Omphalos Read online

  OMPHALOS

  GERALD LYNCH

  Doug Whiteway, Editor

  © 2017, Gerald Lynch

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Doowah Design.

  Photo of author by Maura Lynch, Crow Photography.

  Acknowledgements

  Once again I am very much indebted to the Signature Editions team: to publisher (and editor) Karen Haughian for her continuing devotion to real publishing in a world that one day must thank her commensurately for keeping the fire burning; to publicist Roanne Solitario for her energized dedication to making our books better known; and to editor (and writer) Doug Whiteway, the best editor with whom I’ve worked, for his sharp eye and sound ear, for his knowledge, intelligence, and good humour. To Mary Jo I owe far too much to begin covering at the end of a brief acknowledgements; she has been the better part of me for so long that any such attempt would be tantamount to thanking myself.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lynch, Gerald, 1953-, author

  Omphalos / Gerald Lynch.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77324-012-1 (softcover).

  --ISBN 978-1-77324-013-8 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8573.Y43O47 2017 C813’.54 C2017-904694-2

  C2017-904695-0

  Signature Editions

  P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

  www.signature-editions.com

  for

  Kevin, Sean, and Francie

  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  Omphalos

  Missing Children

  Exotic Dancers

  Troutstream

  Kisbey

  One’s Company

  Non-Fiction

  The One and the Many: Canadian Short Story Cycles

  Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity

  Edited

  Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art: Critical Essays (with Janice Fiamengo)

  The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy (with Shoshanna Ganz and Josephene Kealey)

  Leacock On Life

  Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story (with Angela Arnold)

  Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock

  Familiar Ground: A Prose Reader (with David Rampton)

  Short Fiction: An Introductory Anthology (with David Rampton)

  The Canadian Essay (with David Rampton)

  Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal

  Prose Models (with David Rampton)

  The Rising Village, by Oliver Goldsmith

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the Author

  I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder.

  Leonard Cohen

  Chapter 1

  The early hours of a Sunday morning in mid-August, with Ottawa coughing dryly in another heat wave like a mouthful of drought. High above its shuffling world of cheaply patched street people just looking for a safe place to lie down, high above the jaundiced security lighting whose nightly sizzling seemed to continue microwaving exposed skin, and high atop Omphalos working away on one of his legendary letters to a new find sat Eugene DeLint.

  The expansive office had to be kept chilled so DeLint could always comfortably sport one of his signature baby-blue jackets which, as a result of his bulk and the slight hump, rode up behind like the cresting vest of an obese waiter. Dead silent too, the office, but for the click of DeLint’s splitting pistachios with his teeth and the thp of his spitting the shells into a big black wok on the floor.

  Click…thp. …Click…thp. …Click…thp. …

  Floor-to-ceiling PANOGLAZ formed the room’s two exterior walls, blocking UV by day and enhancing by night what natural illumination there was, though the pissy lighting from below still paled against the bright island of DeLint’s desk. Large as it was, and cluttered, even it was dwarfed in the office space that occupied a quarter of the seventeenth floor of Omphalos. The desk’s surface was dominated by the big glass crock of red-dyed pistachio nuts and a twelve-by-sixteen holo frame. DeLint’s rosy fingers dipped continuously into the crock as his gaze compulsively found the likeness of his deceased mother (smile-enhanced). He slowly turned his buffalo head and squinted at its faint reflection in the window opposite, then found the holo again, pained looks for both himself and her.

  She had always insisted that he was husky, that the other kids were afraid to pick him for football and box-lunch sharing. Such purported cowardice had dogged him through time and space — south to the Ivy League where, as a seventeen-year-old prodigy, he was just so much smarter, already much more fully fledged, than the other ambitious legal eaglets at Harvard. It was an established psychological fact that girls just couldn’t take competition from a better-looking boy, such as her Gene, what with his naturally wavy sandy hair and, it had to be said, prettier face (this last solace was always accompanied by a painful cheek-pinch and spit-slicking, even as recently as a year ago). It was envy pure and simple that motivated competitors to trip him up at every step along the career path. But Mom, his rock and springboard (as he still often described her), had lovingly urged him over every hurdle, mothering his threatened failures to manly successes.

  And now she was gone.

  And things had gone downhill at Omphalos ever since, for…over a year, at least, it felt; yes, at least eleven months…anyway. (Inexplicably, calculating was weirdly difficult this early Sunday morning.)

  Tears from both eyes tracked to the corners of his mouth, where he tasted their salt with reaming tongue tip. His feelings were as real as any loving child’s, they were. Though the saline residue could have come from the pistachios. Anyway, she’s dead. Omphalos was all his.

  The eyes shifted back to business, his letter to the new find. The fat hand moved.

  Click…thp.

  Because the top of the glass jar of pistachios curled thickly, DeLint could pinch and remove only one nut at a time. He transferred the red pod to his mouth where, with the forepart of his tongue, he pressed it against the palate and, heavily lidded eyes shutting sumptuously, sucked out the salt. Then he worked the nut forward with wiggling tongue tip, finished cracking it, sorted shell from meat with dexterous tongue, swallowed without chewing, and spat the faded remainder into, or towards, the big black wok — thp.

  The wok, the largest Administrative Assistant Anna Kynder could find, was a gift from “the girls,” the secretariat. But the gaping bowl still caught only half the spat shells. Someone still had to clean up DeLint’s nightly mess. No problem, because the girls adored Eugene. He all but lived at Omphalos
, he still wrote beautiful longhand drafts of all his correspondence, and he never forgot an occasion with expensive gift. No one could be less sexually threatening than Eugene DeLint. Still, there remained something icky in the chore of cleaning up the mess around his desk, a repulsive something to try any real woman’s morning stomach.

  Click…thp.

  He looked up from his letter-writing, a tiny beige-pink nut in his teeth. He furrowed his big brow and called past the shell, “Don?… Did you change your mind then, Mr. McNicol, respecting some wee-hours work, as ’twere?”

  Nothing.

  Click…thp.

  He returned to his letter, the fist dipped, if a touch more clumsily. He paused again, crinkled the beetling brow and looked up at the repeated sound.

  “Ewan…Doctor Randome? I thought you were at that big shrinks’ confab in Florida?… If that is you, Ewan, as I told you: we have nothing more about which to discuss Psychiatric Wellness and Omphalos finances. … Don?… Mrs. Kynder? …”

  DeLint returned to work, his letter to the new find. With first letters to finds, Eugene DeLint was always careful, especially considerate of length: not too long, but expansive and warmly probing. Through Administrative Assistant Anna Kynder he’d learned the new man’s name, Mark Prendergast, and his Omphalos sector, Essential Supplements. The week before, Mark Prendergast had stood behind DeLint at the executive meeting of World Food Bank (the earliest incarnation of Omphalos itself, and now a failing subsidiary). Anticipating nicely, Prendergast had poured his water just so, like he enjoyed rendering service to his president. His hip bone had pressed, or at least brushed, DeLint’s beefy shoulder.

  DeLint was a star-maker, famous all over the capital for spotting talent. He preferred young men; the only woman he’d ever favoured, Kelly Beldon from the legal temp pool, was currently a federal Crown prosecutor. More than that, Ms. Beldon was already being touted, young as she was, for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, should the lone female judge be the next to die.

  DeLint appeared to smile menacingly because of the shell in his teeth.

  Click…thp.

  The famous Dr. Ewan Randome had also been one of DeLint’s finds (if Mother’s, actually). Though more often lately he felt like Randome’s boy. That just went to show the deteriorating impasse that had been reached at the highest echelon of Omphalos. He was right, per usual: Ewan had to go. They would have the biggest Omphalos blowout ever for him, the cream of two nations’ capitals would be invited, blah-blah-blah. But go Randome must. The bad doctor no longer had Eugene’s best interests — or Omphalos’s — at heart, especially not since Mom…passed… Whatever concerned lies Randome told at their weekly sessions. Or went to her reward, her just reward. Yes, much better.

  Again a noise made DeLint look up from his desk. Has Head Secretary Don McNicol changed his mind and decided on an early morning interview? Don had reported to DeLint that his, DeLint’s, therapeutic corporate autobiography was coming along just fine, but that Dr. Randome had ordered him, Don, to get more material from DeLint of an intimate nature. Don had shown DeLint the memo from Dr. Randome: “If Eugene’s bibliotherapy is to succeed in re-establishing Omphalos’s true global charity mission, then Gene must share more of an intimate nature. The planet’s psychological wellness depends upon it!”

  The closing appeal had almost worked, as it represented the good old Ewan, the caring Randome. But Don’s still not getting more, of an intimate or any other nature, thank you. Don knows too much already. Her Gene had been careless respecting Omphalos business. Mother would kill him, were she…

  He puckered up, because now, along with finishing the letter to the new find, Mark Prendergast, he must pen the letter-cum-report that would initiate Dr. Ewan Randome’s termination at Omphalos. That eventuality would have broken Mother’s heart. Ewan had been her pet.

  DeLint combed his fingers through thinning hair, brushed Mother with another glance, then stared again at his pale reflection in the window as he flicked hair from his fingers like waving bye-bye to a baby.

  Why so much hair?

  Again a noise from the hallway caught his attention. Hadn’t he left the door farther ajar than that?

  DeLint’s bulbous eyes appeared heavier-lidded than usual, puffier, and pink-rimmed. For some reason this early morning, the nondescript stub of a nose had started depositing mucus at the top of his throat, so that between nuts he now must snort and swallow.

  When younger and somewhat less husky, he had been profiled in the Ivy Alumni as having “that Kennedy look.” But if applicable at all this morning, it could be only to DeLint as caricature of a Kennedy, with the matted forelock not so much draping the big brow as pasted there. Only the dead gaze of the eternally promising, aged boy remained, and it was that disappointed boy who now looked hopefully towards the wedge of hall light at the far end of the room.

  “Mrs. Kynder?…”

  Nothing. Did he believe in ghosts? Yes. So did Dr. Randome. And so did Mom.

  “Mmmm… Mom?”

  No one will ever love you like I do, Gene.

  So soothing, always, her living voice inside him. At least Ewan was still helping with that.

  Becalmed, fortified, he paused further to reflect on his few… he wouldn’t call them failures. Rather boys who hadn’t worked out. Disappointments. Yes, finds who’d become disappointments. They’d disappointed him, and after all he’d done for their careers. But why think of them at all?… He knew the answer all too well, for he lived in daily terror of another failure’s returning and confronting him with more lies. Then the routine, the scene, security called. The legal team alerted. Expensive settlement. Randome on his case. Mother not speaking for weeks.

  Reaching blindly he knocked his right pinkie knuckle against the glass lip of the crock of pistachio nuts, and cursed a blue streak while shaking the offended hand like trying to throw off something sticky.

  And don’t forget: the so-called Widower is still “at large,” as the stupid police say. Almost a year had passed since that Detective Beldon — Kelly Beldon’s dad! — had insinuated a connection between Omphalos and the Widower serial killings. Acting then as assistant Crown prosecutor, Ms. Beldon had helped outsiders almost gain deep access to Omphalos! That’s gratitude for you!

  Click…thp. But in his strangely creeping weakness, DeLint was unable to project the shell sufficiently, and its two halves stuck to his chin, one down, the other up, like “inny” and “outty” bellybuttons.

  Omphalos is our baby, Gene, yours and mine, never forget that.

  The Widower, yes. I’ve been the goddamned widower since you abandoned me!

  I will always be with you, Gene. But right now you must do what you have to to save our child, Omphalos.

  Still at large. He could find him.

  From the jowls down Eugene DeLint was unrecognizable as the Kennedyesque wunderkind who, answering his country’s call (Mother’s) and reputedly sacrificing a lucrative legal career in the big leagues (Washington), had returned to Ottawa (the bush leagues) from a temporary teaching assistantship at Harvard’s pre-law school to unite Canada’s charitable organizations under the banner “Omphalos Philanthropics” (Mother had begun the promising work years before with Canada’s Food Bank and had come to believe that a male figurehead was necessary to advance Omphalos’s charitable mission, and who better than her Gene?).

  Through the years, Omphalos had grown exponentially, sub-Sahara Africa starved further, and the “Philanthropics” was quietly dropped (which helped early on with tax audits because no one could determine what Omphalos meant or was supposed to mean, charity-wise). In pace with the widening mandate and outreach of Omphalos’s global conglomeration, DeLint himself had grown until he looked, and never more so than at present, like a cartoonish Kennedy moulting at a huge desk in a hangar of an office perched atop Canada’s former National Defence Buildings (three proximate grey b
oxes of terraced heights) alongside low-rise Ottawa’s world-heritage Rideau Canal.

  Click…thp. Whew (it was getting awfully hot).

  Having manoeuvred the depleted Canadian military out of the stolid Department of National Defence buildings, DeLint had found the tallest structure too rectilinear. So its roof was capped with a copper dome that answered (or might one day) the pale green-roofed Parliament Buildings beyond the canal. Soon that dome was punningly known far and wide as “DeLint’s Button.”

  Along with the signature baby-blue jackets, a more recent affectation was white pants, because (an ironically joking) Ewan Randome had told him they were slimming. Anxious now, he repeatedly spread and clapped his thighs, and the effect was of two carelessly amorous belugas.

  “Don?” he called again into the spectral end of the spacious office. “Did you change your mind, Mr. McNicol?” He sang: “I hope, Head Secretary, that you have something to sho-ow me!” Then barked: “Like my life story!… That better not be you lurking out there, Ewan…Mrs. Kynder?…Anna?” His tune ended with a prayerful, near whimpering “Mom?”

  This time he distinctly heard footsteps retreat beyond the open office door. Then dead silence.

  Ah well. As Mom said at least once a week on bed-stripping day, it will all come out in the wash.

  He returned to his letter, warming to the task. In fact, he was definitely feeling way too warm. He undid the second and third buttons of his check shirt, but wouldn’t rise to remove the jacket the colour of a sick robin’s egg. The skin at his throat had the look of stippled ceiling. He scratched idly there, but soon with intent, raising a rosy rash. Had the girls forgotten to set the A/C for weekend work?

  The air conditioning was powered by Omphalos’s own diesel generators in the sub-basement power plant. Jake Shercock never slept. DeLint fingered three numbers on the glass desktop console and, compulsively secretive, touched the encryption icon. He spoke softly into the cool air: