Idea in Stone | Page 3

any real contact.
Stefan decided to head straight for his favourite store. It didn't look as nice as the others, with its scruffy off-white interior, a necessary paint job infinitely delayed by the rock star signatures scribbled on its walls. With poker shark fingers Stefan flipped through the M category of the Indie/Alternative section. The most recent Microchimp album was the one he had in his CD player. The new album wasn't in the stacks or in the displays above. He could ask the staff, but he knew they'd say that if it wasn't in the stacks, it wasn't in. And if this store didn't have it, no one in town would.
His mission was thwarted. He briefly considered buying another album, but knew that was silly: he'd hate it when he got it home because it wasn't That One. When he was struck with thing-lust, it was specific and could not be fooled. He'd assumed that this search would not only work, it would fill his whole afternoon, too. Now his day was without purpose. But he couldn't go home. Not yet. Not knowing what he'd face there.
He walked up the shop's stairs to the Folk/Adult Contemporary section. He knew better, but found his fingers moving through the M section there until they reached 'Mackechnie'. With each subsequent flip he moved back in time. Last year's album showed his mother just as she looked today at home. Moving to the previous, from a few years before, he saw his mother with grey hair -- a period when she briefly stopped dyeing her hair black. Flip, flip -- the late Eighties, with pastel skirt-suits and a cloud of bullet-proof hair.
Flip, flip.
His father was alive again.
Robert Mackechnie held the neck of an upright guitar with one hand while the other rested around his wife's shoulder, and a big, contented smile parted his soft reddish-brown beard lengthwise. The couple's complementary leisure suits carbon-dated the album to somewhere in the late Seventies. Where was I that day? Stefan wondered.
"Urph!" he heard someone moan. He turned around to see a staff member struggling with a large cardboard cut-out on the stairs. The figure wasn't going to fit in this small space, but the staff member was either determined or under orders to make it fit. As the employee bumped it around the railing, Stefan saw the printed side: Delonia Mackechnie: Verses Versus Verses. The employee forced the figure upright, and the head bent forward at a right angle to the body. "Damn." He tried to fold her hair, which didn't work, so he devised a way to accordion-fold her neck so her face rested in her cleavage.
Noticing Stefan, the staff member apologised as if practising for his manager: "She doesn't fit in here. She's just too big."
"I know how you feel," said Stefan.
~
Stefan moved from store to store, but nothing appealed to him. He searched for something -- a book, a new product of some sort -- that would give him some newfound ability or sense of direction. The searching looks he gave the fresh-faced clerks in the store came from the same instinct. There was a luminous promise in everything, but he knew the promise was an empty one. Here's everything I could hope to have, he thought, looking at a toaster with shapely Deco lines, but it's all meaningless. What about romance? he wondered. No. Romance is not salvation. For all he knew, love wasn't real but just another thing people distracted themselves with. It was all just marketing and acquisition in the vain hope of filling the void.
He shook his head. I live in a cargo cult.
~
Stefan stood outside the church. This is crazy, he thought. He'd read about these people in one of his mother's "hocus-pocus" magazines, as he called them. This group claimed that they'd managed to synthesise science and religion into a new practice which gave them power over the mysteries of life and death. They called themselves the Matholics, and Stefan couldn't believe he was actually walking into one of their hives.
This was one of Toronto's older churches, having been built in the early 1900's. Stefan looked around and laughed to himself: if his mother saw him doing something spiritual, she'd be almost as ecstatic as she was when she discovered he liked men. "At last, I knew you'd have something interesting about you!" There was no way he'd give her the satisfaction of knowing about this.
"Can I help you?"
Stefan turned to see a man in clerical robes of shiny black material with a high, straight collar. The man smiled, warm and friendly, without the spinning hypnotic whirls in his eyes Stefan half-expected to see.
"Uh," said Stefan, embarrassed to say it, even though these people claimed this was their stock and trade, "I'd like to get in touch with