SERIALIZED NOVEL, part 1

That excerpt I posted was basically chapter 2, so here's chapter 1, which many of you have read before in different forms, on AlfA and in other places.

I cannot promise that, a la Dickens and the great classics of the serialized novel, I will end every chapter with a kidnapping, disappearance, death, or earth-shattering epiphany. But I'll do my best.


*****************************************

Two Hundred Dollar Days, by E.L. Tempete



You must understand before any of this that, if in fact he really was dead, his body was never found, and so immediately so many of these things are cast into doubt.

Immediately so many possibilities open up of theory and mystery, so much space for misunderstanding to grow into rumour, and for rumour to grow into legend, and for legend to grow into myth.

But a slow fade in then, a city scene, to open things.
It's night-time, and it's raining.
Our senses are ready.
Begin:




Present Day.


It's raining, in a city, and it doesn't matter which one really since they're all more or less the same, but it might as well be Vancouver, Canada, because if you know anything at all about Vancouver, Canada, you'll know that it's always raining there.

Blur-colour hexagons through ghost-dark sheets of mist, the muted sound of cars, slow flow of traffic glowing its way into view. Strange things of magic could be afoot on a night like this even in a place as unmagical as Vancouver, Canada, because night-time and rain could sometimes bring those sorts of things out, turn ordinary streets into space of legend, ordinary rooms into halls for the imagination. Everything golden-orange around the edges then, thin yellow skin of streetlights on stone-wet darkness that blurs in everywhere, every doorway, rain falling.

And now, at the farthest back edge of our scene, a single human figure appears, running straight towards us, and we can see by his wild gestures that he's yelling something, though we can't quite hear it. He's even closer now, still coming straight towards us, and we can start to notice features--a man mid forties, pale with thinning grey-ish hair, clad in a dark-toned business suit. He's yelling still, and now we see that it's into a cell phone.
And then he flashes past us, water spraying up off him and onto our view-point shot and then FERAL'S ALIVE!, he yells.

Feral is alive.

But we laugh when we hear this, since there's only one fact in this story that is wholly and completely without dispute, only one incontestable shred of evidence that actually gives this all this some substance, and that fact is that body or no body, evidence or none, Feral Danger MacDuff, legendary legend, heroic tree planter of the Canadian North, is dead.
Very dead, as the saying goes.
Very, very dead.




Another dark screen and we fade in to the sound of rain falling again, since anyone who has ever planted trees for a living knows that it seems to rain an awful lot there too.

Right now all we see is a clear-cut, the rain coming down in slow motion. You take a mountainside that's chock full of trees, an old-growth forest that has sat undisturbed for all of time as far as we're concerned, and then you build a road through the middle of it, a couple of rough and gravelly things hardly fit to be called roads. And then, except for the odd moose hotel, you cut all of these trees down and haul them away, every single one of them pretty much, tens of thousands of them, or even hundreds of thousands in the space of several days, and there you have your basic clear-cut.

Exhibit A, then, is one completely random clear-cut in British Columbia, one out of the too-many-to-count, sometime in late spring or early summer. We can tell that it's B.C. because of the mountains, and we know it's late spring or early summer because this particular bit of land is turning a deep-heavy shade of green dotted by patches of wildflowers, by clusters of purple, yellow and orange that pock the otherwise vivid jade hillscape.
Now, you take a clear-cut in early spring, a week or so after the snow has melted, and it's just about the ugliest thing you can imagine. It looks like a graveyard. That got run over by a bulldozer. After a war. Dead tree stumps are everywhere, dead trees stumps and irregular gouges left by the metal-heavy machines, the whole mess of it strewn with piles of left-behind tree garbage, broken and uprooted trees dark against that sky. These piles, this scattered tree-limb stuff was called slash, and get used to that too. That and the rain.
But since it's no longer early spring, and now well into mid-summer, this whole big rainy clear-cut looks like the shimmering green sea-waves in some Japanese print, or like a quilt being shaken by the hand of some invisible giant.
Move our view a bit closer to ground-level now and a dog appears, a big grey-black husky sort of thing with a black mask over lean white-grey face. From our perspective he seems to just materialize, to take shape from out of the mist and the wind and the piles of slash. He's wet, and in our slow-motion view he's sniffing the ground and the air while the rain runs down off his fur.
Add music now, something dramatic, a monk choir singing hallelujah hallelujah pray for us now and in the hour of death amen.
And now two human figures come into view, also in slow motion, one from each side of the screen. We see no faces yet, only figures, a close up of a shovel striking downwards into the earth, then a shot of spray flying up everywhere, now a heavy spiked leather-black boot that digs into the mountainside, a flash of rain pants, a yellow coat-arm and glove, and now a pant that looks like it's made of cowhide, a true rain slicer of the old sea-dog sort, then our view pulls back up and cuts to real time boom their shovels drop into soil at the same instant, a tree seedling rough-slid by a set of wet muddy duct-taped fingers along shovel blade into hole, orange boot kicking it shut as fingers, so unbelievably dirty and ragged-looking, tug at top of tree and then all moves on slowly, slowly, same series of movements over and over as they work gradually up the mountain and away from us onwards, forever upwards into the rain. Hallelujah, the monk-choir would keep singing, hallelujah, pray for us now and in the hour of death amen.

Visible like rock-islands in the ocean of otherwise green are thousands of tree stumps in every direction, stumps up the hill, stumps down the hill, across the hill, everywhere just whole rolling fields of them, sad muddy roads and big dead slash-piles dividing all into irregular-shaped chunks of land. The forest hemming it all in.

A block, it was all called, this collective and human-generated ecosystem.

Or, more accurately, The Block, an unconscious capitalizing of the two words.

Pull our view back now and they're just two small specks, only yellow rain coat showing up at all, and in every other direction around is more mountains and clear-cut hillsides shifting in and out of mist who curtains it all in, sweeping vistas of trees and far-below valleys and forever, forever eternity of rainclouds, endless grey rain.


Two years earlier.

It's raining again, a different clear-cut somewhere else now...