What We See in the Smoke

By Ben Berman Ghan

The world we know is coming to an end. How will we connect in the strange and frightening one that's coming to take its place?

What We See in the Smoke twists the genres of realism and science fiction to tell the future history of Toronto, a story that stretches from this millennium to the next. The novel leaps acr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crowsnest Books
• Release date: May 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780921332695

Ben Berman Ghan

Ben Berman Ghan is an author and editor from Toronto. He is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto with an HBA in English Literature and minors in Philosophy, and Writing and Rhetoric. While attending the University, he served as a prose editor on both The Spectatorial and The Goose. He is the author of many short stories which occur at the intersection where the ideas of classic science fiction and the concerns of all literature meet. When he is not hacking away his writing, Ben can be found buried beneath comic books and sticky notes of jokes, or interrogating cats, convinced they know what's really going on, and just won't tell him.

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What We See in the Smoke

What We See in the Smoke

Ben Berman Ghan

Copyright © 2019 Ben Berman Ghan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit accesscopyright.ca.

Crowsnest Books www.crowsnestbooks.com

Distributed by the University of Toronto Press

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

ISBN: 9780921332695

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover design and illustration by Raz Latif.

What We See in the Smoke

Preface:

For a while, I wasn’t sure what the name was for this kind of book. It’s not a short story collection. It’s not exactly a novel, either. It’s a kind of hybrid book that sits in between the two. I found a name, eventually. It almost fits.

Fix-up novel: A book of previously unconnected short stories that have been rewritten to fit a single narrative.

That’s almost a good way to describe What We See in the Smoke. The seventeen chapters of this book all work as short stories. You can read each story without the others, or even read every story out of order. They will still make sense and can still be enjoyed that way. But it is not how I’ve intended this book to be read.

I say that this book is almost a fix-up, because that’s not entirely correct - this novel wasn’t created in retrospect. I always intended each story to be a chapter, and I knew where these stories were going.

Seeds that are planted early on will later blossom into stories of their own. Characters and settings only sometimes reoccur, but it does happen, and it always matters. You can watch out for that if it’s the kind of thing you like to watch out for, but don’t rely on it. Each chapter pushes a single story closer to its conclusion.

This single story is a story of apocalypse. But I use that term not to mean only a physical end of the world. Apocalypse can also mean the destruction of one way of living or thinking, to be replaced by another. This book is split into three parts, and each part represents its own apocalypse.

There is the present, full of small apocalypses of identity, of modes of living, of ways to survive. There is the near to distant future, in which these little apocalypses are compounded, are made bigger, as change and technology and new ways of being separate the world that is from the world as it might one day be. Finally, there is the third section of the novel – the distant future, and the apocalypses that await us there, when memories of our present time have been long forgotten.

• • •

This is also a science fiction story, but it doesn’t start that way. Much of the book belongs to the city of Toronto, a city that changes continuously and quickly, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Right as the ideas for this book were beginning to bubble up in my head, the store Honest Eds, which had been a big, bright spot so close to my first apartment, was torn down, along with the string of strange bars, restaurants, and shops that made up Mirvish Village. So a lot of what I wrote became wrapped up in those ideas and themes of gentrification, and how the identity of people and places can be wrapped up in our landmarks and our icons.

We (and I say we because books are a journey the writer and reader embark on together) begin in a Toronto that is recognizable and real, that I could leave my keyboard during this book’s creation to see and touch and smell. The streets and places are real. Toronto is a character in this book, indeed it is the only character that makes it into almost every story.

But each chapter will pull us farther into the future, further from that familiar city. The future pulls us into a stranger, more alien world. All the things that ground us that make our homes recognizable are stripped away. This book becomes one of science fiction by necessity, as my explorations of loneliness, gentrification, legacy, queerness, love, and identity all turn to the future. We will end more than a thousand years away from where we began. It won’t be the same world at all.

This is a book about how we might live and love and suffer in a world that is changing, and coming to an end, and starting over again, unsure of how much has been lost, unsure if anything has been learned. It is a book about people finding different ways of fighting to keep their sense of literacy, legacy, and identity, and the problem of letting go, and whether or not we should.

Sometimes I’ll make reference to other stories and writers. My characters might read what I have read, or voice questions that I have had. Indeed, the very first chapter hinges on a question about literature. I feel this is natural, as no writing exists in a vacuum. The world and characters I depict within these pages would be as incomplete without acknowledgment of literature as they would be if I refused to include cell phones or sexuality. These things are a part of life, and a part of the lives I’ve written.

• • •

I wanted to say something in this preface about what kind of book this is, and what it might be about, and I think I’ve done that. I can’t explain any further, because if I could, what would be the point in having a whole book?

I also want to take a moment to say that what I’ve said above, is merely my own reading of myself, and what I think I’ve done. As you read the book, you may not like my reading, and you may create your own. You should feel free to do so.

But I also want to take a moment to talk about what it was like to write this book, because that is something that truly only I can speak to. This was a hard book to write, but I think it would be fair to say it was a book written with love. That might be a cheesy, goofy thing to say, but it is the truth.

I wrote this book with a love for the genres and settings in which I got to play in. I wrote with a love for the characters I found running across my keyboard. I wrote for a love of my city, and our world, and the people in it. I wrote with a love for the people in my life, who I was writing for, and who I continue to write for. I wrote for a love of love, and of friendship, and family, and even self: which is the hardest kind to admit to.

Finally, I wrote and write for a love of you. A writer is nothing without a reader, for as I said before, every book is a journey undertaken by both parties. I love you, and I am grateful to you. I hope you can see that love in the pages that follow.

Ben Berman Ghan

October 26th, 2018

Acknowledgments:

I owe tremendous gratitude to Sharon English, who mentored me throughout the creation of this manuscript in the University of Toronto. With her, ten of the stories in these pages were created and refined. Without her guidance and help, I don’t believe this book would be even nearly as worth reading as I believe it is now, or if it would ever have been completed at all.

This book could also never have been finished without my partner Margaryta, whose love and support and patience have changed my writing and my person and my own love for the better. You were there when I doubted my ideas, and without you, I would have given up. You picked me up when I fell.

Thanks (and also apologies) should go to my friend Rej Ford, who was forced to read many of these stories before they had received copy edits of any kind. I don’t know how the hell you did it. A better pal there never was.

Thanks to my family, my parents and little brother who have been repeatedly subjected to endless rants about things that are eventually put to paper, and have never once asked me to shut up, even though any person in their right mind would have done so. They have been watching me try to write since before I could read, however strange that sounds, and have only ever shown me encouragement and support.

Additional thanks to my friend and mentor Bruce Meyer, and to my first writing teacher Robert McGill, as well as to the editorial boards of The Spectatorial 2016-2018, with whom I served while parts of this book were written.

A few early versions of these stories were published, and are acknowledged as follows: A Carnival World in South 85 Journal, The End of History in The Goose Volume 6, The War with Space in the Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal issue 2.4, Rocket Connection in Occulum, Tenants in Sweet Tree Review Volume 3.1

There is in truth, no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them.

—Terry Pratchett

Contents

Part One:These Memories of Us (2016-2026)

Chapter 1: Stranger Bedfellows

Chapter 2: Planet 58

Chapter 3: Tenants

Chapter 4: A Carnival World

Chapter 5: A Time-Loop Tango

Part Two: These Violent Machines (2040-2280)

Chapter 6: Yum

Chapter 7: The Words

Chapter 8: Dreaming Darkly

Chapter 9: The End of History

Chapter 10: Closing Time

Chapter 11: Re-Pilot

Part Three:An Uncertain and Distant World (2280-3036)

Chapter 12: Rocket Perspective

Chapter 13: We Laugh at Dogs

Chapter 14: What We See in the Smoke

Chapter 15: All My Bells and Whistles

Chapter 16: The War with Space

Chapter 17: And the Stars, Do They Still Shine?

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part One: These Memories of Us (2016-2026)

Chapter 1: Stranger Bedfellows

Chapter 2: Planet 58

Chapter 3: Tenants

Chapter 4: A Carnival World

Chapter 5: A Time-Loop Tango

Part Two: These Violent Machines (2040-2280)

Chapter 6: Yum

Chapter 7: The Words

Chapter 8: Dreaming Darkly

Chapter 9: The End of History

Chapter 10: Closing Time

Chapter 11: Re-Pilot

Part Three: An Uncertain and Distant World (2280-3036)

Chapter 12: Rocket Perspective

Chapter 13: We Laugh at Dogs

Chapter 14: What We See in the Smoke

Chapter 15: All My Bells and Whistles

Chapter 16: The War with Space

Chapter 17: And the Stars, Do They Still Shine?

Landmarks

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Start of Text

Part One: These Memories of Us (2016-2026)

Chapter 1: Stranger Bedfellows

Chapter 2: Planet 58

Chapter 3: Tenants

Chapter 4: A Carnival World

Chapter 5: A Time-Loop Tango

Part Two: These Violent Machines (2040-2280)

Chapter 6: Yum

Chapter 7: The Words

Chapter 8: Dreaming Darkly

Chapter 9: The End of History

Chapter 10: Closing Time

Chapter 11: Re-Pilot

Part Three: An Uncertain and Distant World (2280-3036)

Chapter 12: Rocket Perspective

Chapter 13: We Laugh at Dogs

Chapter 14: What We See in the Smoke

Chapter 15: All My Bells and Whistles

Chapter 16: The War with Space

Chapter 17: And the Stars, Do They Still Shine?

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Part One: These Memories of Us (2016-2026)

Chapter 1: Stranger Bedfellows

So it goes.

—Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five

Do you know what Saul Bellow said about writing?

No, I say, Tell me.

But she just stares at me. Her mouth hangs open, a black hole in space punctuated by too few teeth, yellow and decayed. I stare back at her from behind the desk.

She’s wearing a tie made of bright green plastic beads. It hangs loosely from her calloused and wrinkled throat. She’s wearing a hat that says (eh)PC party. I can’t tell if that’s a joke or if the conservatives are trying a new kind of guerrilla marketing.

She stares and stares. I stare back. I can’t tell what color her eyes are. I’m not really looking. Just staring.

She blinks and looks down at her shoes. They are huge brown boots. It’s obvious someone else tied them for her.

Got anything for a dollar? the old woman asks.

I say yes. She asks if I know any French literature. I say I’ve read a little of Camus. I say I’ve read The Plague. I say I’ve read The Stranger as well, but that’s a lie.

"What about The Outsider?"

I tell her that’s still just The Stranger, but with a poorer translator. She asks if I’m afraid of Americans. I ask if she’s talking about the David Bowie song.

She stays for a long time, stinking strangely of eucalyptuses, frightening off anyone else who might have approached. She takes a duct-tape wallet out of the inside pocket of her brown corduroys, toys with it, then puts it back in her pocket again. She does this twice more as she investigates the prices on the front table, which contains a series of queer erotic novels, none of which I have read. She tells me about how the brainwashing agents in the water supply are only sterilizing white people. She leaves without buying anything.

What did Saul Bellow say about writing?

• • •

I got nothing.

They don’t believe me.

They were waiting for me when I closed at the end of the day. On my hands and knees, I spit, trying to force air back into my lungs. Blood peppers the sidewalk with saliva. I wonder if I’ll vomit. Hands grope along my sides, on my pants, tearing at the seams. It starts to rain; they take the wallet.

I trade the cheap leather and single twenty-dollar bill for a kick to the ribs, promising myself I’m not going to cry. I hear the grunt, but not the crack, as they hit me.

Next, they take the watch.

I’m not struggling anymore.

Then they take the shoes.

I don’t know what they might do next. For the first time, I wish I owned a gun. The sounds of sirens frighten them away.

They run, they leave me there. I watch the firetrucks rush past. They don’t even see me in the rain.

I get up, I walk away. I’m dragging my feet across the cold, slippery ground of the world. I cough. I can feel where the bruises will form. I don’t want to walk to the hospital.

• • •

Just happy to have my bike back, I say.

The man smiles at me. From two garages away, I can still tell how white his teeth are. He’s holding his electric scooter by the handles as I hold my bicycle by the frame. I’m halfway in, he’s halfway out.

Man, there ain’t nothing like a bicycle.

Yeah, I say.

How long’s it been for you?

I feel trapped. One foot in the doorway. Cheap groceries weigh on my back. Even though I want desperately to set them down onto the muddy alley ground, I don’t. He remembers me, but I don’t remember him. The guilt of forgetting roots me to the spot.

I left it out on the street one night back in November. Someone stripped it.

The man with the scooter whistles. I don’t understand why. Is it impressive to be stolen from?

They take it all? he asks

Everything but the frame, I say.

That isn’t true. They’d left the bike chain. They’d left the bell.

Motherfuckers, he says. It’s a cheerful way of saying it. He’s trying to say he’s on my side. You rebuild it yourself?

Yes.

I bought new pedals, inner tubes, tires, wheels, hand grips. It took hours to put it all together. Not out of pride. I couldn’t afford the shop anymore.

It’s a nice bicycle.

He says bicycle like it’s a foreign word.

It’s just a fixie.

I’ll tell you something. he says.

What?

I’d let you borrow my woman before I let you borrow my bicycle. Want to know why?

Why would he tell me a joke like this?

Why?

Because at least I know she would come back.He laughs. I laugh with him. It isn’t funny. I think he’s trying to speak to me as if I were a man. I hate the way men speak to each other. I feel sick. I’m staring at his left hand. He’s missing a thumb.

What’s your name?

June.

I’m Clarence, he says.

He’s climbing onto his moped.

Thank God for bicycles, he says.

I smile and close the gate behind me. I stop smiling, listening to the hum of the engine as he revs his moped and disappears into the night. The gentle growl is soothing, telling me that he has gone away, as the sound of gravel under tires fades out of my range.

• • •

I’m lying on my side in bed. It hurts to breathe. The video is playing on my phone. I don’t know how it got there. I didn’t have this phone then. The internet has slipped older memories into new pockets. Things I should have lost are kept safe in the cloud.

I tell myself that it shouldn’t matter anymore. I tell myself there have been others since her. That there were others before her. I still play it back.

I’d filmed in portrait mode. Her voice from nearly three years ago comes to me from the left speaker, tinny and hollow. Mine comes from the right.

No, no! Turn it off.

Smile.

No.

But she’s smiling. She can’t help but smile at me. We are lying in bed together; naked but both obscured by the other’s body. Her head is resting against my stomach, her hair pooling out around us, covering my breast. Her arm is reached up to wrap around my side. Her skin looks like snow against the browned tan of my shoulders.

Why not?

I’m not decent.

Please smile.

No.

But she’s smiling. Her smile is captured by the millions of tiny lights that make up my phone screen. The image of her is front and center. Mine is floating in and out of the edge of the frame.

I love you.

I love you too.

Her eyes close on those last words. The video is only twelve seconds long. I want to play it again. It hurts just to breathe. I promise I’m not going to cry.

• • •

No, that was Joe Heller.

I know how snobbish it sounds nicknaming the famous dead like old friends. I can’t help it. I’m trying to force myself into a world I don’t have any right to belong to.

Who was he?

"He wrote Catch-22."

Is that the one about Dresden?

No, that’s Vonnegut.

Then what did Bellow write?

"Herzog."

She scratches her nose. The stitches above my eye sting. At the clinic, I’d said I’d only fallen. It’s easier that way, there are less questions. I didn’t know she was still listed as my emergency contact until she showed up in the waiting room.

She doesn’t ask what happened and I don’t say more than I need to. I say I could get home fine on my own. I’m sitting on the second-floor enclosed balcony of a bar that won’t exist in six months. In place of tables are old, rat-leather couches rescued from the side of the road and some 1980s pinball machines.

The wall behind us is painted to match Vincent van Gogh’s famous Starry Night. I try not to look at the church steeple, the crooked half-moon, and the swirl-blue sky holding up its stars. It too perfectly matches the tattoo I know is plastered carefully under her breast, just out of sight. I don’t want to think about that anymore.

I don’t know why I’d mix them up.

Both Jewish.

I look out the window. She watches me. There is an ache in my stomach. She’s dressed in dark blue jeans and a faded red collarless dress shirt, the kind my mother would have called a called a mandarin collar. But I somehow know that sounds racist, so I don’t copy. Her hair is shorter than I remember.

The owner recalls us from when we were younger.

We don’t have much time left, he says as he comes over to where we’re sitting.

Soon they’ll bulldoze this whole block and build a condo, he says.

I ask them, I ask, how many fucking condos does this city need? he says.

Toronto’s only seasons are winter and construction, he says.

He smiles like he’s not really bothered. His nose-ring piercing sparkles in the red lighting that made me love this place when we