Cardiogram of the New World Order

​Excerpt

New York City, Summer

Zara desperately needed a manicure. I watched with one eye as she picked up her whiskey sour and brought it to mauve-painted lips to sip. The glass was wet with condensation. I wondered if it might slip out of her fingers. The noise would surely cause a scene. Waiters rushing with brooms, a new drink for her, maybe free dessert for us if she decided it was their fault for giving her a cold drink in a warm glass. I wondered if she would be embarrassed, or if she would grin at the sound of the shatter, with that smolder she often gave me as if she were enticing me to set her on fire. My other eye was locked on the bridge of her nose. It’s a good way to avoid looking at someone directly.

“I don’t normally drink,” she said, “It’s so poisonous.”

“Why today?” I asked, still staring at those cracked blue acrylic nails.

“Children are starving, people are fighting wars, the great machine of modern capitalism  wants me dead anyways, I’m getting drunk on my business lunch.” The words sounded like an affirmation, one rehearsed aloud to herself during her morning commute in the corner of the subway car.

This restaurant was dim. Marvellous. We were in the basement room, with stone walls that looked like they would be sweetly cool if I could curl up against them. I would run my fingers over the cement between each slab. It would scratch that itch on my fingertips. I would close my eyes and smile and I would listen as the ringing in each ear settled to a harmony. Rested against such a deadly thing as stone, its sharp points like mountains threatening my skull, I would feel powerful keeping my composure. This would make me strong. I would not bash my head against the wall. I would close my eyes and drift away.

Zara ordered some take on a Niçoise with seared tuna and shaved daikon radish and soy-marinated eggs. I had braised escarole in a dense parmesan broth with butter beans and venison meatballs. The thought of deer in my lunch made me feel like a hunter. A lumberjack out in the Canadian wilderness. Northeast Ontario, Moosonee, on the Hudson Bay. My wife, Isabel, gathers mushrooms with our young son. It’s the season for hen-of-the-woods. It is late September and she is pregnant. At night it is dark and she plays the piano and I, my fiddle. We are tired from working and we fall into bed. A million stars and the smell of candles blown out. Honey and wax and fire. Inside a picture book. An antiquity. The venison was too salty. I didn’t finish it.

“You should come to Bali with me this winter,” Zara said. Moosonee was gone.

“My coach is leading a DMT breathwork workshop. I’ve been getting really into transcendental meditation. It’s the only way I can stay off my Adderall.”

An opal laid in the middle of her chest wrapped in gold. It drew me in with its blues and greens, smooth, cool, ancient. Zara’s words circled the air around my head while I stared. I am dancing on a beach on the Indian Ocean. There are ghosts and lizards and waterfalls and salt in my hair. Divination. I transcend, naked, in the jungle, wrapped in seaweed, on ayahuasca. Loïc stands there gaping at me. He would never understand.

The cheque came and went. It was dim when we got outside and the concrete was damp. I read traffic for a sign of what time it was. I guessed three. Our driver looked at me with longing in his rear-view mirror. Big green eyes like the opal. I couldn’t stand that desire.

New York City made me an insomniac. In an air conditioned hotel room I looked out over 41st street. The sound of a car alarm was muted through the glass. Sharp red and white and blue lights cut through the half-darkness of midnight. On the inside, everything was beige and white and soft and smelled of fresh linens. If I had any memory of what it felt like to be a child, this is what I imagined it to be. The house is silent and I have a soft yellow blanket. In the blackness of the nursery I cannot see the rocking chair but I know it is there and I hear the ticking of a cartoon clock. Someone somewhere is watching over me. I smile with loose teeth. 2005.

In the hotel bed I hummed and rocked myself to sleep.