Grant Loewen
Hollywood North

Even on his first day in town, Enr knew he'd made the right choice. Although he had the white male face of the Occupation, Enr gained an immediate confidence that, as a businessman, he would be able to sustain a bias in favour of these people, that this could be his community, his new home.

Enr'd looked around. He felt people's desires deeply, and had a quick eye for the gaps that the Departments of Defence and Welfare were leaving in their lives. Within months nearly every opportunity he saw turned into a job-creating enterprise providing many honest days of work and regular paycheques for some of the people. His efforts helped a lot of them adjust to the rapid changes. In fact, wherever Enr went in the North, economic miracles blossomed.

This phenomenon did not go unnoticed. Shaman initiates from around the Rim were sent to Ulittaq for six-week apprenticeships with Enr in order to learn the value of money. At first the mentor job had bothered him. Carmen, for one, had asked him how he could advise other people's spirits? He'd actually decided to quit at one point, but Peter, the oldest and most northerly shaman, heard about his misgivings and made the trip to Ulittaq himself. He invited Enr to pray. Enr was nervous, but he went along. They cut the hole in the ice, built the iglu, and for the first time in his life, God appeared and spoke clearly to Enr, audibly, no mistake. And even though it wasn't his usual form of God, he felt better.

Enr's customary God, still the one and only Judeo-Christian-Islamic one but branching out, the one whom he still worshipped and studied a little each week at church, was rich and famous and allied to most of the capital in the world. He knew money flipside and down and continued to impress capitalists. They could feel in their bones His critical importance for money far better than a gold standard by itself. Enr was disappointed that fat-assed capitalists knew God as a friend of cheap labour and could reliably follow His missionaries around the world to find it.

God left capitalists and their capital pretty much alone. Enr thought Him too PR sensitive, not wishing to show Himself or speak to anyone but the poor unless it was to send an occasional fatass to Hell for complacency.

But, praying with Peter, God had surfaced as a woman. Enr felt very blessed, very hip: a touch of that Toronto club sex chill back in those heady days of monied arms-length cinema long ago. She wore metallic clothes black anodized tights and a copper-green bra stitched in gold. Her hair was a bright red floating mass of salmon roe washed by ocean currents. Enr could only think Bay Street dike stepping out, but Peter guessed retro-Berlin, and a sweet nod of recognition passed between God and him. Her cigarette breath and bad teeth put Enr at ease. She was straightforward and sympathetic, squeezing his leg and whispering in his ear. She wanted in, she said, the slavery be damned. Finance my people, she said. She took him over the ocean: I give you the whole shore. Go to all the Rim and make consumers, she demanded. She took him down to her abode: How could you hurt us more than you already have, you kind generous man? she cooed. That's true, I will, he promised. Scissor-legged and arm-locked, they floated and bumped along the ceiling above her bed.

Goodness had followed Enr all the way to Ulittaq, positioning him ideally between army and people, where by God's mercy he had prospered. Whose God's mercy? He dared not tell which. Therefore Enr dedicated his entrepreneurial talents to meeting this latest demand from this version of God, the One who had touched him and spoken directly to him, and with whom he'd experienced his first underwater orgasm, at the bottom of the sea, something he'd dreamed of. Even Peter was impressed.

The shaman recruits were quick to tap Enr's power to generate accounts receivable, some making horrible mistakes with the money hard-won from the ministries, others finding brilliant ways to get the money into people's hands, to bring them joy while disguising it as the ruinous frivolity that southern taxpayers wished to believe it was.

One of Enr's students, Donnie's brother Ray, commanded a small band of saboteurs bent on humiliating the Occupation. His training and deployment of bomb technicians and sharp shooters had raised his status with Commander Blakkap. By now they were each others best enemies, a co-dependency sparking deadly cat and mouse strategies between them. Enr could only nod his head when Donnie brought news of Ray's movements. He was jealous.

But Enr knew that he himself was too wired for kindness to be a terrorist. His own gift was actually larger and meaner, his abilities more like those of a director of monetary policy at a governing bank who can spend the imagined money. When he dug deeper into his dreams all he wanted was to turn this skill into cinema. Cinema for high culture, TV for low, these were the weapons he longed to wield against the enemies of earth and God. But the studio he needed was, practically speaking, still a few years off, barring some magic stroke. So Enr settled for the warmer cruelties allowed a middle-class businessman and supplemented his desire for more grandiose wickedness with the prestigious position of world-liaison officer at his church.

Hollywood North. Where you can see someone else as yourself in a movie:

the shoot: Say you're out on the land looking for wolf. Qamutiik's balanced and tracking well. The 2-cycle buzz of the machine feels good on the ass because the pressure's high and you're clamped to the wind cruising at forty kliks average all night on less fuel than you thought possible at minus fifty. You decide to go for that patch of sticks Mike said was there three days west and that means thirty-six hours of steady cruising. Count on it, because Mike never shit his worst enemy with data like that. So there'd be foxes too, and this is going to be your year to snare that heap of pelts. A good blow comes along making the work easy and the carcasses start lying around the machine like scattered bodies, and say you get hit, not from a stupid accident, careless with the weapon, or the pack catches you and tears you up or something like that, but say it's two F-18s, they know you're out there. One cruising high picks up you or your machine's heat and the other one, cruising low, spots you, rolls over and over in glee, and before you can load your weapon for him or her, makes the turn and the hit, and adds your body to the others.

shoot. Hunter-mom and maybe-hunter-to-be-kids watch TV snug in the plywood drift-manacled heat-heated dwelling in town just watching TV together waiting for hunter-man to come home with the dancing wolves and they all blow up because the oldest brought home a mine. It's early in the occupation and the school has not yet received the pamphlet, "Mines and Your Health," from the Ministry of Mines and Health, and snow collapses onto the fire.

shoot. The hacking and scratching at the ice to get 'em out.

a short take. The funerals, with a time shift to when ground and bodies can reasonably be expected to thaw for burials. A few holes, maybe May....