Readopolis

by Bertrand Laverdure

  The survival of a specific community’s culture, the harmony of a particular group, the wellbeing of the inhabitants of a pre-established territory, and the preservation of the principles of general knowledge of a given minority depend on extremely low levels of contempt circulating through its networks.

  Teaching the principles of the struggle against contempt will begin in grade school. Ignorance, arrogance, resentment, weakness, and unmotivated anger will be examined, analyzed, compiled.

  Yet given that human beings are perfectible, passionate about contradiction, and generally, are prone to rebel against their own happiness, at times we will need to resort to artificial solutions and extreme measures. For this reason, we have determined different classes of citizens capable of handling anti-contempt devices.

  Everyone has a right to a Type 1 permit. This means that any contemptuous attempt, manifestation of contempt, or contemptuous action could be noted in the file of the citizen in question if an aggrieved citizen deems it necessary. In short, everyone possesses a pocket-size Extractor 144 that catalogues all forms of contempt. At the end of the day, the extractor determines which ones need to be added to a citizen’s file.

  Permit 2 represents a transitional phase, through which one can eventually acquire Permit 3. A Permit 1 holder with an excellent anti-contempt file will be given the opportunity, after a few years, to apply for Permit 2. This permit grants one thing and one thing only: the right to non-ignorance. As knowledge can be a potential source of conflict, it is preferable that this permit be distributed to the least contemptuous people. This has led to the creation of an Institute for the Struggle Against Contempt.

  The completion of a training program at the Institute for the Struggle Against Contempt eventually grants one the right to a Permit 3. Somewhat dangerous, but having almost no bearing on the mortality rate, this permit grants the right to instantaneously reprogram the occasional contemptuous character, using various extractors available (i.e., Models 500 to 967). For example, Model 834 allows users to vary the reprogramming pressure, while Extractor 967 allows them to search through barely formulated thoughts within a fifteen-kilometre radius. Partial brain death followed by an immediate rebirth are the typical phases experienced when one of these devices is used on others.

  A minority of people are walking around with a Permit 3. Usually, it is the final permit granted by the Institute and constitutes a favour or privilege offered to those with exemplary files of non-ignorance.

  But then what is a Permit 4? Who can obtain it and why?

  The history of Permit 4 is somewhat nebulous. We know that it was approved by the members of the Institute only a short time ago, at most a few centuries. Permit 4 is the ultimate community resource. Each beneficiary may only use it about five times per year. It constitutes the last regulatory step of the ambient contempt level—the pure and simple extinction of the contemptuous unit. For use against this stage of hate, contempt, and repeat offence, a Permit 4 will be granted upon request to an exemplary Permit 3 holder (following a thorough, rigorous, long, and exhaustive examination of the user’s accumulated contempt file and their non-ignorance points earned).”

  The notebook never ends. Neither, it would seem, does Monsieur Dragonfly of Chicoutimi.

  With his zebra parchment, he sermonizes. The entire Jolicoeur block listens—even the sentinels—to the book-free rhetoric emerging from his eradicated mouth. Old tongue with all and with too much.

  One day, I will have blood on my hands after having to watch his charmante hairdo. Come to think of it, I’m starting to wander off topic like Dragonfly.

  He declares on his zebra parchment: “I say unto you: the poet, seated for centuries, fought against the world’s filth accumulated in her. The poet’s sharp-edged thought cut absolute evil at the root. In the blood. In the eye. In the embryo. The poet ate herself from the inside. Devoured completely. Chewed and swallowed the bones and organs. With all the encrusted shit. The warrior poet cleared the air. And when she stands up from her chair, many centuries later, as I do now, do you think the Court will recognize her action?”

  There are tears and there is spite. We hesitate. We think good is possible, then we branch off.

  If I walk around the Jolicoeur block in the morning and I don’t meet up with any contemptuous characters, the day feels long. No one stops doing contemptuous things just because they know that, even if they get caught, they will be resurrected for the better. It’s the law of best action in a short period of time. It’s the game of the chicken and the cleaver. But if I cut today, the body won’t be the only one continuing to hop and run around out of instinct, but the head as well.

  The immediacy of the rebirth sends shivers down the spine, but many like this feeling. Mothers compel their unruly children to be violently contemptuous against certain books written by Type 3 scribwrits. Everyone knows the Type 3s. They jeer at us all the time, it’s practically a sport.

  The sentinels are usually worn-out. Not more than the zebra parchments displayed here and there, but sometimes not less, either.

  Their bodies regenerate often. They are habitually contemptuous. A tough, persistent contemptuous character, ready to give his time in the pursuit of others, will get his chance one day. He will be recruited.

  My books don’t look like anything in particular. Sometimes they have straight lines that invite danger. I don’t pay any attention to the writing next door. Because there is always a scribwrit next door who scorns you a bit, makes you feel less certain of your talent. Then you wish you had a Permit 4. But you’re happy enough with a 3. Most of the time, we kill each other by piecemeal contempt interspersed with rebirth. We become more precise, we stammer less, and our contempt loses its vehemence.

  Only we try not to think too much about Makakrista. You shouldn’t think too much about the Permit 4s. I don’t dare write about them, in fact.

  But I say things, I get carried away. The 4s don’t really kill. They await the bearers of diatribes more resilient than weeds.

  The hands that soar while others withdraw, the swimmer’s movements.

  Scribwrits transform the raw energy of contempt, the harsh net of social orders and carriage returns, even in the glacial time of night, even though the sentinels have become an army of puppets harming all that moves in Jolicoeur, between the great streams of La Chine and the remnants of the Saint River. What happens there, despite death and contempt, the ruined books and the books that get read; what happens there, despite our Eng-Fren battles, despite my not understanding Chineaise and my desire for the Spanishola of the great showcases; what happens there moves all of life’s turbines, all of Quebec Isle.

  Chapter III

  —

  The Organic Library of the Isle

  I, Ezekiel Bradeau, a little older, a lot more burdened, and dressed in a cacophony of abuse (the sound of my voice is conserved in a box, better this way, otherwise subject to exceedingly blatant contempt), I am a scribwrit. To begin with, I reap; it’s like fishing, but the fish fly around me. As soon as the noises leap, I hurry and type as quickly as possible to catch the flying phrases.

  If I repeat myself too much, I’ll have to curse Makakrista. It’s simple when you understand life. So understand it.

  All the land from La Chine Canal to Saint River is strewn with libraries.

  Organic cement is more malleable than wood and slower to deteriorate.

  The sentinels confront us, die in batches, and are reborn without too much trouble. The day after they’re concocted, all the books written by Permit 3 scribwrits shoot off through the pneumatic tubes. A system that ends at the habitat doors.

  The beauty of the thing is that every scribwrit has their preferred neighbourhood block. I never launch my catalogues of torture at random.

  The map of contempt indicates areas of suffering and areas of indifference. Indifference is preferable. Everything we inject, the phrasa
l liquid, comes back to us through better veins.

  Contempt obstructs; it doesn’t want to let anything pass by.

  Sometimes, the indifferent blocks begin to act contemptuously if a wave of contempt touches a habitat’s corner.

  The paradox is that contempt is adequately transmitted, even when indifference does not encourage the transmission.

  In the scheme of things, 10% of one day’s novelistic output returns to the organic libraries. No one consults these books anymore. Street vendors, prospectors, and peddlers deal with them. There are book stalls and book fairs. Prices fluctuate depending on the library fires. It’s difficult to stop them. There are cycles and lulls, fire recessions and peak periods.

  The remaining 90% returns to the pneumatic tubes the next day. People read, discard, buy, recycle, burn, raise prices, keep, burn again, make laws; there are always more scribwrits, then gradually the Permit 4s nab their Sunday trophies.

  Every eliminated scribwrit has a right to a clay statue.

  Every neighbourhood block has its patron saint.

  On the roof of my habitat, I stowed away the statue of André Moreau. He is the patron of the sublime joy of being, as explained to scribwrits. A master thinker devotedly revered during our studies at the Institute, he had been one of us before we were what we became. His work is not as important as that of half the scribwrits today, but it was a precursor of the textual tone prescribed by the Institute. He drove away the Chineaise and the Spanishols. He survived underground in the year 1000.

  All of Quebec Isle is at his feet. We call him Sonny Berkeley or Smiling Faust.

  He wrote: “I am so naive others think that my naïveté conceals something suspect, even dangerous. This is why they come from all over hoping to discover what new towering trick I am hiding in my bag, contrary to Marguerite de Navarre, who hid bags in her tricked-out tower.”

  I never fail to quote this exceptional being. At the Institute, we studied him as an expert weapon against contempt.

  Contempt is a curious beast that dominates and crushes everything.

  Acting contemptuously makes the contemptuous bigger. It is not a matter of staying small but of knowing one’s size. Of frequently adjusting the rate of philosophie in the internal organs.

  I’ve been shot by arrows. Sometimes the sentinels know how to aim, but this doesn’t happen often; their devices are cumbersome and heavy.

  The poor sentinel who hadn’t yet spotted my Extractor 568 (sometimes, I admit, this device has its failings) launched an arrow in my direction. Stupid bastard. I tuned my extractor, and brrrppp! Down in the poppies! Resuscitated, and therefore returned to more positive sentiments, he offered me a fried rat biscuit. He had too many in his Chineaise lunchbox.

  It was good to break bread with sentinels once in a while. I could dream, I had a right, I was a famous scribwrit. I had written three or four novels on controversial subjects—great sagas involving multiple rebuffed ties of affection between sentinels and scribwrits, between Permit 1s and Permit 4s. In my view, excellent anti-contempt work.

  After the publication of these tomes, they called me a sensationalist, even a traitor. I had to empty the batteries of two Extractor 456s before managing to finish off all the contemptuous characters that spread the word! In return, I was reprogrammed so many times over this turbulent period that I lost the gift to hate. Now, I’m only parsimoniously contemptuous, showing a calculated refinement. At the source of all these battles, poor binary logic:

  Contempt = obstacle; obstacle = destruction

  Contempt hit home faster than a look, incited by controversy.

  Of the actual output, as I have already explained, 10% end up in organic libraries. Yet a vast majority of books launched in the morning end up in different receptacles, scattered here and there at everyone’s discretion, by evening.

  Bottomless pits in which the book pulp coagulates—fading the ink, devouring the paper, digesting the fibres. At the end of the tubes, concealed beneath neon, cast iron covers, the abyss glows, the notorious bottom, the great lake of insignificance.

  Reading Saint Louis-René des Forêts at the Institute in a course on death and the book, we learned this great truth: “In the final analysis, doesn’t the omnitelling voice only reveal the vacuity of its inexhaustible flow? Perhaps its sole aim is to get lost in insignificance, the defeat duly recognized so as to stop receiving the validation of success, even if the same notion could designate that which, denied if not rejected for lacking consistency, should proscribe the usage.”

  “The vacuity of its inexhaustible flow,” it was all there. The amazing prose of Saint LRdF in his Pas à pas jusqu’au dernier.*

  The sentinel is harassing me again, so I leave, taking my last seventy words with me.

  Neon-lit Spanishol storefronts everywhere. Glass the colour of faded old gouache.

  I walk around the vast Angrignon Park, home to the city’s largest rat-breeding farm. Tons of these feisty and tasty vermin. Happy meat at the centre of life. Quick feet in the drums of their cages.

  The meat paradox is the most curious one of all. To become meat, one has to be born, but to bear the name, one has to die.

  As for me, I am tired of running. I arm my extractor, and the sentinel collapses.

  * * *

  * Step by Step Until the Last. (Trans.)

  * * *

  Night, night, still night, still the sublime moment, still the face of Mary Magdalene superimposed on the dark TV screen. Love of literature, love of reading, I see it through a mystical face, a lost and found face, a Mary Magdalene, the age-old symbol of the repentant prostitute. The one who offers happiness indiscriminately, disregards ugliness, welcomes bodies between her expert hands the way souls were once received by the breath of the Holy Spirit.

  Okay, I’m becoming a doddering old fool. I don’t feel well. Or rather, I’m dissolving and reality is slipping way. At times, I’m overcome with disgust when I read. Saturated.

  So I had a plan, yes, a plan. I was going to take care of Laverdure the parrot, re-educate it, bring it in line, transform it into an apostle of Quebec letters by training it.

  Propelled by a sudden determination, I jump out of bed.

  First, my face in the mirror. A splash of cold water, the towel, a swipe with the electric razor. Another splash of cold water. My life is restored. Eyes still slightly puffy, I examine myself. A free film, a film of immediate crystallization: the mirror is an astonishing ordeal. I stand there before it, letting my drowsiness go, rudely greeted by reality, already absorbed by others, by their view of my body, their interpretation of my condition, their opinion of my person. I stand there, Ghislain the reader, employed at the Couche-Tard dep at the Joliette subway stop, unknown to Antoine Doinel and Alice Pleasance Liddell.

  No passing through the mirror before being completely awake.

  I am Ghislain the reader, tired of rejecting manuscripts, newly convinced that Quebecois literature needs to be promoted by means other than the usual channels, an employee of the Couche-Tard dep at the Joliette subway stop and an unrepentant consumer of Yum Yum cheese sticks, preferably the 270 g bag. I avoid dietary recommendations and savour this discrepancy.

  I refuse to read the ingredients of these famous cheese sticks. But then I read them anyway and here they are: these snack bites resemble strange bacteriological concretions with a somewhat fecal shape, simultaneously spongy, sticky, and solid, made from corn meal dipped in boiling canola oil, then seasoned with modified milk ingredients, maltodextrin, salt, and cheddar cheese powder (milk, bacterial culture, microbial enzymes, whey, maltodextrin, salt, buttermilk, citric acid, natural flavour, disodium phosphate, lactic acid), colour, monosodium glutamate, flavour (yeast extract), citric acid, lactic acid, disodium phosphate, disodium inosinate and guanylate, beta carotene, silicon dioxide.

  Before taking off to steal Laverdure the
parrot from Pascal, before turning myself into the protagonist of a burlesque sitcom written by a team of hip, young wolves from the CBC, I binge on cheese sticks. I thrust my sticky and already slightly orange hand into the greasy, open bag, driven by a nervous, mechanical, insatiable hunger. My fingers are smeared, damp with the unpleasant oil and cheese-flavoured powder. Once I eat the whole bag, my hand is breaded, covered with a lumpy, phosphorescent, cheese-flavoured crust.

  I need a Coke.

  I open the fridge, open a can. Ah! We breathe better when we give in to dietary fury. According to the nutrition facts table on the bag, I have just ingested 300% of my daily serving of salt. I am slowly turning into the Dead Sea.

  * * *

  I would retrieve Laverdure the parrot. It would be done quickly and well. I had my plan. An old bird cage from the garage, a ragged black sheet from the back of the grey-painted shed. That was all I would need.

  I took off. Unmasked. An overly small cage under my arm, a black sheet in a huge backpack.

  I took action.

  As discrete as a whale on a beach in Normandy.

  Slipping into the night, I sank into a delinquency that helped my digestion, clogged up with cheese-flavoured powder.

  Arrived at Pascal’s apartment. Legs firmly planted on the ground. Cage deposited on the sidewalk. Back still damp from bearing the heat of the black sheet in my 80 L backpack. Silent, itching to start, like any criminal before committing a crime. But I was no criminal. I was an agent of cultural transmission, working to promote local literature. I repeated this stupid mantra, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t stupid. Ever so carefully, I sneaked onto my friend’s balcony.

  I call Pascal my friend, but he is my rival, in a way. Our interactions follow this relational model: disparaging judgment followed by neglect and vaguely contemptuous scepticism followed by unflattering comments. Be that as it may, Laverdure the parrot was rightfully mine. In the dubious balance of our friendship, it fell to Pascal to be betrayed at least once. I’m not stupid so much as I am puerile.