The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. Sean Dixon

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СКАЧАТЬ from her extremely Catholic parents. And then, for several months after I was born, she managed to hide me. You’ve heard the story of Kaspar Hauser? Living beneath the floorboards of a little house somewhere in Germany? Well, if I hadn’t been discovered, I might have been the small-town southwestern Ontario version of that poor kid. And in many respects, perhaps I was.

      What’s more, Romy felt that this was one of the two seminal stories of her childhood, the other one being a Homeric narrative on the subject of fatness and responsibility:

      People get fat through an act of will. Don’t they? It’s instead of a callus. The emotion is all nestled inside, like a pig in a blanket, and, as with calluses, the blows don’t land quite so hard. Is that why they do it? My mother was fat. She was a cement balloon sinking into the ocean, who held me by the ankles and pulled me down, like galoshes on a mobster who’d slept with the wrong moll. I was fat too, but my fat was an air pocket to try and keep me afloat, to try and stop my mother from consuming everything. When I was a kid I once purchased a mouse. A little white mouse. I bought it at a pet store downtown and took it home in a small cardboard box, with a big bagful of mouse food. It was in the middle of a particularly harsh winter. I don’t know what I was thinking. When I got home, my mother flipped out. Another mouth to feed that was not her own. But I have food for it, I said. A whole bag. I’m sure it’s not the kind of food that you would like, I said. Who’s to say? she said, and took the food. Besides, there was no place for the little mouth to live. My mother occupied everything. I found a little fishbowl that had belonged to a long-ago goldfish. And I put the little mouth in there. And then I watched in horror as he scrabbled around the small bottom and tried to jump free. He would leap into the air and catch a small paw at the lip of the bowl, spin his legs frantically and then fall to the bottom again. It was horrifying. Only a matter of time before he mastered the leap. I considered putting a pile of books there, at the top, to block the exit, but then he would have suffocated. I suppose I could have drilled some holes in the books, but I didn’t have a drill and you don’t treat books like that, do you? And besides, the goldfish bowl was way too small. It was way, way too small. There was a woodpile at the back of the yard. I gazed at the woodpile through a window, imagining that it might make a beautiful, spacious, multi-hallwayed new home for my little burden. No, said my mother, the poor thing will die out there in the cold. We have to return it to the store. But there’s a no-return policy, I yelled. It says so on a big sign right on the door! But we drove downtown with the mouse in the box. And when they refused to take the mouse back, my mother revealed her secret weapon, dragging a desperate, sobbing, sorry little me in through the jingling door. And they took back the mouse.

      Romy on how she came to leave Bingotown:

      Bingotown was not a colourful city in those days, though I haven’t been there lately. I remember reading somewhere that nineteenth-century municipal laws restricted the use of colour in the urban environment. This was true all over the world at the time, but Bingotown still had no colour over a century later. And so I left finally and came to Montreal, which, I heard, had coloured gables and coloured spiral staircases. I asked somebody, ‘What is the most colourful city in Canada?’ and they told me to go to Montreal.

      Romy was, in the days of the Lacuna Cabal, a proverbial deer in the headlights, which suggested she always had something else on her mind. Still, she had one outstanding feature that made her, in our eyes, a paragon of womanhood: the most beautiful flowing locks of auburn hair you can imagine, which did much to mitigate the effects of the earnest demeanour they framed. She towered over the rest of us, trying always (and unsuccessfully) to keep her larger-than-life feelings to herself. Let’s see, what else? Romy had a soft spot for children’s literature – due, we hypothesised, to the arrested development that may have occurred as a result of not being allowed to look after that goddamned mouse – and tried to keep up to speed on its developments. She considered Harry Potter to be inferior to some book about a girl and a bear and atheism, the title of which we can’t recall, and the first book she recommended to the group (summarily rejected) was Shardik by Richard Adams, not really children’s literature at all but also somewhat intensely about a bear (though he had written more famously about rabbits). The trajectory from mouse to bear in Romy’s imagination remains a mystery to us.

      Oh yes, and she found the building. The saddest, greyest, ugliest building in the city of Montreal. That was her single contribution to the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club at the beginning of our story, a fact that is, we suppose, nothing to sneeze at.

      Romy sat next to

      Emmy Jones,

offering her constant comfort, due to a heartbreak that had occurred in Emmy’s life at exactly the same time, almost to the day, as the death that had occurred in the Cabal the previous fall. Nobody was certain why Emmy continued to feel heartbroken six months after the fact, but the generous interpretation was that she had occasionally resumed torturous relations with the man in question. The primary casualty of this heartbreak, however, even considering her self-centredness during the season leading up to the new book, seems to have been her love of literature, which made a sudden and, it seems, permanent, exit.9

      What’s more, speaking now of the present, she resents, apparently, very deeply, being depicted in the ‘exaggerated mytho-poetic realm of this account’, and will not read it, will have nothing to do with it, will barely even acknowledge its existence. She stuck it out with the Lacuna Cabal’s final book, she reports, out of loyalty to and concern for Runner’s health and feelings, but was otherwise finished with fiction. She has, in fact, challenged us, through the intercession of a third party, to entirely remove her from this account. But after deep consideration afforded by many sleepless nights, we have determined that we cannot do that – at least not altogether. Many of the decisions Emmy made during the weeks in which this story takes place – decisions which, granted, may have arisen out of heartbroken self-destructiveness – rendered her de facto the catalyst for many other events, events that go to the very heart of our story. Emmy’s private story is intertwined with the larger story of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, which fact renders it not exclusively her own. We’re sorry. We’re very, very sorry.

      We considered changing her name, but that doesn’t seem to go far enough in the case of Emmy Jones. We feel, given her concern and our deep regard for the same, that we have to transform, somehow, her whole self. It’s a difficult dilemma because we can’t just replace her with a scarecrow with no past and no future, who merely commits the actions that are necessary for Emmy to commit in order to move ahead with our story. We also have to be careful to avoid becoming like the storied Islamic painter of the thirteenth century, who, having been told that he cannot depict Muhammad, begins to dream the Prophet in three glorious dimensions on canvas and so prefigures the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, depicting Muhammad and always Muhammad and only Muhammad. The last thing that we need to happen in this story is for us to become obsessed with depicting Emmy, holding up a mirror to reflect another mirror, casting Emmy forever and alone into infinity. We do not wish to be embraced by our repression, lest it bring forth monsters. We have therefore adopted a somewhat radical narrative strategy and decided to make Emmy a fictional character. And to make the fact of Emmy as a fictional character clear to the reader in every moment. In order to fulfil this mandate, we have determined to (ahem) make her striped. And to always comment on her actions and feelings with respect to the fact that she is striped.

9 As a playwright, her highest ambition, according to a recent interview published in the Mirror is to create a théâtre verité domestic drama in which СКАЧАТЬ