One / Present Day with a Side of Apocalypse Then

If Vancouver Island could be imagined as the index finger of a right hand, bent hard over and pointing toward its own elbow at four o’clock, the town of Tyee Lagoon lay on the palm side, near its middle knuckle. Ramshackle town planning had allowed for one paved road spur that led to it, along which were a couple of dreary plazas containing a handful of shops, none easily accessible on foot. Around here you drove, or you stayed put. There were a couple of gravel goat trails that let drivers access the old highway, which in turn could access the new one. Those routes offered enough inconvenience to make them a last-ditch option.

Near the Strait of Georgia but set back from the water just a little, the town once supported coal mining, logging, fishing, and even a little farming. Mining had vanished decades ago, and after flattening the immediate area, logging had moved away to denser and more remote stands of timber. Against their better judgment, the logging companies had left a few trees standing, which surrounded the town like a high, green picket.

The fishing industry was now a mere shadow of its former self, but the sport fishery was non-stop and kept the marina in business. Nothing short of the total evaporation of the oceans would prevent the keenest keeners from wallowing around in small craft to hook a spring salmon and putt around in their well-worn boats. A few souls owned ostentatious floating condominiums, but the old heads never had much patience for shiny yachts steered inaccurately by weekenders from Calgary. But whatever their opinion, the area’s main push had now become lifestyle and tourism.

The locals called the place “the Island,” as if it were the superlative form and all other islands would need to specify. Residents knew that they sometimes had to say “Vancouver Island” as a courtesy to the unwashed, but that was as weird as saying “ice hockey.” So many had come here to retire and, once ensconced in their giant homes, they’d advise everyone else that they should stay away. They, too, had become beguiled. But no one listened.

From Victoria Day to Labour Day, the town and its surroundings crawled with tourists, mostly older couples in matching shirts and Velcro-lashed walking shoes, sallying forth creakily from their ginormous motorhomes, the bane of swift summer travel and on-time ferry trips. Tony Vicar’s beautiful new pub, the Vicar’s Knickers Public House — “the Knickers” to most — was open for business and awaited their arrival.

Through a freakish sequence of events, he had found himself the heir to the hotel and property that housed the pub, a gift from a sweet centenarian named Frankie Hall. A few small acts of kindness by Vicar were repaid by Mrs. Hall ten-thousand-fold.

More bizarrely he also had become a celebrity of a strange type. A few things had happened in the last couple of years that were so odd that most folks just attributed them to the paranormal, the supernatural, or simply the telling of tall tales. It had either been an astonishing run of luck or a heavy dose of magic. Vicar wasn’t sure himself and stumbled through life with a stupid grin pasted to his face, trying his best to be friendly to all his new “pals.” But in fact, he felt like a postapocalyptic Walmart greeter girding himself against approaching zombies.

As successful as the Knickers renovation had been, the old Agincourt Hotel, in which it sat, was nowhere near complete. After two years spent on the pub, Vicar was slightly depleted. Life was gaining speed, his world changing; when he looked back, he barely recognized the man he so recently had been. A minute ago, it seemed, he had been a young, footloose bachelor, untethered but hilarious, a musician and self-proclaimed tastemaker, with that taste frequently questioned by more conventional minds.

He, a guy named Ray, and Farley Rea — still his close friend now — had rented the most awful old house and lived fully immersed in a brand of stag-party squalor that had to be seen and smelled to be fully appreciated. Their days had all been a running gag, and their life bore no resemblance to the tidy and totally civilized way he currently lived: in a huge, lovely, rambling old house with an ocean view, alongside Jacquie O, a woman way out of his league. They lived quite happily together and shared everything — his pub; her house; crisp, clean linens; even fully functional appliances, some still under warranty.

The freakish, smelly bachelor trio of his youth, serious up-and-coming rock stars if you had asked them, were at least colourful. Man, they were sure they’d write a hit or two and fly to the top of the charts, their star qualities and dazzling musical talent lofting them into the stratosphere of fame. But of course, they did not. They had possessed neither talent nor focus, but to his mind there was just something off about the band’s collapse. He had been heartbroken yet somehow relieved. He hated the mixed message. But the issue just wouldn’t quite scan.

He nurtured a blind spot about the viability of prog rock efforts — passé by the time they’d even started. Their magnificent trio was, he had said preciously, a “power triangle.” He recounted the stories of their adventures again and again to anyone who’d listen. They had been great, great days. But … Vicar knew they had been living like musky quadrupeds.

Farley, for example, had claimed that he washed his sheets only on New Year’s Day. This awful factoid was true, so a ceremony involving pizza, beer, and faux-Gregorian chant was devised to celebrate the annual de-cheesing, but despite all the fun, Vicar had been a little grossed out. By year two the grand performance felt forensic.

That old place was not only their bachelor pad but was infamously “THE Bachelor Pad” to the locals — a notorious, exhausted cottage that dated back at least to the 1920s, as drafty as a wind tunnel, arctic in winter, hotter than the surface of the sun in summer, jumping with fleas in the spring, and a year-round fire trap — but it only cost them each a hundred bucks a month. It sat in the front corner of a large farm and had been the original homestead in the years before fancier digs were erected farther back on the property.

The old joint had carried with it the crazy aroma of some unidentified spice, dark and overpowering, that intensified near one cupboard. Inside it was nothing save that pungent aroma and a single packet of prehistoric mac and cheese, marked in felt pen Apocalypse Rations. They had discovered it there when they moved in and the packaging made it look at least a decade old, probably more. Vicar knew he’d only tuck into it if an atomic war started, leaving them irradiated and starving.

Ray had smoked a vast quantity of pot one night during a rocking party, delivered via Farley’s massive bong, assembled from discarded PVC pipe. It was Farley’s one contribution to science and engineering, his so-called “experimental model” — about four feet tall, and merrily dubbed the Douche Bassoon. Using it was a two-person operation but by God it was effective. Vicar had been terrified of the contraption and wouldn’t go near it but watched in horrified fascination as Ray hoovered greedily while Farley knelt below with a little butane torch.

Squinty and famished, his long dreadlocks in a headband, dishevelled and upended, looking like radio antennae, Ray had rooted around in the fridge, pawing at its contents, muttering incoherently. Finally, in desperation, he’d grabbed the mac and cheese packet from the smelly cupboard, cooked it up, and gobbled it down. Minutes later, he’d staggered out to the backyard, higher than a condor’s cloaca, now nauseated, and became violently ill. An angular allegro of lurid retching could be heard, and then pfft — no more sound effects.

They had gone outside to see if Ray had popped his clogs, but he was nowhere to be found. They could track a trail of orangey goop on the pathway to the front gate and then it dribbled to a stop. At that point the trail, mercifully, went cold.

Right about then, one of the partiers had lit nag champa and put on an antique half-speed master LP of Dark Side of the Moon, so everyone forgot about Ray. No one knew where he had ended up that night, but he was never the same afterward.

Vicar and Farley eventually found him asleep face down on a couch that was perched on a porch located nearly two miles away.

He had lain there as if left for dead, at the most unappetizing house Vicar had ever seen … And, for fuck’s sake, he lived in the Bachelor Pad. The house was painted a distressing gonorrhea green, deliberately rendered that way it seemed. No one except had a total skinflint would choose a colour that horrible, Vicar thought, as he spied Ray from the roadway. They probably got the paint for free — more likely someone paid ’em to cart it away. Anyone that cheap would be mean. He’d shuddered with revulsion at the sight before him and feared being caught on the property.

The yard surrounding the infection-coloured bungalow had been mowed bald of all flora, flattened right down to the battle-scarred dirt where three gnarly trees stood in a rigid line, looking like wounded POWs standing at attention in front of their hut. Just by looking at the house, Vicar had known he’d hate the artless turds who owned it — he couldn’t believe they hadn’t already discovered Ray’s unconscious body on their ugly porch and attacked him with a shovel.

Ray’s clothes had been inside out. Still half in a dream state, he’d believed that he had been abducted by aliens, examined, and then returned to this random alfresco chesterfield. Man, he had been fucked up. Soon afterward, he took up sitar.

Everyone began calling him Cosmic Ray. He disappeared one day, just vanished, never again to be seen or heard from — there were some whispers that he had gone to India. Vicar thought that might be a possibility, but then again, he might have gone off with the aliens he kept talking about …

Yup, Vicar mused wistfully. The good old days. The good old days?