The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. Sean Dixon
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal - Sean Dixon страница 4
Название: The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal
Автор: Sean Dixon
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги о войне
isbn: 9780007283491
isbn:
Anna clapped eyes on them too. Ten of them. Looked like she would have to lift a finger after all. No idea what this crazy chick needed them for, but she didn’t feel the need to question. Anyway, they were manageable. Weird. But small. Ish. She gathered them up, and they carried on, toward the stairs, and up, and into a bygone era.
And then Neil appeared.
He’d seen Runner negotiate her way through this sort of accident before, and knew she would survive it, this time at least, even if it wasn’t clear that she wanted to. Earlier, he’d watched, on the second floor, as she gave herself freely over to the fall and disappeared into the floor with all ten tablets. It made him tired. He knew she would apologise when he saw her next, and that upset him and made him even more tired.
He’d been here on the first floor for quite some time, through the negotiations, having made his way quietly around the perimeter. When he finally appeared, though, you would not have imagined him capable of such stealth. He looked awkward in his clothes, which were old and badly fitting, and he wore a pair of large round-rimmed glasses without lenses, and his head was buried in a book even when he walked. It was a notebook, which he held open with his right hand, crooked in his elbow, while writing from time to time with his left. As he crept across the floor towards Du’s backpack, he stopped to jot something down no fewer than five times, creating the impression of a time-lapse photograph or a Noh stage show. It seemed he had a running commentary going on the passing moments of his life.
If we were to have stood over him, in this moment, and peered down into his book, we would have seen the following entry as it emerged from his pen:
Once so strong she was … now so … crazy … accident-prone, and Neil … He carried the bag.
And then Neil bent over and with some effort picked up Du’s bulky backpack, slung it over his shoulder and crept towards the stairs.
The Lacuna Cabal had not always met on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building at 5819 St-Laurent. In our efforts to keep moving, we tried cellars, garrets, walk-in closets and bell towers, with very little account given to our general welfare and comfort. Priority was given rather to the idea that the location should suit the book, the book the location. It went beyond re-enactment and into the realm of living out, as much as possible, the story of the book, in the hope that its experience would rub off on us. Thus we considered ourselves to be the premium reading club of the English-speaking world.
This method took some refinement. An early example: we once conducted a spontaneous public reading of a novel in verse called Autobiography of Red at the airport, for which we all painted ourselves top to toe for the occasion. It was later agreed, however, that we did not absorb a great deal from the presentation, beyond a bit of pigment, some skin rashes and a charge of public mischief (dismissed).
And another time, early on, we kidnapped the aging poet Irving Layton for four hours from the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Côte-Saint-Luc and took him for an excursion up the mountain – a trip from which he was reported to have reappeared sporting a diadem of autumn leaves and looking immensely satisfied. That one made the papers. And the evening news. Still, it had been dangerous and seemed like a cheat to meet the poet himself rather than the words in his book.
In our second year, when our methods had acquired some clarity, we once headed down to Place des Arts on a Sunday and tried to depict the scene of the nun swinging from the bridge-builder’s broken arm in In the Skin of a Lion.5 One of our members nearly hanged herself. Accidentally, of course. But it was memorable and satisfying and we declared that book a success.
Our third year was characterised by a more traditional approach: we began to calm down as a group and seek out a more or less permanent meeting place.
There’s an elongated little park just west of St-Denis on Laurier, north side, with a sandbox and small set of monkey bars.6 We tried to meet there for a while, since someone had noticed that there never seemed to be any children. But when we started going, so did the children. The park stayed empty throughout the week and even on weekends, as long as we weren’t there. But when we showed up, they were never far behind. And when we abandoned the place, so, again, did they.7
5 If the reader isn’t familiar with this particular novel, she might as well stop reading this book right now and go read that one. Or else dispense with the whole idea of reading altogether. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje is, officially, the Lacuna Cabal’s favourite book.
6 Later note: No there isn’t.
Eventually we found a beautiful warehouse on the waterfront, rumoured to have required rent – rent rumoured to have been paid by the wealthy father of our founder and president. There we felt safe from prying eyes and blessed with a view of the river.
But then, in the fall, someone in the Cabal died, and so we decided to move. We felt that the waterfront warehouse had lost its lustre and its luck. And when the general mood failed to brighten by November, we even decided to enlist a new member as a gesture of self-preservation – someone to push against the pall that had fallen over the group.
The Jacob Lighter Building was discovered in mid-December, during a well-needed Christmas hiatus, by Romy Childerhose, on one of her long walks. She tried the door by the loading dock for five days in a row and it was always open. She finally ventured into the building and bravely worked her way up through the darkness of the stairwell, floor by floor, finding that all evidence of squatter habitation – blankets and newspapers and washrooms that would have to be sealed off – ended on the third. Thinking it over, she felt that there must have been an instinct among squatters to be ready for a quick escape, although, if it had been her, she would have climbed as high as she could, like a squirrel with a nest, and kept her stuff near a window that could be opened so that everything might be hurled out and away, to be retrieved later. But it was clear that no one had lived here for quite some time.
7 It’s not there any more. Somebody must have dreamt it. Unless our abandonment of it, along with the children’s, caused it to fade away.
Up on the fifth floor, the flappable Romy found things to be clean, spacious and empty. Though very, very cold. There was evidence that someone had begun to renovate the building up there – presumably Anna’s rovingly entrepreneurial father – but the project had been abandoned. Drywall had all been ripped out and there was little or no insulation. We have long speculated that it might have been the general state of abandonment, by squatters on one side and developers on the other, that had so drawn Romy (who hailed from a city in Ontario which she referred to exclusively as ‘Bingotown’). The building was a book – a weighty tome no less – that nobody wanted, neither СКАЧАТЬ