Nov. 20/21, 2011

My eyes snapped open. They zoomed up to the chalk ceiling and my brain kicked around a thought that I had heard a plane fly overhead.

Wide awake with the jitters, I looked at the bedside clock, expecting to see 11:11. I always saw 11:11, it seemed, whenever I looked at a clock, or passed a bank with a big digital clock, or a microwave or video machine or television guide. Carrie did, too. It was an inside couple joke with us. We always told each other when we saw 11:11.

The red numbers on the clock said “1:12.”

Rolling my eyes, I sat up in the half darkness of the room and heard “meow” outside our room.

The cat had somehow followed us upstairs and I realized it might be starving. So I climbed from bed, careful not to wake Carrie and dressed.

I slipped my boots on and paused, straining to hear – anything besides the meowing. Convincing myself that the noise must have been random old building noise, perhaps a furnace or a generator, I grabbed the key card and opened the door. The cat meowed again and rubbed itself against my leg, meowing and purring.

“Hungry little guy? Let’s go find you some grub.”

The cat followed me down the hall to the elevator and darted inside it when the doors ‘binged’ open. I still marveled at how electric power remained available.

We got out on the main floor and I sauntered across the spacious, empty lobby toward the lounge, with its plush naugahyde seats and pseudo medieval décor. Opening a fridge behind the bar I found a variety of snack foods but nothing a cat would like. I sniffed at a jar of olives and pinched a couple, popping them in my mouth. Savouring the salty burst of flavour, I reached into the drink cooler and extracted a can of Guinness. Snapping it open, I declared to the cat that we needed to find the hotel kitchen.

Glancing outside, the early morning light of an unpopulated city made me think of eggs; bacon and eggs.

“Bet you’d like a piece of bacon, eh?” I said to the cat, suddenly realizing that this strange wee beast was the first creature I had spoken to, besides Carrie, in nine days.

Odd. Perplexing. Fucked up.

I named the cat Chickenhead, in honour of a pet from another life, named by my daughter and stepsons from a Denis Leary bit as it followed me, circling my ankles and purring, as I searched for the hotel kitchen. I found a service elevator and we ended up in the bowels of the old grand dame. Chickenhead meowed constantly, which is why I named him thusly. The first Chickenhead wouldn’t shut up when he was hungry and the more I asked him if he was hungry, the louder he’d meow, trying to assert his point.

Our noses led us through two swinging doors to the kitchen, where an eye-watering stench floated from a large, stainless steel tomb for prepared food that was never served.

Green things, which had been meat topped, half-made sandwiches, as near as I could tell, were lined up on a countertop. A mayonnaise jar the size of a small keg of beer cast an almost luminescent septic cloud. Two piles of white kitchen staff garb gave me the sense that lunch was being prepared when – FOOF – nothingness arrived.

Chickenhead skirted ahead of me, darting back and forth, his feline nostrils zeroing in something to eat. He leapt onto the counter top and my first instinct was to tell him to get down. Old habits.

I let him be. He dared to push his nose close to a green mound, which might have been egg salad, and his small head sharply snapped back and he let out an indignant meow.

“If you can eat that shit, you must be one starved little kitty,” I said, grimacing at the mixture of hideous odors that assaulted my senses. Chickenhead jumped from the counter.

My hand grabbed a steel lever/ door handle to a walk-in fridge and I hesitated before I yanked. I pondered what may lie beyond the door.

An extremely overactive imagination, the by-product of a childhood spent in the country without nearby playmates, cast a mental picture of a stack of corpses, blue and frozen in rigid slow death postures. With a symphony of airspace ick continuing to pound my nostrils, I then wondered if I opened this door, what greater gust of putridity would I release?

Screw it, was my final decision, formed by several internal smacks upside my head by a growing hunger for real food, and I tugged the door open.

It was a cold walk-in fridge. Nothing offensive rushed out and I flicked a light switch. A feast-in-waiting greeted my eyes. Chickenhead meowed behind me and squeezed between my legs.

The walls of the walk-in were lined with racks filled with potentially delectable treats. Sandwich meats, vegetables, steaks, breakfast meats, eggs, breads, dairy, fruits and deserts. I grabbed an apple, rubbed it against my shirt, and took a bite. I could feel my body grow in size as strength churned through my veins from one sweet bite. It had been several days since Carrie and I had enjoyed a proper meal. We’d been surviving on scrounged snacks and whatever food was left that we had brought with us from home.

I grabbed a package of ham and tore it open. A small sniff assured me it should be okay and I tossed a chunk out of the fridge. Chickenhead tore after it like it was an escaping mouse.

Because the kitchen was so rank, I decided not to cook anything, though I gathered together a veritable cornucopia of tasty treats into a box and beat a retreat back upstairs to the lounge.

Chickenhead wasn’t so eager to follow me now that his jaws did some work that benefited his guts, but his instincts urged him to stick with me. I waited for him to finish his snack, holding the door open with a foot and stuffing a rolled slice of ham into my mouth. It’s cool, wet, salty essence was a rarely appreciated treat. Ham had never tasted so good to me.

Chickenhead darted out the crack in the door and we meandered back to the hotel lobby. I popped my head into a few rooms and noticed a few more piles of clothes and shoes.

Once back in the lounge, I snapped open another Guinness and rooted through the box for a slab of cheese.

Chickenhead meowed and circled my legs, before leaping to the chair next to me and meowing again.

I handed him a hunk of chedder cheese and he pounced from the chair and began to gnarl on it on the floor, just far enough away from me that I could not pinch his munch.

“Don’t worry piggy boy, I have beer. And a box full of chow. Eat your cheese in peace.”

The second Guinness turned into a third, then a fourth and finally a giggle-procuring fifth before my mind returned to Carrie.

At that very same time, she opened her eyes in the dark suite and she blinked as she saw the time — 4:44 a.m. Her hand felt for me and she sat up when she didn’t find me next to her in the bed.

“Rob? Are you in the bathroom?” Silence.

Carrie swung her feet from the bed and as she stood, a translucent hand reached for her face. She fell back swiping at air and saw a faint, pale visage of a woman, serene and welcoming, reaching out to her.

“Jesus Christ,” she screamed and bolted for the hotel room door. “Rob,” she screamed, yanking the door open and looking back to see… nothing. No matter, she ran down the hallway to the elevator calling out my name.

I was half pissed and having a grand old chat about the NHL season, which had apparently come to a premature end, with Chickenhead, who licked at his paws and rubbed his face in blissful digestion.

The Winnipeg Jets were embarking on their second incarnation as the transformed Atlanta Thrashers and young Evander Kane was starting to light it up. Highly touted defender Zach Bogosian had also picked up his game was starting to show the promise that made him a third overall draft pick.

It had been a weird start to the season, as I still cheered for the old Jets, which became the Phoenix Coyotes in 1996. Mired in a laissez faire market, the Coyotes seemed to be the team that would be returned to Winnipeg but a stay of execution, courtesy the taxpayers of Glendale, Arizona, meant the flaming out Thrashers became hockey-mad Winnipeg’s ticket back to the big leagues.

The Coyotes, picked by the booze-addled tall foreheads called ‘experts’ on the game to be one of the worst teams in the league once again, despite being one of the top teams in the league the past two seasons, were playing their usual defence-first, pack mentality game and were battling for first place in their division.

Finally, after years of cheering for a dead dog, my team was starting to blossom, with some younger players starting to show promise. And to make it all the better and a tad more complicated the Jets are resurrected.

Then ‘whoomp’ — God comes along and eradicates life on Earth, leaving Carrie and I behind, apparently, to clean up the fucking mess. “Goddamned it,” I grunted, lurching forward in the comfy lounge chair as Carrie burst out of the elevator across the lobby, screaming my name.

My arse slipped from the chair and I did a Gumby lunge to get upright.

“Whaaa!” I shouted from the depths of the lounge.

She turned her head frantically toward the sound of my voice. “Rob? Where are you?”

“Over here,” I shouted, stumbling out of the lounge. “What is wrong?”

Carrie ran into me as if she was trying to force a fumble. “Why did you leave me?” She demanded furiously, pushing me backward.

I had a dash of mustard on my cheek, red from the Guinness and explosive excitement and beer number five was clenched in my hand. I shrugged, “couldn’t sleep. What is the matter?”

Carrie, who doesn’t drink beer — ever — snatched the can of Guinness from me and took a large swig. She looked back at the elevators, as if expecting to see someone.

“I don’t know,” she said after a few massively pregnant seconds. She handed the beer back to me and pushed past me toward the bar. After she had rooted out a bottle of Pinot Grigot, opened it and filled a beer glass with it, she said, “I saw a… a… ghost. Or… maybe I was just dreaming but… no… it was a ghost. A dark haired woman. I’m sure she was a dark haired woman. We’re the only people left alive… or on Earth, so… how strange is it to see a ghost in that context?”

I agreed, considering that context. Then sheepishly admitted to myself that I couldn’t remember what context to use the word context and then also thought ‘Context’ would be a good name for a band.

“Want some cheese?” I asked drunkenly.

Chickenhead meowed.

“We have to get out of here,” Carrie said, looking at the cat.

“What, now?” I asked, looking outside at the cold November morning. I actually thought, briefly, ‘not much traffic for this time of morning.’

“Why did you leave me? Don’t ever do that again!”

I nodded and apologized.

Chickenhead meowed.

“What are you doing with that cat?” asked she who hates cats. “It would eat you if it could, you know? Creepy things.”

“Aw, we’re buds,” I said, “right Chickenhead?” The cat meowed.

“Figures,” Carrie grumped, taking a swig of wine, “all life on Earth disappears but cats.”

“And crows,” I added.

“And crows,” she said.

“So you saw a ghost?” I asked, dropping down in a plush lounge chair.

“Yeah. Or something. Dark haired woman. Scared the piss out of me,” she replied.

“Sure you weren’t dreaming?”

She shook her head and described the dream she was having before she awoke, something about a bunch of Chinese babies on the roof of her father’s shop, a corrugated steel structure. She tore the side from the building in order to cover the babies from the elements.

“Fairly gargantuan of you,” I said. “No ghosts, though?”

“No, none. Just the damned ghost that reached out to me in our fucking room,” she said harshly, “Which you weren’t in at the time because you abandoned me to this fucked up, weird world.”

“More wine?” I asked.

“Sure, why not?” She said. “I don’t have any pressing appointments today, other than fleeing from ghosts.”

So we sat in the Palliser Hotel lounge as the sun rose, casting brilliant reflections off the steel and glass of downtown Calgary. Wind howled past the window and down the streets, cluttered with vehicles, left to run out of gas or crash when their drivers did the big departure.

Chickenhead napped on a windowsill and Carrie and I carried on like it was a Saturday evening in Cranbrook.

In our drunken gabbing we retraced the past nine days, revisited some grief, tamped it down with more booze and started to contemplate our next moves. However, lacking urgency of schedule, we simply lingered into the day, snacking, drinking and dreaming.

Later that day, we moved our stuff from the ‘haunted room’ and after a brief search, found a fourth floor suite with a kitchenette. I filled a large bowl with milk and left it down the hall for Chickenhead, so as not to endanger him from Carrie, who held onto the shotgun like a two-year-old clutching a soother.

Our new digs secured, we then wandered through a lifeless downtown Calgary, in and out of stores and bars, aimlessly searching… searching… searching.

The sidewalks were coated with snow, trampled lightly here and there by cats and marked where crows had landed. We saw no other footprints.

And we got dementedly pissed. We were already half snapped before we thumped down the stairs to The Unicorn Pub in the Stephen Avenue Mall. A few more Guinness, a couple of shots of tequila and a big sipping bottle of Talisker scotch-in-hand later, we were staggering back to the Palliser to fix some dinner. I was drunk enough to believe I could power into the rancid kitchen, clean it, fire the mother up and make a gourmet meal. Frank Zappa’s ‘Dangerous Kitchen’ began playing in my fragmented mind.

“In the dangerous kitchen, if it ain’t one thing it’s another…” I gargled, my voice bounced spastic and ugly off the buildings.

That was when Carrie noticed we were being followed.

“Did you see that?” She slurred.

“The meat things where the cats ate through the paper, the can things with the sharp little edges that can cut your fingers when you’re not looking, the soft little things on the floor that you step on – they can all be da-aynger-ussss!” I farted from my face and took another swig of the scotch.

“Listen! Did you hear that? Stop babbling!”

“Wha?” I huffed, taking a slurp of scotch and spitting it onto the snowy ground.

“Bag there. Something,” Carrie said unsteadily. “Something’s there.”

“Lyg wha?”

Then we both heard the meows… the many, many meows.

“Fuggin’ cats,” Carrie said, comically frightened. “Thod it wuz… I dunno… footsteps.”

“Juz cats,” I said, spitting more expensive scotch into the snow with an impish titter.

“Cats that haven’t eaten in a while,” she continued.

“Caz tha havenent ittinawile,” I blubbered, lurching and reeling. The booze was really starting to hammer me down. “Lezz go – s’cold.”

As we lurched and staggered back to the hotel, a number of cats followed us — so many we couldn’t count (and the plethora of boozy concoctions that we’d swallowed may have played a role). They meowed and yowled, seemingly harmless enough.

But when we got to the front doors of the Palliser, we leaped up the steps to the front door and slammed the door behind us. I locked the doors, in case cats had grown opposable thumbs since humans disappeared. Carrie made a slow kicking motion, as if to indicate to the dozen or so felines that followed us up the marble steps that she meant slow motion business.

“Go away! Shoo!” She hissed. A number of muffled meows were her reply.

Right then Carrie realized she’d forgotten the shotgun at The Unicorn.

“Aw fug! Thaz shiddy,” I said. “Now whatta we gonna do?”

I stopped and visualized an Army/Navy Store and nearly drooled at the prospect of loading up with a wide variety of guns — just because.

“Free guns,” I said enthusiastically.

Carrie, tottering toward the elevators, said, “Ray guns would take care of those piss smelly, snide animals.”

“Com-fuggin’-pletely,” I chuckled. “Free ray guns n shid is a knee of a bee for me.”

It was 5 p.m. when we passed out in our room.

I know that because, for some reason, I scratched “5 p.m.” on the wall beside the bed with my pocketknife before crumpling into oblivion.

A north wind lugged a fresh salvo of winter to Calgary, making the cats still lingering outside the front doors of the old hotel to seek shelter.

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