centennial_park epitome of incomprehensibility The central-west island of Montreal is a strange place. Places where the dark and good treelines of nature converge on human settlement are always strange, and while this may be more evident in the countryside, hark to this: two fairly large parks, one called Millennium Park and the other Centennial Park. One's in Dorval, the other in Dollard-des-Ormeaux. In defiance of their respective names, Centennial Park is much bigger than Millennium. In Centennial there are playgrounds, hiking trails, and a lake, but for all that it seems best at being a winter park. When it snows, a steep hill that has its trees cleared on two sides holds five or more sled trails. On level ground, there's a sporadically maintained skating rink near the parking lot (the lake itself, I guess, would be too high-maintenance and dangerous for this purpose) and a hut with washrooms and heating where you can put on skates and skis. There is a small story, but that can be later. I feel like kicking myself for thinking it relevant to anybody. (There. I kicked myself. Didn't hurt much.) 131027 ... e_o_i [All right, I'll start.] Three related people and one unrelated one are at a bus stop. The smallest of them says, firmly and carelessly, that the snow falling isn't a snowstorm, that Americans think it's a snowstorm every time it snows a lot, and Canadians know it's only a snowstorm when it's really windy. So "we," the related three, the ones carrying sleds, aren't really going sledding at Centennial Park "in the middle of a snowstorm." (The unrelated man nods in slightly amused nationalism.) Besides, if anything goes wrong, it was Yan's idea in the first place. ... Notice the three sitting on adjacent seats along the left wall of the bus. Kay is the smallest and she wears a faded blue coat her mother bought her nine years ago from the children's section of Canadian Tire. She was 15 then. Kay's cousin Lin is taller. Acidic 16, auburn hair, copper coat, new Samsung smartphone. Kay's brother Yan is the tallest, his age is the middlest, and his hair the reddest. But don't think something bad will happen to the new cell phone. It won't. Thinking about bad things won't always make them happen, a fact Kay is glad of. Kay has suffered from sporadic panic attacks ever since she shattered a glass of wine in a friend's face after missing a bus. Lin actually hit someone on a bus, which puts "hitting" and "bus" into closer proximity, but Kay doesn't know that and it might not even have happened yet. It is December 27, 2012, and Kay wishes she hasn't read the gruesome India Times article. The sanitized Montreal Gazette version was enough. To counteract incipient dizziness, Kay thinks: I like how in Canada you can get on a bus without getting raped and having a metal bar shoved up your vagina. Her sled, objecting to the "slightly amused nationalism" part, falls into the aisle. "Sorry," says Kay. "Where do we get off?" asks Yan, standing up. "Is it Hymus or the one starting with an S? De Salaberry?" "Something berry," says Kay. "You mean you don't know where we're going?" asks Lin, looking up from her phone. ... They get off somewhere and find Lake street, which is the right street. They go the wrong way and see a man trying to drive his car out of a snowbank at a cul-de-sac. Kay watches helplessly as his wheels whirr in place. She goes to asks him if he wants their help, but he waves them off, and with the strength of that wave the car sputters out of the snow. Lin's spirits and hat are dampened. The walk and the falling snow doesn't faze Yan, and it shouldn't bother Kay either, so Kay puts up a false front and says something like, it'll be fun. They walk, and she notes the now-buried bike path next to the fence that stretches into the distance. Somewhere in that fence is an entrance to Centennial Park, Kay suggests, and Yan finds the path. Wading through whiteness, they follow what seems like a country path, leaving the houses behind. All around snow falls with deafening silence. The path is very long and Kay's legs feel heavy. The depth of the snow - this path hasn't been cleared lightly - requires that each step be deep, each footrise steep. Lin complains, but it's an energized kind of complaint. It's exercise, Kay's heart is beating at a healthy rate, or is it healthy? She's warm enough and it's minus 5 outside, in fact she's kind of warm, but could she keep this up for an hour? If she had to, to survive... Siberia, some story about Siberia. Yan's ahead and Lin and Kay call for him to come back. He runs back around the curve shouting about Lac Castor. They all round the curve and see the frozen lake. He remembers the ducks. She remembers the ducks, too, but the yawning white gap between duck time and non-duck time makes her shiver. 131112 ... e_o_i [reprise of last two paragraphs] The path is very long and Kay's legs feel heavy. The depth of the snow - this path hasn't been cleared lately - requires that each step be deep, then steep. Lin complains, but it's an energized kind of complaint. It's exercise. Kay's heart is beating at a healthy rate, or is it healthy? She's warm enough and it's only minus 5 outside, in fact she's sweating a little, but could she keep this up for an hour? If she had to, to survive... like in Siberia; she remembers an assignment in eleventh grade about a Chekhov story set in Siberia. She had to answer the question, "Is this story hopeful or not?" and she hadn't answered either yes or no, the way the teacher wanted her to. Or maybe she just didn't explain herself well enough. Either way it shouldn't bother her now, eight years later. Yan's ahead. Lin and Kay call for him to come back. He runs back around the curve shouting about Lac Castor. They all round the curve and see the frozen lake. He remembers the ducks. She remembers the ducks, too, but the white gap between duck time and non-duck time makes her shiver. Over the next curve of the lake is a hill. On this side it's covered with trees, but Yan shouts and lifts a blue-gloved hand in the air. The orange sled jerks in his hand. It's probably the fastest. Lin has the carpet, lightest to lift, and Kay's dragging the old blue-and-white one with the steering wheel and runners. All of them belong to Yan, and the one Kay's holding is really too small for any of them. It's a bit hard to see, since the show's swirling around them, but when they come to the end of the path they see the bare side of the hill. "I think this is it," says Kay. Her voice sounds empty. The hill is empty. She'd expected to find, at the end of the lonely path, blobs of thick-coated children making noises and bumping into each other. The only noise besides them is the wind. No sliding trails, even. They could be in the middle of the wilderness. Undeterred, Yan says he'll be the first. He takes a deep breath and starts uphill. Lin refuses to move. "What's wrong?" Kay asks. She shrugs. "I'll wait for him to make a trail. It's hard to walk." Lin is right, Kay thinks. The snow is nearly knee-deep and getting deeper. "This is a snowstorm," Kay says, stomping. The wind blows in their faces. "I'm pretty sure this is a snowstorm. What are we doing all alone in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a snowstorm?" Lin shrugs. "Yan!" Kay calls, only it's less like calling and more like shrieking. "Wait! Come back!" She can hear her ears ringing. "I'm not going up there. But you can go." "No," says Kay desperately. "We'll get separated. Yan, come back!" "NO!" he shouts from halfway up the hill. Her knees are shaking. "I'm going to have a panic attack." She sits down in the middle of the snow. Yan, who somehow hears that, says, "No you're not! That's silly." Silly. Of course it's silly to be so weak. But her mere feeling of weakness endangers them, she suspects. Like the friend or boyfriend of that student on the bus in India, who'd given the attackers an excuse to target her, Kay can only make things worse. But no one will hurt Yan, Kay, and Lin. No one will see them. They'll die out here alone, hit by hypothermia or maybe a tree in the gathering dark. With no sources of strength, no means of rescue... At the moment she figures out what she needs, Lin steps forward, pulling the lifesaving gadget out of her pocket. "Do you want to call home?" On the third ring her mother answers. Kay blurts, "Look, we're in the middle of nowhere in the worst snowstorm of the year, I'm scared, and Yan won't come down from the hill." There's a pause. Her mother's voice feels warm, like the kitchen noises in the background: "What do you want me to do?" "Can you come and pick us up? We're in Centennial Park." "Where in Centennial Park?" "I... I don't know. In the middle." "Look, I, I, just a second. I need to watch this turkey, you know. And the car, the car has two feet of snow on it. Can't you get back by yourselves?" "Okay." Kay feels stronger and increasingly ashamed. Lin is standing a few steps away from her, rubbing her hands. Her cousin's neutrality only makes her more embarrassed. "Why don't you let Yan go down the hill a few times," Mom advises. "Make a compromise. Then go back." "Okay," Kay repeats, and soon they hang up. She returns the phone and Lin pockets it. They watch in silence as Yan reaches the top and slides down. Friction overcomes momentum and he stops in the middle, a pile of snow in front of him. He kicks at the snow and manages to push himself a few more metres. "The next one should be easier," he says, passing by them. Then Lin says, "My hands are cold." "Stop," Kay orders Yan. The authority has returned to her voice. She could suffer excruciating mental torment and it would not (should not) be a deterrent to anyone, but Lin is their guest and it isn't good for a guest to have cold hands. Together the three mount the hill, wind stinging their faces. When Kay sees what's on the other side, a single syllable - "Tah" - escapes her mouth. In the context of Centennial Park this means she has found her bearings. Below the hill is Lake Street, houses lined neatly on the other side of the road. This is the front entrance. Instead of trudging for fifteen minutes, they could've gone a bit farther up Lake Street and taken a two minute walk up the hill. They were never in any danger; they were never far away from anything, at least not at the hill. As they go down, they meet a teenage boy with a smaller one on the way up. Kay has a momentary fear that the three in their shabby winter gear might excite scorn, but the boy asks in a friendly way, adjusting his snowboard under his arm, "Lot of people there?" Kay smiles too. "Nobody. The paths aren't even cleared." "Yeah? Thanks. We'll stick to this side then." "My hands are cold," says Lin. ... From Lake they find Hyman, which leads back to Sources. Kay calls it a highway - her mother says it isn't, just a large street - and it has at least two lanes going in each direction. Des Sources, that's the French name. Some sources; of sources. What would that mean, of sources? Cite your sources. I have my sources. Fortunately the 209 bus stop has a shelter. 209, direction sud. Sud-est, it should say, but it's the right one. The shelter's glass is clear on all sides except for the right side, where it's covered by a large poster ad for Samsung smartphones. "Product placement," Kay snorts. This paper phone has done nothing to stop snow blowing in the shelter, and Kay uses her valued Value Village boots to kick it right back out. Lin sits on the bench inside and plays a game on her phone, something boring like Solitaire. The snow inside the shelter has reached a manageable level and Kay is eager for something else to kick. Outside she finds Yan pacing back and forth between the bus shelter and the empty field behind it, and a woman about her age with light brown skin and no hat leaning against the shelter and speaking English, not French, into her phone. Neither would react well to being kicked, Kay thinks. Besides, some unthinking snowplow has recently pushed a pile of snow between the bus stop and the road, and that's something Kay can usefully tackle. She stomps and stomps, wearing the snow down, clearing a walkable path to the road. Meanwhile the sky darkens. From the other woman's wrist dangles a bracelet spelling PRIYANKA, so we will assume it is Priyanka saying into her phone, "No. Not yet. I've been waiting for the bus like forty minutes." This isn't encouraging, but Kay works on. In ten minutes she's made a respectably wide path. She feels red-cheeked and useful. Her hands and feet are warm. A car stops and honks. Priyanka looks up. "Oh thanks," she says to Kay, and walks to the car in the path Kay has blazed. "Do you know her?" asks Yan, still pacing. "Of course I do, her name's Priyanka," says Kay after the car is out of sight. Yan shakes his head. "You're just making that up. You make up names for people. Remember when we were in Quebec city? You rolled down the window and shouted, 'Bonjour, Jean-Claude!' I was VERY embarrassed." The girl who was attacked on the bus, her name couldn't be Priyanka, could it? No doubt it wasn't Jean-Claude. Why was she still thinking about that? And bad marks for Chekhov and Siberia. The faraway serious intruding into the mundane. "I was thirteen then." Lin says, apropos of nothing, sticking her head out the shelter, "You two are both adults now. And I'm the only sensible person." "True," says Kay. "Not true," says Yan. Kay imagines the three of them shrinking into their younger selves. In the mangas Lin reads, characters often turn into simpler, cuter, fatter versions of themselves for several panels, then revert to normal. Chibis, TV Tropes calls them. It's been half an hour. The traffic has slowed to a crawl. "Maybe we should start walking back," says Yan. "Maybe we'll start walking back and the bus will come when we're in between stops," Lin points out. Now Kay sides with her brother. "A bus might not come at all. We could walk..." Lin interrupts. "It says a three-hundred something bus comes here too." "Those only go at night." Kay is pleased at a chance to be wiser. Buses are like hotels, she thinks, being wise. In the dark they are lit inside for travelers. They are like islands of warmth. Instead of Bibles they have bus schedules, worth looking at if there's nothing else to read. If Kay had a book right now, like Londonstani or A Room With a View, she'd give it to Des Sources in exchange for a bus going her direction. Her unspoken prayers are answered. There it is, lit and welcoming. Kay is last pressing her pass to the fare box, rectangle to rectangle. The bus beeps admission. 131129 ... e_o_i In the small hours of the morning, e_o_i is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Recently Past. She knows something's wrong when she wakes standing up in burgundy hyperspace instead of lying in bed. The ghost has silver-rimmed glasses. She wears a grey hoodie with "Staff 2011" written on the back, skinny jeans with their ankles folded up, and red polka-dotted socks. "Can't you make up any character who's not you?" she reproves, poking e_o_i in the nose with a glitter-filled plastic wand. "Look at my description. Just look at it. Why am I wearing your clothes?" E_o_i doesn't know. "Did you steal them?" "Steal?" snorts the ghost. "Why would I want anything of yours? Especially the unclear modifiers. Hotels and buses being wise and all." E_o_i looks around her. "Is this place wise? It seems like it." "Like Mr. Darcy, you are proud," the ghost reflects. E_o_i sees that her skin is slightly purple. "Oh, no you don't. You can't just escape into a fantasy world. And don't even think of calling me Priyanka. I know you were thinking it. You don't need to cast yourself as the villain either. Just stop thinking about yourself so much... Why do I sound like your mother now? WHY?" The Ghost of Christmas Recently Past starts hitting herself with the glitter wand. "Don't." Kay grabs the wand. She is alarmed at the parts she can't control and the parts she can. "Talk to me, not to e_o_i over there. I'm the protagonist, after all." The ghost gives e_o_i a dirty look. "It's the narrator I want. You've said it was December 27. If you're basing this on real life, it should be December 28." "But it could be like A Christmas Carol, where the timeline is all screwed up," Kay jumps in. "I'm fine with that." "It's almost Christmas now," e_o_i says wistfully. "The assumed birthday of the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament. That is not offensive any more than a steam engine is offensive. John Stuart Mill. The dark satanic mills. William Blake..." While e_o_i rambles, Kay sharpens the glitter wand with her teeth. Her lips smeared with gold flakes, she stabs e_o_i in the heart. Dramatic music followed by tastefully thick rivulets of blood, which Kay licks off e_o_i's chest in a failed attempt at sexiness. It tastes like German cherries and Norwegian Christianity. "The author is dead!" Kay crows. "And so is Roland Barthes!" The Ghost of Christmas Recently Past shakes her head. "Nope. Now YOU'RE her. I think we have to get back to our genre expectations." "Realism?" asks e_o_i, healing her wound with a wave of her fingers. "Something like that," says the ghost. "Let it be resolved that it's December 28, 2012." "It's December 23, 2013," says e_o_i. The Ghost kicks her in the back of the leg, which almost hurts. 131223 ... e_o_i The Ghost of Something-or-Other Past steps in to say, "Your mom got you that coat from the children's section of Northern Reflections. Not Canadian Tire." E_o_i: "But if you had a coat made out of recycled tires, what would you call it?" The questions hangs in the quiet air. It freezes, and shatters on the burgundy ground. 131228 ... e_o_i At home, the turkey isn't ready yet and the car has snow a foot deep piled on it. Kay stays outside even as Yan and Lin reenter the circle of warmth. She has a plan. She grabs the car by its roof rack - two parallel rails - and hoists herself up. The first time she slips back down, painlessly. The second time she makes it and she's kneeling on top of the car. As long as she distributes her weight across a large enough surface she won't dent the thing. A neighbour car passes and she waves. Then she gets to work. Lying on her back, she grabs the rails again and thrashes around like a snow-crazed child, kicking gobs onto the driveway below. The hard part is poking out snow that's caught between the rails. When she slides down the dashboard, she takes a great quantity of snow with her. Success. The car is cleared. Morally, Kay is cleared for reentry. Her conscience admits her into the planet of housing, the planet of rescheduled Christmas. She eats turkey and cranberry sauce with the best of them. 131228 ... e_o_i The rest of the metaphorical snow is metaphorically morally muddier. "The Inuit don't really have two hundred words for snow, and even if they did, the imposition of metaphor is tantamount to cultural imperialism, don't you think?" Kay might ask Yan sometime in the future. This is an example of manipulation. Manipulation means holding things in your hand. Kay is clumsy and doesn't do this well. But she's tried reverse psychology on innocent children in the past. When she was thirteen and Lin five, she'd say, in the younger girl's hearing, "Let's not go to the park, okay? The park is boring." Why does Kay still want to go to the park? And, more importantly, which park? They go to the park the next day, the day after Christmas, which in their case is December 29th. They go to the park next to the Dorval arena because Yan thinks there's a big snow hill; also because Kay pleads, "Let's not go to Centennial Park this time," and means it. The snow hill is remarkably small. Yan throws a fit, which in his case means calling the situation outrageous and walking around in circles. Kay doesn't throw a fit. She steps onto the small hill, and Lin laughs when, in trying to step off, she falls on her face. The snow is cold but not otherwise painful, and Kay laughs too. Suddenly Lin loses interest. In the near future, they might be at home and Kay might be sitting at, not on, a table when the radio (usually attuned to CBC when it's not at 99.5's la musique classique, la plus belle musique du monde) announces that she's dead. Not Kay, or Lin, or Kay's mother. The radio voice speaks of New Delhi, and then a bus. These are things Kay recognizes and approves of. But then the voice puts them together with other things in a clumsy and nightmarish way: New Delhi bus gang rape victim died today. Kay doesn't like that. She raises her voice at her mother and the radio in the kitchen, "Well, at least no one sang songs about the weather first." Her mother comes into the dining room exclaiming shocked things, and Kay wants to say something different first. She can't, and the second thing comes out "I prayed for her not to die!" which is both falser and more sincere. ("You identify people who are like you, or more likely unlike you, and you identify with them and don't want to die, I mean you don't want them to die, and it's difficult," Kay would elaborate later, under a bland pseudonym.) Lin sits at the table doing something with her hands, overhearing the whole thing. Later she asks Kay why she is making her mother, her aunt, upset. Kay replies because she doesn't have a job yet. This is irrelevant, but true. She starts crying. Kay's mother comes down and asks her why she's crying. She says because she's happy enough to be back, but ashamed of being a bad person during her master's degree. What does she mean by that? She means almost breaking her friend's nose, which is bad, but she doesn't say it. She says she doesn't know how to get a job, which isn't true. In the near future she will get more students in her part-time tutoring job which she never really lost, and she'll also get a completely new job and lose it within the span of a month because her manager is metaphorically shitty, though, to be fair, not prone to hitting people in the face when they try to intervene in arguments. Lin tries to intervene. "Are you quite done the waterworks?" Kay hits Lin in the face. The slap isn't hard, but it is startling. Lin stands up, indignant. "Ow! What'd you do that for?" Kay runs upstairs, shock flashing in her head like a white blinding light - the evil sun of her more esoteric childhood nightmares. "I'm sorry," she sobs, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" (the waterworks are not over). "Why'd you have to make fun of me?" she says on the stairs, but then the sorries take over, and they take over hard. She is a failure. She doesn't deserve to live. She did the one thing she promised never to do again. The difference is only one of degree. Yan hides in his room and reads something by Yeats. Lin calls her own mother and says on the phone that Kay's gone crazy, but she gets over it. Everyone eventually gets a degree in something. (The End) 140113 ... e_o_i [Real life is commenting. I went there two weeks ago with L and the Arthurian novelist. It was swarming with kids and I rather missed the solitude. I couldn't find the particular part of the hill we'd gone up. The parents took us on the way to shopping and they stopped for a stroll along the frozen lake, where they did see ducks. Ducked-up weather patterns or normal? Sorry. Could not resist silliness. Nirbhaya's is sadly a real story. "Priyanka" was an invention. I mean, the bus stop girl had no name-calling bracelet. My first name is nominally Kirsten, Kirsten is Christine in Norwegian, Kirsch is cherry in German (cherry syrup or liquor in English supermarkets), I am neither very Norwegian or German, Kay is one of Arthur's knights, also rather incompetent, but male in that version of the story. Because this is part of the Arthurian stories, you see. I've just decided. One of the mystical and violent ones, like the film Excalibur, where the king represents the land, perhaps the parks of Montreal. I might tell the backstory, but that would take the action elsewhere. I might make surreal spin-offs starring Kay; I might also codify the parks_project.] 140114 ... e_o_i I also see how I keep reusing names. Priyanka reborn as Pri. 220118 what's it to you? who go blather from