Stanley Park Read Free

Professor leaned back in the grass around the fire and only listened.
    Caruzo spoke in the tongues of angels, although the fire of his words licked around the ideas he worked to express and often consumed them. Tonight again, he spoke of the children. “Their death pulled,” Caruzo said, rocking. “The boy, the girl. Killed as they were. It pulled me and it sent me. Pulled others too. We were like the dry leaves, and their death was a puff of black air. For years I searched for them, and when I found them it all began.” He gestured around himself at the park, the darkness. “From a leaf to a lifer,” he went on. “That’s me. A lifer to a leaf.”
    He burned himself out eventually and left as he typically did: without offering firm solutions to his riddles and without saying goodnight. He rose from his haunches, turned in the soft grass and vanished into the shadows.
    The Professor read over his notes, then put the yellow legal pad back in the tent. He returned to the fire to watch it as the flames died. Since their last series of meetings, Caruzo had not untangled. So their deaths had drawn him here, the Professor thought, trying to work it through. The leaf blown by the evil event, the black wind. The leaf becoming a lifer, permanent. The lifer anticipating how he would one day, again, become a leaf. Was that it?
    The Professor put his hands behind his head and stared up through the canopy of trees to find those pieces of the night sky that were visible. The fragments of constellations that, for those who could believe such things, would provide direction. He remembered how Hélène had disdained astrology, indeed most forms of the mystical. There was a certain cliché about the gypsy fortune teller with which she could not bear association. He learned this quickly after they first met. Nineteen fifty-six, Lyon. Hélène was living with her father and uncles, aunts and cousins, trying out city life after generations on the road. The Professor (not yet a professor) was over from Canada with his yellow pads and sharp pencils, observing. The first case study of a professional lifetimeunderway. His thesis named with some of the romance by which it had been electrified:
Romani Alighted: Remembering the Vardo
. Work from which all else had grown, the Professor thought now, branches sifting air above him. Their marriage, certainly. Hélène had been drawn to his interest in her. To his own unknowable history too, perhaps. Before his own father, now dead, there was only an expanse of unknown. A book of blank pages.
    But the work with Hélène’s family had also given birth to all his other work. Launched him across the anthropological landscape. Squatters in the Delta. Russian stowaways. The earliest Vancouver panhandlers who had peopled his successful book,
Will Work For Food
. Hélène might not always have appreciated her role at the root of things. And neither of them could have known how Stanley Park itself lay sleeping in their future.
    The fire was out. The Professor climbed into his tent to sleep. He didn’t dream of Caruzo. Didn’t lie unconscious under images of Hélène’s beauty, the unfolding of their years or even the October morning when he had awoken in the field with a very particular hollow feeling. The morning he had called Hélène, and the phone had rung and rung.
    A welcome relief, this dreamless sleep.
    In the morning he climbed down from the forest to the men’s room by Second Beach. Familiar steps. He removed the pane of glass at the back of the locked building, as Caruzo had shown him long ago. He climbed in, washed, shaved. Then he spent the day on his favourite cliff, high above the sea in a salty breeze, thinking of how it might all be finally finished. Ten years later than expected, but one could not schedule tragedy or the irregular dawn of understanding.
    When it was time to meet his son, the Professor pulled the fly-fishing net from his pack and walked down through the forest to the