Readopolis

by Bertrand Laverdure

  A house for an eccentric client that will cost over four million dollars. He finally has his hands on an inspiring contract.

  So he is designing the fantasy house of an upstart. A businessman who made it big, who amassed a fortune by betting on the sales of granola bars. The Klondike and the granola bar.

  Ball and bounce. Wall, wall and popliteal fossa, knee, arm, head.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  The description matches. He puts away his ball.

  * * *

  Lucrecios is still asleep. He has trouble dealing with the remarks of the masses, the menus written in chalk in Chicago’s pubs. He sleeps some more. Turns on his back. Sleeps some more. Takes his time yawning, rolling his body like a happy seal. Time soothes him. As though the captains of ghostly ships have decided not to bother him, not to wake him anymore.

  Lucrecios has no reason to dream. But he dreams. He imagines himself in the body of an imposing parrot, a parrot fit for a parade, insistent in gait, puerile in form.

  Lucrecios flutters above Lake Michigan, soars over the old Polish neighbourhood, Washington Park, the skyscrapers of the Loop, and the beaches flanking the city.

  He thinks he is Flaubert’s parrot, the parrot of Félicité, a dedicated servant doomed to survive the cruelty of the world. Loulou is amusing, sneaks into people’s houses, pokes them with his beak, catches them with their notorious gullibility and unenlightened faces.

  Loulou doesn’t condemn relevance, he gives it an enema.

  Loulou doesn’t tell a story, he collects touch phrases.

  Loulou lives at the mayor’s house, good old Harold Washington. The only biped in the area to gather good stories. A fragile hologram of a history of talent and birds.

  Loulou and Lucrecios occupy the same body, work the same flying muscles, activate the same frontal lobe regions. Loulou-Lucrecios gorges on seeds offered by passersby. Nothing moves at the same speed as the day anymore. Everything slows down and accelerates according to unknown laws. A fictive pain and a fictive pleasure dwell in this zone.

  Everything ends, of course, at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap (on 55th Street). With a young Saul Bellow. Watching everyone like a hawk, while scribbling the phrases of a hypochondriac in a notebook.

  * * *

  I am not Herzog, I am a non walking sentimental philosopher who happens to dream about a millionaire…

  * * *

  No one today really remembers Christina Baldacci.

  They remember a look, a turn of phrase, her large breasts, her masculine jaw, but then what else? Not her name. Why? Because she never gives her real name. Besides, why should she give her real name?

  When she sucks off a client; when she grips his balls in her mouth; when she reminds him that sex is only one drug among many; when she offers the flower of her asshole with unrivalled generosity (sometimes without a condom if they pay extra); when she decides to kiss an embarrassed client, a “baby” (she calls them “babies”), on the mouth, and he immediately falls in love; when she maternally hesitates before offering her ass to men electrified by embarrassment or excitement, she never gives her real name. For all these wretched men, she is Serena or Venus, depending on her mood.

  * * *

  Chicago burned to the ground in 1871. But its past remains intact. The Chicago River, the railroads, the commercial hub of America, the mercantile inventiveness (the invention of the department store, the mail-order catalogue and McDonald’s), then a personality, Oprah Winfrey.

  Somebody wants to hurt you

  Somebody wants to get used by you

  Somebody wants to abuse you

  Somebody wants to be abused…

  Christina Baldacci is getting ready to leave the Green Mill. She cautiously looks for some male prey.

  Two passable guys in the middle of the room, but one has his head buried in his hands. No depressives or my-girlfriend-just-left-me tonight. Next.

  A huge strapping man, elbows on the counter, is sipping a tall, colourful drink. He seems calm, stoical. He looks good. But perhaps the drink colour conceals certain perversions, certain sophisticated requests that she doesn’t feel like satisfying. She wants a fuck with no strings, a roll in the sack with no complicated scenario.

  A guy in his late forties walks over to a corner, greets a friend. They’re not lovers. She doesn’t look at him. He wants her, but she’s looking for another “prospect.” He’s undoubtedly a bad lover, unable to arouse a minimum infatuation for the night.

  Only the sound technician, a blasé waiter, and two guys laughing loudly near the stage remain.

  The sound technician seems quiet, rolls his cables keeping his head down, walks with a nonchalant gait, lacks energy. Screwing on a special pocket spring mattress requires at least a minimum amount of energy.

  The two laughing guys are an option. But their alliance could be scary. Those who laugh together go to war together. She heard this Chinese saying in a university class. She’s not afraid of anything, except others’ laughter. Not their harmful laughter, their defensive laughter, their sadistic laughter, but their close-knit laughter, the laughter of a community defending the same prejudices. To choose, she would need to decide between them, separate them, sow seeds of discord. Too much effort.

  Only the blasé waiter remains.

  Pleasant physique. The pout of a stripper who doesn’t have the courage to take his clothes off. Proud of his body. Slaving away, carrying trays of pints of beer. Steady arms. Hasn’t spilled a drop. Unpretentious bearing. Doesn’t shuffle around, but flies between the tables. Remains polite despite the traditional sarcastic remarks and two-penny jokes of the bar crowd. Pretends to be blasé, but it’s her last card.

  * * *

  Lucrecios still can’t believe it.

  Without prior warning, the company’s henchmen turned up at the bookstore in the middle of the day to fire his colleague Mat Clearwood, his companion in provisional liberty. The two get along famously, clearly admitting that they’ll never make it out. It’s a way of seeing things and of understanding the world. In any event, a form of caustic friendship sprang up between them.

  Clearwood and Lucrecios see themselves as characters of the dusty and marginal crowd in Nelson Algren’s books.

  The truth is, Lucrecios is not at the level he would have wanted to be at. Why doesn’t he ever have the courage to show his anger? Why is he always afraid of taking up the whole room? Essentially, two things still salvage his dignity: his book-prediction website and his long solitary walks in the city.

  Gas, masks, machines, robots, miniaturization, development, braggarts, dry lives, malfunctions, longshoremen confined to silence, proud ship of Argentinean officers on which people were tortured under the cover of beauty, smart walls, smartphones, smart appliances, wireless electricity, painless illness, continuous energy, weather monitoring, Asimov with his giant’s beard laughing at having predicted everything, disposable hearts, regenerative skin, pageless books, uploaded knowledge (see Fantastic Planet, with Topor’s drawings), telepathic crime, thought police.

  And, on top of all this, now they fire his friend Clearwood?

  It’s too much. Lucrecios has had enough.

  He’s going to write a letter to the Chicago Tribune. He’s going to report this latest affront to liberty. He’s going to sympathize with his ex-colleague.

  Few people exist for the right reasons.

  Few people manage to synchronize their ideas with their reason, their expectations with their passions, their vitality with their pride.

  Few people risk some kind of sacrifice.

  Don’t say too much, don’t go on forever. It’s only a letter.

  But the seriousness of the situation must be made obvious.

  * * *

  Wrongful Dismissal

  at Barnes & Noble

  Barnes & Noble has just casually d
ismissed one of its employees, a bookseller, on October 2, because he posted some unkind comments about the store’s clientele (without naming them) on his Facebook wall.

  Is this a precedent? How should we take this affront to freedom of expression?

  It is an obvious fact that the majority of people don’t like their jobs; they feel lost, underused, badly paid or demeaned. Work is a stopgap between financial necessity and integration in society. Many people manage to make the two ends meet by keeping a cool head and finding the appropriate professional tone and polite appearance. But underneath this social veneer, repressed recriminations, ordinary frustrations, and restrained anger most often lie hidden. All those who live to work and work to live have moments of doubt and spite, moments when they verbally lose control. Of course, when it comes to criticizing or complaining about our employers or our jobs, we’re fortunate to have the safety valve of our friends and loved ones to absorb the shock. Who wouldn’t be fired at least once in their lifetime if one day we would be able to read their thoughts? […]

  And so it continues, padded with opinionated naïveté and good intentions, all the way to the signature at the bottom.

  * * *

  Greengrass sits down first. He’s made a reservation for two at La Petite Folie (on 55th Street). His treat.

  greengrass: A dismissal isn’t death, right? Your friend messed up, lost his little job. Another little job is waiting for him… So what?

  Lucrecios mumbles something to himself.

  greengrass: I have to tell you. A Cameroonian. I fucked a Cameroonian, really top-notch. I paid well, of course­—why wouldn’t I? A total babe, classy ass, shapely breasts, soft eyes. Like almond paste, all honey. Unabashed laugh, vulnerable smile. Totally right to not kiss me on the mouth at the end. Impeccable service. Pure. Know how much purity costs? Well, in Chicago, it costs about $140 an hour. Think about it.

  lucrecios: Listen… (He’s never managed to get interested in his friend’s escapades with prostitutes.)

  greengrass: You see, the effect of fucking lasts about two and a half hours. So when I leave the hotel room, it’s like I remain attached to the girl’s body for another hour and a half. It’s the law of bewilderment.

  Silence.

  greengrass: Every time we meet someone, we have a kind of time map inside us that starts to tick away seconds. Every time we meet someone, a small window pops up on our small onboard computer with a recommended time of interaction. Remember Robocop? The data that appears inside his helmet about the people he meets? We automatically assess how much time we should spend with an individual so that our bodies draw all the juice needed for intellectual and emotional metabolism. I’m sure of it. A Darwinist who gives lectures, spreading the good word of scientific atheism, talks about it, I think. What’s his name, ugh, shit… I’m drawing a blank… He’s on talk shows, gets thrown in the arena to put fear into Christian groups… You don’t remember his name… Chris… or Gerard… or Michael… Studied at Oxford, I think. I saw an interview with him on TV just last month…

  lucrecios: Richard Dawkins. He wrote The Selfish Gene.

  greengrass: That’s him!

  lucrecios: So your thing, it’s a kind of empathy calculator?

  greengrass: No, not empathy, you don’t understand what I’m trying to say. It’s much simpler than that. It’s not conscious. It’s our body’s way of marking out ports of time… Actually, we use a similar process when we learn how to read, for example, but in other parts of our brains… Now, look, about this dismissal business, Facebook is just today’s way of filling up time for narcissists without families or affection, that’s all. I don’t want to get into racial profiling, but it’s obvious, you know, they wouldn’t dare fire you for such neurotic reasons because you’re black. Imagine the scandal! A major bookstore chain, with its corporate image, culture, and books, firing a black man for stupid and superficial reasons!? Couple of calls to the media and it would all come out. We would relive the whole history of slavery, blacks, the Port of Dakar, Audubon, the Civil War, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Sidney Poitier, Miles Davis, Richard Wright, Edwidge Danticat, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Toussaint Louverture, Muhammad Ali, Will Smith, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice… You can’t deny it… I’d even take to the streets with a sign to piss off my bosses, annoy my architect colleagues who bore each other stiff when they’re not watching a Cubs or Blackhawks game or an independent film… You alone are an exclamation mark! Your friend’s suffered a modern humiliation; you’d suffer an atavistic humiliation, a collective humiliation… You know, in a way, if you had taken it on, if Oprah would’ve decided to invite you to tell your story on the air, if people had taken the time to understand the kind of problem that will occupy the better part of our ideological debates in the near future, everything involving free speech and private life, maybe then we would’ve managed to speak frankly, once we’d dealt with the pathos, archival images, and TV tremors… Maybe we would’ve managed to speak seriously about the thought police, don’t you think?

  lucrecios: Yeah, but I’m not the one they fired. As for the thought police, white people invented it. That’s a fact. And it doesn’t stop many blacks from being just as damn stupid as many whites. But it doesn’t mean that we have to march when one of our friends—Asian, Mexican, black, white, Porto Rican or Native American—gets fired for a “thought crime”…

  greengrass: You don’t understand anything about the bastards who govern us. Everything is public… We’re living in the most public era of human history. It’s obvious… And everyone likes it… Being known is no longer a privilege, it’s a prerequisite for being part of society… Whoever isn’t known around you doesn’t exist in three dimensions. The new third dimension now is the fame of at least your name. I’m getting thirsty… Should we order a bottle?

  * * *

  Hubert Lucrecios is thinking of Caravaggio’s Narcissus.

  He’s leafing though the Chicago Tribune, desperately looking for his letter, his note of indignation. For three days, he has been scanning the editorial pages, the letters to the editor, and hasn’t found anything. The absence of his letter isn’t discouraging him yet. He’s sure that it will get published soon, pop up any day now.

  So he muses about Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Not the original painting, but its new iteration. Anyway, the version done by Vik Muniz, a contemporary artist who had a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. Leafing frenetically through the thick newspaper, he notices an imposing ad, one of Caravaggio’s paintings made out of junk, old computers, nuts, bolts, bicycle parts, car doors, dirty furniture, old prints. Inside a huge hangar, Muniz patiently assembled tons of scrap metal, steel, wood, and glass, transforming this heap of obsolete things into an image that unmistakably reproduced Caravaggio’s painting.

  How can anyone remain indifferent before this virtuosic assemblage?

  How can anyone’s words compete with such an eloquent work?

  His letter will never get published, drowned in the flood of whiny letters sent to the Tribune. Does he still believe in it? Does he seriously want to get fired for making unkind comments against the company?

  These questions are still floating around in his mind when there is a violent knock on the door.

  A woman’s familiar voice, a disagreeable, nasty voice, then more irritated knocks on the door.

  What?

  He stands up suddenly.

  His first instinct is to wait. He holds up the phone, which he’s picked up a bit absurdly. His index finger shakes above the automatic dial button for 911. Yet he hesitates. The knocks increase in volume. It’s almost spooky. She’ll soon break down the door by flinging herself at it.

  Then comes an exchange of screams and abuse through the door.

  The upstairs neighbour starts to bang on the floor when Lucrecios decides to open the door, threatening his impromptu visitor with the wooden handle of a br
oom.

  As soon as Lucrecios appears in the doorframe, Christina Baldacci spits in his face.

  * * *

  Oprah arrives on the set, greeting the audience with a big hand movement. Satiara applauds without stopping, like a child intoxicated by respect.

  Today’s show is about the lives of happy, single people.

  Oprah always welcomes her television viewers with a refined, effective message that’s kind and precise. Camera two. She sits on her chic sofa. Camera three pans over the audience, Satiara appears immediately in the foreground.

  Camera two. Close-up of Oprah’s elastic face. It’s the show’s preamble, during which she reads the teleprompter and paints an honest portrait of happy, single people—a lively edit, interspersed with soft, graphic effects, busy curves, multiple fade in–fade outs—illustrating her topic, presenting happy, single people in different contexts.

  Camera three. A wide shot of the audience. Camera two. Close-up of Oprah. Suspense. Why the wide shot of the audience?

  Oprah asks the people in the audience who among them is single and happy. Impossible to know. “Happy, single people are not that different from couples. You’ll see,” she says.

  The hypothesis that the show will try to prove has been made. Happy, single people are not different from happy couples. How so? The show will tell us.

  Commercial break.

  Satiara is glowing. This is her second time as an audience member of The Oprah Winfrey Show, and her excitement remains at an ecstatic high.

  You have to reserve your ticket one month in advance. Then wait in line. Then follow the orders of the floor manager. Then not lose consciousness when the TV star comes on set.

  For this young Cameroonian prostitute, Oprah is the queen mother of a benevolent planet. She reigns over a parallel universe where humiliation does not exist, where financial problems are miraculously solved thanks to the generous donations of charitable organizations, visionary benefactors, or humane detox centres run by Dr. Phil (Harpo Productions, founded by Oprah). Life is simple because Oprah loves us. From her office at 1058 Washington Boulevard, at the corner of Morgan, she governs an empire of love in Chicago.