Readopolis

by Bertrand Laverdure

  He had waited for others all his life.

  He had the impression that life was made up of periods of pain alternating with points of growth. Each period involved a painful experience followed by a sensible solution. Pain then sense. Pain then response. Pain then transformation. The system was as ordered as musical staff paper, but it seemed to him that it leaned more towards pain these days.

  And anyway, what is friendship if not a valve?

  With a Styrofoam cross on the back, a friend walks us to Golgotha, relives with us the pre- and post-pain moments, but only as an echo. Friends are mimes. They duplicate our difficulties and reproduce our fears. They’re a cave in which to project our inner life. Changing friends means changing what you see. Congratulations, you have new friends! Friendship can be bought; friendship can be exchanged; friendship is the material of change.

  On credit, he bought a digital camera, a tripod, Final Cut Pro, some spotlights, and transformed a corner of his bedroom into a game show set.

  This is what he deserved, new skin. He was going to invest in his community.

  Fucking stiffness of everything besides the light of translucid communication, fuck that and fuck y’all!

  He set off on a crusade. He had had enough.

  Fucking white low-lifes, fucking drug lords, fucking gansta gold maniacs, fucking NASCAR drivers, fucking Brazilian billionaire, fucking cunt, fucking midget with attitude, fucking government that chokes truth and treats us like Daffy Duck in a cheap cartoon, fucking think-tank, fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger, fucking Chicago tourists, fucking friends that say nothing else but the official line, fucking nihilists, fucking rainbow-tainted optimists, fucking people who kill themselves for nothing but to escape their cheap and painful inner souls, fucking impatient bastard, fucking pity. Fuck love that bullies everything it touches and fuck luck, good or bad, and fuck Oprah’s stupid kindness and fuck everyone who cries for you and fuck you, Christina.

  * * *

  b.a.l.d.a.c.c.i., a chic handbag brand.

  * * *

  She had decided. The plan wasn’t working anymore. The men no longer managed to secrete the silvering of the mirror. Everything showed, the wings offstage, the ugliness, the frumpy production of the matrix. Everything oozed.

  She thought of the word “shimmering,” and imagined death like a fabric on which to stretch out.

  With her whole body, she hoped. With her whole body, she was done with the dramatics of men in Mercedes (Porsches or Audis) or in Cubs (Bears or Giants) caps. She hoped for an abstract rain, for death and calm.

  She would have liked to end like Harold Washington, struck down by a heart attack on his desk. But first she needed to solve her last puzzle, to insert the remaining piece that would complete her image. You can only die once the game is finished.

  She thought of Lucrecios, of the paradoxical hate she had hoarded in order to unleash it on him one day.

  Once you exit life and the game is over, there’s no better piece to fill the void than the one bearing a failed love.

  Before succumbing to the terminal rage that would liberate her, she would empty herself, like you do when pissing, of her poison. And she would make sure to adjust the last piece of her puzzle, whatever the cost, even if she had to strike it with a hammer like a madwoman to make all the angles of her hate fit in the hole of her incomplete image, before her disappearance.

  And then?

  Nothing.

  It would be over, period.

  * * *

  Greengrass was drinking alone, poisoning his liver.

  A friend from the third zone. A so-called vague acquaintance. Had told him.

  At Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap, at noon.

  That Christina Baldacci had killed herself.

  * * *

  Her throat was pissing blood (a bleeding sow) after the cut with the X-Acto.

  Just beforehand, she had watched Oprah Winfrey’s special show at Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel, over and over. Christina became enraged and excited, but not for the right reasons. She knew that she would soon take action. But she waited in stupid infamy for the Christian flow of human tears. She cried because you had to cry, and raged because she no longer had the energy to be indignant. For her, Primo Levi was the one, not the saccharine, moralizing Wiesel. She followed Levi and cried for the periodic table.

  Playboy was founded in Chicago. Hefner was Mr. Chicago. Nelson Algren had spit in his soup after agreeing to come to one of Hefner’s parties. Playboy meant luxury, fame. Playboy resembled de Sade’s castle, but without the scandalous marquis. The hallways still held fear, but only in order to uphold a waning myth.

  Algren dreaded what he called “the third person society.” The false distance that encourages excess in all its forms, artificial values, and all the Hugh Hefners. Algren died penniless. Oprah would have invited him on her show, if he hadn’t died on May 9, 1991, before it was created. Oprah is today’s Simone de Beauvoir. Algren is the one who wrote letters that no one read to the French author that all women claim to have read. You only hear of love for Beauvoir. Baldacci didn’t write, but could imagine letters to infinite correspondents.

  During the ad for a vinaigrette low in aerosol, she would kill herself.

  Her last earthly show: a healthy woman of the Martha Stewart variety frugally spraying some vinaigrette.

  * * *

  Algren showed the concrete implications of the values Playboy propagated, by creating a character who appears, on several occasions, in the Algrenian corpus. He is called Rhino Gross in A Walk on the Wild Side and Dingdong Daddy in The Last Carousel. He reigns in the sterile and claustrophobic world of O’Daddyland, a repugnant condom factory, and appears to be a transparent incarnation of Hugh Hefner. Algren puts words in his mouth that are practically identical to those spoken by the Playboy owner, reproduced in Who Lost an American? and based on an interview in the Wall Street Journal:

  “‘I’m in the happy position,’ he announced like a man running for office, ‘of becoming a legend in my own time! I have everything I ever wanted! Success in business! Identity as an individual!’” (Dindong in The Last Carousel 51)

  “‘I’m in the happy position of becoming a living legend in my own time,’ Hefner said, ‘I have everything I ever wanted—success in business and identity as an individual!’” (Who Lost an American? 300)

  Rhino Gross tirelessly spews out the same philosophy as Tom O’Connor:

  “Look out for love, look out for trust, look out for giving. Look out for wine, look out for daisies and people who laugh readily. Be especially wary of friendship, Son, it can lead only to trouble.” (A Walk on the Wild Side 181)

  The entire credo of the third person society is exposed here; abstaining from all relationships with others is the only way to guarantee happiness. Gross lives in a schizophrenic world, cut off from the city and nature, immersed in a reddish-brown fog because of the rubber, the quintessential industrial material and a symbol of the particularly profitable creations of “business.” The condom rubber contaminates everything, even the taste of food, and transforms the employees-prisoners into mutants, such as Velma, turned “the Vulcanized Woman” (177). While the overlord may well be a repellent individual, on the margins of respectable society, he is nonetheless representative of the middle class due to his professional success.

  Rhino Gross is the creator of O’Daddy condoms; like Hefner, he owes his professional success to the industrial exploitation of his clients’ erotic urges. In contrast to the Playboy owner, however, his fortune doesn’t alleviate the spite he harbours against the human species, whose reproduction he successfully labours to curb. He believes that the origin of his problems coincides with the origin of life itself, and logically finds in his misogyny an outlet for his discontent.

  Frédéric Dumas, “Éros est mort à Chicago: Nelson Algren accuse Playboy,”* https://erea.revues.
org/92?lang=en.

  * * *

  To: readmeagain@sympatico.ca

  From: earnestoearnesto@gmail.com

  Hey Ghis!

  Have you seen the new game!?

  Gone on Book Wizard lately?

  Lucrecios is black, did you know? We see him in the preamble. He explains how the game works. It’s a game of predictions, an update of his initial idea, ultimately.

  Do you have Dungeons & Dragons? We can use that to play his new game.

  He wants us to use eight-sided dice, octahedrons. He explains that they’re among Plato’s perfect polyhedrons, perfect shapes that described the world, according to the philosopher. I didn’t fully understand his English allusions to the migration of isosceles and scalene triangles. In any case, he claims that he didn’t invent any of it, he stole it all from Timaeus, a dialogue I don’t know… He also said—this I understood and found the metaphor amusing—that each of these perfect polyhedrons is associated with an original earthly element. The octahedron is the wind. The cube is the earth. Fire is the dodecahedron.

  A die of wind is sweet, I think.

  If you don’t have octahedron dice, you can use paper, eight scraps of paper that you pick out of a hat or cone.

  The game is simple. You just need to pick three times or roll the die three times. Each time, we’re looking for one thing, one item of information. Once we randomly combine the three items of information needed, we can then predict the title of a future book and add this prediction to the list on his site.

  I’ll explain. We first roll the die to determine what type of writer will write our book. Secondly, to find which literary genre interests the writer; and thirdly, to discover the tenor of the book to be published, and the quality of the writing.

  Lucrecios has provided values for each of the die’s eight digits. I’ll give them to you, but you can also go to the site to see them.

  So here are the values of each digit, or rather, the descriptions corresponding to each one:

  For the first roll, the types of writers:

  1 – experimental

  2 – mainstream

  3 – scholarly

  4 – careerist

  5 – bad

  6 – precious

  7 – award-winning

  8 – professional

  For the second roll, the types of work and/or literary genre:

  1 – nonfiction

  2 – whodunit

  3 – horror

  4 – historical novel

  5 – literary novel

  6 – romance

  7 – how-to book

  8 – poetry

  And for the third roll, the tenor of the books in question:

  1 – first work

  2 – mature work

  3 – transitional work

  4 – potboiler

  5 – insignificant work

  6 – failure

  7 – scandalous work

  8 – masterpiece

  For example, if I roll a two to start, then a four, and lastly a seven, I must predict the next work of a mainstream writer, who writes historical novels, and who will launch a scandalous book in the next few months.

  As a result, I could predict that James Michener will start writing Iraq: The True War, a thick polemical brick on the recent history of this derelict country, and this, without giving way when it comes to describing the collateral cruelty inflicted on the Iraqi people by the American contingent.

  Of course, it’s impossible. But I would have the right to post this prediction on the Wizard of Books.

  The thrill of the game is that you have to react quickly, in front of the camera. It’s the live performance aspect that gives the prediction exercise an element of game-show-like feverishness…

  At best, we’ll have a lot of fun with this new setup; at worst, we’ll be a laughingstock. Part of the joy of TV-web game shows is to make fun of the hosts or contestants.

  Courrège

  xx

  * * *

  maldonne: What do you think of Chicago?

  pascal: I’ve got nothing against it.

  maldonne: It’s the city of Wizard of Books…

  pascal: Ah, that book prediction trivia… That’s still interesting you all?

  maldonne: Why “you all”?

  pascal: Hasn’t Ghislain infected everyone?

  maldonne: Infected?

  pascal: Your illness. Your book obsession. Real conjunctivitis.

  maldonne: It keeps you on your game.

  pascal: Ghislain just has to speak and he gives me conjunctivitis.

  maldonne: The guy who runs the site is from Chicago. He’s just set up a new video interface.

  pascal: Wow, the geek literary narcissism is terrifying.

  maldonne: How’s that?

  pascal: Truth is a fancy whore.

  maldonne: You make me sick when you get on your high horse.

  pascal: I hate cultured trendiness, I can’t help it.

  maldonne: Ah, you’re pissing me off.

  She leaves Pascal’s apartment forgetting to slam the door. End of scene.

  * * *

  Ghislain gave back the change to an old woman buying some Lipton chicken noodle soup.

  A lineup. When it was more than three people long, he always heard feet shuffling on the floor, quiet sighs. The impatient ones had the gift of making him sick. The gross outrage at having to wait for two brief minutes for a pack of Excel Extreme Fuse gum, a pack of Du Maurier Extra Light cigarettes, and a loaf of Gadoua 100% enriched white bread. They grumbled for a Doritos Cool Ranch, a Mars dark/noir bar, New and Improved/Nouveau et amélioré, and 500 ml of Pfanner Lemon Lychee juice.

  He would have liked to yawn, open his mouth, wolf down the 99,367 products of the dep and survive, film the mastication and ingestion that would take a year, then stream it on UbuWeb.

  In front of a Chinese client buying a Belgian beer, he thought of the last film of the Korean Park Chan-wook. He would have liked to hire him to direct I’m a Cyborg But That’s Okay, with him as the main character. He liked martial arts expressions and military metaphors: Clean it up. In films, when someone “cleaned” with weapons, it was always much messier afterwards. Military clean-up was a false clean-up; they messed things up royally to satisfy a sort of really cool anal fantasy.

  * * *

  Lucrecios rejoiced. Three times more visits. His video clips were popular.

  He didn’t rejoice anymore when he thought of Baldacci.

  As soon as he turned away from the screen and noticed the presence of a Chicago parrot, tears came to his eyes. Why had Christina done it?

  Lucrecios was tormented.

  But now he was receiving congratulations, cheerful and encouraging emails. He needed them. It slightly paralyzed him to attract so many comments from strangers. It amused him because it was an avenue that thwarted the “whys.” Any avenue that thwarted the “whys” seemed good to him, useful.

  The fatal stupidity of a nihilist wasn’t going to screw up his life. The tears and questions weren’t for him, not now.

  * * *

  Ghislain frantically sent out a prank JPEG about the launch of Prosopopoeia to his list of friends. Nothing subtle about it. A few lines, suspiciously laudatory, and the name of a fake publishing house to top it off. Ultimately ridiculous, but he thought he was being tolerably funny.

  He even sent it to Lucrecios, who added it to his scrolling banner. How did he have time for all this? How many people worked for him? The complexity of his site was quite a feat. Ghislain also wanted to be part of the world. He had no qualms sending his junk, spoiling others’ lives with his need for attention. If you no longer wish to be subscribed to this list, please write to readmeagain@sympatico.ca. Few people bothered to contact him. It was easier to delete the email, it was less disagreeab
le for people who, like him, believed that taking action earned them special status in the world. He often mentioned it, he’d practically founded the club. More morons, please! Give me another moron! Moronity was a mental illness. In Quebec, moronity could have been translated as mironie.† Everyone would have understood immediately. Mironie: an illness of Quebecois literature distributors. The symptoms were obvious: saccharine hypocrisy, confab of hatred in phantom committees or award juries, false smiles and the contempt of some for others, and also contempt for the entire local production in favour of the entire production of other countries (for this symptom of the illness, see the publishing house Les Allusifs, which found a remedy for mironie by publishing translations).

  —Moronity attacks the liver. At every book launch, I have a sharp pain in my liver. My liver is so weak, I’ll die of vexation.

  The entire UNEQ directory, over a thousand scattered guests, received the invite to the launch of Prosopopoeia. The great spectacle of editorial speculation had begun.

  Maldonne had quickly answered his prank. She wouldn’t be there; she was taking a bus to Chicago. She would complete the breathless journey from Montreal to Toronto, Toronto to Buffalo, Buffalo to Cleveland, and lastly Cleveland to Chicago. All together, seventeen bumpy hours of shaky washrooms, crying babies, uncomfortable sleeping positions, bus drool on her sticky cheeks, books read, and iPod listened to until her ear canals were irritated. Maldonne was seeking a way to transform herself. No one really ever transforms, but Maldonne believed in it. No compromising the vital instinct, you need to leave when you feel you need to leave. No hard feelings, she apologized in her email, but she wouldn’t write to Ghislain anymore.

  Yet Ghislain knew that he had been only a transient friend for Maldonne—a listening post, activated when needed. The depressing moment when the altruistic intimacy of a friendship dies caused him a dull pain. He too would have liked to find a way to cut off ties with a strange and dying friendship.

  But who is cruel enough to burn the bridges of a long friendship?

  He received about twenty apology emails at most. People no longer took the time to notify you that they wouldn’t be coming. Everyone was so inundated with invitations that no one bothered anymore.