Valley of Fire

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valley of fire

valley of fire

a novel

steven manners

Copyright © Steven Manners, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll

Designer: Jennifer Scott

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Manners, Steven, 1957-

Valley of fire / by Steven Manners.

ISBN 978-1-55488-406-3

I. Title.

PS8576.A562 V35 2009    C813’.54    C2009-900496-8

1 2 3 4 5    14 13 12 11 10

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

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Encore et toujours

God does not play dice with the universe — and win.

He comes out of the desert in late afternoon, the only living thing in the Valley of Fire. It’s a Thursday in June, 4:03 p.m., according to a note in the ranger’s log book. The man identifies himself as John Munin.Tall, perhaps early forties. Old enough to know better. Explains there was a breakdown, engine overheated, the fuel line, he doesn’t know much about cars. His voice is raw; he’s been out there a while.

It’s fifty degrees cooler inside the ranger’s office. I’ll get you something cold to drink. There’s a small refrigerator in the corner of the office, TV on top. Not much to look at outside the window; the landscape is hard to focus on, shimmering with heat, elusive. You all right? Feeling dizzy? The ranger has been trained to recognize the signs of heat stroke.

I’m a doctor.

Then you should know I have to check your pulse. Procedure.Grips Munin’s wrist for a few moments, grunts, then releases him.Could have been a close call. Hands him a bottle of water and a packet of salt from a drive-through.

I have to get back to town.

You can camp out on the cot in the back. I’ll give you a lift into town when my shift’s over. A couple of hours. You look done in.

I don’t want to be any trouble.

No trouble. I don’t mind the company. You can get a tow truck out here tomorrow.

Munin takes off his shoes and sinks onto the cot. It’s a rental.

Then I guess it’s their problem.

Munin can feel the beginnings of a heat headache; his eyes feel scratchy and inflamed as if seeing in infrared. There’s a heat-bug whine in his ears, worse when he lies down. Sorry to put you to so much trouble.

This kind of thing happens out here.

Do you like it? Out here?

You get used to it, the ranger says. Meaning the stillness. Heat and loneliness. It’s a popular spot. We get a lot of visitors. Decent folks. It’s like nowhere else, I guess. No buildings. Rock formations, of course, but nothing much else to look at. A lot of emptiness and open space. People tell themselves that’s what they want. Until they get lost in it.

Contents

I. Narcissism

II. The Unconscious

III. Object of Desire

IV. Intimacy

V. Sex

VI. Giving

Acknowledgements

I. Narcissism

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised ...

— T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

America is roulette: streets, cities, states of mind. Waiting for a hit, waiting for your number to be called. As they fly into a Midwest stopover, a voice crackles in the background like a rumour, the news at noon over a neighbour’s headset announcing a flash flood in Maine, nuclear spill in the middle dozens, earthquake with its epicentre at thirty-six red. The statistics of fate in the air: in the recirculating stink of burger and fries, sweat tang of nachos, a godawful hummus stashed away in a carry-on knapsack. They were warned there would be no food on this flight so they’ve brought it aboard. Enough to feed the Russian army, as they used to say. Enough to feed the thrombus and embolus of future coronary events. They know the risks, they know the odds — they are gamblers, junketeers after all. Later, on their way home, there will be time to analyze the action, work the numbers like a tension knot in the back of the neck, head tight as a migraine, memories ruminating and repeating like flashbacks or flatus, thinking of the down and the double-down. But that’s later. Right now it’s the play. The straight-ahead path. Going west. To Vegas.

The airplane is shadow on landscape across a patchwork of forest and field and empty places. Where you live is busy. What you see is blur. But if you gain altitude — distance, Cynthia would have called it — you gain greater perspective. A bigger picture emerges. You can see that the slow creep of events is an illusion; the landscape is rushing past silently at a thousand miles an hour. Munin tried to explain that to her once. She didn’t say anything, or nothing he can remember. Her voice even then had become part of the silence.

They’ve been in Las Vegas for an hour, barely enough time to check in and have a shower. Munin wants to relax, review his notes for the psychiatry conference, but Hughes insists, Time to have a bit of fun. Get our feet wet. You can work later.

Hughes is newly decked out in khakis and hibiscus-print shirt — protective colouration, he’d call it in his English way, acutely aware of his un-Americanness. The elevator is a bubble of classic music, decrescendo to the casino floor as the doors glide open and they are greeted by the crash of slots. A quick reconnaissance as Hughes searches for a table of European roulette, thirty-six numbers and a single zero. Better odds, Hughes informs him, the double-zero tables were a damn local invention to increase the house edge. They find a spot between a young Vietnamese man and an older woman in a lime-green leisure suit, face a reticule of wrinkles dusted with powder, a hint of talc and something fruity to Munin’s nose. Hughes’s mother used the same brand, if he’s not mistaken.

How is your mother? The sense of smell a highway to the unconscious.

Hughes is busy laying bets, but the remark makes him pause. Odd that you should mention it. I was just thinking I should call her.

The ball stops on two black. The older woman strews chips about the table in no apparent order, the Vietnamese man lays a C-note on red, money plays. Hughes takes a flutter on the nearest six, nickel bets on thirty-one to thirty-six. It helps to have a system.

Perhaps a pointed comment, but Munin lets it ride. You seem to have a strategy.

Simple, really. Stick with the same six numbers — it doesn’t matter which ones. None of that pet number or anniversary nonsense. No anniversary for Hughes to remember, birthdays now too numerous to be something to celebrate. I should hit one of my numbers in the next six turns.

What if you don’t?

Then I’ll increase the bet.

Everyone’s got a system: straight bets, trios, corner bets, combinations. A college kid comes up beside Munin and lays a column bet to cover the whole street for a payoff of two to one. The man beside the dealer lays stacks of differing heights at random places on the table.

Up comes twenty-three red. The Vietnamese man pockets a century chip and lets the money ride. Next is five red, and he cashes out. Then it’s seventeen black, twenty-six black, ten black, zero. Hughes is focused now, quietly determined. All of his numbers have been losers so far, but he keeps to the game plan, laying out his two rows of bets each time the table is cleared. The older woman collects her chips and moves over to the machines. The college kid’s got a short attention span and drifts away. Only Hughes is left, showing terrific concentration, or maybe he’s mesmerized by the spin. On the seventh turn of the wheel he doubles his bets. The wheel turns. The marble clatters. Another loser, a trend now starting to gain significance. A half-dozen more bets and all the money is gone.

Maybe that’s enough for now, says Hughes. He’s out about five hundred.

Munin doesn’t understand the attraction of the game. They could use a random-number generator. It would have the same result.

Not really the same thing, though, is it? Hughes says. The mandala of the wheel and all that. A computer doesn’t work as an archetype — at least not yet. No romance there.

It’d be a lot more efficient. I’m not sure your system was working.

It’s not much of a working system, I admit, more of a working hypothesis, Hughes says cheerily. Nothing really pays off in this game. That’s the beauty of it. Different combinations and permutations, black or red, betting strategies. Analysis is quite hopeless. It’s all just randomness.

You seem to think that’s a good thing.

A bit of chaos in the system. I find it refreshing.

They cross the casino, carpet a sublimina of silver dollars and sea horses, gold brocade and clusters of grapes, a pattern so venal and Jungian that it makes Munin’s head ache, though the real misery is the clangour of slots, the spit of metal on metal. The noise almost drowns out Hughes, but Munin catches the drift. The comment about analysis isn’t neutral; Hughes knows Munin is fond of systems. The unromance of methodology.

Munin sees in categories, patterns — keeping his eyes away from the carpet. He can detect at a glance any evidence of anxiety, the smallest compulsion, trace signs of a disturbed personality or troubled soul. That’s how he’s been trained, but there’s a talent there, as well. Someone else — even Hughes himself — would be overwhelmed by facial features, gestures, the counter-transference coinage of skin, smile and distress. We are distracted by florid narratives, wild talk, sexuality, humanity. Munin’s eye doesn’t see the spectrum, only individual colours, signs and syndromes. In his lectures he’s fond of saying that the senses aren’t meant to detect what’s out there in the world. Their purpose is to filter out the extraneous, separate chaff from wheat. There are so many things to see we end up seeing nothing. The art is in the focus, in realizing what’s important. Something as simple as a word or an image that gets to the heart of things.

Hughes imagines that focus must be a little terrifying to Munin’s patients. They must sense that their bodies — perched half-naked and on display — aren’t being seen in the normal way: no desire or disgust, nothing intimate or even complicit. They are being read. But can they trust that their doctor will interpret the signs correctly? Their bodies covered in stigmata, the tattoo of slashes or cigarette burns that spell out their grief. Munin sees parallel cuts on a forearm as a paragraph of text, the body as a book, something to be read and analyzed. And rewritten, or so Munin tells his students.

He compares the body to another text, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the secular bible of psychiatry that characterizes the features of every form of mental illness. It describes the usual age of onset, clinical course, the criteria needed for diagnosing organic syndromes, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, schizophrenia. Hughes sees the DSM as part of that North American obsession for neatness, for putting everything in its place. Calls it the Damned Shitload of Madness for the benefit of his first-year residents, a bit of an act, the pose of the cynical Brit, and of course his students love the show. But there is a serious point to it. It is never too early to instill a little healthy skepticism about the means and methods they use.

Munin admits the DSM is an imperfect tool, but it’s no worse than any other bible. It can be revised, fine-tuned, corrected. Munin rarely consults it; his experience is the sort that can’t be contained in a clinical cookbook. But he agreed to join the advisory group when it reconvened to revise the manual. Hughes wasn’t invited; if asked, he would have refused.

In a diner on the Las Vegas Strip. An Edward Hopper scene but in reverse: customers in the dim cool, passersby in blinding light. Just a short walk along the Strip from their hotel, but the day is already hot enough to make Munin sweat. They are both parched, but when the waitress asks if Munin wants water — they always ask, it’s a desert, you’ve got to conserve in a city of fountains, golf courses, waterslides — he orders coffee instead. Do you remember Professor Bascule?

I haven’t heard that name in how many years? Hughes says. Twelve, thirteen?

He and Munin met during their residency, Hughes newly arrived from England and Montreal still a bit of a mystery. Didn’t know a soul, spoke some French from family holidays in Normandy, but nothing anyone in Quebec could understand. He latched onto Munin soon enough — it was his town — and in those student years they made the rounds of bar-restos downtown, St-Laurent, as far east as St-Denis.

Is he here at the conference? Hughes asks. I wasn’t sure he was still alive. I bumped into him about five years ago. Anaheim, I think it was.

Atlanta.

The psychiatry convention alternates from east to west each year. Admittedly, it’s difficult to keep track. Such a terrible sameness to these affairs: a week of lectures, workshops, poster presentations, oral sessions. Meetings with the professor. Brown-bag luncheons. In the evenings: a few fireside sessions, dinner meetings, and the usual assortment of drug company symposia followed by an excursion to the trendiest restaurant in town. Damn dull at times. Hughes tries to muster a sort of nostalgia, but it doesn’t take: each city only stirs up recollections of other cities in other years.

Do you remember… the Baltimore oysters that sent a panel of experts to hospital? The symposium — where was it, out west at any rate — where the speaker wandered off, simply disappeared, I heard he went mad, poor chap. Each year not a fresh start but just an overlay of the previous one. What Munin would call a palimpsest if he were in another mood.

You’re right, Hughes concedes. It was Atlanta. I remember it was miserably humid.

When the waitress arrives with their coffee, Munin is staring out at the Strip: tourists with cameras, gamblers with