The Book of Stanley by Todd Babiak Page B

than a plan.”
    â€œI don’t get it.”
    â€œCandace, I need you to help me change. And I can help you. We don’t want Layla growing up spoiled and fancy.”
    â€œYou saying I’m doing a bad job?”
    â€œI’m saying we could be happy together, and Layla could be happy with us. I feel a big transformation coming on. See, there was this poem, this call to me.”
    â€œA poem. You, and a poem.”
    â€œI’m a new man.”
    â€œFrom the handbook of ex-husband clichés.”
    â€œNo. Really.”
    â€œKal, I think you should change. It’d be good for you. But you know it has nothing to do with me any more and very little to do with Layla, right?”
    Candace hugged him quickly, turned away, and stepped up into the driver’s seat, slamming the door with a thwock . Kal waved as she roared away, but the rear windows were too tinted to see if Layla waved back.
    The men were quieter now, in the nighttime parking lot. A part of Kal wanted to lay the boots, but another, more powerful part of him simply pitied the men before him, on their hands and knees, spitting and moaning. Kal bent over the gerbil.
    â€œThat was real sick, what you did to me there. In front of my daughter.”
    â€œBlow me.”
    â€œWhat sort of men are you? You’re way too old for this sort of behaviour. Maybe you even have kids of your own.”
    Kal ambled down the sidewalk toward his hotel. The gerbil cussed again and called out, “Sorry, man.”

 
    ELEVEN
    T he following night, in Saskatoon, Kal wondered about Hell. He was back in his apartment on Tenth Street at Dufferin, playing Halo 2, destroying the Covenant one by one in order to save mankind. Gordon Yang was over, and they were drinking beer and eating Old Dutch salt-and-vinegar.
    â€œThere’s no Hell,” said Gordon, as he wasted a small pack of aliens near what appeared to be a pile of burning tires. “It was invented to stop people from being bad.”
    Kal nodded, but he wasn’t sure he agreed with Gordon. Usually, in these sorts of conversations, he would nod and hope it would be over soon so they could talk about hockey or maybe video games or women. Tonight he actually considered Hell, and decided he believed in it. Not the exotic one he’d learned about at Sacred Heart School, but a different sort of place, smelling of white toast and shoulder pads. Hell was playing hockey all your life, skating for seven years on the verge of the show, only to wake up one morning and realize you were slow, drunk, angry, and uneducated. To have a wife who divorced you because she thinks you have no future and a daughter who’s forgetting you more and more every day.
    â€œYou barely touched your beer.”
    Not only was Kal suddenly bored with beer, he was bored with Halo 2. It was as though he had eaten a bad hot dog, only the rot was in his head instead of his stomach. In twenty years of video games, from the old Pong consolehooked up to the black-and-white TV in his bedroom to the new Xbox, Kal had never been bored. Yet here he was, in his dark and smelly apartment off Broadway, stricken by the meaninglessness of what was possibly the greatest video game ever created.
    Earlier that evening, before Gordon Yang showed up with the beer and potato chips, Kal had staved off panic by fetching the small canvas bag of pornography from his bedroom closet. Even his favourite flick, Indiana Joan and the Black Hole of Mammoo , couldn’t cheer him up. It struck him, for the first time, that the girls of Indiana Joan and the Black Hole of Mammoo couldn’t possibly be having any real fun. Kal removed the disk from his DVD player, tossed it into his canvas bag of pornography, and dropped it all into the garbage chute. After listening to an Otis Redding disc, an emergency tactic, he began to weep. Then he dialed Candace’s number in Kelowna.
    Elias Shymanski answered in that phony high-class