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As The Bullwheel Turns

G.D. Maxwell's head of the line contribution to the Collective Novel experience.
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"Well," thought Diana, groggily, "at least he had the decency to leave while I pretended to be asleep."

She rolled over into the fading warmth left behind by Dan or Dave or whatever his name was and let the lingering scent of too-masculine men’s perfume tease scattered details of the previous evening’s events through the tequila and champagne fog of her mind.

The details, such as they were, came in staccato bursts, nouns tapped out over a tenuous, synaptic telegraph line. Birthday… party… Bill’s… Garf’s… Cuervo… the Twins… Tommy’s… Veuve Clicquot… coke… Dan, no, Dave, no… dammit, what was his name?

She lay in bed, the light of false dawn gently seeping through her east-facing, uncurtained window. Closing her eyes tightly, she willed the bottle of Tylenol out of the medicine cabinet, across the room and onto her bedside table, right next to the glass of water she’d forgotten to bring to bed and had spent the past forty-five minutes trying to will out of the kitchen. "If whatzhisname had really been such a nice guy he’da gotten ’em for me on his way out," she mused.

The Varied thrush’s metallic buzz and tortured screams of Steller’s jays announced the growing light of a perfect spring morning. Spring was her favourite time of year and this – crevassed skull notwithstanding – was her favourite time of day. She favoured spring not because it brought the two-edged blessing of her birthday but because of its frenzy of mixed messages. It was the poetic rebirth of life that inspired such great literature but was, for her, more closely associated with the beginning of the end of her own life-shaping forces. Ski season – a misnomer since ski season had been snowboard season for her since she was old enough to throw a monumental hissy fit and finally make her stubborn father give up on his dream of a ski racer daughter – entered its autumn in spring. School began its slow grind to a richly-deserved, eagerly-anticipated, stifled climax. And at least in Whistler, the season of birth was laced with the irony of death and decay as leaf mould, ancient dog shit and the detritus of the forest floor was uncovered by melting snow, warmed by nascent sun and allowed to make its annual contribution to global warming in a riot of disgusting smells.

"Beebeebeebeebeebee… beebeebeebeebeebee…" Christ! The sound of the alarm – she’d set an alarm? – and phone going off at the same time damn near made her wet the bed. It took a second or two for her doubled heartbeat to pump a tsunami of blood and accompanying pain into her skull. She slammed her hand down on the alarm button, grabbed her temples and winced, certain that grey matter was oozing out both ears. Tears squeezed from the corners of both eyes and she suddenly became aware of an awful, metallic taste on the fur coating of her tongue. "Fuuuuc…" she couldn’t complete the curse, the effort of actually speaking having cleaved the hemispheres of whatever was left of her brain.

Stumbling into the bathroom, she wrestled the child and drunkproof cap off the Tylenol bottle and shook half a dozen bullet-shaped caplets out on the counter. Ripping open a foilpack of Alka-Seltzer, she broke one of the discs in half, grabbed a couple of the Tylenol, shoved them all into her mouth, twisted the cold water tap while she started to chew and filled her mouth directly from the faucet. "High honey…" she heard her mother’s sing-songy voice speaking to the answering machine.

The effort of bending her head into the sink had the effect anyone sober enough to witness this act of desperation might have anticipated: she thought she was going to pass out. "Happy birthday darling…." "Shut-up, Mother!" Stumbling to the toilet, she held her head back and chewed furiously, a slurry of acetaminophen, H 2 0 and instant effervescence foaming in her mouth. "I’ll call later…." When it seemed as though the last identifiable piece of solid was ground into solution and the pressure of the Alka-Seltzer was going to blow it all out her nose, Diana swallowed, grimaced and shuddered at the foul, bitter taste.

"I’m getting too old for this shit," she thought. "Love you, honey." Click.

She was, in fact, thirty-three. Such a nice squiggly number, so perfectly rounded, so symmetrically, double-digitally hump-sided, so… so… frickin’ pathetically old. Thirty-three. How had so much time drifted past? A question that needed the qualifying, "with so little to show for it," tacked on to complete the thought. Birthdays were a morose paradox of loving acknowledgement and self-loathing for Diana. They graphically exposed the wedge between the people who loved her and the difficulty she had loving herself. Birthdays dredged up happy memories while simultaneously cracking open the door to her deepest, darkest closet of shame and sadness, fear and hatred. It wasn’t just her birthday; it was little Timmy’s birthday. Or Johnny’s or Oliver’s or Rupert’s or whatever his name was, the son she’d never seen, never named, never held except inside her womb 17 years ago.

She drove the thought from her mind. "Hello denial, my old friend," she thought popping a few more Tylenol and the other half Alka-Seltzer into her mouth, chewing vigorously.

More for warmth than modesty, she slipped into a tattered terry robe she’d once borrowed from a chambermaid’s cart at the Chateau, closed the door to her suite behind her and walked around the massive logs of the massive ‘cabin’ on Blueberry Hill to the house’s main entrance. Using the key she’d had made for herself off the one the owner kept in the obviously fake rock placed casually among the real rocks, she unlocked the door, punched in the alarm code and let herself in. Stopping long enough to grab a box of Girl Guide cookies off the kitchen counter, a cold V-8 from the well-stocked fridge and an instant cold ‘ice’ pack from the hall bathroom, she crossed the designer-decorated living room, slid open the glass door, unhinged the hot tub cover, gave the dials a twist and lowered herself into the bubbling hot water.

"Dammit!" she said as half a vanilla cream Girl Guide cookie she was holding between her teeth broke. The half not in her mouth quickly disappeared in the churning water where she fished ineffectively for it until she was certain it had dissolved in the chlorine soup.

The heat, the effervescence, the liquid weightlessness absorbed her. The panoramic view across the golf course, across the rising expanse of Whistler Cay, up the striated mass of Blackcomb and into the infinite sky was laced and misty from rising steam and light, lingering morning fog. With Tylenol working on the inner girl, hot water caressing the outer girl and chemical cold slapped squarely on her forehead, Diana’s humanness began to slowly emerge from her cadaverous consciousness.

She began to play Catch-up. Catch-up was her own mental trick to offset the effects of whatever wretched excesses she’d inflicted on herself to bring her to the morning after the night before. "Last night," she hummed softly, the Traveling Wilbury’s filling in the musical context. "Thinkin’ ‘bout last night."

She remembered meeting the Twins early in the evening at Zeuski’s. The Twins, Jane and Jelly – Angelica actually but she loathed the name and everyone agreed angelic was the last thing she would ever be mistaken for while Jelly, as in "it must be jelly ’cause jam don’t shake like that", seemed to pretty accurately capture her whole je ne sais quoi – were already pounding Ouzo and eating calamari slathered in garlicky tzatziki.

"Whose heart are we breakin’ tonight?" she’d greeted them.

"Hearts," the Twins answered. "All of ’em," they laughed.

Ouzo appeared and disappeared as Diana drank her hardest to catch up, and stay up, with Jane and Jelly. After a quick bite – "I like Greek food," they’d joked, "it’s either great or it’s falawful." – the evening quickly turned into a ball-bustin’, heart-breakin’ club crawl. They drank, they flirted outrageously, they danced, drank some more, bumped and grinded, teased and tortured, taunted and tempted every good looking tourist boy who got in their way, working quickly and efficiently to whip each one into a sufficiently overheated frenzy, then dropping each like a bad habit, joking among themselves as they notched up the evening’s score.

Near closing at Tommy’s – or maybe somewhere else – Diana turned her attention and what was left of her charm on a vacuous looking, gym-toned, curly-haired tourist who appeared horny enough to squirt if she touched him. The lift ticket hanging from his Official US Ski Team Spyder jacket was like a neon target proclaiming him dumb, impressionable and American. The six-day ticket had just expired according to the blurred – to her – date stamped on it. That meant he’d probably be leaving tomorrow, was definitely desperate to hookup with someone and wouldn’t be around to hound her in the future. Perfect.

For a semi-gorgeous, raven-haired, green-eyed, hustlin’ beauty with an athlete’s tight body and a rack you could chin yourself on, it was even easier than shooting fish in a barrel… however easy that is. She’d taken him home, suggested – requested actually – he just sneak out in the morning without waking her, boiled his hambone ‘til his brain exploded then lay back swirling in the twin glows of drink and orgasm as he fell sound asleep next to her. Of course, she wished he’d have just gotten dressed, called a cab and left right away, reminding herself of the original definition of eternity: the period of time between her orgasm and the sound of the door closing behind him.

"Well now," she thought unkindly, "there’s an evening to be proud of." She toasted the air with the can of V-8, took a large mouthful and slowly sank beneath the bubbling water.

* * *

Returning to her little downstairs suite, the light on her answering machine flashed with a nervous tic and the disembodied robovoice informed her she had 5 messages when she stabbed the Play button.

"Hey Dee, Dad here. Happy Birthday, honey. Rach and I aren’t going to make it up there this weekend. Sorry but we’re going sailing with the Wiseman’s. Listen though, there’s a bottle of ’82 Moet and Chandon in the cellar I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Why don’t you treat yourself to it. We’ll call it a birthday present. Gotta go. Love you, baby."

"Love you too, Rosco," Diana thought, relieved her father had given her the champagne she’d pilfered from his wine cellar several weeks ago when the Twins were over and they celebrated the first day of spring… or Tuesday, or whatever it was they decided to celebrate to justify pinching such a good bottle of bubbly. It was, she’d rationalized, one of the perks of living in daddy’s suite and having unlimited, if not exactly authorized access.

"Miss Vertifeuille, we need a Grade 11 English teacher today. Please call immediately if you can come in."

Shakespeare hungover? The thought of subbing made Diana’s skin crawl. It was mostly because she was in no shape to stand in front of a roomful of hormonal teenagers, half of whom were bored out of their tree and messaging each other from not-so-hidden phones under their desks while the other half were ADDH and ready to bounce out of the room at the slightest, imagined provocation. Mostly, she was still chafing at having lost the job she’d really wanted, the librarian job at the public library. She’d wanted to be a librarian – the librarian – since the first time she’d ever entered the tiny Whistler library, way back when it was tucked into a closet under muni hall, and fell under the lifelong spell and guidance of the world’s greatest librarian. She couldn’t believe it when the job came up and was flabbergasted when they’d short-listed her for it. It was the one dream strong enough to lure her back to Whistler and she was crushed when someone else got it. She still wasn’t sure why she decided to stick around but with degrees in English and library science, she’d fallen easily into substitute teaching at the local high school.

"Dee, you comin’ up to the park today? I’m cool with you askin’ me to stay over at Josh’s last night. I understand. Uhh, Happy Birthday… there’s something for you on the stereo."

Diana cringed. Rob, her ‘roommate’ of sorts, was possessed of a well of forgiveness almost as limitless as his longing for her. She’d asked him, informed him actually, that she wanted him to spend last night at his friend’s place. He accepted it in his passive-aggressive, whipped puppydog way, making her feel like a real shitheel since it was obvious he was not only excluded from her birthday but she had every intention of bringing some zipless fuck back to their place and didn’t want him around when she did. She loved Rob, sort of, and needed his salving influence in her life. But only as a roommate, preferably part-time roommate and most definitely not in the steamy, love-you-forever way Rob hoped she’d eventually come around to.

" Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to… yadadadada . Hey Dee-Dog. I’m patrolling today. Stop by the bump and we’ll sneak off for a run or two if yer not too hungover."

Sally, a/k/a Slash, was Diana’s oldest friend. The two of them were holy terrors back in the day, growing up in Whistler, raising hell at Pemberton Secondary, snowboarding on the mountains like they’d tapped into the wellspring of eternal life force. They’d grown up thinking boys were stupid, grrls were tough and everyone who wasn’t them was irrelevant. They’d smoked their first joint together, laid the foundation for their first hangovers with a bottle of scotch Slash had stolen from her father together, shoplifted for thrills together and even experimented with a few girl-girl tickle and rub sessions. Diana wasn’t really too surprised when Slash came out but their friendship did take a hit when Di told her she just didn’t have it in her to join the cause.

" Da da da da da da, they say it’s your birthday. Da da da da da da, it’s my birthday too yeah! Hell, you know it’s not my birthday. But I do know it’s yours. Tell me you still love me Dee Dee. Just kiddin’. Hey, I’m coming to Squeemish next weekend to meet with the Ashlu coalition. Wanna get together? Give me a call."

Waves of revulsion, loathing, fear and resignation washed over Diana as she listened to the last message. "Rasputin, you jerkoff!" Jack Wieckowski was a cancelled cheque, a returned gift, a closed chapter in Diana’s life. Wacky Wieckowski, Rasputin to Diana, was an unreconstructed Earth First! anarchist who’d graduated from tree-spiking and monkeywrenching to more subtle acts of ecotage and grossly antisocial behaviour. He had a dangerous, deranged, persona she’d found irresistible when they’d met at a protest rally against yet another cookie-cutter, upscale subdivision intruding into the forest outside Kelowna. Theirs was a stormy relationship and when it finally ended – for her but apparently not entirely for him – after eight years, she felt enriched by the insight it had given her into many things she absolutely didn’t want to be part of her life, Rasputin topping the list.

"That was your last message. Good-bye."

"Same to you," she shrugged.

Her cell began chirping the first bar of The Beatles Here Comes the Sun . "Hey," she mumbled into it. "Carumba! So that’s why I set the alarm. Be there in 15. Bye."

She’d forgotten in the fog of the morning this was a volley day. She was supposed to be hanging banners or hanging out or doing whatever they told her to do for the World Ski and Skid Festival. That was what the alarm she’d remembered to set last night was all about.

"Oh well," she said to no one in particular, closing the door behind her, "another day in paradise."



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