Flick Book

by Mark Bastable

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

The snow was piling up against the door, and the wind was doing its damnedest to break in. Patrick drew the curtains and walked back across the dim study to his computer. He took a slug of red wine and topped up the glass, before laying his hands on the keyboard.

Offer her $25,000 as a one-off, he wrote. But on the condition that that’s an end to it.

He backspaced and changed the figure 2 to 1.

Paggy watched himself typing. And he knew — because it was there to be known — that Louise was still in Paris, while he was here in Vancouver working too little and drinking too much. And it was his fault. Paggy felt a jolt go through him as he touched that realisation, like the sudden and incongruous shock from faulty Christmas tree lights. It was his fault — he’d had an affair. No — two. One in Paris, one here in Vancouver.

How had his life come to that?

Paggy pressed his forehead against the cold pane.

* * *

Across the years, Paggy found success and disappointment, love and betrayal. Two marriages. Three kids — great kids, beautiful, startling children. Several homes — Montreal, Berlin, Santa Fe, New York. He lost his hair in his forties. He became a grandfather in his late fifties. He had a heart-bypass in his sixties and retired with Penny to Cape Cod, to be near their grandchildren.

Ten, thought Paggy, leaning into the glass from his sixty-sixth birthday.

And there was only blackness.

Paggy considered.

Five, he thought.

More blackness.

Three?

And he was sitting in a mezzanine box at the opera, watching Carmen. His hands were brown-speckled, and his glasses kept slipping down his nose.

So, Paggy sighed as the toreadors marched, I die somewhere between seventy and seventy-two.

He pushed his life forward, month by month, and then day by day — but he lost courage when he still didn’t come up against the blackness. He didn’t want to know.

He made a grand tour of his life and times. He visited his early childhood, and played in the sand on long summer evenings at the ocean’s edge. He ran and re-ran a late adolescent weekend in Vegas, living a certain debauched evening over and over, until he knew every gasp and snort of it, every subtlety of neon-light fractured across goosebumped hairs, every bubbling dribble of champagne spurted on the bathroom mirror, every tone of the scent of over-generous perfume.

He went to Paris — to just before the point of meeting Louise. He got off the plane, knowing that he would bump into her at the Sacré Coeur in three days’ time. And he stayed at that when from first kiss to last spat, just enjoying it.

Paggy became a tourist in his own existence. And like any tourist, he gradually became familiar with his environs, and blended in. No longer a shadow, skulking behind his consciousness, he became adept at simply merging with himself, experiencing his life directly — being there.

But still he couldn’t find any event, any moment, any trigger that explained his transformation from the lumpen, shy Paggy of seventeen to the self-possessed adult Patrick in whose life he travelled. He wondered whether the simple process of growing up had imbued him with such self-possession and ease. It didn’t seem likely. Something — some epiphany — had changed everything. He could feel it, though he couldn’t identify it.

And so he continued his tour of a lifespan — spending a year here, a decade there. The years he had experienced mounted up — over a hundred now, comprised of short excursions, extended stays, the occasional blissful week repeated over and over. Age meant nothing. Paggy was living a boundaried immortality. He existed in an eternal Paggy themepark, where all the rides were free, but there was only blackness beyond the gates.

And he began to get bored. He was intimately acquainted with every experience he flicked to, and the excitement of each dulled — because he knew how it would go, who would say what, which emotion would be inspired, what outcome would result. It was all unchangeable. He could run his thumbnail across the corners of the flick-book, and he could stop the animation where he wished, or skip to and fro — but he couldn’t change the frames. His life was simply what it was — and all he could do was live it.

Immortality palled.

* * *

It was difficult to keep track of which parts of his life Paggy had visited. When he flicked towards the end of his span, he had memories of doing things that he’d hadn’t yet been to. It was if he had read the book, and he knew that a certain chapter was in there somewhere, but he couldn’t find the page. Every so often, he would happen upon some undiscovered event and almost shriek inwardly with joy, like someone in a record store discovering an unsuspected CD by a favourite band.

He was in his late forties. He was in Albuquerque again. He was attending a High School Reunion.

“Patrick!” yelled Mickey Lownds, striding across the school gymnasium towards him. He was portly and red-faced. “Jesus, man, it must be twenty-five years. Damn — you’re looking good, you bastard.”

“Hiya, Mickey,” Patrick said, grinning. He accepted a glass of punch. “What’s up?”

It was great to see Mickey again. The memories leapt forward in Patrick’s mind as they talked. The trips to the coast. The parties. The girlfriends and the ballgames.

“Hey — you remember that night we painted over all the windows of the school hall?” Mickey asked. “Bright red, right? Man — you had some crazy ideas back then.”

Patrick remembered. He remembered the pranks, the fights, the drunken poker games. He remembered hair-raising adventures in the coupe. And, behind all that, the travelling part of him — the part he still thought of as Paggy — remembered that Mickey Lownds was going to die of a heart attack in two years’ time, and that his kids would stand at his graveside all in black, and weep silently in the bright New Mexico sunshine. But Mickey didn’t know that. He was happy, slightly drunk and completely ignorant.

“They were great days, Patrick,” Mickey grinned wistfully. “Never see ’em again, huh?”

Paggy couldn’t bear it anymore. He flicked.

* * *

The days rushed backwards through him, gibbering and nonsensical — vain light and noise. Knowing everything about his life, living it over and over in spurts, focusing on the thrilling parts, made it all a choreographed, plotless puppet show. Patrick’s span — unremarkable childhood, awkward adolescence, affairs, marriages, children, globetrotting career, grief, happiness, declining old age — that span was what anyone would call a full life. It wasn’t particularly noteworthy, perhaps, but it was a life with a point. It went somewhere. It progressed.

But only in a line. A life, Paggy realised, is a story with structure. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s not a flick-book, a series of frames that can be made to give the illusion of movement.

There was no escape now though, for Paggy. He knew what he knew, and knowing it had emptied his life of any real direction, any tension, any plot. If there was anything left for Paggy to achieve, it was just the solution to that one itchy problem of how he’d been transformed from ugly duckling Paggy into self-possessed, popular Patrick. And he wasn’t even sure he wanted to solve that, because then there would be nothing to do at all — except flick, flick, flick and sink deeper into miserable indifference.

* * *

Paggy clicked the window that had just appeared on his computer screen.

Vita would like to message you, it said.

Paggy opened up his chat-history file and scanned the first column. He had never chatted to anyone called Vita.

hi there, he typed.

how r u? came the response.

cool. u? Paggy answered.

cool2, Vita told him. wanna chat?

At that moment, a whispered shout came from outside the open window.

“Hey, Paggy!” A pause. “Paggy! You sleeping?”

Paggy looked out of the window. Mickey Lownds was standing in the middle of the lawn, and behind him on the street was a sleek coupe into which were crammed four or five guys and girls from school.

“Wanna come for a drive out to the Heights?” Mickey asked, in a deafening whisper.

Paggy glanced back at the computer screen.

...???? Vita insisted.

Paggy leaned a little further out of the window. “Can’t do it,” he told Mickey. “Workin’ on somethin’.”

Mickey shrugged and grinned. “Yeah, I bet. Don’t know what you’re missing, man.” And he turned to lope across the grass to the car.

“Wait!” Paggy shouted.

Ahead of him, he knew, there waited Patrick’s life — a life that he had no idea how he would come to achieve, but a life that he nevertheless knew by heart. He couldn’t change it — but he wanted to unknow it. He wanted to live it not knowing.

He turned back to the screen.

...???? Vita said again.

The cursor blinked in the message box. Paggy watched it from behind his eyes. Perhaps there was one single thing in his life that he could change. A change that changed nothing. He put his hands on the keyboard.

sorry. gone, he typed.

He switched off the computer. And something melted in his mind, like ice loosening on a windowpane in the spring sunshine, slipping off onto the sill and dripping to the ground. And all the refractions of light through the crystal — the rainbow multiplicities and the mosaic layers — resolved themselves into a single simple view of the day outside, beyond the unyielding glass.

Paggy blinked, hearing Mickey telling him to hurry. He stepped out onto the roof of the porch, and dropped silently, if clumsily, onto the grass. He trotted across to the coupe and levered himself onto the backseat.

“Alright!” said Mickey Lownds. “Let’s hit it! You got that door shut, Paggy?”

“Say, guys,” Paggy said, as he checked the door. “Could you do me a favour? Call me Patrick. It’s my name.”

He didn’t know why he asked — but it seemed important all of a sudden.

“Sure — whatever,” Mickey agreed, as the coupe revved away into the night, trailing the laughter and squeals of teenagers who had nothing to do but live their lives.

to Challenge 348...