“.. we went to Len Vodic Vehicle Hire to pick up a four-wheel-drive for a two-day jaunt into the baking wilderness. The eponymous Len was a very wiry old guy, energetic and friendly, who looked as if he had spent every day of his life doing tough stuff in the out-of-doors. He jumped behind the wheel and gave us the kind of swift, thorough rundown that people give when they assume they are dealing with intelligent and capable listeners. The interior presented a bewildering assortment of dials, levers, knobs, gauges, and toggles.

‘Now, say you get stuck in sand and need to increase your offside differential,’ Lend was saying on one of the intermittent occasions I dipped into the lecture. ‘You move this handle forward like so, select a hyperdrive ratio of between 12 and 27, elevate the ailerons, and engage both thrust motors–but not the left-hand one. That’s very important. And whatever you do, watch your gauges and don’t go over 180 degrees on the combustulator, of the whole thing’ll blow and you’ll be stuck out there.’

He jumped out and handed us the keys. ‘There’s twenty-five liters of spare diesel in the back. That should be more than enough if you go wrong.’ He looked at each of us in turn, more carefully. ‘I’ll get you some more diesel,’ he decided.

‘Did you understand any of that:’I whispered to Trevor when he had gone.

‘Not past the putting-the-key-in-the-ignition part.’

THE day was one of those breathless, clear, blue days that only Greece, of all countries in the world, can provide. The cicadas were zithering in the olive trees and the sea was a deeper blue, moving reflection of the sky. We had just finished a large and leisurely lunch under the twisted, pitted olives that grew almost down to the edge of the sea on one of the most beautiful beaches in Corfu. The female members of the party had gone down to bathe and left Larry and myself alone. We slouched there indolently, ferrying a giant, wicker-covered bottle of turpentine-like retsina between us. We drank and mused in silence. Anyone who thinks that when authors meet they indulge in witty exchanges and saucy badinage is sadly mistaken.

“This is a nice retsina,” said Larry at last, thoughtfully filling his glass. “Where did you get it?”

“From a little man who has a shop in one of those alleyways leading off St Spiridion Square. It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said Larry, holding the glass up to the light so that it glowed a pale old gold. “The last bottle I got from town tasted and looked like a urine sample from a mule. It probably was.”

“I’m coming this way to-morrow,” I said. “I’ll bring you a flagon if you like.”

“Hmmm,” said Larry. “Bring me a couple.”

Exhausted by the intellectual exchange, we filled our glasses and lapsed into silence again. The ants were foraging over the remains of our food. Tiny, black, busy ones, large, leggy, red ones, with their behinds cocked up like anti-aircraft guns. On the bark of the olive against which I was leaning there were flocks of curious larvae moving. Minute, fluffy creatures that looked like misshapen and rather dirty polar bears.

“What are you working on now?” Larry inquired.

I looked at him in surprise. We had an unspoken and unwritten law that we never discussed what we called Our Art with each other, lest it lead to dissension and vulgar abuse.

“I’m not working on anything at the moment, but I’ve got a sort of vague idea of something. As a matter of fact, I got the idea from reading Spirit of Place.”

Larry snorted derisively. Spirit of Place was a compilation of his letters to his friends, painstakingly amassed and edited by our old friend Alan Thomas.

“I’m surprised that it gave you any ideas at all,” said Larry.

“Well, it did. I thought of doing a kind of compilation thing. I’ve got a lot of material that I haven’t been able to use in a book. I thought of putting it all together and making a book out of it.”

“Good idea,” said Larry, pouring himself out another glass of retsina. “Never waste good material.”

He held his glass up to the light and admired the colour. Then he looked at me and his eyes twinkled mischievously.

“I tell you what,” he said. “You could call it Fillets of Plaice.”

And that is exactly what I have done.

 Fillets Of Plaice

Mr Don Van Vliet & Magic Band

He smiled back at the blonde, who actually seemed a bit awkward. With his head, he motioned her over to the bar. She froze, and Luke thought, Oh crap, too forward. But then she stood up and walked over to Luke with a strangely mechanical gait. He wondered if she was a model, and if that was how models were walking these days. She’s so beautiful, Luke thought. Cartoon beautiful. She’s a Barbie doll.

She approached Luke, touched the stool beside him, and said, “I am going to sit here.”

“Please do.”

She sat on the stool, but her body language made it seem as if she’d never sat on a bar stool before and it had a learning curve, like learning how to ice skate or juggle. She stabilized and stared at the bottles against the bar’s mirrored wall. Luke looked at her, and she seemed unconcerned about being stared at. He said, “A guy walks into a bar, and the bartender looks at him and says, ‘Hey, what is this — a joke?’”

If Luke wanted a reaction, he didn’t get it. “My name is Luke.”

There was a pause. “My name is . . .” There was another pause. “. . . Rachel.”

“Nice to meet you, Rachel.”

“Yes.”

Luke felt way out of his league, and awkward as all get-out. He needed to order more drinks, and maybe some snacks, but what do you feed a woman like this — hamburgers made of panther meat? Peacock livers on Ritz crackers? Do beautiful women even eat food?

“Can I order you a drink?”

“Oh. Yes. A ginger ale, please.”

“Great. Bartender?” Luke called for Rick’s attention but got only part of it, as Rick was watching the loving Internet couple interact.

“What can I get you?”

“A ginger ale for Rachel here, and a Glenfiddich with ice for me.”

“Right away.”

Luke reached into his jacket pocket for one of the wads of cash and threw a fifty-dollar bill on the bar, and suddenly he was carried away back in time — back to when he still thought of himself as a good person; back to when every moment made him feel as if he was getting away with something; back to when he didn’t need to loot twenty thousand dollars from the church bank account to land himself that feeling; back to when every moment felt like a drink with a beautiful woman at a bar; back to when he felt that his prayers still counted, still made a difference, when praying sent a beam out into the heavens as powerful as a sunbeam breaking through clouds at the end of a prairie day, like a light beamed from a sidewalk outside the Kodak Theater at the Academy Awards. Luke didn’t feel lost, but he didn’t feel found, either.

On the mute TV above the bar, there was an ad for something colourful, useless, and no doubt destined to clog the planet’s overtaxed landfills with more crap, and for some reason, a computer-animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was endorsing the product. Luke said, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in July? We need Christmas in July like a hole in the head.”

The beautiful Rachel said, “You mean Rudolph the Useful Reindeer.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a fact, Luke. If Rudolph hadn’t been able to help the other reindeer, they’d have left him to be eaten by wolves. I think the other reindeer would have laughed while the fangs punctured his hide. Rudolph was an outcast who became an incast only because of his utility. That’s not a judgement. It’s a statement of fact.”

Luke looked at Rachel. He had a shivering sensation that he was speaking with someone not even human, temporarily given human form. Was he simply being insecure about her beauty or was she genuinely alien? Or perhaps she was the desired end product of an entire century’s eugenic efforts at physical perfection, and with that perfection now having been achieved, humanity was now left free to pursue other avenues of perfection. He said, “I take it you’re not a big fan of Christmas?”

“I have no orthodox beliefs. I have no pictures of an afterworld for myself. In the past, I have tried to convince myself that there is life after death, but I have found myself largely unable to do this.”

Alcohol loosens tongues, and Luke knew he was in the presence of an unusual mind. He asked Rachel, “Do you believe in sin?” As he asked this, he was wondering if she considered him hot. At the same time, he was wondering if he had a chance with her. At the same time, his subconscious was churning through a list of random images: the church basement on a Tuesday morning, lit by a cold sun through the south window and quiet as abandoned Chernobyl; fragments of old Battlestar Galactica episodes beaming from his TV while he watched from the kitchen, eating Campbell’s soup straight from the can; a trio of sparrows outside his bedroom window, fighting over who got control of the ledge.

Rachel said, “I believe only in human behaviour. And I think that if your brain forces you to believe in sin, then you at least ought to calibrate sinning. Religions seem to have no Richter scale of what’s worse than something else. If you do one thing wrong, no matter how small, you’re cast away for eternity. I also find it interesting that no religion has any dimension of ecological responsibility.” Rachel paused. “Luke, I get the impression that you once believed in religion but you no longer do. Am I correct in thinking this?”

Part of Luke was wondering about Rachel’s speech patterns; hers was neither an indoor voice nor an outdoor voice — something like robotized phone menus for United Airlines: The estimated waiting time for the next available member of the United Airline’s quality assurance team is . . . seventy-five minutes. The rest of Luke was thinking about all the dark secrets he knew about his former congregation — might as well start thinking about them in the past tense now — and he thought about his family members and all the crap they put everyone else through. And he thought about his friends and their families and their ongoing family scandals. And he acknowledged that every human on earth is a bubbling cauldron of dirt and filth. Then Luke became slightly spaced out and looked once more at the TV monitor above the bar: BUS CRASH INJURES THREE. HYDRO RATES TO INCREASE 1.5 PERCENT. OPEC MEETING GENERATES CONFLICT. All the crap and evil and meanness in the world — every single person on the planet! — and the best the news can come up with is BUS CRASH INJURES THREE?

Luke looked at Rachel. “Yup. I no longer believe in God.”

“Oh. Okay. Why is that?”

“Because one morning I saw a sparrow yawn.”

“Yawning as in waking-up yawning?”

“Yes.”

Did he dream about dragons? Did he dream about deer? Did he whisper the names of friends who were near? What songs did they play, and how far away? Why did he whisper, why does she scream? What does the sound of a screen door mean? Who walks in the pasture? Who talks on the hill? Who goes to the cellar, can you feel the chill? Where does the river, when will the wind? How far are the mountains? Where do they end? Why would the church? Did the service begin? Tell me who died, and tell me who cried. Help me to hide in the skin of a deer, my zippered-up bag in the mouth of a stag so swiftly I go through rows of does, it flows, it flows, it flows all over the hill where the green grass grows.

A man on a horse with a box on his head
He was sayin’ to the Nation
He pay him dues the goodbye blues
Is simple syncopation
And then I told my story to the cannibal king..

Where was the body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

***

from his acceptance speech (Nobel of Literature 2005)  Art, Truth, and Politics

Ah ..yes!

(I’m under the suspicion they don’t make them like this anymore)