Russell Twyce

It is a minus 40-degree morning and it doesn’t really matter if you prefer the Celsius or the Fahrenheit scale, it is just extremely damned cold. Wind-chill is not a factor: the air molecules have huddled together and nature doesn’t possess a bulldozer big enough to move the contracted mass. It seems like the earth is no longer the third rock from the sun, it’s been demoted to the fifth or sixth planet away.

“A diamond fog.” Crystal says to the audience of her own muffled ears. Then she looks at her own words floating as distinct clouds of visible breath: they are as the syllables she uttered, as translated into Apache smoke signals.

The girl watches a 1-ton pickup turn onto her street. As the vehicle accelerates, twin plumbs of exhaust curl up behind like twin fluffy squirrel’s tails. As the truck nears, she leans expectantly and invitingly forward to look into the windshield: maybe the man wants to unload his nuts. Then Crystal might buy a rock to fuel the insatiable craving of her crack habit’s life devouring furnace.

No. The gentleman inside brakes to looks at her but then guns his engine to drive on and his diesel fumes waft over the hooker, like a downy cotton shroud.

She takes a draught of a glacial air cocktail comprised of frigid atmosphere mingled with the assorted byproducts of internal combustion. Her inhale sears her lungs with both a frosty nip and chemical astringency. A direly chilly thought crosses her mind: I should hide in an alley and remove all my clothing. Crystal has heard freezing to death is a relatively painless way to die and at the very end, a victim feels warmth and experiences a sense of contentment.

“There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven.”

Crystal spins at the words and she sees a man standing nearby. His brown beard and moustaches are frosted snow white on the tips.

“With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given.”

“What do you mean?” Crystal asks: her usual opening question is ‘are you looking for some company?’ but his odd mention of a corpse, on the heels of her fleeting suicidal notion, has thrown her an erratic pitch.

“Robert Service wrote that in the Cremation of Sam McGhee.”

“What are you looking for?” Crystal risks. Her need has quelled her caution. To get a fix out of the inclement weather, she is willing to take her chances with a weirdo.

“I’m more interested in what you want.”

“I’d like you to pay me for a week’s worth of my services,” the streetwalker jokes icily, “and to take me somewhere warm.”

“Okay.” The strange man says. “Ironically, that’s what Sam McGhee wanted too.”

“Who is Samantha McGhee?” Crystal asks when the two are in the cab of a 4-wheel drive truck: it seems like all vehicles in this northern area are 4×4. She has wracked her dim distant memories for where she might know either Sam McGhee or Robert Service. All that swam to the forefront was a fuzzy image of her grandfather.

“Samuel maybe.” The man says as he keys the ignition. Then he leans over to the glove box, extracts a book of Robert Service poetry and sets it in her lap.

“How much money are you giving me?” A 100-dollar note marking the page where the Cremation of Sam McGhee starts has made Crystal think of her fee.

For an answer, the eccentric man extracts a large wad of currency from his wallet and hands it over uncounted. The hooker feels a pang of concern as she puts the bills into her shirt pocket. It is a small comfort to know she is being paid but that’ll be hollow if she doesn’t arrive back alive to spend it. Crystal has personally known some of the many sex trade women who never returned from their final transaction.

‘There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold.’ The crack-addicted girl reads from the poetry book and some toasty memories come back. They are of her dearly departed grandfather reciting these poems for her: the old man knew them by heart.
‘The Arctic trails have their secret tales, that would make your blood run cold.’

As they drive on a highway, Crystal reads the Sam McGhee poem. Then she thumbs through the rest of the book. Occasionally, she looks up but as the customer has given her enough for a few days, she doesn’t ask of their destination. But then the pattern of her not questioning is established and when they turn onto a succession of smaller bush roads, she still doesn’t inquire. Instead, the girl leans against the door and soon nods off.

“We were supposed to go somewhere warmer.” Crystal awakes when the vehicle stops. The forest seems even colder than the city had been. Besides a log cabin, the clearing where they’ve stopped has detached garage.

“My place will be snug enough once I’ve stoked a fire in the stove.” The man says as they get out of the vehicle. He walks over to opens the garage door. The compacted snow in the driveway is so cold and brittle that it squeaks under his boots.

“You picked a pretty spot.” While he tucks the vehicle into the garage and plugs it in, Crystal gazes at the nearby mountains: they are furred over with evergreen trees.

“This ideal location has another special feature that you haven’t seen yet.” The man leads the way to his house. Inside, he strips off his parka and throws it onto a peg. He kicks off his footwear, opens a pot-bellied stove located next to the entryway and puts split wood in. The glowing embers inside will soon have the fire going strong.

“Have you brought other girls here?” Crystal asks while removing her outerwear.
The client deigns to answer. He shuts the firebox door and latches it. He then sits in a large and comfy looking easy chair. His eyes lock onto the crack addict prostitute.

“What do you want to do now?”

Instead of answering, the man just continues to look at her. His left hand roams to his chin and his lips purse, as if he is mentally appraising her physical appearance.

“Okay.” The girl misreads his body language as his wanting sex right now. Under his intent gaze, she takes off the rest of her clothing. Crystal is soon standing stark naked. But he has yet to make a motion of undressing, so she feels uncomfortable in her fully exposed skin. “Uh, what is your name?”

“Nicholas.” He notes that she is slim and her limbs are lithe. Her emaciation is not a function of vanity or anorexia. Rather, her abnormally thin body is due to nutrition holding a lower priority than drugs.

“I’m Crystal.”

“I already knew that.” Says Nick. “I also know that your surname is Scott.”

“Are we going to do it now?” Crystal asks as a mild qualm rises in her breast: how would he know her last name? She hopes that ‘do it now’ will not be interpreted as killing her now. Her escaping fate is not likely, as even if she could fight him off, how would she find her way back to civilization? Yet, his face seems kindly and it is only her mind that is expressing worry: her intuition’s alarm has not jangled at all.

“I don’t have sex with crack whores.”

“We can use double condoms for extra safety.”

“I’m not afraid of sexually transmitted diseases. I prefer having the vagina vender involved in the sexual congress with me and not just acting in automation, with her thoughts trained mostly on anticipating her next high.”

“Then why did you pay me to come with you?” Crystal sits heavily and nakedly on a sofa opposite his chair.

“I brought you out here to see if you wish to become human and I didn’t pay you for anything: I gave you money because you wanted some and I have plenty of it.”

“I am already a human female.” The girl spreads her legs to display her gender.

“Yes,” Nick smiles warmly, “you are inarguably female but humanity isn’t automatic. I suggest that you gave up the quest for betterment when you took up a crack pipe.”

“I don’t suppose you keep a ball or two out here. I could use a hoot right now.”

“Sorry.” The man says but he doesn’t sound contrite about it.

“How about cigarettes?”

“I haven’t any of those either.”

“Liquor?”

He just shakes his head.

“Will you take me back into town?”

“When you’re ready to go, I will take you wherever you want.”

“You’re a strange duck.” The street whore laughs. She also takes a better notice of his appearance. He is somewhat short but powerfully built. Nick seems in his late twenties or early thirties and is ruggedly handsome. “Maybe I could show you that doing it with a hooker can be better than you imagine.”

“I wasn’t just guessing: I was speaking from personal experience. I’ve been intimate with as many Jill strumpets, as you’ve had paying Johns.”

“Were that true,” Crystal did some quick mental math: it is a talent that she is fairly good with,
“You would have had about two per day since you turned 18.”

“I am significantly older than I look.” Nicholas confesses in a wry way. He doesn’t elaborate on his having been born in 1330, making him nearly 700-years-old.

“Lucky you.” She says with a mild annoyance evident. Crystal is somewhat younger than she appears and that disparity will only become more pronounced as the drugs and street life rack up more phantom birthdays to supplement her normal aging.

“Let’s continue our talk in my hot tub.” He stands quickly and extracts a thick pair of insulated coveralls from a closet. He tosses them onto the girl’s lap. “You’re already correctly attired for it but we’ve a ways to walk before we get there.”

Well dressed for the excessively inclement environment, they leave the cabin by a back door.

Crystal notes that this entrance does not even have a latch: Nicholas has pulled it shut and it stays in place by either friction of the weather-stripping or due to an exceptional job of setting the door’s cantilever balance, or both.

“You obviously enjoy a hot soak as often as possible.” The girl remarks as they set out on a well-groomed path. It appears to be regularly roller packed. As she had not seen a tractor in the garage, it meant Nick must pull the heavy implement by muscle power alone. The walkway is wide enough for the two to walk abreast and flat like an urban sidewalk. Nicholas has obviously expended every effort to remove stumps, brush, roots and forest floor undulations.
Nicholas doesn’t answer. Instead, he does a quick shuffle step to bring his cadence into pace with her. The girl’s height is largely from her long legs, while his is in his torso: consequently, he needs lengthen his stride to match walking tempos.

Crystal barely notices his steps being in tune with her treads but for the first time since meeting, she feels slightly akin with him. They are sharing an adventure and as equals. His breathing is also even matched with hers and a glance back shows a puffs contrail of moist breath, condensed in the cold, like twin strings of pearls.

“You should’ve installed your Jacuzzi closer to your cabin.” Crystal complains after they have hiked at least a kilometer, in the massively sub-zero weather.

“It is where providence,” he rubs his chest as if scratching an itch, “decided to put it.”

After a few more minutes, they arrive at a natural hot springs. The air surrounding the warm pool is steamy and temperate. It is a misty mild bubble in a sea of cold, or a habitat constructed on the surface of Pluto.

Nick strips quickly and hangs his clothes on the dead branches of an old tree stump. The girl removes her thermal gear too, and they both enter the water. The bottom is muddy ooze mingled with some sandy patches and it becomes deep fairly quickly. The two swim to semi-submerged rocks that are eroded smooth and comfortable.

“So what is your definition of human?” Crystal asks when they are settled. Along the walk here, she had been thinking back over their earlier words.

“A human being defies defining because they are so much more than just a unit of breathing, breeding and laboring flesh. But I have a different topic of discussion in mind. When did you abandon your life’s aspirations?”

“Who says I didn’t grow up treasuring a goal of being a crack whore?” Crystal quips and she stares him down with an expression intended to say ‘mind your own affairs!’

“Perhaps after you lost your virginity,” Nick ignores the look and surmises, “you might’ve decided that having sex was a pleasure you could turn into a career, but why would you add the drug addiction aspect to your life’s business plan?”

“Once you are hooked, then you do what you must to get the drugs.”

“Really?” Nicholas lilts the word, as either a question or a sarcastic remark. “Yet your comment about an objective of being a crack whore begs a question. Did you start whoring to get money for cocaine, or did you start smoking crack as way to socially excuse your desire for plenty of sex with many random partners?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” Crystal ducks her head under the water to get away from his inquisition: then she kicks off the rock and shoots across the hot pool like a sleek torpedo. She surfaces and strokes a slow lap of the pond that is about the size of a public swimming pool. The steaming water soon saps her physical energy and her mind grows tired too, from internal wrangling with his last question.

“Well,” he asks when the girl returns to the rock seat, “did you decide the answer?”

“Did the chicken or the egg come first?”

“The egg and hen conundrum is an old chestnut with no bearing on your future, but the prostitution and addiction poser is of vital impact on your life prospects.”

“I’m just an addicted street whore.” Crystal says sharply. “What do you want from me? Answer that riddle or leave me alone.”

“This encounter is about what you want.” Nick stands up on the submerged rock: his strong physique and maleness is displayed. “Do you want sex from me or drugs? I can give you plenty of either but I utterly refuse to provide both.”

“Did you fib about not keeping a ball of crack around?”

“I don’t lie about anything: neither to others nor especially to myself.” He stands exposed for another moment, awaiting a decision from her. When the girl just sulks and soaks in the warm water, Nick sits back down.

The decision he asked for has disturbed her. She recalls the boyfriend she gave her virginity to. He dumped her after finding out that she experimented with sex with a few other guys too.
His possessive attitude mirrored a society at large, which exerts extreme pressure towards monogamy. Though she hadn’t taken payment from the other boys, she had been made to feel like a tramp.

“I’ve tried to quit the crack.” Crystal says after a few moments. “I’ve been into rehab twice but I can’t seem to give it up. In case you don’t know, cocaine is an addictive narcotic. Shall I define addictive for you?”

“Allow me to. Addictive substance means an alternate gun that an unhappy person uses to commit a slow suicide.”

“I’m not suicidal and I’m happy enough when I’m on a high.”

“And I suppose you drew these slash scars on your wrist,” he grabs her hands and turns the old wounds up for examination, “as skin decoration like a macabre tattoo.”

“That was just a teenage girl’s cry for help.” Crystal snatches her hands away and hides her arms back under the water’s surface.

“What assistance did the teen girl get? Was it sermons from professionals who wouldn’t or couldn’t address her real issues? Doubtlessly she got prescriptions for some anti-depressant medications? Isn’t that just the prep school on a career path to a master’s degree in crack whoring?”

“Let’s change the subject and talk about you. Are you so bloody perfect?”

“I’m human, by my own conscious efforts and determination. Humans do err but we are human and therefore master,” Nicholas idly taps his chest with his knuckles, “of our own destinies.”

“I’m not independently wealthy enough to shape and control my own future, as you seem to be. And if you really must know, I slashed my wrists because I’m living in a world that was not made for me and which I don’t fit into.”

“God created this world precisely with you in mind.”

“Jesus save me!” The girl shouts in mockery. “Preserve my soul from self-righteous bible-thumpers. Praise the Lord, I now see exactly what you’re all about. You want me to swap my chemical addiction for a dependency on crosses and rosary beads.”

“I’m devoutly spiritual but I gave up on Christianity a long time ago.” Living through the Spanish Inquisition and witnessing the forced conversions of the colonial era sundered Nicholas
Flamel’s respect for organized religion. “And you’re wrong: I’m not seeking to convert you to anything but your becoming human.”

His displaying himself a moment ago has stirred her desire and under the water, she slides a hand to his loins but he abruptly pushes it away. This unexpected rebuff is as disconcerting as his frank talk. Being female and nubile, she is used to being the one to dictate when sex occurs and her overtures have not often been refused. Even the boyfriend who spurned her didn’t refuse sex later: he just shunned her in public.

“Was that a non-verbal answer to my question regarding which you want from me?”
Crystal blushes then mopes for a few minutes until the quiet becomes disconcerting.

“Maybe my addiction is an outgrowth of my dissatisfaction with my place in the world, or rather my lack of a satisfying place. I’ve tried to quit the crack but like cigarettes, cocaine is addicting.”

“With both those substances you mentioned, the physical dependency is quite mild.”

“How could you possibly know?” Crystal shoots back. His looking younger than his age would suggest that he maintained a strict regimen of health.

“I don’t speak as an authority on anything I haven’t personally experienced. As an experiment, I lived for five years on the streets doing as much crack-cocaine and other drugs as I could do without overdosing. I purposefully got myself as addicted as possible. When I knew as much as I needed, I quit. My habit was castrated just as simple as that. As with nicotine, booze, and anything other habit forming stuff, there are a few nasty days worth of withdrawal symptoms and then it’s done.”

“Did you have the same amount of money then as you claim to have now?”

“More or less.”

“Then you had the resources to do whatever you wanted after. If I get clean of the drugs, then I’m still in the same situation that I used the drugs to run away from.”

“That is an excuse without any grounding.” Nick says flatly. “Cash is a commodity made from printed paper: it’s not the cause of your ruination. You have a means of making money but you use the financial gain only to feed your crack habit, instead of employing it to better your situation. Without that heinous crack monkey on your back, you could command an up-scaled clientele and a vastly improved cash flow.”

“To get that money, one needs adhere to society’s complicated rules.” Crystal says in a bubbly tone to attempt to lighten up the intense conversation: she even playfully splashes him. “The police let an addict girl do what she does for the occasional BJ on the side but in the higher priced bracket, the government and its law kicks in hard.”

“Were that true,” he wipes the water from his face, “then the establishment is guilty of condoning and in fact encouraging drug use. They would be saying that breaking a law is acceptable, as long as the proceeds are used to purchase drugs. But in actual fact,” Nick punctuates this with a return splash, “the police are extorting your sexual favors on false pretenses because here in Canada, prostitution is NOT illegal.”

“Bullshit!” The girl exclaims and she splashes him harder for effect.

“I know law exceptionally well.” During the many years of his extraordinarily long life Nick had obtained an assortment of law degrees, in a variety of jurisdictions, under a plethora of identities. “The closest law that applies is ‘communication for the purpose of prostitution’, but unless you’ve used explicit terminology like ‘do you want to pay to have sex with me?’ and if you and the guy didn’t immediately go at it right in the street, there is a huge open field for even a marginally competent lawyer to easily beat the charge. And if the girl has enough funds for a roof over her head, the police can’t employ the various vagrancy statutes either.”

“There are still the tax laws.”

“Until society recognizes prostitution as legitimate occupation, it has neither a right nor the ability to require reporting that income. A call girl needs only jot a notation on her internal revenue form, indicating she is employed in a non-taxable job and she has fully satisfied the tax laws.”

“I’m guessing that you earn your living as an attorney.”

“Not even close!” Nicholas laughs. His discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone gave him eternal youth and it also enabled him to transmute lead into gold. “I’ve studied law as a General gathering intelligence on his foe: I could never swallow my honor sufficiently to actually practice law. Lawyers are about as beneficial to civilization as the bubonic plague.”

“The difference between a whore and a lawyer,” Crystal recalls a joke, “is that the whore stops screwing the client when he dies.”

“That is true. But even though we all know that law practitioners are whores with pens and that law passing politicians are whores with podiums, they feel at home in this world, that you think you don’t fit into.”

“Being a figurative whore is socially acceptable: being a literal one isn’t.”

“So what of it?” Nick counters firmly. “Why must you attempt to please a society that is unbending towards who you wish to be? I’ll give you a phrase that I live by: when you are comfortable in your own skin, then the whole world fits you like a glove.”

“I finally appreciate what you’re trying to do but it won’t work.” Crystal turns to him and sets her fingers on his knee. This time he interprets her touch as a gesture of a growing rapport and he doesn’t reject it. “I could swear to you and promise myself, that I will change my life – but as soon as I get back to civilization, something inside of me will make me fall off the wagon: it has happened time and time again. I have no reason to expect the outcome would be any different this time.”

“That is a factor of your subconscious mind sabotaging your best efforts. That is also why we’re talking here in the frozen wilds, instead of in a street-corner coffee shop.”

“Why does the subconscious mind do that?” The girl wonders idly. “It has to live on with the nasty effects too.”

“Psychiatry calls it the subconscious mind but honestly, the supposed science of the human psyche has regressed over the last few hundred years, almost as fast as our technology has advanced. Trying to understand the mental state of humans without accepting the fact of our having souls, is like attempting to fathom how a light bulb works, while refusing to accept that electricity exists.”

“The subconscious mind is the soul?” She asks. Crystal vaguely notices that his voice has taken on a different quality. He is no longer modulating his tone and the effect makes her a bit drowsy: the steaming water isn’t helping her stay alert either.

“It’s complicated but the spirit has its own separate intellect. Understand that your body and your brain will ultimately die. Your soul will live on and your soul knows that, so it has nothing to loose with your death. And though a soul is participating in a life, to learn what it will, the spirit’s most fervent desire is to return to eternity.”

“I have an ethereal assassin inside me that wants to kill its host, as quickly as it can?”

“Yes and no. When your soul is unhappy, then it wants to murder you. If you feed it what it craves, then it is your very best friend, in fact it is your guardian angel.” The two center fingers of his left hand drum rhythmically on his clavicle.

“That sounds a bit like a loving – but violently abusive spouse.”

“That is an apt analogy except for one critical difference, you are your own soul.”

“You are an out-of-the-box person.” Crystal chuckles. She’s not sure if she fully understands all of what he’s said but she has certainly come to like him well enough.

“In more ways than you can possibly imagine.” The 700-year old man briefly joins in her infectious mirth then swiftly becomes serious again. “But our afternoon is wearing away and we’ve yet to arrive at the crux. Can you surmise what it would take to get on your soul’s good side again?

“No.” Crystal says tentatively. She has a suspicion though: it’s been riding along in her mind’s passenger seat from the moment that she met him and considered her safety. Even longer, it’s been in her background since she first contemplated suicide.

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