The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. Sean Dixon
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Название: The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

Автор: Sean Dixon

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Книги о войне

Серия:

isbn: 9780007283491

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ like this book itself, whose leviathan bulk is a reflection more of waste than achievement.

      When we moved into the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, it was decided by vote that we had to acquire a portable heater with a scary-looking flame and two enormous and truly frightening propane tanks, rented with the benefit of Missy’s father’s credit card. We called it ‘the blue flame thrower’. Some of us wondered how Missy’s father could have allowed such a rental to be made by his daughter. Where paternal love was concerned, we could understand the silver Sunfire with its custom pull-down top, we clocked the purchase of the flat in Outremont and we appreciated the rent paid on our waterfront meeting place. But allowing a propane heater with an eternally flaming grill, like the burning bush except indoors and blue – this took parental indulgence to a new level and led some of us to wonder whether the man was paying any attention at all. What’s more, there was a period wherein Missy erected a large tent up there – also acquired by the divine grace of her father’s card – to try and contain the heat. So the blue flame was two times indoors, a fire hazard inside a fire hazard, at least until she pulled the tent down and returned it at the beginning of March.

      We wonder, from the cool perspective of three or four years’ distance, whether we didn’t all share a funny latent death wish that one weird winter.

      So we stayed on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, 5819 St-Laurent, even though it did not provide us with the poetry of shelter from winter. Missy told us that we all had our respective homes for that. The readers of Don Quixote, she said, huddled shivering for centuries in cold places and still managed to get through the book. That book was present in point of fact, she added, all the way through the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution. You can only imagine, she said, what kind of horrors people must have endured between bouts of reading Cervantes’ book.

      That’s the thing about born leaders. They convince you that you’re capable of doing – that you want to be doing – the craziest things. When they go too far, we suppose, is when you find yourself with a cult on your hands. And when they don’t go far enough, they come across as carping, opinionated, pain-in-the-ass purveyors of sloppy thinking. Missy fluctuated between these two extremes. How could she not? She was young and only beginning to experiment with holding the reins of power. Anyway, it’s no secret that the two primary writers of this book remained loyal to her and would have followed her anywhere except that point beyond which, according to the foundation principles of the Lacuna Cabal, we were expressedly forbidden to go.

      Which brings us finally to the call of the role. The sitting members of the Lacuna Cabal as of 18 March 2003.

      House left, stage right, in a semi-circle heading towards house right, stage left, books open in our laps, it goes as follows:

      The first is one of us. One of the two of us. One of we two narrators or, if you prefer, glorified stage-direction readers. Missy liked to keep us separate so that her consolidation of power would not seem so obvious. So I, Jennifer, about whom the less said the better, sat at the farthest left, house left, all by myself, next to the newest member, whose name was (is)

      Priya Underhay,

      Priya, who carried a travel guitar with her wherever she went, missed the occasional meeting because she had the occasional commitment to play at the occasional small-time open-mike event. She called these ‘alt-country nights’, whatever that meant. Such events were never attended by the Cabal, for two, no, three reasons:

      1 They would have blown our cover.

      2 We were declaratively interested in the written word, to the exclusion of every other art form, and would pay attention to a ballad only if it were written in a book.

      3 An example of Priya’s early song lyrics:

       we are the fortunate ones, you and I,

       who travel with the pelicans and the platypi …

       ‘goodnight’, lisp the smiling, dozing sarcophagi

       as we pass them by.

       we are the delicate ones, though we do not cry

       when we wound one another with the lash of an eye …

       ‘and you think you’ll live,’ screech the dead sarcophagi

      but they are out of earshot, by and by.

      We’d like to meet some living sarcophagi.

      (Allowing a folk singer into our ranks seemed, for the longest time, a very serious mistake.)

      At the time when this story begins, Priya had written, by all accounts, upwards of thirty songs, most of them incomprehensible, and suffered from the occasional nosebleed, one can only imagine because of her nocturnal flights with fellow folksinging witches.

      Next to Priya sat

      Romy Childerhose,

      the aforementioned squirrel in her nest, who hailed from the so-named Bingotown and had felt drawn to the epic seediness of the Jacob Lighter building.

      We have no desire to present a negative portrayal of Romy in this passage, as we feel it might cause pain and would not be commensurate with the esteem in which we currently hold her. This presents a problem for us because, during the time this story takes place, we felt nothing but contempt for her, and this account would be nothing if it did not present something resembling the truth. In confessing this dilemma to the subject in question, however, a solution presented itself: apparently, not surprisingly, our contempt was nothing compared to how Romy felt about herself.

      Here, therefore, is Romy’s introduction, in her own recently commissioned words. Characteristically, she has begun far earlier in her story than expected, and has included informa tion that we were perhaps better off not knowing:

      I was born in a barn. I was. Just outside of Bingotown, Ontario, where my mother-to-be had been dropped in a field with her two older sisters, one of whom had vomited on the other two while their parents – my grandparents – were on their way to church in their Sunday best. They dropped the vomit-covered sisters in the field to wait out the hour while the clean ones – the younger boys and the parents – went off to do their churchly duty. It was just enough time to quietly induce labour, since the sisters were privy to the know ledge of my mother’s condition and the vomit had in fact been purposely induced. My mother СКАЧАТЬ