Idea in Stone | Page 3

for browsing the music stores based on selection,
price, and what the staff were like to look at. He had favourite staff
members who were friendly, cute, or both, though downtown
interactions were limited in nature by a band of high-pressure air
surrounding each person, preserving anonymity and professionalism,
and also preventing 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