End of an Era

Boundary layer

Klicks always took his vacations in Toronto. Partly it was because his parents, both in their seventies, still lived there. Partly it was because his sister and her two sons, whom Klicks doted on, lived just east of the city in Pickering. And partly, I liked to think anyway, it was because he enjoyed spending time with Tess and me—although he did always turn down our invitations to stay at the house, preferring his sister’s luxury condo overlooking Lake Ontario.

But the main reasons for his frequent trips to the mighty T.O. were the culture and the food, both as good as New York’s. Klicks relished the finer things, and there weren’t a lot of them in Drumheller, Alberta. Tonight we were going to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest musical, Robinson Crusoe, touted by the critics as his best since Phantom of the Opera. Even the most pathetic road company of a major show like that wouldn’t make it out to a small town in the middle of the Prairies.

It was an 8:00 p.m. curtain. That gave us time for a leisurely dinner at Ed’s Egalitarian, the new hot spot in the heart of the theater district.

“I hate menus like this,” I said, my eyes running up and down the three panels of steaks, poultry, seafood, salads, and soups. “Too much selection. I never know what to order.”

Tess, seated next to me, sighed that I-married-him-despite-his-faults sigh she was getting so good at as the years went by. “You do this every time we eat out. It’s not like you’re making a lifetime commitment.” She gave me a playful poke in the belly. “Just pick something that isn’t too fattening.”

That was sound advice. My weight usually started going up around Thanksgiving and continued to rise until the good weather came back in March. I always managed to take it off over the summer, and, if I was doing any fieldwork, I could get reasonably thin by late August, but right now I was up a good seven kilos. I glanced across the table at Klicks, who looked more like an athlete than a scientist, then turned my attention back to Tess. “What are you going to have?”

“The petite filet,” she said.

“Hmmm. I just don’t know…”

Klicks looked up from his menu. “Well, while you agonize over what to eat, I’ve got some news.”

Tess, always a devourer of any gossip, smiled that radiant smile of hers. “Really? What?”

“I’m moving to Toronto for a year. I’m taking my sabbatical at U of T.”

It was a good thing that the waiter hadn’t yet brought us our drinks. Otherwise, I might have spluttered gin and tonic all over the fancy lace tablecloth. “You’re doing what?” I said.

“I’m going to be working with Singh in the geology department. He’s gotten a small grant from—what do they call it? Whatever that new, scaled-down thing that replaced NASA is. Anyway, the money’s to study satellite photographs. We’re going to see if a technique can be worked out for identifying fossiliferous locales from space, as a prelude to an eventual Mars excursion.”

“If they ever get enough money together to do one,” I said. “But, Christ—that might put you in line for the mission. I’d heard they were considering having a paleontologist go with them.”

He made a dismissive motion with his hand. “It’s too early to speculate on that. Besides, you know what they say: the reason Canadians have an inferiority complex is that we’re the only country that routinely has to lay off our astronauts.”

I laughed, the better to hide my envy. “Lucky stiff.”

Klicks smiled. “Yeah. But now we’ll be able to spend a lot more time together.” He turned to my wife. “Tess, see what you can do about dumping Brandy.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

Our bow-tied waiter returned with our drinks, the aforementioned gin and tonic for me, an imported white wine for Klicks, and mineral water with a twist of lime for Tess. “Are you ready to order?” he asked in the requisite obscure European accent used by all waiters at Ed’s various restaurants.

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll decide by the time he gets round to me.”

“Madame?”

“A small Caesar salad, please, and the petite filet wrapped in bacon, rare.”

“Very good. Sir?”

“To start,” said Klicks, “the French onion soup—please make sure the cheese is cooked.” He looked over at Tess. “And the lamb chop.”

My heart skipped a beat. I wondered if he knew that “Lamb-chop” was my pet name for her. I tried never to use it in public, but I suppose I might have slipped from time to time.

“And for you, sir?” the waiter said to me.

“Hmmm.”

“Come on, Brandy,” said Tess.

“Yeah,” I said. “The lamb chop sounds good. I’ll have the same thing as him.”

“Good night, Dr. Thackeray.”

“ ’Night, Maria. Try not to get soaked.” Another strobing flash of lightning sent wild shadows sprinting around the room. Even when it wasn’t storming out, the Paleobiology offices at the Royal Ontario Museum were a wonderfully macabre place—especially in the evening after most of the lights had been turned off. Bones were everywhere. Here, a black Smilodon skull with fifteen-centimeter-long saber teeth. There, the curving brown claws of an ornithomimid mounted on a metal stand, poised as if ready to seize fresh prey. Sprawling across a table, the articulated yellow skeleton of a Pliocene crocodile. Scattered about: boxes of shark teeth, sorting trays with thousands of bone chips, a small cluster of fossil dinosaur eggs looking as though they were about to hatch, and plaster jackets containing heaven-only-knows-what brought back from the latest dig.

From outside, the claps of thunder were like dinosaur roars, echoing down the millennia.

This was my favorite time. The phones had stopped ringing and the grad students and volunteer catalogers had gone home. It was the one opportunity in the day for me to relax and get caught up on some of my paperwork.

And, when all that was done, I took my old Toshiba palmtop out of the locked drawer in my desk and wrote my daily entry in this diary. (I normally wouldn’t run a computer during an electrical storm, but my trusty Tosh was battery powered.) I executed a macro that jumped to the bottom of my diary file, inserted the current date—16 February 2013—boldfaced it, and typed a colon and two spaces. I was about to begin today’s write-up when my eyes were caught by the tail end of the previous entry. I let my tears flow freely, it said.

Huh?

I scrolled back a few pages.

My heart pounded erratically.

What the hell was this?

Where did this entry come from?

Living dinosaurs? A journey back through time? An attack by—? Was this some kind of joke? If I ever found out who’d been messing with my diary, I’d kill him. I was so pissed off, I barely noticed that the freak lightning storm had stopped almost as suddenly as it had begun.

I jumped to the top of the document. I’d begun a new diary file on January 1, about six weeks ago, but this file started with a date only five days ago. Still, there were pages and pages of unfamiliar material here. I began to read from the beginning.

Fred, who lives down the street from me, has a cottage on Georgian Bay. One weekend he went up there alone and left his tabby cat back home with his wife and kids. The damned tabby ran in front of a car right outside my townhouse. Killed instantly.

Those weren’t my words. Where was my diary? How did this get here in its place? What the hell was going on?

And what’s this about Tess and Klicks—? Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ…