the time, it's mostly projection, but it leaks over. It gets in. So dream Barry is part of real Barry, but more than for most of us. Most of us have this dream, this dream of ourselves that we can release. Every day we let it go, and then we get it back a bit sometimes and there's this ideal us that's always in the back of our minds, ten pounds lighter and half again as smart, but we know that's not the whole us, that there's the dream us and the real us.

Barry doesn't make that distinction. He thinks he should be able to – the other day, we're in the garage, and Barry drops his keys and it bounces, hits the concrete floor and bounces because it hits this funny little crack that spiders right across the floor. Barry's dad told him like four years ago, there was this little crack and Barry's dad told him that it was the frost heaves, that the foundation wasn't properly set and if Barry didn't get it looked at the garage floor would crack like an egg. Barry didn't – well Barry and Barry's dad, that could take all night – so anyway, now we're here with this massive crack that runs across the garage floor and it's like continental drift every year.

The house isn't very well designed. It's one of those Landsdowne houses, you know, the ultramoderns. It looks good, but there's something flawed in how it was built. I don't know.

And Barry drops his key and it hits the angle of this crack and bounces right under the car. So the key is under the car, and the garage floor has oil and God knows what on it, and I'm thinking “this is so Barry,” but I'm not saying anything, because he'd just get mad. So I'm keeping my mouth shut, but I'm thinking here we're going to get oil all over his new pants, and I don't have a key on me but by the time I go in to get one Barry will get impatient.

Barry sort of stoops over, and I think he's going to try to sweep the key out from under the car with his fingertips. Like he can just reach under and brush it out. But he doesn't. He reaches his fingers under the car, grabs it and tries to pick it up.

And he's surprised when he can't.

He doesn't say anything, but I can tell what he's trying to do. Somehow he's gotten this dream-Barry idea that real-Barry can just pick the car up like it's made of balsa wood, like it's just a cardboard model. And he sort of gives it a tug and jerks a bit like it's putting up more resistance than he figured.

You know what he says?

“Huh.”

Barry is standing there with his hand under the car, looking at me as though I, as though I've done something. Like I distracted him while he was picking up the car and now he can't. Like my being there prevented him from picking it up, like my real vibes prevented dream-Barry from manifesting and picking up the car.

“Huh.” I can't do it right. It was more dismissive than that. It was more like huh-what-are-you-doing-here-you're-in-the-way. When I do it it's like huh-puzzled. And he was puzzled too, but dismissively puzzled. Sort of a what's-going-on-here-go-away.

And I ask him “Barry, what are you doing?”

It's like a jerk. It's like I've hooked him. I remember there were these ducks, when I was a little girl. There were these ducks in a pond near my house, about a mile through these fields with bullrushes and red-winged blackbirds and I used to go down there when I was a kid, to think and stuff. I wasn't – heh – I wasn't very popular at school, hard to believe I know, but I had sort of a hard time and I liked to go down there and just stare at the water and think about little living things and what their lives must be like, just drifting unconscious of anything beyond what's around them. Living in these perfect little self-aware vacuums. I didn't have the terminology at the time, of course.

So I got down to the pond one day, and I'm halfway there and I hear this horrible noise, this flapping and sick quacking and what sounds like laughing, so I start to run. And I come through the bushes and see my older brother Rob and some of his asshole friends – I'm twelve or thirteen at the time, which would make Rob sixteen, sixteen-seventeen, something like that – Rob is stomping ducks.

Which is you take an old fishing rod, one you don't mind if it breaks, and you take a high-test line and a nasty hook, the kind with barbs, and you put some bread on it and then you go out where ducks are and you fish for ducks. You throw the line with the bread in the water and you wait for the ducks to come pick it up, then they get hooked. And they're flapping and trying to quack and spitting blood and Rob is hauling them in on the line and then he and his friends are just kicking them, crushing them with their feet.

I see this and I start screaming and screaming. And ... well, I don't really remember much after that.

Why was I telling you – right. That's what Barry looked like when I caught him trying to pick up the car. He looked like one of those ducks when it gets hooked, this sort of guilty expression, and he just says “huh?” and it sounds all the world to me like he's trying to be this big presumptuous asshole but really in a weird way it sort of sounds like a quack.

Barry tried to pick up the car, though, that's the point I'm making. He reached down and grabbed it with his hand and tried to lift it. Right up. He tried to lift the car up so he could get his keys. And nobody can do that. I mean, Olympic weightlifters, maybe with both hands and some sort of special move, like squatting or something, maybe they could do it but nobody can just reach down and lift up a car like it's nothing.

Dream-Barry can, though. And that's what I mean about Barry being a dreamer. He doesn't know he's not dream-Barry sometimes. I worry that he's going to hurt himself. Sometimes I catch him wandering around the house late at night, standing in the kitchen picking things up slowly and putting them down again. The eggtimer, a coffee cup, a butcher knife, a plate. Sometimes I wonder what dream-Barry does that neither of us know anything about.

Sometimes I wonder who's driving the bus, if you know what I mean.

WINSTON

Well, I can't guarantee it'll keep mice away, but it'll help.

There are two kinds of people that tell you they can absolutely positively keep mice away. The first is a liar. The next is a cheat. If you're asking me to tell you the difference between a liar and a cheat, well, I'll need a sheet of bristolboard and one of those whattayoucall Sharpie markers. It takes some diagramming, but there's a difference.

But what I'm saying is nobody can guarantee something will keep away the mice. Mice aren't like you or me. They're not like people. They're not like anything else on the planet. Mice have everything going on that normal animals have going on – they can run, they've got little teeth – gnip gnip gnip through your wires, gnip gnip gnip through your floorboards, gnip gnip gnip through your insulation – they've got their little claws. They're mainly self-preserving beasts. They care about their wellbeing, mice. If you hold out a cleaver and say “come out mouse!” in front of a mousehole, they wouldn't.

Which is why you're here, I guess. I wouldn't be in business if they were that stupid. So it's a good thing for me that they are.

But mice are different. How do I know this? I put my kids through college, that's how I know this. Mice get what the French call the idée fixée. That means basically they get their brains stuck on something and can't get them unstuck. Most of your great literature is about this same sort of thing. The idée fixée. It's what make mice what they are.

Say you're walking down the street one day and you see a dress in a store window. It's a nice enough dress, but the price is a bit high. So you keep on walking. Normally, this is where it stops. You put it out of your mind. You're done with it. But for some reason, the dress sticks in your mind. You can't stop thinking about the damn dress. You're at work and you're thinking of the dress. You're at home and you're thinking of the dress. That night you lie awake in bed and you're thinking of that dress. But you can't afford it. It's too expensive. You can't have the dress.

And the next day you find yourself in the store trying to bargain them down, but it's the last day of the sale and the price of the dress just went up. And again, this is when most people just say forget about it and go about their business.

You can't. You can't get that dress out of your mind. You can't leave it alone. You start to come up with money-raising schemes to get the dress. Sell the car. You don't need it, you can take the bus. Or maybe put the dress on some sort of payment plan and get a weekend job. You need the dress. But the car's not worth much. You can't work weekends, you've got kids. Usually that's when people would finally pack it in, call it quits, give it up. But the dress. The dress.

You begin to think of ways you can steal the dress. You have these fantasies of going in with a shotgun and sticking up the teller and having her wrap it up, wrap it up in a box with a bow. You'd have to leave town of course, hit the road, but it would be yours, you'd have the dress. It's insane.

It's insane, right? You'd never do that. You'd never get that stunty over a dress.

But that's your idée fixée right there. That's what it is. And that's what mice are like all the time. That's why you can't ever find a way to eradicate the buggers, because once they set their minds to thinkin' about something they will get it. And they will come up with the most elaborate goddamn schemes and plans and ideas to do it.

One thing that works, I find, is sound. A bit. Sound works a bit. You get these things make a sound, let's just say they find it unpleasant. Doesn't kill them or anything, but for you it's like heading into a dentist's office. You just don't do it. The noise is nasty. And if the mice don't have the idée fixée about anything near these little sound thingies they'd just as soon avoid them. That one, right there, the fat little farmer fella? Pretty popular. People like to put it in the garden, just off the walkway.

If the mice get the idée fixée, though, you're screwed. That sound won't deter them, but nothing really can. You want my advice, you get a cat. I breed them. Special generation cats. Sort of an American Shorthair mix. That's not – I don't sell them through the store, you understand. Don't have the licenses for that. But you take this, take my card, no, it's fine, just take it. Take it. There you go. That's my private number. You give me a call and I can show you some cats. Some mousers. Aggressive little guys, but gentle as lambs with the kids, I promise you that. I had kids myself.

No? Well, I understand that. Some people just aren't cat people. Traps? Yes, but... yes, I do sell traps. But they're really not ... people have the wrong idea, they think that just because everyone has traps, traps work. It's hogwash. I mean, if that were true we wouldn't have mice, right? Right? Traps work a bit, but it's the idée fixée that does those traps in. The mice find paths. The mice make paths. The mice build paths around the traps. You put a food trap out, all you're going to catch is the starving mice, the mice that were being released by the tribe. Like when the Inuit put grampa on an ice floe and kick him off to sea. Those are the mice you get in the traps. The other mice in the mouse community, they've isolated this mouse and keep it from food until it has to go elsewhere, and that's when it smells – what's that? I'm starving! Oh, that smells good. That smells goooooood. That – SNAP! and goodbye grampa. But only because he's starving, you understand.

So people lay the traps down and they catch a couple grampa mice and they think everything's tickety-boo. But they've been deceived. And while they're dumping grampa mouse in the trash, momma and poppa mouse are fixin' to pop out another dozen. Another dozen mice to eat through your wires, gnip gnip gnip, and poison your water, gnip gnip gnip.

What do recommend? Me? Well, you need a balanced approach to mice. You need – okay, if you're looking for something simple, a one-stop shopping sort of deal, I can set that up. I can help you out. There is one thing I carry that I consider pretty much foolproof. This will solve the problem. Guaranteed.

Three words, friend: low yield radiation.

ALBERT (2)

What is my earliest memory of my mother? Boy. Let me think. I can remember... hmm. Eggs, I think. When I try to think back that far, I get the smell of frying eggs. A radio's on somewhere, not close by, in the other room maybe, and the announcer is talking about food. It's a recipe show, I guess – or maybe a news report on food, I can't tell. Eggs frying on the stove. In butter, my mother always used butter to fry eggs. This was before the spray-on stuff, of course. They didn't have that back then. And there wasn't any teflon, either. Frying eggs in butter on a cast-iron stove and she's there. My mother.

I'd be sitting at the table, I guess, waiting for breakfast. There's a dog snuffling around for scraps underneath the table, maybe I've slipped it some bacon in the past and it's ... hopeful. Big dog.

My father? He's not there. Not in this memory, anyway. I mean he was there, I had a father and he was home and everything, he just isn't in this memory. They didn't have broken homes in those days, you understand. Divorce is like no-stick spray, it comes later and then it's in most homes. But my dad isn't in this memory.

Mom's wearing an apron over top of some sort of white shirt, button-up, and a long blue skirt. Navy blue. She's got shoes on underneath. Maybe ... it must be Sunday, and Dad's gone ahead of us to church. He was in charge of lighting the fires, it was a small country church and somebody needed to go in two hours later and light the big woodstove at the back so the church would be warm when the people got there. No heat in there the rest of the week, you understand. They don't have churches like that any more. I can't imagine even having a woodstove out in the open like that any more. Some kid would burn his finger and the church would get sued or something...

...she's frying eggs on the stove and the radio is playing in the other room, but my mother is humming something. She'd do that all the time. Turn things on and not pay any attention to them. It's this funny off-beat, off-key little tune. Sort of a da da da daaaa, da – no, that's not it. I can't – I can hear it in my memory but can't bring it to the front of my mind, you know what I mean? I can't bring it forward.

So it must be Sunday morning, eggs in butter and dad at the church building fires. It didn't end in spring, though. Dad had to go early all year 'round. In summer, it would be to air out the church and turn on the big electric fan in the steeple. In spring, he'd have to adjust the giant steel buckles. There were these steel buckles around the outside that kept the church from cracking with the frost heave. It'd been left alone one year and there was this huge crack right across the floor, a huge crack right across the floor of the church like it was splitting right in two.

There was a group of us that went to church together. Since Dad went early, mother and I wouldn't have the car. We'd have to be picked up. We usually rode in with the Masons, they had this hazy old Studebaker, brown with these crazily thick tires Mr. Mason would put on special. Tony. Mr. Mason's name was Tony, and his wife was Linda, and their son – it's on the tip of my tongue – I don't have it. That's funny. He was my age, you'd think I'd remember his name. We went to different schools. So Mom and I would have our fried eggs and then we'd go outside and pile in the Studebaker and head off to --

-- we didn't have a dog.

That's funny.

I distinctly remember, under the table, but we didn't have a dog. We had cats. We had this mouse problem, see, and they were breeding in the walls. So we had this American shorthair cat, this little wiry thing that we bought from some breeder. And it chased the mice. It never got rid of the mice, never permanently, but it kept them in check. It was sort of like our own little ecosystem, like with the deer and the wolves up north, it was kind of like that. If the mouse population got to a certain size, the cat would whittle it back down. But if the mice got too scarce, the cat would just eat cat food or hunt outside. And the mice would breed.

You could never get rid of all the mice. They were part of life, just like fried eggs in butter. They were part of the package.

There's a dog under the table. And we didn't have a dog. That's a funny thing. It's a weird-looking dog, sort of metallic blue, and it's got this bark that sounds almost human. It sort of wuffs when it wants food, nudging my leg with its nose. This weird shifty low bark, kind of automatic.

People think it's strange for a grown man to live with his mother. But I don't think it is. I think it's perfectly natural. I mean, look at – way up north, they used to be Eskimos but now they're something different. They changed the name. But look at them. Look up there. They live their whole lives together, generations in the same igloo. Nobody ever moves out, they just learn to get along. They travel together and live together. There's nothing odd about somebody living with his mother in the North. People down here, they've seen Psycho and they think it's this whole Norman Bates thing, but it's not. It's perfectly natural. It's the way families should be. They should take care of each other and live close together and share their lives, you see? You see how it should work?

My mother would hate this garden. She'd hate it.

WINSTON (2)

You wake up in the night one night, dark as pitch, and you can't even see your hand in front of your face. I mean it's that dark. I've-gone-blind dark. This barely ever happens where I live. My bedroom, it faces the back of the house, so we hardly ever close the curtains, and my wife, she's a real sound sleeper. Nothing gets her up, see. So I can usually get up in the night and tinker with things, and I'm sort of in the habit now, I'm not much of a sleeper, I get up around 2 a.m. and work on some designs for an hour and a bit and go back to bed. I was a furniture designer at the time. Sort of like an architect, you know? Heavy job, though. Lots of stress. Hard to sleep, so I often get up and do some designs just to ease my mind.

This night, though, I wake up and it's too dark to move. I'm afraid of getting out of bed because I don't know what's underneath it any more. I guess my brain is hazy from sleep, but I get this idea that there's nothing under it, that the bed has detached from everything else and we're just floating, floating in space without stars, and if I get out of bed I'll just fall forever. I know it sounds crazy.

So I touch the wall. I reach out and find the wall, and if there's a wall there must be a floor, right? Because something has to hold the wall up.

And I'm about to get up at last, take a piss and head down to the studio, when I hear this sound. This little sound, but it's huge in the darkness. It's like a train in the walls. Gnip gnip gnip. Something's chewing on something. It's a chewing noise.

It's paralyzing.

All I can think, standing there with my feet off the edge of the bed, suspended over a chasm that goes down forever, is there is something eating my house. And the sound is tiny, but the sound is vast. Like it's coming from very far away but being amplified, reverb, echoing around the bedroom.

There is something eating my house. And it's terrifying.

On some level, I guess, I know that I've pulled this out of a dream, that nothing in real life could be this huge or terrifying. Nothing could eat a whole house. But sometimes in the middle of the night it's hard to separate the dream-you from the real-you. Things get pulled over. It's like there's a bigger version of everything in the back of your mind, and you just can't keep it from flooding up.

But I had what they call a 'moment of clarity', sitting there in the dark, listening to the chewing. I knew that the future was no longer in furniture design for me. And I used my will, the force of my will, I used it to shove that chewing noise back into the box of its natural size. I shrank it until it became a mouse.

And then I got up to build a better mousetrap.

FOREST

Other toys. Boy. I built... well, designed, more ... I designed loads of them over the decade. There was the Framing Professional, that was a good idea that didn't go over too well. Resizeable picture frame parts with some thin clear Plexiglass instead of real glass. Kinds could frame their own drawings from school, frame damn near anything they wanted to.

Turns out kids aren't all that interested in framing things. Who knew, really?

It was hard to repeat the success of, you know, that big hit I had. Especially when the burden of expectation was on me. I needed to do something as impressive as the damn dinosaurs – this was after the dinosaurs but before the trouble started, you understand.

So everyone thought I was on the verge of another major breakthrough. And I stayed up late sweating bullets, vomiting into the kitchen sink, worried that I was going to be another Xavier Roberts. Remember him? No? You do. You just don't remember that you remember him. He was the guy that made those Cabbage Patch dolls. Yeah, now you know. Now you're listening. You remember those. Your parents probably fought to get you one when you were a kid. There were these screaming fights in toy stores, parents curb-stomping each other. Their heads looked like... like soft apples, you know? Just rotting enough to dimple in the sun.

This guy was huge. He was like a god to us. Everyone looked up to him, because he... he invented the craze, you know? It was the original craze. And it's never been matched since. There was that Tickle Me Elmo thing, but that was no toy. It was like a joke, a bad joke you can't get outta your head. That was no toy.

But Xavier Roberts. Xavier Roberts. Where is he now? Where are the Cabbage Patch Kids? When was the last time you heard somebody ask for a Cabbage Patch kid? They're still making them, and you know who's buying them? Precisely the same fucking people got them twenty years ago. They're all in their thirties now and spending money “adopting” the little bastards as they roll out of the factory.

Now they sell them in little cabbages. No foolin'. Little cabbages.

The point is, this guy was it, he was the thing, but it never got duplicated. He never had that sort of bolt again. And I... I was coming off this thing, this huge thing, the dinosaurs in water thing that I'm not supposed to talk about, and people thought I could pull another one out of my ass. It's like that. But it's not like that. That's not how it works.

Look, it's like – it's like a mousetrap. It's like you're building thousands of mousetraps to catch these kids, see, and if you build a good mousetrap you can catch almost all the kids. But the same mousetrap never works twice. Maybe you can switch a couple things around and it'll sorta do the trick, ten years later, but it never really works exactly the same way twice.

Can you imagine inventing successful mousetraps year after year? The ideas you'd have to have? The stress you'd be under, with all those mice, those tiny mice, scampering around you, nattering in your ear, telling you you're a failure and you've only had one good idea in your life and that ended in sixteen deaths and a battery of lawsuits and you're maybe going to jail forever?

I never thought kids would eat the damn things --

-- I'm really not supposed to talk about this. Sorry. Sorry. I'm really ... I think we're done here. Okay? We're done here. Done for the day.

JANINE

Barry's like that a lot. He dreams awake. I'll be having dinner with him, just talking about something like the weather, and he'll say something like “It's a beautiful day. I love watching Mars slip behind Jupiter like that.” and he's staring at the sky. Just staring up into the clear blue sky. And I checked it later, I have these astrology books at home, and he was right – from our perspective Mars was slipping behind Jupiter sometime that day, but invisible to us.

I don't know how he knew. Maybe he'd heard something on the television the day before and it had stuck in the back of his mind. Maybe it was just a guess, a weird coincidence. I don't know.

Most of the time, though, he's perfectly normal. He gets up and goes to work. He works as a real estate broker. I hope this doesn't start carrying over to that, because if it – I just don't know how a prospective home owner would react to the real estate agent trying to lift the house up over his head to show off the septic bed or something, you know?

Of course I took him for tests. He's been tested. CAT scans and MRTs and all that. Doctors say he's fine, physically fine. Healthy as a horse. He won't see a psychiatrist. We went to a therapist together for a while, after Donny ... after Donny died ... but Barry didn't like it. Didn't like how it made him feel, he said. I think he still feels guilty about leaving Donny alone in that room. Paint flakes. There was no way of knowing.

I think he's letting dream-Barry come out more and more these days. I think dream-Barry can do things real-Barry can't, and that's why dream-Barry is slipping through. I think maybe Barry thinks that if dream-Barry had been in charge, Donny never would have died. I could never say this to Barry, though. I just couldn't. We don't talk about Donny any more.

Every day it's like Barry's drifting further into the dream. It's like I'm above watching him wander into a hedge maze, and I'm trying to tell him which way to turn but he won't listen. Or he can't hear.

ALBERT

Kids? Yeah, I guess I sort of regret not having any. It's getting a little late in life for me now. To meet a girl, I mean, get married, have kids, all that good stuff. Living with mother makes it hard to get out. She can't leave the house, and her eyes aren't good enough – well, she can't even see the garden from the window, you know? Which is a mercy for me, I tell you. This is supposed to be my mother's garden, but I can't do the job she did. She had a real green thumb. Back when I was a boy.

I work mostly from home now. I'm a patent lawyer, intellectual property stuff, so it's mostly work I can do from here. The firm knows about mother so they let me stay here and forward the necessary calls. It's an amazing field, intellectual property. Defending people's rights to profit from their ingenuity. That's the up side. You meet some brilliant people, people shaping things. Building better mousetraps, that sort of thing.

The down side? Well – it's a slippery side of the law. Hard to prove that you thought something. So you get a lot of shysters, con men, people trying to capitalize on being good at making paper trails without ever actually doing the work.

We do a lot of business with a toy company, and let me tell you, you'd think those places would be fun. No. No sir. Everything they do, every move they make, it's backed with paper. They practically videotape their creative department thinking. Because when the bolt comes, that bolt from the blue, you've got to hammer it down. You can't just build the best mousetrap any more, you have to prove it's yours or get caught in someone else's trap, you know?

Mother's calling. I have to get supper on. I'm sorry.

REAL ESTATE

KNOWLTON

Thirty-two years. It seems like a long time, but it's not. Not when you love your job. When you love your job, it flies by like a June weekend. That's what my father used to say. “When you love your family, decades fly like a June weekend.”

Well, I love my job.

I think what it is, I think what I love, is potential. I love the potential of things. I love kids because you can look at 'em and see what they can maybe be. I love stationery because so much is going to be written on it. Letters, notices, novels, poems. I love walking into an office supply store and just breathing it in, all that potential, all that paper and ink at the service of creation. That's magic to me.

I'd rather have an egg than a chicken. Because when you have an egg you're never quite sure what's going to come out of it.

Most real estate agents, you ask them they say they love the job because they love people. They love the job because they love talking to people and dealing with people and interacting with people. Not me. I mean, I like people, don't get me wrong. You don't spend 32 years in the business without liking people. Impossible.

But the difference between me and those other guys is maybe they're in this game because they love people, but that just means they could hold any sales job and be just as happy. Used cars, toys, ball bearings. Me, I couldn't see myself doing anything else. Because what has more potential than this? What has more potential than an empty house?

Let me give you a f'rinstance. Let me walk you through something. Let's just take a look in today's paper... there. See that? Two-bedroom bungalow for sale. Now most people look at that, they think “house for sale.” I look at that, and I wonder who's going to buy it and move into it. Maybe a nice older couple, retired and getting out of the city. Maybe a single mom with two kids. Maybe a young fella looking to get some property behind him. Maybe a struggling family that can barely make ends meet. And then what happens to these people once they're in that house? How will they decorate it? What will their kids be like? Maybe there'll be a garden, a small garden with geraniums, echinacea, and that purple spreading flower, what's it called.

These are the things I see when I open up the paper. These are the things I see when I visit a house: potential. I like to imagine generations sprawling out in front of me in these houses. I like to think about what could happen.

One of the things I recommend people that want to sell their home do when they move out is paint it. Every room, eggshell white. It only takes a weekend if you apply yourself. And then you can see anything in that house. Have you ever walked through a house, and empty house with eggshell walls? It's an amazing thing. Takes my breath to do it, even now. You can't help but put yourself in that house.

That's where the couch would go, see, and the television there – have you ever noticed that when you're looking at a new house with somebody, they always want to figure out where the television goes first? Before even the bed in their bedroom, before the books in the study. It's always the television first. That's something I've noticed. It's ... well, it's all right, I suppose, but I get a little nostalgic for the days when people planned for company, not for home theatres. But that's just me. Thirty-two years in the business. I guess I'm a bit old-fashioned in some ways.

This will be the kids' room. No, wait, this will be the master bedroom and this will be the kids' room. Hold on. Which way does the sun rise? It might be worth a smaller room just to have the sun rise on us in the morning.

You see? That's the game people play every time they look at a house, especially an empty house with eggshell walls. That's the game I play every time I look at one for sale, that's the game I play every time I show a house to somebody. That's part of the secret. I love the potential, and I try, I try my damndest, to make sure they love the potential too.

If you can look at a thing and not see it, but see the things it can be, you're bound for greatness. Something else my father said.

TRIBUNE

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MARY

I want something very specific in a house. I'm a hard shopper. I don't put up with a lot of the salesman telling me what I need. I know what I need. And I don't put up with people overselling me.

The key to a house is order. That's why it's important – I've read books – that's why it's important to buy a house made before 1970. After 1970, the industry fell under the – I don't know, the spell, I guess you could say – of an architect named Bennett Landsdowne, who wrote this little book called The Ultramodern Space. And it changed architecture.

He'd taken all these Eastern ideas like Feng Shui and jumbled them with this post-structuralist nonsense and came out of it with the idea of the home as a “broken space.” Get this – I memorized it -- “A space incomplete insamuch as it needs family to connect it, to bridge the circuit. Any attempt at coherence in a space so meant to be filled is bound by the nature of its emptiness to be apathetic, callow and weak in design.” So what he was saying, basically, was that an empty house is an incomplete house, so there was no point in trying to make it complete by itself.

So Landsdowne built what he called “ultramodern” houses. Houses where the rooms and corridors didn't match up the way they used to. You'd never look out of the door of one room and through the door of another. Corridors would be short and rooms would connect to each other without a major artery. That's where the whole “family room” idea comes from – a central space that serves as a “functional corridor,” to be given meaning by the occupants of the house rather than its designers. That was another big thing for this Landsdowne: having the occupants define the house. No obvious bedroom, living room, kitchen. Everything was designed to be generic and given shape, I guess, by the family moving in.

It was supposed to be a revolution in home design. It was a disaster.

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HOWIE

I'm what you might call a professional ghost. I guess Knowlton put you on to me, huh? Yeah, he's a good guy. Been in this business longer than me, 30 years or something. I've only been at it for 25, but when you've got a unique service like mine, so to speak, it gets a bit easier.

So people move outta a house, and they wanna sell it, but maybe it takes a while. And they got things to do. Company transfer, death in the family, what have you. So the house, it's gonna be empty for a while. An' you know what kind of shit happens to an empty house. Kids break inna it, people checkin' it out, starin' in the windows, even – there was this one Christmas – I'll get inna that later.

People need somebody to make the house look like there's people there. Mowin' the lawn, turnin' lights on an' off, openin' and closin' the drapes, wavin' to the neighbours, that sort of thing. Not somebody livin' in the house, but animating the house. Like a ghost. This presence that takes care a' this stuff without you havvina worry about it. An' that's what I do. I'm like a ghost.

I take care of a dozen, two dozen places at a time, depends on the season. Basically drive around, make sure everything's okay, flip a few lights here and there, wave to everyone I freakin' see, check for broken windows, popped locks, anything missing outside, yadda yadda. The idea is nobody knows nobody's home.

Yeah. A few Christmases ago I was taking care of this place about a five-minute drive outside town. Two-story place set back a bit from the road. A sweet gig because half the house was on timers, so all I really had to do was the sweep and move some stuff around outside every now an' again. But this one day I swing by an' lights are on inna house and I'm thinking that the timer isn't due to go off for another hour. An' when I get closer to the house I hear singin'. Singin'. Like Christmas carols. So I'm wonderin' if maybe there's a stereo in there I forgot about, something with a radio on, but it's not good singin'. It's shit singin'. It's like me singin', but four or five of mes.

So I take it slow and creep up and look inna window, and there's all these bums from town. Musta popped a lock round back. An' they're havin' a bum Christmas. They got a little tree from somewhere and they've all got this shit wrapped up in newspaper, old shoes and Salvation Army sweaters an' stuff, an' they're passing it around. A few of 'em are kinda tanked up. They're havin' a bum Christmas. Singin', laughin', a few of 'em even have this meal they made from whatever they could find, an' they're all sitting around the living room havin' a good time and smilin' an' just bein' happy. Don't know how many times you get to do that, livin' like these fellas.

So I left and called the cops, and a half-hour later the wagon showed up and they hauled all the bums outta the house an' I fixed the lock and cleaned up the place, which wasn't too bad. I felt kinda bad but it's the job, you know? Twenty-odd years in the business I'm not gonna let some bums give me a bad reputation.

LESLIE

I had to deal with a ghost dog once. This guy, young fella, he called my number in the paper because there was a dog in his house and they didn't own a dog. It was sort of a metallic thing, that barked like a human coughing, he said. I don't normally do this sort of stuff, but the kid sounded scared. Really scared. So I checked it out, and I didn't find anything directly but whenever the radio was on I could feel it brushing past me. Especially under the table. There'd be this tingle against your leg like when a dog walks up, nails clicking on the linoleum, and puts his head up against your leg. “I want treats.” That would happen. I never saw the dog. I never heard this human bark. But I felt it.

But then, it's been – it's been a busy year. People tell me that I'm full of it. All the time. People tell me that we're in the age of science, and that all I am is a con man that feeds on mystic trickery and preys on the gullible.

But every year I get busier.

The headlines talk about psychology and the scientists say that things are impossible and every year I get more calls. You tell me why. I guess a lot of people believe what they know, not what the newspapers tell them. And when you experience something in my line of work, you know it. You know forever. It's not the sort of thing you can forget.

I know you don't believe me. I can feel it. And that's okay, really. A lot of people don't. Some of my best friends, they look me in the eye and say they believe, but I can feel they don't. Not really. They just dine out on me. They tell their friends they know me, every time there's an article in the paper or I run another ad in the Tribune. It's a good story. It's a good laugh. “I know Leslie Phibbs.”

And yes, before you ask, the last name is a problem. I don't change it because it's my real last name and my parents would be angry with me if I changed it. They died ten years ago in a car crash, but we both know that doesn't change a thing.

You know I'm making a fund? I've been laying away cash for over a decade now. Enough that I can take a few influential skeptics – people like yourself, people that don't believe but keep an open mind – take a few of these people, people in the public eye, people with an audience. And offer them money to stay in any of a number of sites for a week. Not for one night. The one-night thing is bunk. For a week. It's a question of... familiarity, a lot of the time. If you were a game warden and you had to choose between catching the idle poacher who wanders through your woods just looking, or catching the one who has set up camp with one thousand bullets, which would you choose?

There are places I haven't been able to resolve. I admit it. It might be bad for business, but it's a business built on trust and honesty and that's everything to me. I need to be perfectly honest with my customers. And I can't work without their trust, so if they think I'm holding anything back, the relationship... well, it doesn't work.

And these places, the ones I can't ... we call it 'resolving' in my line of work, I think I might have already mentioned that ... those are the ones I'd have these skeptics stay in for a week. No loud parties. No drugs. No soporifics. They have to live in it as though it were a normal house, but of course it isn't, ha ha. And I can't take responsibility for anything that happens to them. That's why I offer the money. It's hazard pay, you see. I've taken some risks, so if you're going to question me... you can take some risks too. For pay.

On my tax form it says I'm a “land value consultant.” And a lot of the work I do is for real estate agents. They need somebody like me, see. Not that they all know what's out there, a lot of them are ignorant. Salespeople, they believe in money, you know? There's this one – but that's not important. They hire me because they know some clients, like me, have seen things. Experienced things. And they can spot a disturbed house a mile away, these clients. They need to have that house spotless, walls made of eggshell and carpet steam-cleaned. Floors re-sanded. They need to know that the house is clean. And I clean houses. Just not regular cleaning.

TRIBUNE

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JANINE

Sometimes when Barry's asleep I look at him and I wonder who the real Barry is. He's been building up artifice for years, pretending to be who he's not, crafting this public persona. In public he's always laughing, smile and a handshake, but I see him at night sometimes when he doesn't know I'm in the room. I've seen the way he touches things, like he's been lost for years and is just re-learning the shapes of the things he loves.

It's yearning. That's the word, he gives off yearning like a sad blue glow. It's like there's a space around him and the rest of the world, a buffer, and sometimes I wonder if this was something that happened to him, you know, since we married, or if he's always been like this, been keeping one foot in the dream, and I just never noticed before.

I told you about the car, right? Well, we won't get into that again. But it keeps up. It continues. And sometimes I think it's like real estate. That Barry was vacant ... no, not vacant. Barry's always been Barry. Like Barry had a vacancy. That Barry wanted a tenant, or a roommate, or maybe – who are those people you cook for? A boarder. That Barry wanted a boarder.

Last week he bought me a ring. Not anything too fancy, but out of the blue there's Barry with a jewelry box, and it's this nice little, well, you can see it here – the twisted silver and gold braiding. Simple but elegant. And I didn't know what to say. So I looked at Barry, and his face is blank and he says “I needed to buy that for you.” Just like that. And then he leaves the room.

Anyone else I'd think he was having an affair. But not Barry. In some ways I wish he were, it would simple things up for me. But if he's cheating on me, it's with that dream Barry has of himself in his head. His tenant. Every day it's another inch into dream, and soon Barry might vacate the premises and then I don't know who I'll be living with any more.

It's sort of exciting, in a way. I'm not scared. I don't think Barry could ever imagine himself as anything but kind, so anything but kind isn't something he could ever become. So I'm not scared. A bit concerned for Barry, but there's nothing I can really do, right? Therapy... he hasn't. He won't. We tried a while ago, after Donny, but Barry won't now. Not since Donny.

So now I'm waiting to see when dream-Barry's going to take over the lease. And sometimes I wonder if dream-Barry is Barry at all. There's all sorts of things out there, I think. Looking for houses.

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KNOWLTON

When people deal with Knowlton Reckert, they know what they're gonna get. No questions asked. I've had people that have bought houses, sold houses, they always come back to me. Because they know with Knowlton Reckert, you're going to get a clean house. No fuss, no muss. I have a friend in the storage business, and he gives me bulk rates to pass on to his clients so they can get everything out and paint the walls. Eggshell, that's right.

You know why I like that colour? Because people walk in, they know they're in an egg. This house is an egg, and it can hatch and any kind of bird can come out of it. It can be a seagull! It can be a phoenix! It can be the goose that lays the golden eggs. Any kind of bird can hatch from an egg. That's what I sell. I sell potential.

TRIBUNE

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MARY

He infected architecture. That's the best word for it, infected. This “ultramodern house” became the hot thing and then it became the universal thing. That's why you can't find new homes that make sense any more. They're jumbled. In my house, there is order. Rooms match up. You can look out the door of the kitchen and see straight to the dining room table. The dining room is separate from the living room. The bedrooms do not adjoin a television room. That's all there is to it.

Another reason to buy homes built before 1970: lead-based paint. There's a lot of crap out there about how dangerous it is, but it's not. It lasts forever, and there's a depth to the colour you can't get out of today's paints. It's got a grace to it. You just have to remember not to eat the chips, right? Don't lick the walls and you'll be fine. It's like they dummied up the world to protect the stupid. Who lets their child eat paint? I don't. But when you can't look down the hall and into your kid's bedroom, who knows what the kid is up to? You see? Landsdowne infected architecture, and parents can't see their children any more. It doesn't make any sense.

There's also the union issue. Before 1970, building contractors were independent, but in 1970 there was a national builders' association formed. They said it was for uniform standards, but really it was for money. Nobody's fooling anybody here. And the whole country basically became this one giant union shop. They were all in on it, all across the country. All of them. You know what happens when they get a foothold. First it's more money, then standards start to drop. Drop way down. And you can't just sack the company building your house, because the next one along is just going to be part of the same damn union, resentful because you fired their “brothers.”

That's why it's important to get a home built before 1970. That's the demarcation line. That's my Maginot line for house-buying, and I've bought a lot of houses. That's all there is to it.

TRIBUNE

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LESLIE

You've seen the houses that just don't sell, right? At the end of the street, cobwebby and questionable. You can paint the walls a thousand times, wash those rugs, do those floors. And you just can't unload those houses. Because they're not clean. They're just not clean. There's something in them you can't just scrub up with some CLR and stick it in a bucket and flush it down the toilet. That's why you need me. People need people that can take care of these things. People who are willing to admit they don't know everything about the universe but by that admission gain some ability to control what happens in it.

New houses, old houses – people think it's old houses, but that's got nothing to do with it. No – o – thing. Sometimes it's brand new houses that get it. A real estate agent will be trying to unload a plot of land, or a developer's house, and ... it won't go. Won't budge. Good neighborhood, good construction, but it just won't budge. Can't move it. And then they get a buyer in there who tells them they get that feeling. And they call me.

It's like riding a bike, a bit. You can't unlearn it. You can't forget it. Once you've been there, you'll know what I mean and you'll know why I'm necessary.

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HOWIE

Spooky stuff? Yeah, you'd think, but no. Nothin'. And I'm not even one of those skeptic guys, I think there could be stuff out there, but nothin' I've ever seen. Kids bein' stupid from time to time, but nothin' that ever really gave me the weirds.

People are weird enough. Trust me on this. We don't need anything else to freak us out, you think hard enough of what people do. The places I ghost are supposed to be empty, right? Eggshells, Knowlton says. He talks a lot about potential and shit. But the things I find in there. Boy. You see a wall enough, it don't matter what colour it is, if there's somethin' on that wall under the paint you're gonna see it. And I can see things behind that eggshell white. I see what people have left behind, you know? Marks on the wall and such.

It's not seeing things, as much as seeing where things aren't. A lot of people paint the wall but they don't resurface it so much. I see a lot of blank walls, I guess, in my profession. And if you don't resurface that wall, if you don't take the drywall plaster and drop a coat on there and smooth it out before you paint, you get this thing, these marks in the new paint where the old indentations were. Where people hang paintings. And if you look really hard, you can see what used to be painted on the wall. If there were patterns.

I've done a lot of painting. There was this one thing I did in the Seventies, when the whole lead paint thing came out, I – actually, I'm not supposed to talk about it. Forget about that. But I know paint, that's what I'm saying. And the new paint just layers, and if the light catches it just right, you can see the shape of what was there underneath. There was this one house, and on this room in the basement – aw, it's not important. It's just ... people are weird. You don't need anything spooky. People are weird as it is.

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MARY

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and undo things, you know? Go back and tell the world that Landsdowne and this Ultramodern movement was the wrong move. A bad move. But it's like people are mice. People are mice and they get an idea in their heads and they can't get it out.

This ultramodern thing, if you look into it, you can't see how it was ever a good idea. Like poured concrete – that came out of this. That was another element of the whole thing. People thought “we can do it, so it's good.” There's no – they get the idea and it gets stuck in there, right? And there's no way to change their minds. It doesn't matter how right you are, they've got this fixed idea. Like a train on a track, and you know that the bridge is out but the conductor just won't listen.

The ultramodern houses feel like there's a spirit to them. A ... what's the word? Malicious. That's perfect. There's a malicious spirit in them. Like they're permanently infected with the idea of modernity before functionality. Style before soul. And sometimes I just get the creeps, when I'm alone in these places, this weird sense that there's something right behind me.

No, no, that's wrong. It's not malice. It's loneliness. Loneliness so deep it feels like hate. These houses feel lonely and disconnected and wrong, somehow. I like to keep a clean house, and I don't feel like these places could ever be clean. Not really.

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KNOWLTON

Every house has potential. Every house. And when I see a new family step into one and start thinking about it, I can feel the flush of excitement. I can see the next few decades unrolling in my mind for this family, this house.

Sometimes I wonder about where my life will be when this all unrolls. These families, living their lives and growing families and growing old together, and I'll be selling the houses. Peddling the houses. In the old days, salespeople were called peddlers. I don't know if it really has anything to do with pedaling a bicycle, but I like to pretend it does. It's a nice image. Somebody pedaling a bicycle, always moving forward but never getting to a destination, never stopping the journey. A pedaler. A peddler. Because it's a never-ending road, sales. There's no end of the line. All you have is perpetual track or broken bridges. And I've sold... I've sold a lot of houses. I remember back when they found out about lead paint, the lead paint scare of ... '74 or so, I guess. I was just starting out. I didn't know what to do about it, all these homeowners suddenly asking for houses without lead-based paint and what was I doing, I was selling all these homes and half of them were empty. There was nobody to repaint them.

But I knew a guy that sort of took care of things. Kind of a freelance caretaker. And I had him paint over the lead-based walls, late at night. He painted over the toxic paints with oils, and for whatever reason the hardware store that week, it was having this huge clearance sale on eggshell white. And I would go into these houses, three or four in the morning to see how he was doing, and I'd think “this is nice, this eggshell. I could use this.” And that became my thing. Now people, people in the biz, they know if they're showing a Knowlton Reckert house without even looking inside. Just a quick peek through the windows – oh, eggshell white.

I bet the lead paint is still there, in some of those houses. That was the problem with the stuff. You couldn't get rid of it. It was indestructible. The surest methods for removing it – sanding, heat-blasting – they were also the most dangerous. So I just kept covering it up and selling the houses. Sometimes I swear, I swear I'm back in one of those houses when I'm selling, and I can see the lead paint behind the eggshell white. It's cracked. The lead paint under the eggshell is cracking and you can see how it's forming patterns, crazing across the wall, zigzagging around and making patterns you can just discern behind the eggshell when the light hits just right.

Families are going to be born and give birth and grow and die and I'm still going to be selling them houses. I'm a peddler on a tireless bicycle. I'm the conductor of a train that doesn't end. And I love my job, I really do, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like to stop pedaling. To sit for a spell and really talk to people, instead of sell to them. But selling is what I do. I've been selling for so long I've forgotten how to talk to people, really talk to them. If I tell them about my problems, I'm selling my misery. If I tell them stories, I'm selling my past. You get locked down and strapped in and the train doesn't stop, even though the stations have been closed since before you were born.

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LESLIE

One key indicator is what you can see in a blank wall. In a disturbed house, there's often a lot of electromagnetic activity, and this – a lot of people don't know this – this exerts some long-term force pressure on the walls and causes these cracks in the underwall, the drywall, whatever you want to call it. These hairline fractures. And if the light, if the light's just right, you can start to see shapes in the wall. Almost invisible. Sometimes I think there's a language in there I can't read, and if I could just figure it out... but there's things we're not meant to know, right? I mean, there's the great mystery.

It's important to know what people have been dreaming. That's very important. Not just in the house, because the house is frequently empty, but in neighboring houses. Up and down the street a bit. There's often a key in there to what's bothering the house, what's stuck in there. Stuck in the walls. You can piece it together. I have this standard questionnaire – actually, I think I might have a copy on me somewhere. Here we go. I'll, uh, read it out to you.

“Hello. This is part of a survey on dreams being conducted for PhD research at the university. Please take the time to answer the following questions honestly. All answers are anonymous and confidential.”

I include a self-addressed stamped envelope. The university thing, the PhD thing, it's well, you know. Some people get I don't know, skittish. So it's best to give them something they can hang onto so they'll fill the survey out.

“One. Have you been having unusual dreams lately, or any time within the last two years?

Two. Have these dreams featured any of the following things, or reasonable approximations: a singing child, heavy snowfall, apple blossoms, wilting flowers, mysterious people, shadows, the alphabet in reverse, non-sequential numbers, a dog with a human bark, a woodstove, or ice?

Three. If yes, please describe these dreams with as much detail as you can provide.

Four. Are these dreams recurring?

Five. What is your emotional condition when you wake up? (i.e. exhausted, happy, scared, refreshed, worried, sad)

Six. Are these recurring dreams?”

And then I wait for results. Sometimes people just don't reply, but you'd be surprised how many do. I think if they – if they're being touched by a dream, they want to share it. They want to let me know about it. I think they know that it's not really PhD research but they know I can help them.

The things in question two, they can be changed around a bit to reflect the house that's under investigation. The current ones, they cover a sort of range of things that almost typically describe a disturbance.

People want to talk if they have these dreams. They want to share them, but there isn't really a venue for it normally, you know? You can't just talk to your co-worker about the dream with the dog that barks human, the snow, the shadows that move behind the wall, rippling the paint so only you can see where they've been. Most people just aren't equipped to talk about these things. And I think these are messages being passed on, I think that whoever is sending the messages can't talk in a language we know, not any more, but I think if you're receiving these messages and you don't pass them on, you get this backlog. It's like if you have a mailbox and you just keep getting more and more mail but you never take it out of the box – you never deal with the mail – eventually the box is going to burst, right? It's going to burst. You need to deal with that mail. And there's hardly anyone left that can deal with it any more.

That's why disturbed houses come in sequences. It's like an – I don't want to say 'infection,' because that implies some sort of malicious presence, and I don't think this is about malice, it's not about that. It spreads virally, though. The disturbance disturbs nearby houses, and then those spread outwards. There's almost nobody left who knows how to deal with these things. There used to be remedies, home remedies, but they've been lost. I've seen whole neighborhoods disturbed, radiating out from some central point, somewhere where something happened. I look for an empty house with crazing behind the paint. That's a good spot for an epicenter. Because people carry it, but people are also buffers. That's why it's not everywhere. Because people absorb the disturbance, and from house to house it diminishes like ripples in a pond. So by the time you get three, four houses out it's very quiet. Unless something happens.

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HOWIE

Hold on. You asked about weird stuff, I said nothin', right? But there was this one thing. The dog house. Almost forgot about it. This was one of Knowlton's contracts, right? I was s'posed to be takin' care of this old house a bit in the country. Owner had gone away. Don't know where. His mother died and he skipped town or something, relatives told Knowlton to sell the place. It was in terrible shape, but Knowlton, you know him, he had me in there painting over all the walls. Eggshell white.

And I'd go there at night, just to look in on the place, make sure kids weren't breakin' in or nothin'. This was the sort of house kids'd break into. You know what I mean? It was that sorta house, all Victorian, like. Peaked roofs, a little tower room. There was this garden out front, all tangled, like somebody'd been trying to grow this nice garden and failed, just utterly failed. Dead geraniums, echinacea gone to seed, and this weird spreading flower, I'd never seen it before, just taking over the place. The lawn too, even. It was kind of creepy, this big dead garden just lyin' like a corpse in the yard.

So I'm in there three, four days, just paintin'. Keeps me busy and the pay's all right, you know? Get some music on, light a smoke, do a wall, repeat. Takes the mind off life's problems. But I'm a dog guy. You gotta know that. I grew up with dogs, I own two dogs, Terry and Buttle. I love dogs. And I just sort of know when a dog's around, you know? It's like you can get to hear the breathing, that little click of the claws on the floor, so quiet you can't pick it up consciously but ask any dog guy, they know when there's a dog around.

And there's a dog in this house. I know it. I'd stake my damn life on it. I can feel it, the dog, and I keep turnin' around an' there's nothin' there. I even walk around the house with a Milk-Bone – I keep some in my pockets, y'unnerstand, for the dogs at home – and nothin'. But there's a dog somewhere in this house, and I know that like I know the hair on my head. You can't see it but it's there, all right. You can feel it.

So I keep this up for a couple days, paintin' and lookin' around every once in a while for this dog, and I hear this noise out in the yard, it sounds like a human trying to bark. Like a person, some guy, is imitating a dog. And I look out the window an' there's nothing there.

That sort of got me feelin' weird, boy. But then after a few days I figure I've never known a dog that's hurt a person unless it was raised mean, an' this don't feel like a mean dog. You get a different sense of a mean dog, an animal get away sense, and I never had that once in the house. Just the feelin' the dog was there, and the barking. So I let it go, and I finished the job, and I never once saw that dog. An' later I asked Knowlton, I asked if there'd been a dog in the house, and he just said he didn't know, he'd only been out there a couple times and after the house was abandoned.

It sold a couple weeks later. Young couple, just starting out. Nice folks. Nice folks.

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JANINE

I've been looking for a house lately, for Barry and I. I think a change of scenry might help us both. Having something to look at other than the same walls all the time. Nothing radical, maybe just outside town or just a couple of towns over, not a huge move but a different set of walls, of people, you know? I have this one friend, Mary, she moves every three or four years. She says she doesn't like being settled. “Only things that take root can rot.” That's what Mary says. But she love houses, loves them. Especially older ones. She just loves visiting real estate agents and touring houses and just looking at them. I'm sure she's on at least a dozen agent Rolodexes around town. Barry doesn't even want to deal with her any more. Says she's too much bother now, and when he sells a house he likes ti to stick and with her it never does. That's Mary. She's got that confidence.

But Barry's a real estate agent, and I don't know if he's in a position to – I don't think he's up to looking for a house for us. He'd know why, and I'd know why, and it'd just make everything awkward. So I've been looking at houses with this guy from another company, a different company from Barry's. Knowlton something. He's in the ads in the paper all the time. And he – Barry's a good salesman, he's a diligent real estate agent, don't get me wrong – but this Knowlton, Knowlton loves houses. I mean, he loves them. And he's so warm and personable when he shows you around, and you can really tell that he – well, he loves houses. More than most people love anything. So you sort of get the thrill being with him, and you kind of just want to buy a house from him because he loves them so much.

The down side is he deals a lot in – I don't even know how to describe it. Creepy houses, if that doesn't sound too weird. Houses that just feel a bit lonely inside, a bit disconnected. And there's often this guy around, doing odd jobs, painting the walls eggshell white or something. He's got a weird feeling to him. Overweight, never shaven, and he sort of ... well, smells bad. Maybe he's a relative of Knowlton's or something. Maybe Knowlton hires him because of that. I don't know. But Knowlton is so enthusiastic about a house, so effusive, and I'm thinking it's a bit depressing-feeling, and there's this strange man slapping eggshell paint on the walls.

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HOWIE

Knowlton doesn't know this, but I collect keys. Every house I work on, I get a key cut. And I got them all labeled in this fire safe in the house. It's amazing, the people that move into a place and never change the locks. Like they think the old owners will never come back, never want to just see the place.

Sometimes I let myself in, late at night when everyone's asleep. I'll just slip in the back door, take a quick look around. Because I get curious, you know. I'm in there painting things eggshell white, turning the lights on and off every night, and I never get to see how it winds up. How it all turns out. So I just take a peek. And usually, the people seem like real nice, decent people. They're living their lives. That's all I want to see. Then I go. I leave them be.

KNOWLTON

Nobody knows this, but I take pictures. After a family moves into the house, I'll drive by every evening at around the same time, just after nightfall, and take pictures of them through the windows. I have a telephoto lens. And I have this album at home, a photo album, I have several of them, actually. And it tracks the histories of these families for the first month or so in the house – settling in, decorating, putting things on the walls, being a family together. I feel I'm entitled to this. I sold them their future, I like to know where it's going, at least in the short term.

I collect families, I guess you could say. Over six hundred so far. It's amazing, going back thirty years and looking at the photos. Amazing how things have changed. Some day they'll make a book from these photos, they'll put them all into a book. Over six hundred families, six hundred little histories, spanning probably forty, forty-five years by the time I'm done. Then they'll know something about Knowlton Reckert. They'll know something about sales. They'll know something ... they'll know something about real estate.

ABSOLUTE TERROR, PART ONE

FOREST

Boy. I guess this happened when – it'd have to be 1963. That's the only thing that makes sense. They had one of those shows on the television where you put some little kid on there and the interviewer asks him a question and everybody laughs at the little kid's stupid answer. Well, that's what I thought of those things at the time. Everyone said it was charming and sweet and all that shit, but all I saw was grown-ups laughing at some little kid.

I didn't laugh much when I was a kid.

So my parents, this show is shooting in the city, and my parents write in and somehow get me on the show. I guess they sent in a photo or something, and I looked good. Maybe they wrote a letter detailing all the dumb crap I said all the time. I don't know. But I was on this show, and they drove me into the city, and I was shoved into this studio.

Television was live in those days, or at least this sort of thing was done live. Cheaper that way, you understand. So I was there in this little checkered suit, black bow tie – parents dressed kids stupider back then too. We looked like this little, I don't know, these little used car salesmen. You'd half expect the kids in church back then to pull out cheroots and start whaskin' on the wheels of all the cars in the parking lot.

So I get on the show and the host is talking to me and these other kids, and he's having a great time, laughing at me, and the audience is laughing at me, stupid little kid can't pronounce “spaghetti,” all this stuff. And the host, this jerk in his own checkered suit and bow tie, he asks me what I want to be when I grow up. What do you want to be when you grow up, little fella? Little fella. He actually said that. And he's expecting some answer like a fireman or a policeman or maybe an astronaut, they're making a pretty big deal out of the whole space program, you understand. So he's asking me what I want to be when I grow up.

And I look him straight in the eye and say “it doesn't matter.”

And he sort of pauses, and then his grin gets even bigger, he's thinking I'm about to say something king stupid and everyone's going to laugh and I don't know, he's going to get an even bigger bow tie, and asks me why not.

I don't know how I knew to do this, but I did. I guess I'd been watching him and they way he turned. But I knew that the camera with the light above it was the one that was on, so I looked straight into the camera, a six-year-old kid, and I said very slowly “because we're all going to die when they drop the bomb on us.”

JAMIE

The history of the twentieth century is etched in its horror movies. No, seriously. Nobody believes me but it's true. This is serious stuff. This is what I think. If you look at pop culture, really look at it, it traces the history of our society. Because if you want to understand something, really understand it, you have to look at what – at what scares it. Look at the major trends.

Okay, we'll start with early horror movies. You know some of the first movies ever made were horror movies? Truth. Truth. Some of the first movies ever made in Germany. I'm talking like 1920 or thereabouts. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Nosferatu. These are all silent movies – Nosferatu was an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, even. And then in the States you get early movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy. Now ask yourself: late '20s, early '30s, what does this mean? What do all these movies mean? What are these horror movies telling us about the spirit of the times?

Two things. The first is death. It's all about death, and things coming back from the dead. Death is the ultimate barrier. The second thing, though, is the transgressor. The invader. There's this terrific, truly terrific, fear of somebody coming from the outside and taking over. And in many cases not just through brute force, but – especially in the case of the Germans – by subverting your will, your vitality, your spirit. Look at the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. A peaceful small town invaded by a sinister hypnotist and his sleepwalking zombie-type slave. Not only can he take over the town through force, he can take your mind as well. As with Nosferatu. He doesn't just take your body, he twists your soul until you, too, do his evil bidding. What are the Germans afraid of? They're afraid of death, obviously, but they're also afraid of a subverting influence. An enemy you don't always recognize as an enemy, but who can destroy you by controlling your mind and your spirit. And you know what happened to Germany in the 1930s. When all the kids watching these movies, when all these kids grew up.

America? Same thing, but more violent. Less mental control, more straight juggernaut violence. Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, the Wolfman – they also come from beyond, they also thwart death, but they'll just roll right over you. They'll stomp you into the ground because they're massive brutes, engines of destruction. I mean we've got a young nation here, respectively. A young nation finding its place in the world, and you've got to understand – what do they do after World War I? What position do they hold next to the old powers? There's a fear there, a fear that everyone's just going to pack up and head over and just destroy them. But America's afraid of subversion, too. The big one there is Dracula, which bears no explanation. And The Invisible Man, came out about the same time too. Again, you have these influences. These creatures that move in your mind, in the case of the Invisible Man, that move among you undetected. But even the other movies. What's Frankenstein's Monster but the creation of science? The Mummy – a monster now, but once he was royalty. You could even read a bit of anti-Royalism in there, a touch of the old Down With King George sentiment, I suppose. And the Wolfman – well, by day he looks like us, doesn't he? He kills only by night.

And when does this end? When does the era of the big-monster movie end? The juggernauts all die around the mid-1940s. Just after World War II. The German film industry is broken forever, and the Americans ... after World War II, they sort of lose interest in threats from beyond. They get bored with supernatural monsters on the rampage. They have new things to worry about.

FOREST

You have to understand. When I was a kid – this is just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, you understand, I got scared of nuclear war. And I don't mean just like worried about it. I mean really, really fuckin' scared. Like I'd lie in bed not sleeping at night because I couldn't see the point in the next day. My parents didn't know nothin' about this. They thought I was just quiet.

But that answer I gave on television... it was the truth. I wasn't trying to bring the show down or anything. It was just the truth for me at that time that I didn't see the point in figuring what I was going to be when I grew up, because I wasn't going to grow up. I was going to die when the Reds dropped the bomb. It's hard to understand if you weren't there. It's hard to – there was a dread, a constant dread, and I think it seeped into all the kids back then. You look at us today. Look at the baby boomers. Running around in blue jeans getting Botox injections. Scared of age. Scared of death. There's no such thing as a good end to a good life any more, and there used to be. I'm sure of that. But we've all got the fear in us, got the fear right down to our bones. People don't even go to church any more, they're so scared of confronting the ultimate answer that church is supposed to give you.

I don't know. Now that I'm analyzing, maybe that's why I got into toys. Because I loved science as a kid. I still do. But maybe I applied it to toys because my life, my childhood got stolen by these bombs and I wanted to give kids something so they wouldn't have a crummy childhood like I did.

JASMINE

Nuclear war? I don't really think about it. I mean, it's one of those things that I have no power over, right? It's like some guy with his button. And I can't call him up to tell him to push it or not to push it, so I don't worry about it. It's like worrying about meteorites. You could go around with, like, this titanium helmet on all the time, or you could just live your life and realize that if a meteorite hits it hits and what are you going to do?

What I do, is, I'm a dancer. I dance for people. I'm just starting out, so I do these little shows, we have this group that does African dance and we do these cultural festivals and displays for schools and stuff. It's just a little group. But we dance for people and what I like to think is, we're showing them some beautiful things and some new cultures and that does two things, right? It teaches them that life is full of beauty and that the world is full of different things that they can learn about and, like, appreciate. And maybe these aren't the people pushing the bomb button, these people I dance for, but maybe they know people and they know people and it's this ripple effect, right? Like if everyone had someone dancing for them, then everyone would feel better and nobody would want to push the button.

Why are we talking about this, anyway? It's so 1980s. I remember being six or seven years old and that Reagan guy, President Reagan, was always on the television talking about nuclear weapons and the Russians, and I just wanted to watch cartoons, right? But he was talking about how we needed more bombs because they had more bombs and I remember, I remember I saw this guy on the news saying we had enough bombs to blow up the whole world twice over, and I remember thinking “what do we need more bombs for, we can only blow up the world once.” And I was only six or seven. I think I thought we could all live on spaceships or something when we blew up the world.

But I don't worry about bombs so much now. I mean, I guess they're still out there, but nobody talks about them any more. The funny thing, the funny thing is when I was a kid everyone was worried about the Russians and there was this movie, Red Dawn, where like the Russians took over America or something. And then it turned out that the Russians were falling apart the whole time, they were just lying to the whole world about their troops and their armies when they were practically all starving. And they were lying because they were worried about the American invading them!

And I'm just starting high school when I find this out, and I asked the Geography teacher why the Americans kept all this up for so long, when if they'd just been honest and the Russians had been honest we wouldn't have all these bombs. He didn't answer, really. He just looked at me.

JOHN

I figure if they start a nuclear war I'm in pretty good shape. As good a shape as anywhere, I mean. I'm a good five hundred klicks from any major urban centre, anywhere worth blowin' up, I've got a small farm an' the lake's not too far off. I dunno. They say these things can take out the whole world, but I can't see how a bomb could get dropped over the horizon and still make it to here. I mean, I hear on the news that it's possible, that they can do that, but I still can't figure it.

This is still one of the quiet places. And I'm happy with it like that. A lot of patches like mine, you hear about folks moving up to “get away from it all,” building cottages on lakes and camps in the bush and such. Coming up for a week every year, fancying they're outdoorsmen. Beats the hell out of me. Build the life you want, you won't have to escape, that's what I say. For now, though, they haven't got up this far yet. I still have the run of the land up here, and it's pretty much all mine, and those that own what ain't don't much care if it sees some use anyway. Numbered corporations. Sometimes I see a helicopter fly by, making sure nobody's snuck up here to plant marijuana crops, other than that I'm pretty much alone. The orchard takes care of my fruit for the year, I keep some animals out the back and hay a couple of acres for the winter; hunting takes care of most of the rest. Vegetable garden stretches around the barn there. It's not bad.

Wasn't born up here, no. Got sort of pushed up. Farming family a ways south, five boys, me in the middle. My little brothers went off to school and I sort of had a falling out with Lyle and Michael after my folks died. Set out on my own, used the inheritance to buy this land up here and set to it. Built the barn and house myself. They're a little rough-lookin', but they do the trick. Figure as long as you can tell which one's the house and which's the barn, I'm doing all right.

I get down to the city once a year, buy some record albums at the Goodwill and clothing and such for the winter. Bought a radio once, the kind with a winding crank, but couldn't hear much up here and didn't much care for what I could hear. I figure it's just the same people robbing and cheatin' and killin' each other, just with different names, and it don't really affect me none. I head down to the maildrop once a month and pick things up, send the government my tax form sayin' I don't make enough to be taxed every year, and that is what it is. They don't believe me, they can send someone up to check.

At night I think about the next day, mostly. What needs doin' and what I can get out of the way. That's the most of it. I used to think about my family a lot, about why we fell out and what went on there, but the past is the past and there's no use chewin' on it when it's got no taste left, as my dad used to say. Think about God a bit too. What the hell the whole point of it is. I got raised by the Bible and it's hard to put that stuff out of your head, but at the same time it's sort of like the news: it don't really change and it don't affect me much, so I don't spend a lot of time on it.

There's more time to think in the winter, but I spend most of it thinkin' about how I'm freezing.

JAMIE

So before the war, horror was all about invasion, right? Invaders from space, invaders from foreign countries, invaders from our past. But then World War Two comes and goes, and after that everything changes.

What do we have? Well, Godzilla was made in the '50s. The first one. And that's not just a North American thing, that's a Japanese thing. But let's see – Them, Tarantula, Deadly Mantis – horror was big back then. And radioactive, right? Again: horror movies are a marker of our time. Look at the big debates of the '50s, look at what everyone's talking about in the papers, on the radio. It's economics. Foreign policy. Russia. But you look at horror movies, you know. You know what's on everybody's mind. The bomb. Mutation.

It's not about supernatural invaders from somewhere beyond us now, it's about us. It's about our technology wrecking everything and turning things that used to be harmless into monsters. Making everyday life a nightmare. Think of The Incredible Shrinking Man. Everyday life becomes a horrorshow when technology runs amok. Same with the Attack of the 50-Foot-Woman. You want an insight into the true fears of the pipe-smoking 1950s suburban male? A pissed-off giant woman on the rampage. Technology and the looming spectre of feminism smashing everything in sight.

On the other side of the coin – getting away from the Bomb, getting away from radioactivity – there's a growing dependence on technology. And we'll see this a lot. We fear technology, and we love technology, and maybe the two things aren't so distinct. Movies like The Blob – which also follows an interesting undercurrent, fastidiousness. Things that are clean are safe. Things that aren't clean are dangerous. And here we have this, basically, glob of mud destroying an entire town. What saves it? Technology. Technology saves the town. And in all these other movies, generally, it's an invention or a new application of technology that stops the monster and saves the people. Never applied by scientists, though. Again, it all comes back to the bomb. Scientists used to be heroes, but the '50s movies are where you first start seeing the popular egghead – the impractical theorist that endangers everybody and leaves it up to the football player to save the day.

There's also a spate of teenage monster movies directly aimed at the high-school market. I was a Teenage Frankenstein, Horror at Party Beach, I was a Teenage Werewolf, the GIant Gila Monster, the aforementioned Blob – teens are the heroes, teens are the subject, teens are the entire focus of these movies. Which seems natural, when you consider that teens were the main market for the movies – but this is the first time teens had ever been a market! Before now, they sort of fell in between adults and kids, this uncomfortable adjustment period where childhood is knocked out of you and adulthood shoehorned in. Now – these movies – now teenagers start to get celebrated. Fetishized. Delinquency is paramount – look at the Blob again. You know what the problems are, but your parents just don't see it. They don't understand. They don't get it. All you can do is act out to protect yourself and your friends.

So on the one hand, you have radiation run wild, turning everyday things into monsters. On the other hand you have teenagers running wild, or at least that's the perception. And you have all of this hybridized in the horror movie. Teenagers running wild fighting technology running wild. Teens treated as a buying power for the first time in history. And you have to wonder, in the eyes of the parents – radioactive monsters or teens that are self-determining and willfully independent: which one is the greater horror?

And finally, McCarthy. Communism. The Reds. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the ultimate Communist scare movie. I mean, come on. Your friends are acting strangely. They have new ideas. They're subtly different. They've been replaced by communists! I mean, invaders from space. Come on. This was – I mean, it's classic. It doesn't need any explanation. It's so transparent it's almost scary. Kevin McCarthy is this square-jawed American fighting the Plant People from Outer Space, who have taken over his town and all think... collectively.

But I think that's a beard, if you know what I mean. The big picture is the big three: radioactivity, teenagers, and communism. When you think of the '50s, can you think of three more appropriate scares?

JOHN

I haven't noticed much of a difference since all the squirrels died. Fewer foxes, maybe. I was down on a city run and I noticed all the newspapers so I read up on it a bit. Hadn't even really noticed ... well, maybe I had, but just not up front, you know? Sort of background noticed. Some sort of virus, I guess, something that just gets squirrels. There were all sorts of big theories being tossed around about the end of nature, what we've done to the planet, so on. I just came back up here, kept working the patch. Nothing to do with me.

I figure, if I can just keep working my patch, just keep going, eventually I'll die, or I'll die. No two ways about it. Until then, though, it's a good life. Maybe someday somebody'll happen along and see all I've done and think there was somebody here once, and wonder who I was and what I was doing up here, hours away from anything. I kind of like thinking that. I figure these buildings, the land I cleared, it'll be sort of a ghost up here. Something for people to wonder about. I don't really get lonely any more. I did for a while, but not any more. You find a stability inside yourself and it stops bothering you so much.

FOREST

No-stick cooking spray. Now there. There is an innovation. You spray this stuff on the pan, and it forms this, this layer. This layer of ... grease. But it's not greasy. It forms this sort of barrier between the pan and your food, a non-greasy slippery barrier, and the food doesn't stick to the pan. And it was what people needed at the time. Exactly what people needed at the time. And that's – that's what invention is. It gives people what they need when they need it.

So the moral obligation of the inventor, my moral obligation, is to make things that are needed. In my case, I invent toys. That's what I do. I invented the crawlnuggets, I invented Dial Kids, and I can't talk about the dinosaurs, really, but that was me. That was me too. My moral obligation, my duty, is to make toys that are needed. And that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's not. It's not at all. Because you have to wonder what toys children need. Well. They need toys that will help them develop, help them imagine. And what I do, with my toys, I try to teach them wonder. They need wonder. They need a little jolt to that part of their brain that regulates curiosity, something that will make them say 'why does that happen?' and get out and start looking at the world. They need that more than they need anything, I think.

My responsibility – I am morally obliged, therefore, to make kids wonder about things. To engage them. And this is my personal moral responsibility. And I think I honour it. As an inventor. I invent things that engage wonder. And that is, in my opinion, that is what is needed. I mean, look at the state of the world today. Do children need more death? No. But that is what the immoral industry puts out. That is what it presents. The immoral industry makes war toys and soldier toys. Do women need more make-up? Do they need to be told what to look like? No. But that's what the immoral industry puts out. That's what it gives them. Look like this. Dress like this. Be shaped like this. Kill like this. And it's all these molds, these little plastic molds being stamped out, and now half of them are just advertisements for another movie. That's not moral. That's immoral. Toy Maven was a good magazine once, but now it's just a breeding ground for sycophants and immoral leeches like Bill Mason.

But I'm getting off track. I was talking about morality, the morality of invention. And the inventor's morals, their obligations, centre around making what is needed. But what if what is needed is death? What if the inventor works for, say, the government, and the government says “what we need is something to prevent the people of Country X from killing us.” Is the inventor morally obliged to build bomb Y to protect people from Country X? Is that what's required to keep us safe? And we're protecting, we're protecting our people, but we're not protecting other people, we're not protecting the world. Is this moral? It's needed, but is it moral?

You have to understand. All these bombs, these things, they were made by people. They were made by inventors. But what were they inventing? They were inventing things people needed. And there's a level of abstraction to it – it's like an exercise, it's like a puzzle. It's a theory they're working out. And then the bombs are made and built by people in factories, and who makes them? Just people, but bit by bit. Bit by bit. They make a housing, or they assemble something, or they rivet something together, but it's not a bomb to them, it's just a thing. It's a thing they do. And the soldiers, the people that use the bombs, it's something they've been told to do. It's not their decision. And the people giving the orders, well, they're acting in the best interests of their people. That's why they're there.

So nobody makes the bomb, in the end. And somebody drops the bomb, but only as an extension of the mind behind the bomb, which is responsible for all the people behind him or her, so we all drop the bomb. A little. We all drop a very small bomb and they funnel together, across an ocean and a million minds, to become one focused bomb. One big bomb.

Nobody's immoral because we're all a little immoral. You see? Nobody built the bomb. And nobody dropped it. It's transparent. It's invisible.

JASMINE

Mainly I like to shop. I know that sounds shallow, but that's what I like, so that's what I do. I think that there's really no such thing as shallow, really. Because you are who you are, right? And if you're happy with who you are, like deep down, then nothing is shallow because you're acting on your true self, which is deep. You see? I took this class on like philosophies of the world, and they were all in agreement that, like, you can't be distracted by the superficial things of the world and you have to focus on being connected to like, other people and stuff. And you have to be in touch with, like, your inner being. And God.

I figure I do that best when I'm shopping, because it's like, transcendent for me, you know? I feel like I'm really in touch with myself when I'm looking at clothes, trying things on, and I totally connect to the other people in the shops, so I'm totally connecting with humanity. We talk about everything. And when I'm shopping, I'm so totally at peace. It's like I find some universal harmony running through everything and I'm totally humming to it. It's like meditation for me.

I'm totally careful not to buy stuff made at sweatshops or anything. I read about it on the Internet and I ask store clerks and I try to buy stuff made in this country if I can, right? I mean, sometimes you don't know, and nobody knows, and you just have to say “I totally hope this wasn't made in a sweatshop” and buy it anyway. But what are you going to do? The world isn't, like, perfect. You can't control everything all the time.

People look down on me when I talk about this. I can see it. And there are these girls at school who always dress in, like, sarongs and kerchiefs and are all hippied up, they're always talking about me and my friends and about how we like to shop and totally don't care about anything else. But at least I know what makes me happy, right? I'm totally comfortable with myself. And I'm into clothes from all over the world. This scarf? See the pattern? It was made in Africa or something. And this bracelet I bought at this little store downtown that imports stuff from Indonesia. I love the little frog on it. The store clerk was all totally like they don't exploit anyone to make this stuff, so it's cool.

I mean, you can sit around and talk about the environment and how the world is going to hell and not do anything about it, or you can get out and actually live in it, you know? I like to shop so I go shopping. And I talk to the clerks in the stores and the people I go shopping with, I talk about buying clothes that are like environmentally friendly and don't use toxic dyes or come from sweatshops or anything like that.

You don't have to be, like, angry at the world to care about it, you know? And you don't have to be all, like, anti-corporation anti-government anti-everything. You can pick good and bad. Everything doesn't have to be, so, like, absolute. It's not a black and white world. There's good and bad in, like, everything, and if you label something as just totally bad, you're just going to shut yourself off from the good in it. I don't think that makes the world a better place. I think that makes it a worse place.

JAMIE

The 1960s were a weird time for horror movies. But they were a weird time for everything, weren't they? But the '60s were when horror turned from straight-up radioactive monsters and crazy teens to something more inward-gazing. Something darker. The country is losing its moral compass, and the black-and-white distinctions between good and bad are getting blurry.

I mean, there have been killers before, sure, but always in police movies. Always men on the edge, not monsters in human form. But in the '60s, that all changes. We've stopped looking for fantastic reasons for monsters. The delinquent teens of the 1950s horror movies have grown up, and we're reaping the whirlwind.

The king of the '60s horror pictures was of course Psycho – and it's still called the best horror movie ever made. Who's the monster? What's the horror? In the end, it's just a guy. Not even a particularly handsome, robust, or physically fit guy – just an ordinary sort of man, on the surface. What do we learn? It's a development of both the delinquents of the '50s and the theme of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: people are not always to be trusted. Some folks are good, and some folks are bad, and you can never tell which is which for lookin'. We get the same lesson, but reversed, in Polanski's Repulsion, also from the same era – no matter how beautiful the girl, her mind can be a seething mass of insanity just under the surface.

It wasn't all Psycho in the '60s, though. Hitchcock also made The Birds, but the theme is still there – a seemingly normal woman infects a town and brings the wrath of all Nature down upon it. The entire village is wiped out by an onslaught of birds that seem to follow this woman, and we never know why. Or do we? Hitchcock never says it outright, but the woman in question is known, in the movie, to have lived what they called a “fast” lifestyle back then ... and that, apparently, has displeased even nature itself. Once again, a normal person – even an attractive person – with the taint, destroying a community. You could even see The Birds as a backlash against the sexual revolution, an extended parable about STDs and the perils of living the free life – you, and all those around you, will inevitably pay for it.

Hitchcock wasn't the only one-two punch of the '60s, though. And people call a lot of what Hitchcock did horror movies, but they weren't horror movies. Psycho and The Birds were his only bona fides. The rest were suspense movies, but the line was sort of blurry until the advent of the '60s and Psycho, which pretty much set your suspense films with crazed killers apart from the horror movie, where the visceral connection to the horror is the defining factor, not the mystery. So to speak. But Hitchcock wasn't the only twofer horror king of the '60s. Polanski made Repulsion, and then he made Rosemary's Baby, which comes off pretty goofy now but was completely horrifying at the time. Satan worship was one of those things that just wasn't talked about back then, except in terrible movies where they were all hooded geeks. And here we have a fairly naïve woman caught in a web she can't get out of, and not only Satan worship – which was, again, a pretty taboo subject at the time – but Satan worship practiced by a kindly old couple, the everyman grandma and grandpa types!

So who can't you trust? You can't trust the kindly man that runs the motel. You can't trust that pretty lady who just rolled into town. You can't trust the sweet old couple down the hall, or even your own husband. And you can't trust your brothers in mistrust – which is the lesson in Romero's Night of the Living Dead. People look at this as the grandfather of all zombie movies, and it is, but it's a lot more than that. It's an essay on how people just can't be counted on, even if they're 'your kind of people', when the chips are down. You'd think that a small cluster of people trapped in a house surrounded by flesh-eating zombies could be relied on to pool their efforts, but no – even in this end-of-the-world scenario, they can't.

Look at how paranoid the continent is right now. Especially after the World Trade Center attacks in the U.S. Look at the swelling of the religious right, the bunker mentality of mistrust and fear of anything that doesn't toe the line, and recognize that the spine of it is the generation that saw these films. That learned that nobody can really be counted on but yourself, when the chips are down. That the only person whose faith and honesty you can trust is you.

This is what scared people then, and it's a theme that gets refined and developed over the next forty years. The Sixties were about learning to hate and fear your neighbour. Wait until you see what the Seventies taught us.

JASMINE

People are all like “oh my god oh my god all the squirrels are dead” and it's like this big end of the world thing, but that was five years ago and we're still here, right? I mean, everyone thinks there's going to be some sort of plague or something, but nothing happens. Nothing at all. And then the World Trade Center thing sort of got everyone distracted by Al Quaeda and all that, so everybody stopped talking about where the squirrels went.

It makes a little sad to think that if I have babies, they're never going to see a squirrel. But I don't know what else to think, really. There doesn't seem to be anything else wrong, and a lot of people can't even figure out what the squirrels were for, you know? There are more chipmunks now, they say, and I saw something on television that said there were less foxes, but they weren't sure if that was because of the squirrels or something else. Anyway, it doesn't really affect me.

JOHN

Sometimes late at night I wonder if something bad were to happen – really bad, I mean, like really horrible – how I'd know about it. Would I feel something? Would I just know somehow? Suppose I try the radio one day, the crank thing, and don't get nothin'. I'd probably just think the radio was busted. And I wouldn't know somethin' was wrong until I made the trip to town the next year, and then everything'd be gone.

Maybe I'd feel something inside. I don't know. I saw this movie once, 'bout dead folks coming out of the graves and attacking other folks. I was just a boy, and I didn't get to the movies much. Maybe I saw it at a friend's house or something. Scared the Jesus right out of me, I tell you. Didn't sleep for a week without hearing somethin' at the window and getting the screaming fits. My dad laid into me with the belt until I stopped hollerin' about it, though, and thank God for that. There's worse things in this world to fear than dead folks walkin', and I'll show you that sure enough, he said, and show me he did. He had a practical streak, my pa.

It's weird the things your mind turns to late at night when I'm up here by myself, but that's one of them. I figure on that movie maybe two, three times a year – what if I head to town and it's full of dead folk walkin' around, attackin' each other? What could I do but retreat back up here and hide, and wait for the end? I figure if they were to come after me it'd take 'em years to get here, because they can't drive nothin' and they don't have much of a sense of direction, but they'd get here in the end. And I'd wake up one morning and the house'd be surrounded by the dead, maybe even my family come to claim me, and they'd smash through the windows and the doors and that'd be the end of me.

Unless it was winter. They'd freeze solid if it was winter, and then the animals'd eat 'em.

I guess the mind can turn to stupid stuff when you're alone enough. I mean, there's other things to be worryin' about, like one of the cows is lamed and some of the chickens been peckin' each other somethin' fierce. But if they dropped the bomb, or if there was some disease or something that killed everyone, I'd never know up here. I'd just carry on workin' and livin' until I died, most likely.

Which I suppose is what I'm going to do either way.

So I guess I got nothin' to be scared of.

ABSOLUTE TERROR, PART TWO

LLOYD

I am pissed. I mean, pissed. I am pissed off like you would not believe at John Hughes.

Because he lied to me. Because he lied to all of us.

It's true. Ask around. I watched all these movies when I was a kid, I watched them, and I – they were lies. Not just little white lies, but this huge fabric of connected lies, this massive network of lies, this entire alternate freakin' reality of lies that have formed this ... this cage, this cage that he trapped an entire generation of people in. John Hughes. Yeah, the film director. The liar. The dirty liar.

See, you're a teenager. And you watch these movies, and you think this is the way the world is, and you want the world to be this way because in this configuration, in this pattern, you think you have a shot at it. The brass ring, the man behind the curtain, I don't know. These are movies that make you think you have a chance.

And you don't. You never did.

John Hughes lied to all of us.

If you're a guy in your – I don't know, late twenties, early thirties – you know what I'm talking about. You know what I mean. You saw the movies too, right? In grade school, in high school. I'm talking about Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Say Anything, Ferris, Some Kind Of Wonderful, even, even Weird Science. God, even Weird Science. And maybe some of those aren't even John Hughes movies, but they're still John Hughes movies, you know? They're – they're his spawn. His radiants. His offshoots.

They were lies. They were this stinking pile of lies.

John Hughes ruined my life.

I hate John Hughes.

JAMIE

The Seventies for horror were all about suffocation. Really. Remember we were talking about the sixties, and how everything started getting closer to home – the nice man at the hotel, the grandparents down the hall, the pretty woman who has come to town. They were the sources of danger in the '60s. A budding bit of paranoia that started with McCarthy in the 1950s, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers syndrome, and started circling like a vulture. Spiralling... inward.

So. The Seventies. We've seen that the stranger can't be trusted. We've seen that the ideals of the '60s have a grimy side, a grim twist. Where do we go from here? Do we start looking back to the stars for fear? Do we start investigating the supernatural again?

No. We bring it even closer. We take that web of fear and we draw it even tighter around us like a shawl. The Seventies were about reacting to the Sixties by retreating into our homes, our safe havens, and discovering that even they weren't safe.

Iconic films? The Shining. Dad's taken everyone on a winter retreat so he can get some writing done. Dad goes insane. Dad tries to take an axe to the entire family. Dad dies horribly alone in the cold.

In The Omen, parents find out their child is, well, the Antichrist. Happy birthday, son. And they die horribly.

And then there's what a lot of people call the scariest movie of all time The Exorcist. It was also one of the first “blockbuster” movies – and I know they come out ever week now, but back then it was a big deal. We all know what the Exorcist is about – a little girl gets possessed by Satan.

In Carrie, the evil is awakened by wicked classmates, but certainly fostered by a domineering, bible-thumping mother, which is an interesting reversal on the piousness of earlier horror movies – before Carrie, almost all religious material in movies was a source of great good, not a breeding ground for evil. Carrie and The Exorcist broke the mold for a more cynical look at Christianity and the Church in subsequent horror movies, and eliminated yet another source of safety for the moviegoing public.

So we're down to horror within the family. Not trusting even those closest to us because they might be mad, posessed, or even the Devil in disguise. And that dovetails nicely with this generation all grown up – Libertarianism, right-wingers, and a general sense that you're the only one that can look out for yourself. Nobody is beyond suspicion.

The Seventies was also when an ancillary feature of the horror movie became a genre in itself. It used to be that the killings informed the movie. In the Seventies, we started getting killings as the basis of the movie, with script a sort of afterthought.

The King Hell of all these movies is, of course, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There were other “splatter” films that preceded it – a movie called Blood Feast in the 1960s – but Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the movie that really pushed the splatter genre to the forefront and kept it there as a viable horror stream for over twenty years. And it's a good movie. It's shocking because it's so flat – it's almost void of conventional filmmaking craft, which means it can shock you with its matter-of-fact, documentary-style look at violence. The first time we see the main killer of the movie is through a protracted static shot – no cutaways, no close-ups. Watching the Massacre is almost like being in a war but on some sort of antidepressant – there's a disassociation, an arms-length look at this horrific violence that really makes it, in a way, more horrifying. Because it just seems so flatly plausible.

Along with the splatter, came the slasher – and the grandfather of them all, in this case, was John Carpenter's 1978 movie Hallowe'en. Not about the blood, but about the killing – and again, the emphasis is nowhere is safe, not even one of the most traditionally innocent of American professions, babysitting. But it's a movie about the killer more than about the victim, the first movie where quality seemed to be measured by body count more than filmic genius.

But that was the beginning. That was the first trickle in a flood of blood. Because filmmakers quickly realized that there was an audience for splatter movies, for slasher movies, an audience that didn't really need wide release of these movies to find and worship them.

What does this tell us about fear? About society? It's harder to tell with the slasher and splatter movies, because we're shifting away from pop art into subcategorical art. Directed art. Targeted art. It's no longer the pulse of the people, but a reaction to an overstimulated society. And maybe that's the key to the fear of the '70s. After a decade of excess, these audiences feared nothing more than a lack of input. A lack of stimulation. They'd rather bathe in blood than live in boredom.

And then came the Eighties.

And video changed everything.

JUAN

What we do here at the Almond clinic, the way we treat phobias is through a phenomenon we call Jungian confrontation.

Let me start by explaining a bit, maybe, how phobias used to be treated. No, we'll start with what phobias are. We all know what phobias are. Phobias are an irrational, an irrational fear of something that is under normal circumstances quite harmless.

Fear of heights is your sort of classic phobia. Now it's important to distinguish, to set apart a phobia from a legitimate fear. Many people forget, they forget that lots of fears are legitimate. Your classic phobia, is, say, your standard fear of heights. There was a horror movie by Alfred Hitchcock, this horror film called “Vertigo,” and Jimmy Stewart had a fear of heights. That was one of the big introductions of the idea of phobias to the public, did you know that? And in the next year, the number of people reporting phobias, it tripled. Tripled. Three times as many people reported a phobia to their doctors the year after Vertigo came out. The power of the, the media, I suppose.

So most people know the fear of heights, actually called acrophobia. And in that movie, Stewart has a bona fide phobia, because his fear is irrational. He can barely climb a ladder. But if you're at a construction site and you don't like the idea of working high steel, walking around on the top of girders three hundred feet above the ground, that's perfectly normal. That's natural. Stewart, in the movie, there are parts where he is hanging above the ground and certain death, and that's no phobia. That's fear.

Another common one, perhaps the most common one we see here at the Almond, is the fear of spiders, or arachnophobia. Also a movie, as I recall. Never saw that one. And again, there are appropriate fears – tarantulas, for instance, should provoke some sort of reaction, and if you can recognize a brown recluse, you'd do well to respect and avoid them – but most arachnophobics have inappropriate fears. Tiny little spiders that you can barely see, spider-shaped pieces of fluff, throw them into a panic.

And then there's your more exotic phobias. Some people are afraid of open spaces, that's agoraphobia, but there's a whole range of them. We've had an amnesiophobic, who was so afraid of getting amnesia that he kept detailed notes on everything he did every day. Eight thousand notebooks of diaries with sticky notes for quick review should the unlikely and, ah, unfortunate event arise. Another fellow, scriptophobic – fear of writing in public.

Some of the phobias are, in fact, quite compelling. It's almost got a religious pull to it, a divinity, in which you believe in the inherent harm of a thing, a concept, a state so much that you can actually pull others into that orbit. It's not uncommon for an untrained psychologist to map a phobia onto himself while attempting to cure a patient. Here at the Almond we're a little more advanced, of course, but not entirely immune. One of our doctors became so paranoid about the phobias “rubbing off” that he actually developed the first case of what we termed metaphobiophobia, the fear of developing a phobia. We, ah, had to dismiss him.

So most of these things are treated, most phobias are treated by standard psychologists, or psychiatrists, with no particular phobic expertise. And they use a ... well, we look at it as sort of charmingly quaint, this sort of Victorian approach to the phobia, which is this thing called graded-exposure therapy. Which is kind of like taking a little poison every day to build up an immunity, which is what killed Napoleon, you know. Iophobia, incidentally, is fear of poison.

And what they do is they expose you to your phobia, a little bit, to build up this tolerance level. And then a bit more, and a bit more, until you are completely immune to the fear. Primitive but effective, and it works. Indeed, it works. I've seen arachnophobics literally juggle tarantulas three at a time after a few years in graded-exposure therapy. But it's a bit like, ah, it's a bit like seeing the building is falling over and that's forced the siding off, and instead of fixing the building, you put new siding on it. It's effective in its way, but it doesn't address the collapse of the building. Batophobia is fear of being in or close to tall buildings, by the way. Casusphobia is the fear of collapsing structures.

You can't fix a collapsing mind by slapping a fresh coat of paint on it – fucusphobia is a fear of paint, often found among auto plant employees – and at the Almond, we've come up with a better way to treat phobias. A more comprehensive way. It's more involved, of course, and not without its detractors, but I think you'll find it's very effective.

JANINE

My father had this thing called the holiday box. It was, well, a box, I guess that's self-evident, it was a box that he'd made out of these pine boards, he'd painted it bright red with these white highlights, sort of white running up and down at the corners, and a big brass handle on the top. It had a hinged top and it opened upwards. It was designed very well, it fit together – my father was a travelling salesman, you see, and he'd be away for long periods of time. Months. But the joke, the joke between him and my mother, was that these were her holidays. This was her little holiday from him. Which isn't really fair to him, he was a wonderful man, but it was their joke. I guess we all have our ways of coping.

And he'd put gifts in the holiday box. Usually when I was asleep, but I could hear him banging around in there, sometimes wrapping them with mom at the kitchen table after he brought them home. The holiday box was filled with presents, these little things he'd buy on the road, and every time he left, I'd get a present from the holiday box, and every time he came back, I'd get a present from the holiday box. I never touched the holiday box. It was one of the big rules of the house. Only dad touched the holiday box. It wasn't mine to touch.

That might be my first memory, actually, sitting around the holiday box with mom and dad, dad packed and ready to go, wearing this funny newsies hat, ruffling my hair and opening the lid of the holiday box so I could reach inside.

Then this one time, dad stayed away for longer than usual. Like, more than a month, more than six weeks. And my mom said, just this once, let's open the holiday box before your father gets home. And that's when I knew something was wrong. When she opened the holiday box and gave me a gift. I wouldn't open it, I just sat there and stared at it for about five minutes, and then I opened it, and it was, I don't know, a crayon set or something. And I started to cry. And mom left the room for a while, and when she came back in dinner was ready and we just sort of went on.

LLOYD

One one level, you know it's a fantasy. But you think – and the movies are carefully constructed to reflect this – you think it's a fantasy that reflects truth. It's not like elves and dwarves and space monsters. It's people, people that seem like you, discovering each other. And you think maybe this is something that happens, in the real world, something that can happen.

The message I received time and again was that if you work hard, if you try your best, if you show that you are a good person, a smart person, a funny person who really, sincerely, cares – that makes a difference. That's what John Hughes taught me. That the ugly duckling can sometimes get the swan, and even if he can't there's a shot, and even if he doesn't have a shot, in the attempt maybe he'll meet somebody who works for him. With him. Whatever.

And persistence pays. That's a big one. And believing in yourself pays. That's another big one.

So John Hughes taught me, at a very vulnerable age, that persistence pays and being tenacious is a good thing and if you have self-confidence, if you try to be yourself, be genuine, everything will work out okay. In the end.

It turns out that persistence – are you listening, John Hughes? Are you out there by a radio right now? Because I want you to hear this, John Hughes, what you call persistence, what you think of as a charming tenacity, that's called stalking, John Hughes. And believing in yourself, being yourself, following your dreams, that doesn't get you anything. That doesn't get you the girl. What that gets you is alone and scared and wondering what you've done with your life. Why you've been chasing these dreams and wound up waiting tables in a Greek restaurant and spending your nights poring over radio scripts that go nowhere. Recording things in your bedroom with a piece of stolen stage curtain over the window to keep the light and noise out. Hoping that it will pay off.

It doesn't pay off, John Hughes. You taught me to believe in myself when what I should have been doing is building the act. You taught me to be true to my dreams when what I should have been doing is living pragmatically. You taught me to pursue the girl with all my heart, soul and strength when what I should have been doing is settling for second best.

You ruined my life, John Hughes. I hope you're listening. And I know you're listening, other thirtysomething men, sitting in dismal one-room apartments trying to ignore the traffic noises and the rattling in the pipes. I know you're out there, lives shattered by the promises this bastard made. I know you're out there, breathing steam in a hovel you can't afford to heat because you blew the money on flowers and she didn't even read the card before throwing them in the trash. You blew the money on a lawyer to contest the restraining order. You blew the money on love, yes love, you blew the money on a hopeless chance and a daring dream that was shoehorned into your head by the bastard John Hughes.

Ferris Beuller's Day Off was never about Ferris. We knew that. Anyone with half a brain knew that. It was all about Cameron and growing up and being himself and standing up. And you knew at the end of the movie that it was Cameron and Sloane that were going to end up together, because Cameron had grown up and Ferris was still a boy, a charming boy but a boy with no sense of consequence, and Cameron had gravity. We knew that. We all knew it. And we believed that because Cameron had gravity, because Cameron was going to stand up and do the right thing and slog through, rather than coasting on a magic carpet, the carpet of the blessed and the charmed, the Ferris carpet, we knew that he was going to get the girl and the happiness in the end. That's the secret message, John Hughes, the message we received. Loud and clear.

And now the Camerons of the world cry themselves to sleep each night in their filthy sheets because you lied to us, John Hughes, you lied and we hate you.

JAMIE

Until the late seventies, horror movies had more or less been a pop phenomenon. Because movies were, well, only released in theatres. There was no small-market movie industry serving the specialized customer – unless you count pornography – and unless a movie was going to show on a certain number of screens, in a certain number of theatres, making it was pointless.

But video changed all that. There was already a growing interest in slasher and splatter flicks in the late Seventies, but still a heavy restriction on making them: if there wasn't enough audience, there was no point in making the picture. Ten thousand potential viewers scattered across an entire continent wouldn't mean a profit for moviehouses, filmmakers or producers, so why bother?

Then came video.

And now we're not looking at mass culture any more. This is where the horror movie stops being a reflection of the pop sensibility and starts catering to the micro-audience. This is when splatter and slasher and all those other genres start coming out in earnest. Because with video, it's possible to make a move for fifty thousand people and still make money. Lots of money. Magazines spring up, imports from Europe and Japan go way, way up, and anyone with a few thousand dollars and a video camera can now find their audience – and a lot of them try.

In the mainstream, though, horror survives. It's not a very good decade, though – marked mainly by franchise series like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, and the continuation of the Hallowe'en movies. There are a few highlights, but all in the first half of the decade – Poltergeist, in which a television channels ghosts, The Thing, about a shapeshifter who can take anybody's place, Videodrome, an intellectual Cronenberg movie about the seductive nature of violence in the media.

Videodrome is maybe the most prescient movie about the horror industry itself, because it has a simple message: media affects us in ways we don't understand. And in an industry that is suddenly under siege from a former underdog, with new technology cutting it off at the knees, this becomes a very important concern. So there's a new pattern among the old patterns of mistrust – you can't trust your neighbours, your family, your friends, and now you can't trust media itself. The Nightmare on Elm Street series is a bunch of movies puportedly about dreams, but we know what they're really about – they're movies about movies. What you dream about can kill you, and when you put your dreams on the screen, who can they kill? It's a precursor of the meta-horror of the 1990s.

It's taken eighty years, but the horror industry is starting to get scared of itself. America can now address any audience, no matter how small, and supply and demand almost guarantees that the more focused the target, the more lucrative the subject is going to be. Horror movies aren't about identifying public fear and exploiting it any more – it's about finding specialty markets, seamy underbellies of the private mind, and worming its way in.

The philosophy is being stripped away. The justification for making these stories is being stripped away. Horror filmmakers are being forced to confront themselves and realize that what they've been telling themselves for decades – that these movies are valuable ways to confront and defeat the demons and weakness of the human mind – that's all crap. People just want the blood and the killing and the thrills of seeing other beings exterminated. The horror industry is built on a self-perpetrating lie, designed and adhered to so that the filmmakers can cling to some sort of shaky justification for feeding that need. But the cat's out of the bag. There's nothing that scares the horrormeisters more than themselves now, and that will become the defining factor in the decade of horror yet to come.

JANINE

My mom would open the holiday box every now and again after that. When I came home from school crying, when I mentioned something that one of the other kids' fathers had done for them. I exploited that a bit. I was a kid, and it was there.

But one day my mother gave me something out of the holiday box and it was wrapped wrong. I couldn't even tell you why. Maybe the corners were folded different. Maybe the tape was a bit to neat. I don't know. But I knew that there weren't any gifts from my father left in the holiday box, that she'd been sneaking presents into there while I was at school to fill the holiday box. And that's when the holiday box was over for me. I never accepted a gift from it again. I never saw my father again. The holiday box is still there at my mother's house, but you – she put a blanket over it years ago, and you can't see the red any more. There are plants or something on it now. We've been talking about moving her to a home, and if we do I suppose I'll have to do something with the box. There might still be gifts in it, decades-old colouring books and pencil boxes and doll clothes. I don't know what I'll find in there. I never looked inside it. Not once, not even after it stopped meaning anything to me. I never touched the holiday box.

JUAN

What we do here at the Almond Institute, how we innovate, it's called Jungian Introduction Therapy. The problem, you see, with phobics, it's not what they're afraid of. What they're afraid of is just a symptom, a symbol of what the structural damage is. What they fear on a more profound level. And you need to break through that symbolism to penetrate to the root of the problem, and then dig that root up like you have a shovel and you're boring your way through the crust of the mind, finding the heart of the sickness and prying it loose. Treating a phobia through graded exposure is like trimming the weed so it doesn't flower. Jungian Introduction is like digging it up and burning its corpse on the pyre of intellect. You understand?

So you have to confront the secret fear that the phobia represents. If you are arachnophobic, you fear the spider. Large and small. But what does that mean, really? What is your fear of spiders telling you about yourself? What is the fear you truly need to confront?

A fear of spiders is really a fear of what? Well, spiders are in Jungian theory part of the mother archetype. The web, you understand, the web and the babies. So if you are arachnophobic, it is obvious that the problem lies not with spiders, not with spiders and exposure to spiders, but from unreconciled fear of your mother as represented by the spider archetype.

And so the lesser approach is to expose you to spiders, first bitty ones on a television, then little ones perhaps dead from a distance, and then slowly work your way up to live encounters with real spiders, until finally you are touching the spider and letting it crawl on your hand.

Which is charming and quaint but is not psychology. Not really. At the Almond institute, we would find your mother, as well as hire several actresses that resemble your mother, and lock you in a very small room with her for several hours while your mother screams at you, screams horrible things about your inadequacy as a son and how much she hates you, loathes you, despises you and wishes she could go back in time and cut you from the womb, dispose of you like the trash you are. We might even dress the mother in a spider costume, in some circumstances, and suspend her from the ceiling of the room in a sort of web apparatus. And we would repeat this treatment six, seven times a day for several weeks, depriving you of sleep and food while subjecting you to this constant battery of abuse from your mother, until you are totally psychologically broken down.

Then we would reintroduce you to your mother through a sort of mechanical birthing process, where you are put in a gentle salt water wave pool dyed a nice glowing pink, and forced through this flexible polyethelene tube to meet your mother, this time dressed appropriately in a maternity gown, smiling and kissing you and telling you how much she loves her baby. And thus is the arachnophobia cured, because you have reconciled your deeper trauma with the mother complex.

We've been practicing this therapy for over eight years at the Almond Institute, and while it hasn't met with universal success, we're confident that some of the work we're doing is important and will result in, if not perfect recovery of all patients, significant improvements. Fear of doctors is iatrophobia, by the way, but maps onto the Jungian archetype of the father, of authority. It has a very complex cure.

LLOYD

I owe you, John Hughes. I owe you for a decade of loneliness and a life without hope. I owe you for what happened with Martha and Virginia and Merideth and Michelle and all the girls that wouldn't even give me the time of day, no matter how ardent and creative and brilliant I was. I owe you for wasted years of my life, years of pursuing a foolish dream on your advice.

Every day I wake up and stare at the ceiling for an hour, John Hughes, and I can see how everything should have unfolded in a John Hughes world, where the sky isn't always blue but the sun always comes out at the end of the movie. Where hard work is rewarded and dreams come true.

But that's not the world I live in, John Hughes. So I put on my shitty clothes and leave my shitty apartment for my shitty dream, all the result of following the John Hughes dream. I think of you every day, John Hughes. I think of your movies. And if I ever meet you, John Hughes, I don't know what I'm going to do.

ABSOLUTE TERROR, PART THREE

JONAH

I was a horticulturalist for several years, after I left university. I'd been studying math. And I was good at it. I mean, I didn't leave the university because I was in trouble or anything. I had a scholarship and things were going well, three years of straight As and not a wrinkle ahead. The material was easy enough and my professors were actually starting to give me permission to skip tests and assignments to assist them with some theory stuff, research that they were doing.

So I was doing well in school, no question. But I still felt that math wasn't for me. It wasn't right for me at that time in my life. Let me tell you a story and maybe you'll understand where my head was at.

I'm in the lab one day, using some computer software to figure out transaxial coordinates on a probability grid. It's not really important what exactly I'm doing, but that's what it was. And I'm staring at the green dots on the screen – that's what we had back then, green dots. Computer monitors were basically a series of green pixels. No, seriously, that's all there was. Glowing green dots. We didn't have colour – that didn't come along in a convenient format until the VIC-20 – and we didn't need it. Still don't.

So I'm staring at the dots on the screen and thinking about the points on this grid that I'm plotting, and I'm getting sort of dizzy. I'd been out the night before with some friends and I'd been drinking pretty heavily that year, what I think they call now “self-medication,” but at the time it was just known as “fun”, and I wasn't feeling that great – a bit of a headache, some nausea, I hadn't had breakfast that morning. And I'm looking at this green glowing monitor and the green starts to make me think of growth. Like the numbers are growing inside the monitor.

I need to stress that this wasn't a hallucination, I wasn't dreaming, I hadn't gone insane. It's not like I'd snapped. I didn't really think the numbers were actually growing inside the monitor, like I was some guy on an acid trip or something. It was just an association I made. So I was looking at the numbers and how every number spun off from another one and how they kept branching. And that's the term, actually, that they use for this sort of thing. It's called “branching.” And where do you think that comes from? That's right, trees. It comes from trees. So I started to see the parallels. I started to think of the numbers as an organism, and organism that exists in superspace that we can only see a segment of through applied logic.

The lab, you understand, it was pretty isolated. In the basement of the science building, two or three computers humming away all the time. The electricity and the heat of the computers meant the place was pretty dry. Always dry. There was a water cooler in the hall, but it was always empty; the fountains had never worked. Never to my knowledge. So for obvious reasons, there were no plants down there. And I was staring at the green screen, at the green glowing, growing numbers, and I wanted to see a plant. I just wanted to see a plant to look at the mathematics of it. So I went outside.

And then it happened.

JAMIE

(STRAIGHT TO VIDEO HORROR)

Street Trash – 1987

JANINE

Mainly I just ignored the holiday box. Tried to forget it was there. Which was easy enough, most days, except for ... well, holidays. My mother tried to get me something from it from time to time, like when I was having a rough time, but I'd refuse. Usually I'd end up just leaving the room. I don't know if that was cruel or not now. But it was something I needed to do at the time. It was necessary.

I don't – I'm not married now. I don't think I will get married. I don't think it's the right thing to do any more. Not just because my parents broke up. Well, not just because my father left us, really. Not just because of that. I just don't think people need to get married now. There was this whole structure built around how hard the world was, and how people had to depend on each other just to make it, and now that's gone, it's over. We don't need other people to survive any more, right? There are tons of single mothers out there. Single fathers. People doing it on their own. They don't need a breadwinner and somebody to stay home with the kids. We have daycare now, we have social support and independence. We don't need to get married, women or men.

The whole institution is breaking down. It's funny because there's a big thing now, about whether or not gay people should be allowed to get married. And it's kind of a reversal, because these are people that society has scorned, rejected for centuries, so it's kind of funny that we want to deny them this social institution that we've outgrown. We have no use for it. It's like not eating a cookie on an airplane but throwing it away instead of giving it to the person sitting next to you. They ask you “are you going to eat that cookie?” and you say “no, I'm not” and then you throw it in the trash. In front of them. It doesn't make any sense, but I suppose nothing does when it comes to this.

The last time my mother tried to use the holiday box was on my sixteenth birthday. I came home from school and my classroom had had a little party, nothing special, just a cupcake with a candle right before lunch, they did it with all the kids, but I was still feeling good about it. I could still taste the chocolate in my mouth. And when I walked into the house I just knew. There was a silence there. There was a space I could feel.

And my mother was sitting in the living room with the holiday box open, and there was a gift in her hands, a big one, and she was crying a little and she held out the present and said your father wanted you to have this, when you turned sixteen. And I just looked at her and I looked at the present and I said dad didn't wrap that, the paper's not all screwed up. And I left the house. I didn't come back for about six hours, I was just walking around looking at the sky, looking at the bricks on houses and how they all fit together. And when I got home Mom had made me a birthday cake and a roast chicken for dinner. The holiday box was closed. There was a blanket on it. We didn't talk about it, but the next day she put a plant on the holiday box and that was the end of it forever.

JONAH

I stepped out of the science building and the light was blinding. I mean, it was horrible. It was like nuclear holocaust searing your eyeballs bad. And I was sort of staggering around, blinking and trying to get my eyes to adjust to the light and wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Everyone else seemed to be walking around normally, so it wasn't like the sun had gone nova.

And I realized that the residence I was staying in connected to the science building through this underground tunnel that had been built in the late sixties when the science building had been revamped. And that the student cafeteria was on the other side of the residence and was also connected, this time by an aboveground breezeway sort of thing.

I realized that I hadn't been outside for over three weeks. I was blinking because I'd forgotten what the sun looked like.

And in retrospect, I realize that part of the whole math-as-plants thing was probably partly my brain telling me to get out of the building and into nature for at least a couple of minutes. My mind was informing me that a little fresh air never hurts.

But at the time, I couldn't see anything.

And when my vision cleared, all I could see was grass.

The science building opened onto the commons. This huge one-acres space in the middle of the campus, nothing but grass and trees. The point, I guess, was to have an “oasis” in the middle of all these large buildings, all this technology. And it was usually full of students playing frisbee, talking, eating lunch under a tree. But all I noticed that day was the grass, millions of blades of grass, each with its own length and root system and orders to grow, grow, grow. Angles where it had been cut. Ripples from the breeze. All of it interacting, informing the next blade over, so purely mathematical I couldn't begin to process all of it.

So I walked onto the commons and I lay down and buried my face in the grass.

And I started singing to it. Softly at first, but then louder. I was running my hands through the grass, feeling the texture of it under my palms, trying to figure out what the vectors of each blade were and how high this grass would have to grow before each blade would intersect, form a giant twisting knot in the sky.

And then I had what alcoholics call a “moment of clarity.”

JAMIE

We're at the '90s. So the horror industry, and make no mistake, it's an industry – at this point, the horror industry has turned into basically what you'd call comic books. What does that mean? Well, it means that the bulk of what's sold is to a small, specialized, dedicated audience that tends to be passionate about the medium. Very few people just walk into a video store and “pick up” Puppet Master 6 on a whim. Collectible statuettes, memorabilia, and so on is almost as big a seller as the movies themselves.

Horror isn't dead, but it's dying. The mainstream industry can see it being segmented into smaller and smaller packets. In its own way, the '80s horror industry predated the modern dilemma of satellite television: things become so specialized that 'hits' are almost impossible. Such was true in the early '90s with horror, where the greatest threat to the long-term viability of the genre was horror itself.

So two things happened. Two things that completely revitalized the genre – one for the better, I think, and one for the much, much worse.

The first was the post-ironic horror movie, directed by Wes Craven. And no, it wasn't Scream. Yes it was, actually, but that wasn't the first. The first was Wes Craven's New Nightmare, which was sort of a coda to his Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, which started off strong but just got silly. In New Nightmare, see, the actors, directors, cast members and crew from earlier Nightmare movies play themselves in “our” world. And Freddy Kruger – given power from his vast popular image – tries to break through the fictional barrier to enter our world, escaping from movies to seek revenge on the people that created and keep killing him.

Fiction and metafiction become the dominant themes of the mainstream horror movies of the '90s. Right after New Nightmare comes In The Mouth of Madness, a John Carpenter movie where an investigator gets pulled into some Lovecraftian fiction. And then came Scream, which bears no further explanation, except that it is at its root a horror movie about a killer that uses the “rules of horror movies” to kill people.

Nineties horror is Ouroboros. It's the snake eating its own tail, chasing itself into butter like the tiger under the tree of Little Black Sambo. It recognizes its inherent ridiculousness and cliches and tries to break out of them, but also recognizes that it must structurally always fail to do so. It's like Derrida with a budget. New Nightmare and Scream spawn sequels and iterations, but they're like ripples in a pond, with each one weaker than the last. The Scream sequels are movies about being sequels, but the joke is tired. And the other mainstream movies – I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend – they're just weaker attempts at self-referential winks.

The industry has consumed itself. There's nothing left to eat. It's just spent the better part of a decade looking at itself and deciding it merits only mockery.

And then came The Blair Witch Project.

FOREST

In the midst of my career, sort of between university and inventing, I became what I call an art consultant. It's a little hard to describe what I did exactly, which is probably why the business failed, but essentially it boiled down to this: I was a brilliant guy without a lick of talent. Not a shred of artistic ability.

So I'd have these, these ideas and lack the capabilities to execute them. These great ideas for sweeping, relevant, interesting installation art pieces but not a patch of power to make them happen. I wasn't an arts student, I was a science student. I did experiments. I looked at how things were built and how things fell apart. I wasn't given any time or latitude to do 'art.' And if I'd tried, I would have been drummed out of the department. Things were more conservative back then. There were barriers, serious barriers. I mean, serious.

So I just hung out with artists instead. At the pub after classes, around for the holidays – there wasn't much point in going home for Christmas, if you know what I mean. And I'd talk to them and look at their work and it became obvious to me, blindlingly obvious, that they had the talent but not the ideas to back that talent up. They just didn't know how to capitalize on what they were doing. They'd have a sequence of paintings, each with some common element, and just say “these are some paintings I did,” and I'd say “no, look at that, then look at that, then look at that – this is a SEQUENCE of paintings focusing on the mortality of the soul.” And a light would go on in their eyes and they'd get it.

So it wasn't too long before some of them would come to me for advice. They'd have to do some major art project and wanted some sort of cool theme or underpinning to put underneath the whole thing. So I'd ask them some questions like what are you interested in, what things do you worry about, what do you know a lot about already, and then I'd try to help them look at their art a different way.

Like this one guy, he came to me one night and had to do this major assignment in a week, eight canvases that the professor wanted to “address a major human theme.” And I mean a nice, guy, lots of talent, dumb as a stump. I mean, stupid. So we stuck to what he knew really well, which for some weird reason was World War Two – he got a fascination in high school and slogged through a bunch of books on the subject – and, get this, ducks. His parents owned a duck farm. So he knew ducks and he knew World War Two. Okay, what do you worry about in life? Well, he worried about dying. Death. He feared death. Which isn't very specific, but good enough.

So what I told him to do, was to get famous photos from World War Two, especially ones with dead people in them. Invasion of Normandy and so on. And recreate them on big canvases in black and white, but paint ducks on them as well in colour. Like sometimes a duck flying above the scene, sometimes a guy's head replaced with a duck's head, sometimes some corpse holding a duck instead of a gun. And the point – I'm drunk of my ass in a pub, telling this guy what to do on the project that will make his career – the point is the ducks represent life and hope, either present or thwarted. The ducks are a symbol of our fears and frustrations about life, cast against the most epic and recognizable battle of good versus evil in modern human history.

And again the eyes light up and he runs out of there like Van Gogh on fire. The next thing I know, he's not only gotten an A on the project, his professor has lined him up a gig in a New York gallery and he's selling paintings for $150,000 a pop.

I never hear from him again, of course.

But I liked doing it. Not only for the vicarious thrill of being an artist by extension, but because I loved seeing the hunger in the artists' eyes, the fear, the raw gnawing terror that they have the talent but not the gift, and quashing it. Sort of a power trip.

So I decided to go into business.

JONAH

If math is in nature, see, and nature is fundamentally math, as all things are, then perhaps it would be possible, I figured, to go out and start growing things mathematically. I mean, really mathematically. Take concepts like chaos theory and grid patterns and statistics and apply them to plant growth, then start a mathematical nursery.

Admittedly, I hadn't really thought it through. I'd been stuck in a basement for weeks, eating nothing but fatty cafeteria food and breathing recycled air. I was probably more than a little psychotic at the time. But that was the idea. The idea was to start a mathematical nursery where I would grow mathematical plants.

Well.

Conceptually, it was a neat idea. And it had enough merit, at least on a theoretical what-the-hell level, that I was able to raise a bit of money from my peers and even a few professors, enough to rent a bit of land on the highway outside of town and build a greenhouse. I was lucky enough to even involve some folks from the biology department, who would send students over to help me work out some issues with basic growth patterns, how plants seeded and reproduced, and so on.

But I had no gift for customer service. That was my first big failing. I had a bit of money together, I had some biology students helping out with the growing, but I didn't know how to sell. Somebody would come in looking for geraniums, I'd blab about the flower's vectors. It was ridiculous.

And then, after the school year ended and the biology students left and I was running this nursery solo according to my mathematical principles, I discovered the second big failing of somebody in the plant business: I had a thumb of the darkest, deepest black.

JAMIE

The Blair Witch Project just squeaks into the Nineties – it was made in 1999 – but it was the breath of fresh air the industry was desperate for. They'd already had horror eat itself in irony years earlier, and now they needed something to reset it – something post-ironic, something post-horror to realign the way these movies worked.

And then a bunch of – kids, really – as more or less a school project put together this movie with no monster.

No monster at all.

And it's the scariest goddamn thing in the last twenty years.

But the amazing thing about it is how fresh it is when compared to the conventions. And it's been aped so much in less than a decade that it's hard to even see how fresh it was then, now. Horror movies were all about the special effects, having the scary monster, having the big “boo!” moment. Even the best of the you-can't-quite-see-it scary movies, Alien, had its rubber-monster moments at the end. But Blair Witch riffed on the fact that it's what you can't see that is scary, and played it to the hilt.

And there you have, at the end of the millennium, the ultimate scare movie. Horror was the first staple of the film industry. And in the dying days of 1999, horror is redefined again.

We go from being scared of foreign monsters to being scared of monsters we've inadvertantly created. Then we're scared of strangers, human strangers. Then we realize we can't even trust the people we do know. And then we can't even trust ourselves. We can't trust the people who tell us NOT to trust ourselves.

And then we find out that we've been the scary thing the whole time. That the only horror that matters is the horror we generate, the things we invent when we hear noises in the dark. That all this time, we've just been scaring ourselves to death.

And the millennia ends.

And we start over.

And over.

And over.

JANINE

The funny thing is, once mom is out of the house and into a care facility, I'm thinking I might like the holiday box. I got married last year, and my husband and I are planning on having kids. We're trying right now. But I know that I won't be – I'm a doctor, you see, I'm finishing my internship right now – I won't be able to be home all the time, I want to get into emergency care, which means a lot of odd shifts and last-minute calls. It's something that's important to me, helping people. It's why I got into medicine.

And the holiday box wasn't such a bad idea in a way. It was like a happy mystery in our house for years before dad left. It was a way to celebrate when you couldn't actually be there and show thoughtfulness and love even though you're on the road or far away. If you use it right. It can be a symbol of neglect or a symbol of great caring.

It's kind of a family heirloom now.

And I think if I took the holiday box, if I took it and used it, I'd be reclaiming all the pain that my father caused by leaving. I'd be taking back all that hurt that I felt over the years and turning it into something good, transforming it into something with meaning for a new generation of the family. I don't want to be a repeat of my father. That's not why I'm getting it. I'm not going to repeat what he did. I'm going to fix it. I'm going to raise a happy family and have a full career, and the holiday box is a tool to help me do that. The last thing I want is to think of my child, my future child, crying in the dark because she can't stop thinking about that box in the next room, the box that used to hold treasure but now makes her stomach hurt looking at it. That reminds her of how she drove her daddy away. That's not what it's going to be like.

That's not what it's going to be like.

FOREST

It was kind of neat at first. I set up a small office in the back of my apartment – it had one of those walk-in storages spaces, about eight feet by six feet, big enough that I could get a desk and two chairs and a filing cabinet in there. No windows, but no big deal. I could have somebody paint a landscape on spec or something. And I started taking visitors. One of the first ones was another art student at the university who wanted to combine his minor in biology with his major in fine arts, so we figured out a way for him to use the breeding cycle of the Arctic Hare as the foundation for a series of abstract works that incorporated stats from a zero-population growth movement. No sweat.

The next person was sort of interesting, though – a middle-aged lady or maybe a little older, very sweet, who had been dabbling in watercolours her whole life and thought she was very talented and that I was some sort of agent. Neither of which was true. The paintings were crap and I had no interest in hitting the street and flogging them on the unsuspecting. So the conversation turned more to revitalizing her career. I suggested she embed the paintings in frames made entirely of flank steak which would then rot around them and make a statement about the ephemeral nature of art and the world we live in, but she didn't like that.

And we were kind of stymied until I thought of something interesting – she had defined her life by painting mediocre watercolours, and how many other middle-aged women were doing exactly the same thing? Insipid farm scenes with haybales and blurry clouds in the background. Millions of them, all over the country, all dabbling on weekends and forcing their husbands to gaze at thousands upon thousands of paintings that all make you feel like you might have impending cataracts.

There's no merit in them per se. There's no way people are going to want to buy them – they aren't saying anything new, they aren't moving things forward in the art world, they get put in closets or resentfully hung next to the fridge in your children's homes and serve as a deathwatch – the sooner you die, the sooner they get pitched. But the point is, the point is there are millions of these paintings out there and the only people really interested in them is the people that actually make them.

So get them to shellac the paintings off on each other.

As it turns out, her husband is a semi-retired mechanic; they have this big empty barn-type garage, not heated but weatherproofed, out back of the house. So what I lay out for her is a business plan of sorts: she starts taking in paintings. Puts an ad in all the watercolour magazines and painting magazines: “the Beauty Exchange.” And she stores hundreds of these paintings in her barn. And every six months, every participant who registers and sends in a painting and a $100 cheque gets a random painting from the barn. If they don't like it, they return it in six months – they pay the postage and send $30 to cover the return mail – and they get another painting, selected at random, sent to them. It's like art roulette, but supporting amateur artists around the world. If they really like the painting, they can buy it for another $100. But once the artist sends a painting in, they're done. They never see that painting again, and they pay the postage to get new paintings – the $100 is like a registration fee and the postage for the first painting mail-out. The $100 off the top stings a little, but then you can legitimately call yourself a professional artist – you have an agent, of sorts, and you're exchanging your professional services for other professional services – and all your painting supplies are now tax-deductible.

She left my office with dreams of empire. And built one, too. She eventually made enough money off the scheme to start her own art magazine. It's called “Watercolour Wizardry” or something like that. She keeps sending me free subscriptions.

Word gets around when you do this sort of work, and before you know it I had all the jobs I could handle. My calendar was booked. People were happy. Everyone was happy except me.

It had seemed like a great idea when I started it, but now it rang hollow. Because it was fun to help these artists out, it was a power trip and the money was all right, but nobody ever wanted a collaborator. Just an idea. And basing your life on propping up other people's successes isn't as much fun as you might think. I've never really been a power-behind-the-throne kind of guy, you know. I'm no Machiavelli. And all around me, people were using these ideas I had to build these careers, these amazing ideas – take sixteen televisions have them facing each other, record yourself having eight conversations with yourself, sequence them, people walk down the middle and you're laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, interacting with yourself, they're in the middle but not in the loop. That sort of thing. Ideas, you know. And people are doing these things and they're getting famous, they're on the covers of magazines, and I'm still in the storage closet.

I didn't get into it for the fame, really, but it started to burn me a little.

So I got into inventing.

And you know what happens next.

JONAH

The plants started to die. I couldn't – nothing I did was helping. It was useless. I tried everything the bio students had taught me, I tried everything in the books, but the plants just started to die. It was like they hated me, they hated me personally, I'd done something to them to really, I don't know, piss them off.

Every day I go to work and everything around me is dying. Everything around me is turning black. I'm the cancer in a world of green. I guess I don't need to tell you that this is the sort of thing that can kind of shatter your confidence.

The thing is, though, the mathematical conviction held. And I think it kept me alive for that summer, I think I would have killed myself a couple of times if I hadn't been riveted by the principle of decay. The mathematical properties of death and rot were almost as intriguing to me as the principles of growth, so I was able to at least look at the value of death, the values of death, and plot what was happening with different plant cultures and types, how they were dying, the gradient of leaf rot and stem collapse, the pure unrefined science of my cataclysmic effect on living things. Even the dog hanging around the place, this mutt with scraggly fur, started looking sick, bluish, and began yapping this weird bark that sounded like an ancient man with lung cancer.

And I was sitting in my dying greenhouse one day, unshaven, filthy, despondent and lost in the principle of atrophy, when this woman walked in. She wanted to sell me a watercolour painting. I don't even know what I looked like, what expression I had on my face, but she took a look at me and started backing away slowly, you know? There was something there she didn't like. I wouldn't be surprised if I had an aura at that point. If death wasn't crackling around me black like a cloud.

She took a good look at me and walked to the door of the greenhouse and she turned around and said “you're failing because you're scared of love.”

And then she left.

So I called her a crazy bitch and got back to my business, which was watching things die. But it stuck with me, mainly because my days were like unreconciled streams of sameness, and that was the only point of difference I'd had in my week, like a red rose blooming in a field of weeds.

She was wrong. That was all there was to it. Normally I'd forget this sort of thing immediately, people say crazy stuff every day, but like I said it was remarkable because the rest of the week had been so unremarkable, so it stuck with me. But there was love in me. I wasn't scared of love. I loved math, that was for damn sure. I loved the sciences. I loved working with my mind. I loved the potential of these growing things as expanding, evolving proofs of theories we could barely dream up. She probably thought I was some soulless jackass in it for the money, in it just to make a buck off old ladies who liked gladiolas. Maybe she'd been ripped off by some other garden center and began taking it out on others. No idea.

The next day, things started to get better. It wasn't an instant turnaround, of course. It wasn't half that. But a couple of the plants that were dying started to rally, and a couple of the ones that I'd planted were beginning to sprout. And the day after that, things were a bit better still.

The data was all the same – I hadn't changed my methods, which were set out by the biology students. But the plants themselves began to change. They began to grow. One, this plant with a little purple flower I couldn't identify – that was the biology students' thing, I just read the signs they stuck in the little pots, and this pot didn't have any – it began to spread like crazy, even somehow hopping into neighbouring pots. I had to put a ten-foot gap between it and the other plants before it would settle down.

The geraniums were doing well, and believe it or not, the echinacea – which is supposed to be a pretty tricky one – rallied. Customers started dropping by; usually my professors to discuss theory and biomath at first look at the purple flowering plant and try to figure out what those vectors were, but later their wives too. And they told their friends, and friends told friends, and soon I was doing a brisk little business.

I even saw that lady, the “love” lady, come in a couple times and buy things. She didn't talk to me, though. I'd hired some summer students by then, high school students, and they dealt with most of the customers. I was taking measurements and graphing different plants and growth rates on charts in my office, trying to determine what feed and fertilizer mixes combined with which light exposure resulted in height versus breadth, stem thickness, and so on.

It only lasted a few years, though. Maybe five. One day I woke up and that big passion, that thing that had been born in the commons when I'd left the computer lab that day, it had burnt itself out. The application no longer interested me. I'd done a lot of work, and shared it with the math and biology departments at the university, and they were doing some very interesting research with it. I just no longer had the interest. The flame had died overnight.

So I sold the nursery to some collective from inside the city, real hippie types, and went to work for a pharmaceutical firm as a data analyst. It's not quite as interesting work, but the pay is incredible. I chart death and illness rates for drugs under trial, but correlating them against global results and information from other drugs, factoring for pre-exisiting conditions.

It pays very well, did I mention that?

JAMIE

So why do we do this? Why do we want to be scared? Why do we want something on a forty-foot screen to tell us what to be scared of?

Because we need to be frightened. Ages ago, they had stories to scare the kids. Tons of 'em. Ever read the original Little Red Riding Hood? Little girl goes into the woods, takes her picnic basket to visit grandma. But a wolf has slaughtered her grandmother and taken her place, and he kills and eats her. The end. Nothing more. That's it. The whole thing with the woodchopper and the rescue and all that? Bullshit. That came later. That's westernization. That's the happy ending.

Back in the olden days in Bavaria or whatever, there was no happy ending. You look up the old stories. You'll see. Kids back then, when they ran into trouble, one of two things happened. One, they got slaughtered. Two, they survived, but only by being as mean and nasty and ruthless as the fuckers they were up against. Oh, and sometimes the angels saved them, but that usually comes later.

Kids back then needed to know two things. They needed to know that the world was a nasty, brutal, unforgiving place. And they needed to know to stay out of the goddamn woods. That's what most of these stories boil down to. Kid, stay out of the goddamn woods or you will die and die horribly and nobody will even be sad.

But we don't do that any more. We don't tell kids to stay out of the woods. We empower them to wander around the woods with a camera and an MP3 player and tell them that if anyone messes with them, they have human rights and get a cop and the bad guy will go to jail. It happened in my generation. Remember that? When I was a kid they were still beating us in school. They called it “the strap.” And then came “don't talk to strangers,” and then came “don't go anywhere with strangers” and then came “don't take any guff from strangers.”

We're not scaring the kids any more. So we kids, we grow up and we want to be scared. We want sensation. We want something black to burst through the walls of this pink womb we're all trapped in, this North American TV utopia, and scare the living hell out of us just so we know we're still capable of something primal. Being scared is the only primal emotion we have left that's not illegal, for God's sake. Try raging sometime. Try being hysterically happy. You'll wind up in jail or the booby hatch.

The fear's been stolen from us, the fear that should have been a gift at childhood, it's been taken away by the safety police and the culture police and the feel-good police. So we're looking for it everywhere else. We need it. We need that fear to keep us in line, and we know it deep down, so we seek it out when it's not given to us.

That's why horror movies work. Because we need to be horrified. We need to be terrorized. We need to keep our boundless human ego in check or we'll just reach out and devour everything. And I think that's the scariest thing of all, in the end, is realizing we're all just animals that need to be kept in line.

Even better, we're animals that keep ourselves in line. The farmer died centuries ago, but we still lock ourselves in the barn every night, still tell tales of what happens to the animals that escape over the fence and into the woods, and those tales still often end badly. Because we need to know this. Because nothing scares us more than leaving the fields and walking into the woods, walking through the electric fence of fear and leaving it all behind and becoming ...

... I don't know what.

A different sort of animal entirely.

PENCILNECK

CHRISTIAN

I'd been on the job for maybe a week when the truck started acting funny. Just sluggish at first. Reluctant. I was driving a route for Molson, hitting most of the bars around the Waterloo area, which meant a combination of studenty places, a few prep bars, and a couple of hardcore dives for the serious drinkers that didn't want undergrads jostling their elbows. It was a good route – I knew the area, I knew a lot of the people, and I was still young enough and good-looking enough to pick up at least one girl, usually from the university, on every run. Girls have a thing for the beer delivery guy. No idea.

But then, like I said, one day the truck starts acting funny. I tell the dispatch guy, and he gives me another truck, and that one just doesn't start. I'm no rook at this point, but I'm still the youngest guy in the room so I'm figuring maybe this is some sort of prank, but Juan, he runs dispatch, he seems totally baffled. And he's not a joking kinda guy. You've got ten thousand cases of beer to roll out every night, you don't screw around with your drivers. Not even in the slowest week in July, which is what this was.

So Juan gives me another truck, and this one's okay, but midway through the route it scoobies on me. Just dies in the middle of the road. And I call it in and now Juan thinks I'm messing around, but God knows why I'd dick with him like this. So we're both a little suspicious of each other at this point. He sends another truck out, we transfer the beer, and I ride with that driver to finish the route. No problem. I get back and Juan's a little pissed, says somebody brought the scoobied truck back and the mechanic can't find any problems, so I just give him the shrug. I mean, it's not like I pulled the fan belt out or something. The truck just died. I'd say humidity on the plugs but it's dry out, it's July.

So I'm getting into my car to go home after the shift change, Juan gets off when I get off, we're both getting into our cars and my car won't start. More it starts, then changes its mind and shuts off. I try again. Engine won't even spark this time.

Juan is driving past me as I get out of the car, and I'm pretty pissed now, and I'm about to haul off and kick hell out of the driver's side door when he slows down and yells hold up at me. Then he turns his ignition off, gets out of his car, and tosses me his keys.

Juan's driving a reconditioned '71 Dodge Challenger. He rebuilt the damn thing from scratch. And he barely lets anyone touch it, ever. He parks it at the far end of the lot, far from the street and other cars as he can manage, he even has one of those damn tarp things he puts over it when he thinks it's going to rain and even on some sunny days. Keeps it in the trunk. You could be dying and crawling to that car for medical help and Juan would shoot you to keep you away from it.

And I'm holding his keys. So I look up at him, probably looking as stupid as all hell, and he jerks his head towards the car and says “fire 'er up.”

I'm never going to get a chance like this twice. I'm in there like a goddamn ninja. Moving too fast to be photographed. And I breathe in, breathe out, start the car.

Nothing happens.

Juan is looking at me as I get out of the car. I'm not even mad now. I'm a little scared in a weird way. Juan shakes his head. He's built this car, like I said, and he's all like there's no way it could not start. It never doesn't start. So I toss the keys back to him, and he gets in. Car starts right away. No problem.

He looks at me out the window, real serious, and he tells me that this happened to his uncle once. That engines don't like me any more. And he drives away.

I take a cab home, and the next day back to work. Same deal. Car doesn't start. Trucks don't start. The foreman looks at me and tells me he has some order forms he's way behind on and could use a hand in the office.

And that's how I became a pencilneck.

ULYSSES

The motivational speaker's job is not to motivate. It's not. The job of the motivational speaker is to sell motivational speeches. Now fortunately for all concerned, those two goals mesh awfully well. But the truth of the matter, friends, is that if the motivational speaker could engage in a two-hour dirge about how his wife left him and his children hate him and he hates being on the road and he sits in the Motel 6 and thinks about blowing his brains out but he doesn't have a gun and he's scared shitless of trying to get one because what if somebody robs him instead ... if he could do that and get paid, paid more than he does to make motivational speeches, he'd do that in a heartbeat.

Because he is not here to motivate you, friends, he is here to sell motivational speeches. I am not here to motivate you, colleagues, I am here to sell myself as a motivational speaker and get more engagements and raise my rates.

Do you notice the language I'm using, friends? How I love to use the word friends, and how I love to use the word colleagues, and how I love to use the word truth and motivate? Because that's the racket, friends, and the more I say friends, friends, the more you will think of me as a loving and yes, friendly person. Because I am. I am a friendly person. I'm smiling warmly and gesturing openly and using carefully crafted body language to show you that I am open and receptive and giving and dynamic.

And friends, I am not open and receptive and giving and dynamic, but I am creating the illusion of such to sell more motivational speeches. I love to use body language because it tells you something, something about me, something false but something true. Because there's a truth here, friends, and the truth is I love to sell, and what I sell is motivational speeches, and in so doing, in selling these speeches, in selling myself, friends, colleagues, many of you will in fact become motivated. I have no idea what you'll be motivated to do, but by God you'll be motivated to do it. I am speaking in a clear and even tone and pausing to make eye contact, because I have important information to share with you, and I want you all to feel a personal connection with me, and that's why I make eye contact. I practice in the grocery store, friends, in the fish section I gaze into the eyes of halibut and I make eye contact with all the halibut in the fishmarket as I talk, dear friends, I talk to them as I am talking to you now, with confidence and vigor.

Because I am motivating you, friends, I am here to motivate you and I love to motivate you, and I am motivating you to buy more motivational speeches, to tell everyone you know about me, about how I motivated you, so they will book me and I will raise my rates and I will become richer. Because that is what motivates me, friends, and you can see it in my dynamic posture and my open arms, I am a warm and honest and open person speaking clearly and confidently and you trust me and I trust you and I am making eye contact.

I am speaking to you collectively and individually and I am dynamic and responsive and making lots of eye contact. I am motivating you. You are being motivated, friends, and you love being motivated, because there is so little motivation left in this world.

SHAWN

They used to do all sorts of shit to me. The stuff you hear about in movies. They'd put my head in the toilet and flush it, stuff me in lockers and lock me in, turn me upside down and shake me to see if change'd fall out of my pockets, pick me up and carry me around, all that stuff. I don't even think it was because they didn't like me. I think it was more just I was there, and that's what you did to guys like me. You see it on TV and that's what you do.

And I was, you know, sick of it. It wasn't like this weariness that set in, it was just that one day I was sick of it. There was a weight room at the school, but I didn't want to go there – that was where most of these guys went in the first place. But there was a gym up the street from me. And I had this job on weekends, cleaning cars for this car rental place. I'd get in there with the vacuum. You wouldn't believe the shit you'd find in the back. I mean, once I found a fingernail in a Ziploc bag. Not like a fingernail clipping, the whole nail, like somebody had pulled it out with pliers. No blood back there, just this Ziploc bag, halfway under the driver's seat, human fingernail in it. A guy's, I guess. No polish.

Anyway, I had a bit of money from this job and I'd been thinking about buying a car, just an old beater, but instead I go down the street to this gym. And this is like a gym, right? Not a fitness centre. You couldn't pay a chick a million dollars to go anywhere near this place. Full of hoodlums – that's what my mom called 'em – and I'm sure half the guys there were on drugs. Grey place, all clanking steel and the reek of sweat. So I go in there and I look up at the guy at the counter, who is looking down at me like I'm some dog walked in off the street to shit on his floor. And I look up at the rates and I give him enough money to cover a month and I say “I want to be big.”

He just smiles at me and tells me this ain't your gym, kid.

And I just repeat myself real slow, I want to be big.

He looks down at me and I just stare right into his eyes, and normally I'd be pissing myself in terror because this guy looks like the motherfucker that bikers cry themselves to sleep every night in fear of. He's like wide as a door and wearing this faded red bandanna and he's got this crazy scar zig-zagging across his face like he was knocked to pieces and put together wrong. But like I said, I was sick of it. I was sick of being picked up and tossed around the parking lot. I was sick of having girls laugh at me. I was sick of being called “elf.” So I just stared back into the guy's eyes and I thought as hard as I could I'm sick of this and God help me I might weigh seventy-five pounds but if you kick me out I'm going to kick your ass clear to hell.

And the guy says okay and takes my money. Doesn't even really smile, just takes my money. And then he yells over to another guy even bigger'n him, hey Bruno, kid wants to get big. And this new guy, the Incredible Hulk, he looks at me for about a tenth of a second and looks back at the counter guy and says Jones, no way.

This is when the counter guy smiles. I still have nightmares, swear to god. The teeth that aren't missing are foul. I have no idea what the hell is going on in his mouth. How he eats. And he says think of it as a challenge, Bruno; you get this kid twenty pounds mass in a month and I'll buy you a two-four. And Bruno comes over and looks me up and down and says kid, I hope you at least got good jaw muscles.

And I must look blank and scared and I'm thinking mostly about not laughing because I can't believe that an eight-foot monster that lives in a gym is actually named “Bruno,” and I manage to stammer out “why?” and Bruno says because you're going to be eating a hell of a lot.

That's where the rest of my car-cleaning money went that month. Lean chicken, eggs, protein powder, these milkshake things. And I was in that gym every night after school. At first I wanted to hit all the machines, I figured I'd just expand into this huge freakin' monster now that I'd made up my mind, but Bruno basically held me back and told me we'd be on a three-day rotation to start with – legs, torso, and arms. And that's what we did. Every day I'd wolf down what felt like half my body weight in protein. And every day after school I'd go to this hellpit and hang out with a bunch of psychotic giants hoping to lay on just a bit more muscle.

It changed nothing at school.

Not at first.

THOMAS

You do things because you're supposed to. That's what I think. I think people get their lives sort of laid out for them, because they don't know what to do to fight it. You sort of get assigned a lot in life and the path of least resistance is to bob along it like a bit of cork floating downstream.

So you just kind of roll with it. That's how I wound up here. Teaching. My dad was a teacher, my mom wanted to be a teacher before my little sister was born, and I just sort of bobbed along. I mean, my dad taught English and I teach History, but basically I just fell off the tree and never really rolled away.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'm not. I enjoy my work, I like the kids, I like teaching in general. It has its down sides, but basically I'm sharing interesting information, interesting stories, with groups of young people, some of whom are actually engaged by the material and discover it's something they like. I'm not fooling myself – most of them just want to get the hell out of the classroom – but every once in a while, you see the lightswitch get flicked in one of those kids. I like it especially when it happens to the meatheads. Can't call them that in the school, of course, but here it's okay. These kids that all they think about is football, or cars, and suddenly you're in class with them and they actually start holding their head up straight and listening hard, because you're telling a great story. I mean, a great story. And it's a great true story.

It's a little weird when you think about it, though. I mean, I've followed the path my whole life. I haven't ever bucked the system. I rolled through school, picked the courses that most interested me, went to Teacher's College, got out, and started teaching. And I've been at it for a while. But the subject I teach, the thing I do, is the one that most celebrates the people that don't bob. That buck the current. That leave the entire stream and roll around on the shore for a while. And here I am, the guy that never took the risks, that never ran off-script, telling all these kids about the great people that were great because they took that risk, dared their mighty dare, and became something that had never been before.

So I try to work the failures in there, too.

Not constantly, but enough. Because that's life, right? You can talk all you want about your Napoleons and your Banting and Best and the people that rocked the boat. But the truth of the matter is, most of the people who rock the boat fall out of it. Most of the people that fight the current, they drown. So I don't want to give these kids dangerous illusions. I want to make sure they know that leaving the beaten trail is a hard road. And history is full of failures if you look at it the right way. History's a path of glory, but it's built on a causeway of drowned and broken men.

It makes the successes seem more glorious, too. And it doesn't take much time. You just run through a quick bio of the also-rans, the almosts, the losers. Just enough that they recognize that taking risks is a dangerous thing. It's not all glory and wonder. There's a nobility in doing the easy thing, a responsibility in doing what you're supposed to instead of chasing after glory and leaving a regular life untended and choked with weeds.

There is.

That's what I'm trying to tell them.

CHRISTIAN

A few days go by, the engines still don't like me, as Juan says. It's a fucking phenomenon. The guys make me start trucks for the fun of it, one of them even talks about calling one of those TV shows and I make it clear that they'll find bits of him up and down the 95 if he even jokes about it again. I'm not a freak. I don't know what's going on, I don't know what the hell this shit is, but I'm not a freak.

And so I get balled up in paperwork. And Jesus, there's a lot of it. Union says I can't get sacked – nothing in the regs about being supernatural – so even though I suck to high heaven at this crap, I'm left to do it. And I'm wailin' away with a calculator and all these charts, trying to figure out what got sent to where and where all the returns come from and who's worked overtime and all sorts of crazy crap, and it's like somebody's drilled a hole right in my goddamn skull and dropped a fly in there, and the fly is buzzin' around and eating my damn brains.

But you know, what else can I do? Not a lot of jobs around, leastways not ones I'm qualified for. Union won't let them fire me, because I ain't done anything wrong. I can't afford to leave. But I can't drive, not even a forklift. The forklifts had a particularly bad reaction to me, actually, sort of smoking from the electric battery as I tried to jam them into gear. I even had people try starting vehicles for me, then switching off, and they'd just die on the spot.

So I'm working the paper and trying to stay sane, which is hard when you've got no head for math and you find this stuff boring as hell, and the other guys are giving me a hard time about it but not too hard, because you can tell the whole thing sort of freaks them out. It's a little Twilight Zone, right? Like that guy in the dark suit is standing somewhere in the warehouse waiting for his cue, and the camera pans over to me and hey, it's the guy that kills cars.

And Juan would tell me the craziest shit. I mean, he'd just come over and start talking to me about the weirdest goddamn – it's like he's been storing all this up his entire life and I'm the first guy he can just blurt it all out to, you know? Crazy stuff. Like he was telling me I'm the guy that can't turn engines on, and his uncle was like that, but there was this other guy his uncle knew, this guy couldn't stop turning engines on. Things would just engage when he was around. He was a disaster zone. He'd walk by a factory, some poor bastard cleaning the aluminum press would get his head crushed to jelly when the thing just starts up despite being shut down, key out, power cut. Roller coasters at carnivals would kick into gear. This guy was like this huge crackling living engine-activating thing and eventually he just vanished, Juan's uncle figuring the government had him captured or killed because he was just so goddamn dangerous.

And for everything like that Juan's got a dozen more. It's like a door opens somewhere and you go through it and once you're through you're in a whole world of bizarre crap. And that's a one-way door, baby, it disappears once you're through it. And Juan's uncle went through this door and at first it was just him, the guy engines don't like, but then other people started finding him. The guy that engines REALLY liked. The frog guy. The lightning guy. The guy with no arms that could move stuff with his mind. And once they're in your life you're like Planet Weird, and the force of your gravity just starts attracting more and more freaks flocking together.

That scared me more than anything else. The idea that I was never going to drive again was bad enough, but the idea that I was never going to have a normal life, that things were just going to get stranger and stranger – I didn't want that. I didn't want that weird gravity.

So I started really throwing myself into that paperwork. I didn't even try to drive any more. I took the bus and there was nothing I did, never, that showed me as any different than any other Joe Lunchbox on the floor.

I started getting pretty good at the stuff, too. I started picking it up. Not so good with the math but that's what the calculators are for.

Then I had my stroke.

THOMAS

Because what's destiny, really? I mean, what is it? Who is it it? How do you judge it, quantify it, list it? You can't. Can't be done.

ULYSSES

Friends, I am standing here in front of you tonight motivating you, and I can tell you feel it, you can feel the energy rising, and I am telling you you can do it and you know you can do it, you have the power to do it, you have the inner strength and resolve and energy to just do it, and even though neither of us have any fucking clue what you can do, you know you can do it like it's never been done before, you can do it straight through the floor and out the window and out onto the damn street.

Because I am motivating you, friends, and I am motivating you not because I love you, although I do, and not because I feel very close to you, although I do, and not because I love your town, although I do, and not because this is a topic very near to my heart, although it is. I am motivating you solely to sell more motivational speeches and get more engagements and raise my rates, and you have the power to do this, I can feel your power, I can look into your eyes and make eye contact and speak with clarity and enthusiasm and tell you you have that power. You have the power to buy more of my motivational speeches, friends, and I love this power you have and that you can feel it, that power, the power to be motivated by me.

And this is what they call radical honesty, friends, sharing with you that my goal is not to motivate you but to sell myself as a motivator, but even that is veneered by the gloss of salesmanship, friends, because this approach, this approach of radical honesty, it is calculated to shock you out of complacency, to undercut my competitors who also use open body language and speak in crystal enthralling tones, this approach, friends, I love this approach because I am being bare and honest about my cynicism and you in your cynicism respond to it. I am telling you that I am not here to help you and you are so grateful not to be bullshitted by yet another motivational speaker that you are in fact being motivated by the fact that I am telling you I am not in any way here to motivate you, not really, friends.

And you're smiling because I'm smiling, and I'm smiling constantly and using sweeping gestures that keep my arms away from my chest, gestures that show I am receptive and caring and want to give you all a hug, give you all a big warm hug while maintaining eye contact and telling you I love you and you can do it, you have the power. You have the power to do it, the power to watch me making sweeping gestures, you have the power to recommend me to your friends, the power to listen to me tell you that I am not really here for you at all, the power to hear all of this and fall for the meta-pitch, the pitch that is not a pitch, the Zen Taoist motivational speech wherein it is revealed that the speech is a sham, and all that matters is that I am speaking in a clear voice, friends, clear and confident and dynamic, that I am telling you that you can do it, you have the power, and you love the power you have.

And my book is at the back table, copies signed by my assistant, and you have the power to buy this book, to take the power of this seminar home with you, the power to pick it up and affirm yourself, the power to say yes, I deserve to make this motivational speaker rich. You have that power. The book is called I Want You To Buy My Book, friends, and I love you all but I will love you even more if you buy my book, and I will shake your hand with a firm grip and look you in the eyes and tell you that I appreciate you, friend, that I love the fact that you've fallen for my sales pitch, and you have the power to agree with me, friends, you have the power to nod your head and tell me how motivating this all was and to buy a copy of this book for your spouse.

We're almost out of time because I love this so much, I love doing these engagements, I love motivating you to buy books and motivational speeches, helping you realize with confident body language and eye contact that you have the power, the power is in you, and you can do it, you can do it and get it done, and you are motivated and I am happy and smiling and everything has sort of hit a crescendo now and I'm slumping a bit, demonstrating that I'm fatigued after giving you my all, giving you everything I have, giving like a generous motherfucker, but I am still up and energetic and enthusiastic and I can feel the love in this room, and we're out of time, but I just want to tell you, friends, that I have loved selling myself here tonight and if any of you, if any of you can take with you just one simple message tonight, that message is that you have the power, you have the power to be motivated by me, it is within you, and nobody can ever take that away.

Thank you. Thank you. You're too kind. No, thank you.

THOMAS

These kids come into the classroom, this light in their eyes, expecting me to tell them to go forth and dare. To go forth and shake the firmament and do their mighty thing. But if they go forth and do their mighty thing, what happens to the rest of us? Who takes out the garbage when everybody's striving for greatness? Who mows the lawn when everybody's building a rocket ship in the back yard?

I made a choice. I chose the path of least resistance, and people say that doing the easy thing is what kills the soul, well it's not. It has nurtured me. I know this goes against the grain. I know this works against type. I know I should be telling you to be radical and innovative and do things that have never been done before, but I am a history teacher. I teach history. And while most people seem to develop this myopia about it, this blind dedication to the spectacular, I read between the lines. For every Napoleon there's a million Pierre's out there feeding the horses and cutting the wheat. For every Einstein there's a million Joneses delivering the mail and repairing televisions.

These kids, most of them, let's face it – they're mundane. And all we do by throwing these visions in front of them, these visions of greatness, all we do is give them pain. Imagine spending your youth being told you're capable of anything and then becoming a sales clerk at Wal-Mart. Imagine that. Imagine the grind you feel in your soul every day when you pull into the parking lot and put on your blue smock and think “I could have been changing the world today, but instead I'm helping alcoholics grub through discount DVDs and telling senior citizens which aisle the baked beans are in.”

The truth of the matter, the awful truth, is that the great ones are going to be great no matter what you do to them. Look it in the face. They keep talking about changing the way we teach, talking about better classes and better methods that are less restrictive, more condusive to individual growth and expression, teaching creativity and problem-solving... but by God, didn't the best books ever written get penned by people that suffered through the chalk-dust rigor of the old linear teaching system? Haven't the greatest philosophers arisen from the most primitive of societies?

So I teach mediocrity, and I remind my students that doing the easy thing is sometimes the noblest thing of all. How arrogant can we be, to presume we all have the seeds of greatness? How cruel?

BRYAN

This stuff doesn't happen overnight, that's what I found out. It doesn't happen over a lot of nights. After a month, I could tell I was more solid in a small body, but not big; I wanted to be Schwartzeneggar. The guys at the gym just laughed at me, told me to shut up and move the weight. That was their answer to everything: shut up and move the weight. And as a kid that grew up with his head in comics, science fiction stuff, that was maybe the best thing I could have had: a corner of my life that was mindless, repetitive, a mantra. Move the weight.

But life at school didn't change that much for me. I still got picked on, teased, and every day after school I'd move the weight. And I still didn't get bigger. It was driving me insane. Winter fell into spring and I was solid, but I wanted to be intimidating. I wanted to make those assholes shake in their boots and back away from me apologizing, holding their hands up like mimes behind the invisible wall.

And even as spring opened to summer and school was about to let out, I still got poked and yelled at a bit. But not as much. There was something different about me by then, the way I looked people in the eyes, that made the big guys uncomfortable. They'd laugh at me still, but more behind my back. They'd throw things instead of picking me up. And I'd just look at them, knowing the day was coming. So eventually, it sort of tailed off, and they stopped. They found easier kids to pick on, ones that didn't look them in the eyes while they did it.

I kept hitting the gym every day. It had stopped being about not being bullied any more and more about moving the weight. And the less I worried about getting big, the bigger I got. By the time I finished high school I was – well, I've never had the frame of a linebacker, but somebody to be reckoned with. And I've kept it up. I don't look like a monster, but I'm big enough. If you're getting lippy and I get up to you, you notice.

The only thing that pissed me off was I never got that confrontation. I never got that big showdown where I'd beat one of these bully kids and put him down and pound him in the face until his nose exploded. I never got that. And I'd see them pounding on these little kids, and I'd watch. And sometimes the kids would look at me like could you help me out here, I know you've been here, and I'd turn my back and walk away.

Because they need to solve these problems themselves.

I did.

I got big.

End of story.

CHRISTIAN

The funny thing about being in admin is all your old friends start to hate you. It's true. I never really got promoted, not really, just shuffled over into the office at the same pay, but I could feel the resentment. I'd get it all the time, guys staring at me as I walked into the plant. Tie heavy around my neck – I had to dress a certain way to work in the office, you see, I couldn't just keep wearing a T-shirt and jeans. And I could feel that tie pulling down on me some days, boy, I could feel it just hauling my head down when I walked across the floor to ask somebody something.

Pencilnecks were what we called them because we hated them, the office guys. Sitting there typing all day, writing notes on clipboards. Reporting on us. No clue what it was like on the floor, to be the guy who did the real work, lifted and sweated and shifted and strained. These guys, observing us like science experiments, always demanding more, jotting things down, making you feel like a rat in the biggest maze on the planet. I hated those guys, the pencilnecks. And I was one of them, keeping track of the numbers, filling in forms. And there was nothing I could do, because engines hated me. I kept taking the bus to work, that tie feeling a little tighter every day.

And you can't do things the same way you used to, when you're in the chair. Suddenly Tom's way of being a goofball on the forklift isn't just Tom being Tom any more, it's a couple thousand units a week not being moved because he's horsing around and breaks something and everything comes to a halt as we clean it up. Joe being late by five minutes every day begins to get under your skin more and more, because you have to be there at 8:59 or there's hell to pay when the phone rings at 9-A for head office status report and you're not there, and these guys come breezing in 10-15 minutes after the clock starts. And the tie feels a little bit tighter.

I guess the tie just got too tight one day, up and strangled me, sent a blood clot rocketing through my veins and punched itself right into my brain. Kapow. And it was ... well, it was kind of interesting, if that makes any sort of sense. Tom's dropped a case on the floor by the truck, glass and foam everywhere, and Barry is sort of standing there staring at it, but there's a pile of glass under the truck tires and the truck's getting ready to roll out. So I come out of the office, tie like a noose, and I'm pissed and all the guys just look at me like what happened to you, you used to be on our side. But all I'm thinking is if the truck drives through all this glass something's going to happen, glass in the tires, splinters of it flying everywhere, and in my mind I'm seeing Tom with an eye out or Barry with a shard of glass in his cheek as the truck splinters the bottles and makes them explode.

Because that's what you do, in admin. You think about what's going to happen, not what's happening. That's what you do when you're a pencilneck.

So I'm heading out of the office and my clipboard is in my hand and I'm yelling at Harry not to move the truck and at Tom and Barry to clean up the bottles before the truck rolls over them, and suddenly something happens in my brain and I can't keep walking. I start turning in circles.

I must have some sort of look on my face because everybody's staring at me, and I keep turning in circles, but I can feel my knees buckling and there's this black thing seeping up from the floor to cradle my face. And my last thought before I hit the floor is “well, I guess there's one more engine that doesn't like me, the old engine inside is shutting down, I should have seen this coming and washed the car.” Seriously. I don't know why, but my last thought was that I was dying with a dirty car, and even if I couldn't drive it it was a damn shame to check out like that.

And I woke up in the hospital.

It was a pretty minor stroke, as it turned out. Not from the tie, as I thought, but insanely high cholesterol. My daily exercise had dropped right off, going from the floor to the office, but I'd never adjusted my diet – and I'd been putting on weight like crazy, and I guess it just burst through, the fat, burst through into my bloodstream.

The crazy thing is that I broke my spine in the fall. Somehow. A one-in-a-million thing, the way I twisted, the way I hit the floor. Snappo.

So they tried to fit me with a dozen mobile wheelchairs, electric ones, even one old diesel model, but for whatever reason they couldn't get them to work for me. I kept telling them engines don't like me, but you know science.

I have this old manual wheelchair I use to get around most days. In the office, I often just use crutches, haul myself up and hop across the room on arm-strength, do what I need to do. And by Jesus, my arms look great. I should have done this years ago, is the joke.

I'm not one of those guys that pisses and moans about shit, life's not fair, I hate this, yadda yadda. I can't stand that shit. But some days I wouldn't mind some idea why, you know? Why engines just stopped liking me. Why I had to be a pencilneck. They say there's a reason for everything, but I just can't figure it. I was an average guy. I wasn't a bad guy. And then one day everything just stopped working and now I'm in a chair.

I'm a pencilneck and I don't know why.

And I'll be a pencilneck forever.

OPEN, TO LOVE

NARRATOR

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

MATT

I know I'm not really at the top of your favourite people list, so I'll be brief.

I learned a lot from you. It took me years to realize it, but I did. I spent a long time being pissed off at you because you didn't feel the same way about me as I felt about you, and then a longer time pissed off at myself for being pissed off at you.

And after a really long time being angry I realized something that seems real obvious when you write it out, but was hard and hurt like a motherfucker for me to really understand. Which is that I need to like myself, not depend on other people liking me so I can like myself for that.

I can't say I'm there yet, but I'm a hell of a lot further along than I was six years ago and I have you to thank for that. So thank you.

I never hated you. I hated myself and I got confused.

I don't expect this to buy favours or forgiveness, but I wanted to tell you that I'm the better for knowing you, even if you're not better for knowing me.

There's a hatchet in the back yard of my mind, and years of rain have rusted it and years of cold have split the handle, and every time I see that old hatchet I get a knot in my stomach and my hands start shaking because it's the worst of me just lying there. I'd like to bury that hatchet and pretend I'm a better man, but I don't even have the right to touch the shovel.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

REGGIE

Boy, I must have carried sixty, seventy million suitcases in my time. All sorts of people. Rich folks, poor folks – did you know that that guy, the guy from that TV show, he stayed here once? It's true. I carried his luggage. There's a signed glossy of him in the lobby. He was driving across Saskatchewan as a vacation thing and stayed here. Most authentic motel he'd seen in eight hundred miles, he said. Nice fella. Tipped me good too.

Yeah, we get families, old people, single folks, young couples lookin' for a quiet place, folks lookin' to sign in as John and Jane Doe, if you know what I mean, sometimes some real shady types. But I like the young couples best. They've got a shine to 'em, and even if you're old enough, like me, to see what's down the road for 'em, you still get a good feeling from that shine. A great feeling. Even if you can tell they're not gonna last too long, that it's gonna end in tears in nine, ten months – a great feeling, yes sir.

And sometimes you can see it in their eyes and the way they walk and you just want to shout up to heaven They Need This, Lord, they've been battered and bruised by life so that they can barely see the morning come and they need this, they need this, I can see their chances aren't good and there's lots working against them but they need this, Lord, they need this chance to be happy.

The best couples – the best of 'em – the motel seems to welcome 'em in. Sometimes the door just swings open at a touch and the lights in the parking lot pop on just when they pull into a space. You know that feeling? That everything's exactly where it should be and not a hair out of place? That's what happens sometimes with these folks.

Then there's the couples the motel don't like, but we won't get into that. We're talking about a feeling, a feeling you get to experience when you're working in a public arena like I am, standing in the stream of warm humanity with your hip waders on, knowing you can't change the direction of that stream but you sure as hell can admire some of those beautiful fish, sure enough.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

MATT

I suppose I owe you an explanation.

Oh, hell, I don't owe you an explanation. But I want to give you one. Because I have this feeling that I've wronged you, that even though I could say you hurt me first and you hurt me worse that's a child's game, that's the sort of thing you do in the schoolyard when the teacher comes over, and that's not what I want to do any more. I want to take account for my emotions and my actions and my petty spiteful selfish self that I hopefully left behind a long time ago.

Oh God. Please don't take that to mean I think you're childish and that I'm the big person for doing this. This isn't about – it's about me figuring out how and why I hurt somebody that should have been important to me, nailing down a dark spot on my soul that's been skittering around like a June bug for near-on a decade. It's not that you're ducking the blame, it's that I'm trying to find and shoulder mine, trying to lift up the weight in my life and carry it forward so I can lay it to rest somewhere not in my path.

But I mean, I was in a very bad place at that time, and when you stopped speaking to me, when you stopped returning my calls and my e-mails I didn't know what to do. You didn't even respond to the telegram, and I really thought that was sort of cute.

DARLING STOP. WHERE ARE YOU STOP. MY LIFE HAS HIT AN ICEBERG AND YOU ARE THE ONLY THING THAT CAN MELT IT STOP. SINKING FAST AND I THINK THE CAPTAIN IS DRUNK STOP. PLEASE REPLY STOP.

Maybe sending it as a singing telegram was a bit much.

I don't know, but I do know that when you stopped replying to me, stopped validating our relationship and seemed to have rejected it entirely, it was like somebody had punched me in the stomach. No, it was like somebody had used some sort of massive black steam-driven tool to drive a piston into my stomach, a machine the size of a building, a machine with giant orange flashing spinning lights and large yellow-and-black striped signs warning people to keep away, that this is a dangerous machine, a machine that can kill anyone that gets too close, and through the smoke and the steam and the hideous clanking I'm there, pinned against the wall sobbing, as this machine, this massive beast of iron and wheezing steel, this machine drives a piston into my gut over and over and over and over.

I wasn't – um, I can't really take account for my frame of mind back then. I didn't feel very good about myself at that point in my life, and you made me feel so good about myself – knowing that somebody like you would be interested in a spiritual hunchback like myself – suddenly the knowledge that this feeling might go away and I might be alone in that little tar elevator of loathing was the worst thing in the world. And I wanted to claw myself out of that elevator, rip through the black oozing walls and climb up the shaft and collapse into your arms again.

I couldn't do that. And every bit of dislike I had for myself, those flames of dissatisfaction, they became the immolating fires of true self-loathing. I wanted to grow claws and horns and bristling black hair, I wanted a facial scar that would make small children scream when they saw me. I wanted to be a beast, because a beast was how I felt.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

JANET

I'm not worried. I mean, a hundred years ago, a single woman in her thirties would have been pegged an old maid forever, but I'm not worried. This isn't a hundred years ago. I'm still young and dynamic, and I've been seeing people lately. I haven't found the right one yet, but I've been seeing lots of people. The right one will come along.

I think you have to believe in it.

Because if you don't believe in it, it won't find you, but if you do believe in it, it will. I see it like a bird, a beautiful yellow bird that flies somewhere up there, above the clouds, higher than we can see, and it's always looking down at us. And maybe laughing a little at how foolish we are. And sometimes that bird sees the glow, the little light on the ground that says you're open and ready, and that bird flies down through the clouds and the air and comes to you and lands on your shoulder, this beautiful yellow bird, and it whispers in your ear.

It sounds like a children's story, I know. But why not that? Why can't that be how it works? It's a mystery and nobody knows how to describe it, so I describe it like that. The important thing is you have to be open, you have to be receptive. You have to let it find you.

And I think a lot of people that are alone, that spend their lives alone, they don't let it find them. They hide from it. There was a song in church when I was a girl, about your little light.

This little light of mine,

I'm gonna let it shine.

This little light of mine,

I'm gonna let it shine.

And then there was a verse that was about ... it had to do with hiding it ... yes.

Hide it under a bushel, no!

I'm gonna let it shine

Hide it under a bushel, no!

I'm gonna let it shine.

Hide it under a bushel, no!

I'm gonna let it shine

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

And the song was about ... well, it was about your faith in Jesus, in that context, back then, but I think it applies to a lot of things. I think it applies to how ready you are and how willing you are to show the world that you're ready for that next step.

I'm not hiding my light under a bushel any more. I'm trying to go out more, spend time with my friends, I'm on one of those Internet services and I joined one of those clubs where there are big get-togethers every second week like non-smoking dances.

I think I've spent too long with my light under a bushel. I need to let it shine. I need to let it shine bright so that amazing yellow bird will see it from space, will come down and land gently on my shoulder and whisper in my ear.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

REGGIE

It has gotten to the point that I think, I firmly believe, that I can predict how long a couple will last by the heaviness of their bags and the openness of this old motel to them.

I talked a bit about the motel being more open to certain couples, and it's true. It's absolutely true. Sometimes you swear the doors open by themselves, the pen at the register rolls to meet their hand, even old Barton, who has come to hate the check-ins as much as I have come to love him, even he gets a smile 'cross that cracked and creaking bit of leather he calls a face.

But the lightness of the luggage – the weight of what they carry – that's the other, what the scientists call a 'predictor.' With an oh arr at the end, mind you. If I can predict the weather, I'm a predicter, ee arr. If it's something that scientifically sets out what's going to happen, a bit of data, that's an oh arr predictor. And I say that the weight couples carry, that's an oh arr predictor of how long that relationship is gonna last.

Because if the bags are heavy, say, if I have to strain and grunt to carry 'em, what does that say about the couple? No spontaneity. No ability to just grab something and go, no mind what you pack, because you have each other. Each pound in a case is another nail in the coffin, you ask me. You see couples with two massive valises and each one filled to bursting with clothes, books, stuff to do in case it rains, stuff to wear in case it gets cold, stuff to put on in case it gets sunny – these are not couples that are gonna make it, long-term. They don't know it yet, they're smiling, but I heft those bags and I feel a pop in my back and I know. I can see that they're smiling at each other, but they're looking around at the same time. Checking the exits, if you like.

So you take their bags anyway. That's the job. And you try to bask in that glow they have, regardless of how long they're gonna have it.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

THOMAS

I don't like competition. Not even board games. It just ... even if people invite me over to play cards, I won't do it. It just seems so childish to me, so counterproductive, so aggressive, really. Even if you're playing 'for fun' you see people get that look in their eye, that animal gleam. It even starts with kids. I've seen six-year-olds learn to hate over a round of Candyman. I've seen siblings split forever because of Clue.

They say it engenders coping, that it makes kids better able to contend with the ups and downs of life, the competitiveness now inherent in our society, but that's wrong. It's a breeding program, I think. I think board games were developed to foster that early bloodlust in our infants, made to teach our children to go for the jugular before they can walk. Have you ever seen the results of a board game among children? Bitter name-calling, throwing things, tantrums. Alliances are formed, lines are drawn. And at the end of the day, at the end of the session, they've learned about rugged individualism and competitiveness, sure enough. They're choking on it.

Board games are also, I am convinced, a tool used to turn children away from God.

I know that sounds crazy.

But think about it: if you ever want to shatter the belief of a small child in the divine, in a divine plan or a cosmic spirit – and we're talking about an immature mind here, a young mind – what better way is there to do it than to expose them to raw chance? Bad odds? You take a kid that believes that God loves him and rewards hard work, thank you Protestantism, and you sit him down over Trouble and once this kid loses six games in a row to Fat Henry, who spits on littler kids and shoves people and is selfish and has bad breath, once this kid loses six games in a row to Fat Henry, who keeps shoving a pudgy finger in his face and poking him in the chest, once this kid loses six games in a row to Fat Henry, he'll start to wonder who the hell is looking out for him really. He'll start to doubt, in other words, even if he doesn't have the mental equipment to know he's doubting yet. But there's nothing like the rolling of dice and the slapping of cards to convince a wee one that capricious Fate is not governed by bearded benevolence, but by the cold hand of mathematics.

That's sort of lyrical, isn't it?

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

REGGIE

This one time, we had this fellow who made his fortune, and this is one hundred percent true, who made his millions making exercise bicycles that would heat your home.

It is amazing isn't it? Amazing what people will think of. This fellow was walking past one of those gymnasiums one day, the ones where they have the big windows facing onto the street, and he saw all the people in there on exercise bicycles and treadmills and such just whizzing away, zoom zoom zoom. And he got to wondering what happened to all that energy created by the bicycles and the treadmills and such. Because when he'd been a boy, he'd been to a science museum where you had to power your own television by pedaling a bicycle, you had to pedal like mad, like crazy, like an IDIOT just to get that television to flicker to life.

But he got to wondering where all the energy went on people's home bicycles, and if maybe there were more efficient ways to get all that energy and do something useful with it, something not as clunky as those old exercise bikes at the science museum bringing television to sputtering light.

So he tinkered himself up, using one of the newer bikes on the market, a little converter and got a ceramic heater from Canadian Tire and jacked it in there and lo and behold, when he pedaled – it heated. Not tons, mind you, just cranked out a few degrees over room temperature, but at least the energy from the bike was going somewhere, it was doing something.

He dressed it up a bit – custom-welded a frame, dressed up the alternator, and took the whole thing down to an auto paint place to get it done up.

And then he went to all those sports manufacturers, you know, the ones that make those ten-thousand dollar stepping machines and ten-thousand dollar rowing machines and ten-thousand dollar machines that move your legs for you so you don't ever have to leave the damn house. He took his bike to them and said “look at this,” and they were blown away, astounded, falling hand over foot to give the guy money.

So he sold to these companies, and all it took was a bit of a recut of the frame and different colour schemes, maybe an additional feature or two that differed from bike to bike, and he sold to all the companies under their brand names.

And pretty soon he had more money than he knew what to do with, and he decided to drive across the country and take pictures of all of the big things that we build. The big potato in New Brunswick, the big nickel in Sudbury, the big goose in Wawa, the big peirogie in the Prairies, and so on. We love to build big things, and he wanted to take pictures of all of 'em.

And so when I met him he was travelling light, across the country. Digital camera and a couple changes of clothes, not much else. I like folks that travel light, I told you that. Indicates a certain freedom of spirit.

He checked into the hotel, and I carried his bags, and when I got to his door he turned and looked at me and said “I've been to eighty motels in eighty days, Reggie, and this is the first one where I've seen a bellboy who carried my bags. I'm surprised they pay you to do this.”

And I told him that they don't pay me here, not exactly, and he smiled and nodded. And then he opened the door to his room. It was dark in there – housekeeping usually leaves a small lamp on by the bed, and the curtains open, but for whatever reason they didn't that day, so the room was a cave. Ink black. And this fellow, the bicycle fellow walks directly into the room, doesn't turn the light on, just goes in by the light of the open door and sits at the end of the bed, reaches into his pocket and pulls out this silver flask, thin and deep.

“Come on in, Reggie,” he says. “Come on in and have a drink.”

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

MATT

I guess I'm a bit of a drama queen. Hell, I am, I admit it. I like attention, I like raising eyebrows. I like confessions, I like explosions, I like being emotionally involved in things and attached to things and being part of things.

And so I kind of smile when I do this. When I feel like this. It feels like somebody has cut a hole in my stomach and is pumping everything out, they've just jacked a tube right in there, a Shop-Vac set on “wet and chunky” and it's pulling out every damn thing it can find. And even as it slurps and chunders and grinds, I'm grinning like an idiot because i can see this from outside a bit and Jesus, I'm such a pussy.

Look at me, whining on ... she doesn't care about me, blah blah blah. But you know, I have this theory. And it's that the worst thing that's ever happened to you, well, that's the worst thing that's ever happened to you. If the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the time you failed Grade Nine algebra and your dad yelled at you, that carries the same mental scars as, I don't know, some kid in Rwanda who watched his parents get shot when he was six. I mean, the kid in Rwanda is probably more messed up in a lot of ways, don't get me wrong, but the emotional investment you have in the worst thing is always the same. The worst thing that ever happened to you is the thing you get stuck on forever.

Let's say some guy loses his parents in a car accident. It's the worst thing that's ever happened. He cries and cries and for years afterward, he's gun-shy around cars. Hard to even get into one. And he thinks of his parents all the time, and it's the worst thing that's ever happened until, until, until his wife and infant daughter are caught in a house fire and die. And my God, his parents were getting on in years, and it was tragic what happened to them, but this – this is unfair. This is God spitting in the face of man. This is the worst thing ever. And where that car accident with his parents used to sit, where that was the benchmark in his mind for the Worst Thing, this is the new one. Wife and child just – they don't raise the bar, you see, they replace the bar. They just replace it. And then this guy, who is having a very rough life, I guess, loses both his legs and one ear and gets horrible facial scars in a train derailment. He's mutilated and has to live the rest of his life in a wheelchair, and that, now, meshes with everything else to form the new Worst Thing, it supplants his parents and it augments the tragedy of his wife and daughter, and now he's a legless half-deaf hideous thing in a chair somewhere, and it's the Worst Thing.

Before his parents died, not getting a promotion or something was the Worst Thing. Then his parents were the Worst Thing. Then his wife and daughter were the Worst Thing. Then his legs and face were the Worst Thing. But the Worst Thing was always the Worst Thing, and the nature of it changed because of life events.

Do you see what I'm saying? I'm saying sure, I'm a drama queen, and I'm theatrical, and you can laugh at me if you want for living in perpetual horror and self-loathing, but that's because – your perspective is because I am not your Worst Thing. You cannot appreciate that because you're not in my shoes.

But you are my Worst Thing Ever. You leaving me is my Worst Thing, and it will stay there, lurk there, until a greater horror replaces it. That's what you are to me, in your way. You're a blameless wonderful Worst Thing Ever, and all I can do to ease the pain of losing you is wait for something even more terrible to erase you from my mind.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

JANET

Where is this bird from? Where's it going? I don't know. It's always there, it's a spirit animal, like the Natives talk about. It's a ghost. It's the embodiment of human emotion.

I don't think we're supposed to know what it is, just know that it's there flying above us, watching over us, ready to land on our shoulders and whisper in our ears. So the question you have to ask yourself, if you're alone, the question you have to ask yourself is am I ready for this? Am I ready for the bird to land? Am I making myself visible? Because it flies high up, and if you're not glowing bright, the yellow bird will never see you and it will never come down to land on your shoulder.

Not everyone finds the yellow bird in their lifetime, and lots of them get married and raise families without ever feeling that feeling I'm talking about. But you can see something in their eyes, the way they look around. There's a sadness. I think they're sad, inside, because they're trying to participate in something they don't truly understand, something they've never really been a part of. They're not open to it.

They tell you they're open, they tell you they're happy, but they're not. Because they've never really been ready. They've never really seen that amazing yellow bird. And they carry the weight of sadness with them for their entire lives.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

REGGIE

I go in. I don't know why. Everything's telling me this is stupid, and anyone rich as this fella is rich enough to get away with anything, and what kind of guy drives across the country staying in motels to take pictures of big things anyway?

But I go in.

And he gets up and shuffles to the bathroom and doesn't close the door. I hear the fan kick on, it's got this arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rumble whenever the light is turned on, and I'm sitting there on the edge of the bed in the dark with only the light from the front door and the bathroom. And he comes out again, with the two clean glasses from the bathroom and I have to admit, I'm a bit relieved.

So he pours us a drink and sits down beside me and downs his, tosses it back, and gives me this long look. Long enough that I start getting a bit uncomfortable and I sort of shy away, like. And he puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Reggie,” he says to me, “I've only known you a few minutes, but I can already tell you something, Reggie, something about you that you might even not know yourself.”

And his breath is sweet with brandy and my heart's pounding pretty fast.

“You're a happy man, Reggie.”

And he takes a drink from the flask this time, because his hand is still on my shoulder. “There's something great about drinking from a flask,” he says, “it feels so raw.”

I sort of shy away a bit from him again, but his hand is still on my shoulder and it kind of grips, digs in a little. Not enough to hurt, but I don't want to get in a tussle, not if I can get out gentle in a couple seconds anyway.

“How did you do it, Reggie?” he asks me, sitting there in the dark. I look over and his face is pallid in the flourescent light seeping out from the bathroom, he looks like a corpse or a ghost or something. Wasn't there a cartoon once, about a rich little ghost? Or am I getting that mixed up?

So I ask him do what, and he stares at his shoes for an awful long time, and then he looks back at me and his eyes are leakin' something awful. I can't say he's crying, because he's not making any noise, his voice is clear and he ain't choked up.

“How did you get happy?” he asks.

I think about it, and I tell him I don't rightly know, I just am, I guess, and he lets the hand off my shoulder. “I like meeting people like you, Reggie,” he says, “you give me hope.”

Just keep putting one foot ahead of the other, I tell him, doesn't matter who you are or what you do, live simple and just keep putting one foot ahead of the other and you'll get there. It's what my granddad said and what my dad said and they all got there in the end, and I'll get there sure enough too.

“Thank you, Reggie,” he says. And I close the door behind me.

I never saw him again. Checked out the next morning before I woke up. And nobody ever saw him again. They run a bit in the paper from time to time on his birthday, on the anniversary of his disappearance. A vanished billionaire, an eccentric. I figure maybe he took it to heart, decided to live simple, grew a beard and got a job somewhere, and when he dies somebody'll be in for a hell of a surprise.

Or maybe he was never there at all.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

THOMAS

If you're going to deal with other people, openly and fairly, you need rules. You need order. And mavericks, competitors, they just ... they're what messes everything up in the end. You understand. Sometimes they accomplish great things, but nothing that wouldn't've been done without them, and in the grand scheme of things, on the whole, they do more harm than good.

I hate those movies where the cop has to break all the rules to get the bad guy. Because he's a symptom of the bad guy, not a cure. There's this idea in society that you have to bend the rules, break the law, screw the other guy to get ahead, and it's engendered in our kids pretty much from birth. They get to school and they start playing games where somebody, some team at least, wins. And another team loses. And they start making those divisions, right off the bat, the division between them and others and what makes them winners and what makes other people losers.

So people get marginalized from infancy, and they have two choices: fade to survive or thrive for revenge. I dislike that. I dislike that whole approach to society. We should be better than that.

There's this photo I have, from this trip I took. It's the only photo of me from this entire trip. I went down south, to one of the islands, because I wanted to do some coral diving, I wanted to see the coral reefs. They're being destroyed, you know. Pollution. Seafaring vehicles. You have to see them before they're gone, because we're killing them all. And it struck me, down there under the water, how beautiful it is when something actually works in harmony with everything in its environment. Nothing tries to cut the coral down, other coral don't backtalk it or betray it or chisel it out of everything it can. People talk about competition in nature as if it justifies any sort of behaviour in the “real” world, but it doesn't. It doesn't justify anything.

And it really was down there, under the sea, looking at the coral and the fish and the sheer humming harmony of it all, that I felt a deep peace settle upon me. There's competition in nature, sure, but it's not mean competition. It's just necessary. But behind that competition there's an underlying harmony, an understanding, a greater purpose. There's a balance that nobody seeks to transcend. And I think that's what's wrong with us, is we can't find that balance any more. We've lost track of it. Everybody wants to rule the world, and nobody wants to live in it. Everybody breaks one rule just for them, and then gets upset when other people break the rules. Everybody wants to get ahead. But what's ahead?

It's amazing how clear things are underwater. I thought about disconnecting my tanks and just drifting for a bit, just drifting through the coral and seeing how things were down there, but I had to head up. There were people waiting for the tanks, and we only had a twenty-minute dive each.

The photo taken of me on that vacation – I'm looking right into the camera, and my eyes are all squinted, and there's this weird photo effect – they call it an artifact, I think – of some yellow blur obliterating my left shoulder. But I kept the photo, because it's the only one I have. And when people come to visit, they look at that photo on the wall and say “you look angry, Thomas, you look upset.”

And I tell them that I wasn't upset, and I wasn't angry.

I was looking into the sun.

This is Paul Bley on solo piano.

THE NATURAL WORLD

ROB

When I was a boy, I stomped ducks.

It makes me sick to say this. I can't even imagine who I was back then. I have these disconnected memories that I can't reconcile with who I am now, and it sounds stupid to say this, I know, but sometimes even now when I'm sitting at home with my wife and my two beautiful babies I look around the room and I look at the fire in the fireplace and the dog sleeping by the door and I wonder how I could ever have been such a beast.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn't even be talking about this. I mean, what if I decide to run for office or something some day? This would inevitably hit the press, I'd be called the “duck stomper” and my life would be over. Just over. And for the rest of my life I'd be the duck stomper. Duck Stomper Robert. And the funny thing is, I'd deserve it. Because, well, I feel bad but what do you do? Drive fourteen hours, head on down to the pond and apologize to the ducks' families? Not likely. The pond probably isn't there any more, either. Last I heard from a down-homer, there were subdivisions going in all over the place. Hell, one developer with a million dollars in his pocket destroys more ducks in a day than I did in six years of adolescence, and here I am gnashing my teeth about it.

I don't know. It eats away at me. I know it's not like I killed somebody, not like I'm a murderer, but it eats away at me. The malice I had in me, the hatred for living things, the need to go out and bait fishhooks with bread and snag ducks and beat them to death with my feet. I mean, what was wrong with me?

And the question that really gets me, the thing I worry about – is that thing still wrong with me now?

WINSTON

You sell enough mousetraps, you get a feeling for the people that have mice. You know? And let me tell you, not everybody has mice. That's just something the exterminators tell you, make you feel like they're not lookin' down their noses at you. But not everybody has mice.

You've got to look at mice as – okay, they're not just mice. I mean, biologically, yes, they are mice. I'm not saying they're space aliens or anything. But if you're in the elimination game, as I am, if you're working to rid people's homes of vermin, you need to develop this fundamental understanding, this key, core idea that these are not isolated creatures walking around and randomly popping into people's homes for a cup of tea and a chat. These are empires, understand, these are empires that parallel the human empire, but that exist within and around our empire. And they make incursions. They probe for weakness. They poke to see if they can find sore spots, and then they move in.

So when somebody's home is infested with mice, when they come in looking for traps, it is not a simple matter of them having a couple of mice living somewhere in the walls, it is an invasion. An advance force, if you will. Because as much as you think these are harmless nose-twitching doe-eyed little critters, if you give them quarter they will expand and do their damndest to take over. They are not a little family looking for a home. They are an advance team from the Empire of Mice, and they want nothing more than to get a foothold to destroy us and reclaim the earth.

They're all like that. Termites, carpenter ants, mice – even the empire of sparrows will gladly move in and expand throughout your home, given the opportunity. Abandon a house, and see how quickly it becomes unsalvageable. Things moving in and taking over. It's true. You can deny it all you like, but it's true. The human empire has put itself in opposition to the rest of nature, and the other empires, in their jealousy, are taking over. And you cannot deny this, because you know in your heart it is true.

I was an architect of furniture. I designed things for comfort, for style, for people's lives. And then in the middle of the night one night, I realized that there was no point in making things for a doomed empire, and while humanity ruled the earth for now, the other empires were not transient. The human empire is transient. We're ephemeral, which is a word I learned from The Little Prince. We're just passing through, like the dinosaurs, here to make a noise for a while and then to disappear. But the mice, the ants – these empires are inevitable. When you think about all the mice out there, scurrying, breeding, squeaking, eating, making little mice plans in their little mice homes, eyeing our houses covetously and whispering to each other in the dark – don't you get a feeling of inevitability? Not inevitability like standing in front of a tank with your arms thrown up, but inevitability like seeing an avalanche roll down the mountain very slowly, like you're stuck in slow-motion as the snow crawls down towards you to bury you whole.

That's the feeling I get, anyway. But even if I can't stop the avalanche, at least I can give humanity a shovel. So I have a shop full of mousetraps, and I'm always working on a better one. I'm always trying to find the thing that will crack the Empire.

And I think I'm getting closer.

LESLIE

I guess I've always been concerned with the paranormal. And for the record, I hate that word. “Paranormal.” I mean, it's diminishing even as you say it. There's normal, and then there's paranormal. What is that? It's demeaning. A hundred and fifty years ago, if you talked about sending voices through the air over thousands of miles without even a wire connecting the two speakers, they'd call that paranormal. Two thousand years ago, they'd call a calculator paranormal. Just because we don't have the technology to recognize the potential for – sorry. Sorry. I'm going off on a thing again. I get riled up.

The approach I take to it, though, the approach I like isn't that the spirit world is an extension of the human world. It's part of the natural world, just like people are part of the natural world.

Imagine that there are these people that live on a plateau, and they can look down on the town below them. But for whatever reason, the townspeople can't see the people on the plateau. And every once in a while, one of the townspeople climbs up onto the plateau, and joins the people living up there.

So the people in the town can't see the people on the plateau, and the plateau is so steep and so dangerous that it is rare that anyone on the plateau can actually climb down and enter the town. But they can shout from the top of the plateau, they can shout and throw things and make themselves known in subtle ways to the people of the town. And the people in the town, sometimes they hear distant voices, or sometimes a pebble or a leaf or a branch falls in the midst of where they live and they wonder how it got there. But they don't wonder too much, because they don't know or even much care about the plateau.

But how arrogant would it be to think that there are just people up there on that plateau? That they live on air and sunshine? And how can you possibly think that the people up there, on that plateau, that they don't live in the same world as the people in that town? Because they do – they do. The plateau people are in the same world as the townspeople, it's just so damn hard to interact that the two are almost oblivious to each other most of the time.

If it rains in the town, it rains on the plateau. If there's a fire in the town, the smoke reaches the plateau. And there must be more to the plateau than just a bunch of people milling around, but I live here, in the town, and they haven't invented the right kind of binoculars yet that let me see up there. You get me?

You'd be a fool not to believe in something just because you can't see it. You believe in bacteria, right? And have you ever seen it with your own eyes, not through some special machine? No. You can't. But you believe in it. There are phenomena, observed and documented, and to say that it isn't real is foolish, and to say it is not of our world is foolish.

They're here and among us because they are of us. They're here.

ROB

I didn't hate ducks particularly. I don't know why the hell I did it. I was at high school one day, and ... well, high school wasn't really a place for me, you know? I did all right, I didn't get in trouble much, but I figured out how much I could cut and not get in trouble. I got my hands on the policy manual for the school – you just had to go to the office and ask for it, as it turns out, so I did. And I saw how many days I could miss without a call to the parents, how many days without a visit to the principal, and how apart they had to be so as not to draw official wrath, and I made a schedule. Seriously. I made a schedule. And every day I could skip, I did.

And I was pissed off, too. I wish I could say why, but I can't. I don't know, I was just angry all the time. My parents were great, at the time I felt like they were trying too hard, staying to close, but in retrospect – they were great. My little sister, too. I treated her very badly. We haven't spoken – well, I haven't spoken to her since it happened. Since she caught me.

I was out back of school with Reggie MacAlister, we were going to take off for last period, which is allowable about once a week if you talk to the teacher first, but leaving a note in a teacher's mailbox counts as contact, so the method was to pick your Friday, write a note and drop it off at lunch, and take off at two o'clock because – in theory, according to the regs – the teachers check their mail between each period, so the teacher has notice that you will not be in class that day. So Reggie and I were out back of the school, about five klicks from my house, and we decide to just walk it home, walk it home and see what we can find to do. And to get there we cut through some fields, and we start just kind of wandering around back in there, and we come across the old pond with all the ducks in it, and Reggie says “hey, you know what would be funny?”

No, that's wrong. See, I'm editing it. I'm even now, I'm editing it in my mind to try to push this off me. To pin it on somebody else. But that wasn't it, that wasn't how it worked. I said it. I turned to Reggie and his eyes were small, slits because the sun was behind me, and I couldn't see anything in his eyes. And I said “hey, you know what would be funny?” and Reggie said “what?”

And I said “I bet if we put some bread on some fishhooks we could fish for these ducks. Just like fishing. We could hook them and haul them in.”

Even then – is this new, am I making this up? I don't think so. I'm sure I remember that even then, something was squirming inside me, something recognized that this was a monstrous idea, that I was being a beast. But I stared at Reggie and his screwed-up eyes and for a second I thought that he might punch me in the face. I couldn't read what was going on in there. And Reggie, Reggie just looked at me and said “sure.”

“Sure.”

And that's all the encouragement I needed. My dad kept a lot of fishing stuff out in the shed, and ... oh Jesus, I can't believe I'm really talking about this. I can't believe I did this. This is like, it's like I'm looking at this in my memories like I'm at the movies, like it was something some kid did once, but it wasn't me. There's no connection now, I don't know this boy. It's like a film. I can almost see the artifacts, the flaws in the print. The reel-change dot.

So we got the fishing line, and some hooks, and some bread.

And we set out, mighty warriors, bold children fueled on boredom and adolescence, we set out to kill us some ducks.

WINSTON

You see, the empires ... the empires aren't united against us. They're independent. But they're not allied against the human empire, they just have the human empire as a common enemy. You have to appreciate that distinction. It's a very important distinction to make. The human empire isn't against these empires, either, not directly. We're barely aware of them. Fat-assed blinking sonambulant arrogance.

It's like Europe, around World War One. You ever take any history? A bunch of empires, a bunch of nations, and none of them like each other particularly much. But when they get together, it's not because they're fond of each other, it's because they have a common enemy. It's because they have a mutual reason to work together, to wipe out another empire that threatens them all. Now imagine what World War One would have been like if they other countries had never coordinated, never gotten together, just sort of dog-piled on Germany without any planning between them, and that's sort of the situation with us. Against the natural empires.

So how do you stop this? Well, imagine your country is being attacked by a bunch of different countries from all directions at once, but none of these countries like each other – they just dislike you more. What do you do with that?

You convince the other countries to gang up on each other instead.

You tell them that they hate each other more than they hate you.

And that's what I'm doing.

Screw killing the mice.

I'm going to get the ants and the roaches and the birds to do it for us.

LESLIE

Focus is key.

And it's hard to focus.

I think everything we do, as a culture, as a species, is designed to fragment our focus, actually. I mean, think about it. Think about how we lived a hundred years ago to and then think about how we live today. Can you concentrate now? Can you spend eight hours ... even four hours... doing something without interruption? I know I can't.

We have the Internet, we have mobile phones, we have television and movies and airplanes and cars and pets and video games and hotels and motels and roads. There is no reason to sit still, and it's so easy not to sit still, so we don't.

We don't focus. And I think that's where they are, they're in the focus.

Uh... more that they're out of focus and we need to have focus to see them. I mean, really out of focus. Like a picture taken with a camera with the shutter open for a minute, you see the background, the static things, they're there crisp and clear and beautiful but the man running through the picture, he's just this faint streak of colour. He's almost invisible, but he was there. And if you stare at the picture long enough, if you focus, you can see him. You can see where he passed.

But you can't focus any more. You can't see what's right here because you're always distracted, something's always pulling you away. Imagine sitting in one place doing nothing for eight hours. Just imagine that. You'd consider it torture. After fifteen minutes, you'd be begging to move. After half an hour, you'd be fidgeting. After three hours, you might actually go insane. But the way to access this phenomena, this documented and proven phenomena – there are people who have sat, sat and focused, for twenty-six hours. Looking at nothing but the air, where they felt a presence, trying to glean something from the space between space. Not another world. Not another dimension. Not heaven or hell or any sort of magical other-realm. Just a different way of focusing.

I think it's sort of like those “magic eye” paintings you saw back in the Nineties. It looks like a blur of garbage, but if you find the trick, if you relax your eyes and let yourself see things a certain way, images appear. Things pop out, three-dimensional, and you wonder why you couldn't see them in the first place, because they were obviously just there the whole time waiting for you.

Imagine if the world were like that. And imagine if instead of the thirty seconds it takes you to relax your eye muscles and shift focus, it took you years to learn to see the signal in all the noise that surrounds us. It's not easy, and most people that try it go crazy, but it is possible. It's been done. People are doing it every day.

We don't see ninety percent of what's around us. That's the truth. And what we see isn't our world. Our world is mostly made up of what we don't see, what we don't have the capacity to experience.

I'll tell you what to do.

I'll tell you how you can see a ghost.

ADAM

We stayed at the hotel the night of the storm and when we came back to the campground the next day, everything was gone. Everything. It was like nobody had ever been there – well, I mean, it was mowed and everything, there weren't any trees there, but all the tents were gone. When we left there were hundreds of tents, a couple of those camper trailers, but the army said we had to leave those behind and vacate as soon as possible and all the tents were gone. Everything was gone, blown down across the beach and into the ocean. Even the picnic tables had been pushed around by the wind, one was tilted up and had shoved itself all the way over to the end of the area, a huge groove in the ground in some places.

And I felt ... well at first I was grateful, I guess, that those guys had come to get us, because even if we'd spent the night in the car I don't know what might have happened, a lot of the cars there had their windows smashed and the insides were just wrecked, just ruined from the rain and the stuff flying around.

But then I was angry, I suppose. Because I'm standing there looking at this field, this field of ruin, and it's like I've been negated or something. Like we were just erased off the field with this careless swipe of the hand, and God didn't care and nature didn't care if it killed us or ruined our vacation or destroyed our most precious things, it just brushed us off this space and back into the sea. Like it was spitting us out. And it just seemed so wrong, standing there with dozens of other shell-shocked families, children crying, that anything could be so monstrous as to just throw all this away.

I guess it's just that you're standing there and you feel small, you know? Naked. The sun comes out and the clouds roll off and you almost think it's going to be a good day, then you look out and realize that everything that was there is gone, everything that you wanted out of that day, that week has been swept away. And you feel kind of pissed off. You feel it in your gut a bit. It's like something's been pulled out along with all that... stuff, all that stuff that shouldn't matter, well, there's something that's gone along with it. Security, I guess. The feeling that you're in charge. It's gone and you get kind of mad about it, and then the sun is shining and you realize that the sun doesn't care. The planet just doesn't care. You're going to die someday and the Rockies just don't give a shit.

And your vacation is ruined too, which is a pisser, the kids are traumatized and they're not going to be able to weather a storm without crying, well, EVER, and you just – but the thing, the main thing is the lack of security. Nobody likes feeling endangered and this sort of things makes you realize you're in danger all the time. No matter what humanity builds, Mother Nature can take it out. It might take force or it might take time, but it will be gone one day. Even if the planet doesn't get us, the universe will.

That's why I don't get people that are into nature, not really. I mean, I like to walk in the woods and stuff, but people that study this stuff seem so, I dunno, chipper about it. It's like they don't get that it all basically proves that we're going to die. Think about it. You study trees, right? At some point it has to occur to you that this tree was around before you and probably this tree will be around after you, too.

JUSTIN

Zombies. I mean, zombies. Pretty dull, right? And the people in zombie movies, Jesus, are they stupid. I don't know why the stupids are the only ones to survive zombie attacks. Sometimes I think all the smart people on earth actually UNLEASHED the zombies, and they're in these secure underground bunkers, watching the stupids get wiped out via satellite or closed-circuit cameras and just laughing their asses off.

Seriously.

I mean, take “Dawn of the Dead.” Either version. You've got these people in a world overrun with zombies, which is pretty horrible, so you take refuge. They happen to find a mall, and good for them. Lots of food, lots of places to run, lots of neat tools – hardware stores, convenience stores, department stores. Aces. So you're in the mall, and you have department stores and hardware stores and sporting goods stores, and you need to leave the mall.

Let's review at this point. I know it's early, but let's take a quick overview. You're in a mall with a bunch of different stores, and more or less anything you want at arm's reach. Outside, there are a thousand slavering zombies who attack you using their fingernails and mainly their teeth, and if they bite you, your're dead.

And you have to leave this mall. Omigawd! You have to leave the mall. The mall surrounded by a thousand unarmed zombies, who attack by biting.

Here's the question: do you go to the sporting goods store and grab some hockey gear, or the department store to snag a bunch of thick leather shit, or the hardware store to pick up some battery-powered hardware and some makeshift armour...

...or do you dash outside into the throng of zombies wearing a tank top?

See what I mean? Somewhere, there's a bunch of smart people watching this shit and laughing and laughing and laughing as all the stupid people kill each other off. All the stupids being wiped out by zombies, and then becoming zombies and only marginally less stupid. And eventually all the zombies die off and the smart people inherit the earth, only to find out there's nobody to clean the goddamn sewers and the joke is on them.

And here's the second bit.

Watch a zombie movie. They usually unroll over a long period of time. Weeks, probably. But by the time the movie starts, most folks have already become zombies and are already staggering around, aarrrrgghh grunt and yadda yadda. And in most of the newer zombie movies, these mofos are fast. I mean they sprint everywhere, even when they have no reason to. Zip zip zip.

So the movie unrolls over weeks of time, and your heroes are eating food and drinking water and trying to stay alive, and the zombies are running around zip zip zip, humanity's been destroyed so they have nothing left to eat, because zombies only eat living people. Because if they ate pork chops, you know, problem solved.

This is the thing.

Humanity takes back the world from the zombies. Shouldn't be too hard, if you have access to a goddamn sporting goods store or, God forbid, some riot gear. So you've got the world back, and you're trying to contain the few zombies you have left roaming around trying to bite through your shin guards.

And then some bright light thinks: hey, we've been around for WEEKS fighting these things, and they haven't eaten jack-all in about a month and they're still running around like Bruce Jenner on meth. So what the hell? There's a word for something that doesn't need any fuel and keeps going forever, my friend. It's called “perpetual motion.” And man, that stuff is golden.

So you take the few remaining zombies and you build these giant, like, hamster wheels. And you put them in these big steel hamster wheels with transparent plexiglass sides, over one inch thick, unbreakable stuff. The idea is they are trapped. T-to the -r- to-the A-P-P-E-D. No rivets popping loose. They're stuck. Hell, the plastic is melted together. They're never getting out, okay?

Then you get, I don't know, a toddler on a string. A big plump juicy baby. Maybe an orphan, nobody'll miss an orphan. And you dangle the wee tyke in front of the hamster wheel, the big plexiglass hamster wheel, and the zombie just goes apeshit and starts sprinting towards it.

Before you know it, you're powering a small city on zombie power.

Okay. Now, I know what you're thinking: this shit always goes wrong and you wind up with another outbreak. Hear me out. You pull all the zombies' teeth. Chop their fingers off. Remove anything on their body that might be used to cut or slash. The bait, too. Pull the little creep's teeth and duct-tape some mittens on it so that on the off chance a zombie gets loose and bites it, nothing much will come of it. And then, even if the zombies get loose, what are they going to do? Roam around and gum people?

So you've got a bunch of running dead dudes that apparently never run out of gas, and even if they do get loose, they're about as dangerous as a ninety-year-old with gum disease.

Damn.

LESLIE

If you want to see a ghost, you have to be ready to accept them. And I don't mean accept them in the “have them over for tea” sense, I mean accept them as beings with as much validity as you have. None of this “shadows of the living world” stuff. That's like trying to treat slaves as equals while still thinking they're your inferiors. You're just going to come off as smarmy and superior and they're just going to avoid you.

Or conversely, they're going to get very angry. And you don't want that.

I clear houses for a living, that's what I do. You may know that. I have a reputation in some circles as being very good at it; that's why I make a living from it. Lots of people, people who share my beliefs to some extent, they try. And they almost always fail. They fail because they lack a fundamental understanding of how it works, they think they accept these things but they don't. They don't truly accept it.

The approach is not that these are external things, the approach is that these are internal things. They are not from outside, they are from the inside, with us. The failures in my profession are scattered across insane asylums and looney bins and special-needs homes from here to Utah because they always approached it as an external thing, like a mess that needs cleaning or a mouse that needs killing. But you can't clear a house like you kill a mouse. That's not how it goes. You need to not banish things but clear them, and that's where most people fall down; it's not a matter of saying you don't belong here but you do belong here, but we'd much prefer it if you'd leave. Ninety percent of all clearances are just at matter of making it clear that the presence has as much right to be there as anybody, but the presence makes other people very uncomfortable and a gentleman or lady would choose to leave the party under such circumstances.

And that usually works.

But sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it's harder to clear things, and that's when you – but I can't give away the trade secrets. And that's not really the point, is it? The point is that people need to recognize that they're not dealing with a world apart. They're dealing with an aspect of this world that they can't normally see, just like microbes or ultraviolet light. We haven't figures out how to pierce that veil yet, but that doesn't mean the energy isn't there.

You just need to focus. Focus on understanding things you have no evidence to understand with. Focus on comprehending the incomprehensible. Focus on totality.

Focus on nature.

WINSTON

So you create what's called a pheromone, a pheromone trigger. It's how you talk to insects, to ants and such. And this trigger, it sort of rewires them away from mice-neutrality to mice-aggression. It's not that hard when you know how, there are bioscientists working on it right now. It's how they control mosquitoes in areas infected with West Nile virus. You convince them that they don't want to mate. Pheromones. And you do the same with the birds, other insects. You convince them, using pheromones, that the mice are the bigger threat. And you let the empires flail away at each other for a bit.

The worst-case scenario? Not much of one. The ants kill the mice or the mice kill the ants, and either way you're laughin'. Human empire wins. Maybe a few more mice to deal with, or a few more ants, but you're certainly not much worse off than you were in the first place.

That's the better mousetrap. That's what people have talked about for centuries. Everyone's been looking at the mechanical without focusing on the biological. Disease is a bad idea – too volatile. I was investigating low-yield radiation as a sterilizing agent for a while, but that was no good – governmental regulations were problematic, and dosage was hard to regulate without danger. But pheromonal control to use other animals to control mice populations is smart. That could work. And rather than use the human empire to focus, you have the other empires on each other. That's the brilliance of it. Resource conservation and having the enemy do the job for you.

Did I say 'enemy'? Sorry. Didn't mean to. Enemy's the wrong connotation, really. You can't be fooled into thinking this is a battle like that, a struggle between thinking equals. That's a key mistake. Because if you think they think, you start to think about what and how they're thinking, and then it's over. The key is to understand that you don't understand, then progress from there. Look for patterns, not intelligence.

But never forget that this planet is a struggle for empire. Humans are just one – mice, ants, birds, snakes – they're some of the others. Spiders too.

You have to watch out for the spiders.

ADAM

So the vacation is over and you go home and you stop thinking about it. I mean, literally stop thinking about it. And six months later it's one of those vaguely funny stories you tell dinner guests to entertain and impress them, how you nearly got swept away, ha ha.

You can't think about this stuff too much. You'd go crazy. I was talking a minute ago... naturalists. And how they can be so happy. Because you're looking at a tree and it's a hundred years old, and you realize that the tree – if everything goes as it should – will be around long after you're dead. And then you start to think that even if the tree goes, well, that mountain, it'll still be around after you're long gone. And even once the mountain erodes, even if humanity – we've scaled up to humanity here – even if humanity outlasts the mountain, well, the planet will survive us.

And if not the planet, the solar system.

And if not the solar system... well, you know. But no matter which path you take and which road you go down, you always end up at the same place. The universe expands and the universe contracts and in the end, in the very end, in the unimaginably distant future, it all has to stop. I'm going to die. You're going to die. My wife and my kids? Dead already. I had this friend, Jarrod, sort of a Zen scholar guy, and he broke a plate in front of me once. It fell on the floor and he got the broom and said it was broken the moment it was made, all the plate was doing was following the inevitable arc to its own destruction and there was no point in getting upset about something that was already broken.

Which made a lot of sense at the time, but then you look at nature and realize that we're all born broken, when you get right down to it. The planet doesn't care if we live or die. The universe doesn't care if the planet lives or dies.

We need to make sense of all this, of how small we are in the face of how big it all is. We need to define ourselves against this doom. I think that's why we build things. I bought a coffee table book once, photographs by some inventor who packed it all in and drove across the country taking pictures of all the gigantic things Canadians build. And it seems like the bigger the space we're in, the bigger the objects we try to fill it with.

We can see that void and we know what it means, we just choose to ignore it.

And that's nature too, I guess, in a way.

That's nature's way.