Nikolski

by Nicolas Dickner

  Noah closes with an invitation for Sarah to come visit him as soon as she is able. He smiles as he pictures the old trailer moored near the Jean-Talon market. The image is absurd and improbable.

  Before sealing the envelope he rereads his letter one last time. His handwriting is as illegible as Jonas’s, but there is nothing to be done. He frowns, signs his name and then spreads his road maps out on the kitchen table. Here he is, faced once again with that old problem: in the last five weeks his mother may have covered thousands of kilometres, turned back, stopped in dozens of towns. If he does not succeed in locating her this time around, the probability of finding her again will be approaching zero.

  Better apply his new method. Eyes closed, he aims at the map of Manitoba. His index finger harpoons a little village called Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes. He scrawls the address on the envelope, thinking that, all things considered, this place name holds out the promise of a miracle.

  Little Italy is asleep. A few wakeful Moroccans are working at the stalls of Jean-Talon market. Noah walks along the deserted streets until he locates a mailbox near Dante Park. The mailbox is almost empty and the envelope hits the bottom with a light metallic tap. He closes the lid very softly, so as not to disturb the unreal silence of the neighbourhood.

  He watches the sky growing blue over St-Laurent Boulevard. He ought to get some sleep. In a few hours he will have to confront a new peril: AR-10342, a course called Methodology of Archaeological Studies.

  William Kidd

  THE OKA CRISIS, DAY 37.

  At the request of Robert Bourassa, the armed forces have dismantled the barricades at Kanesatake. The pine grove is crawling with soldiers and journalists, and a small group of Warriors who have fallen back to the reservation detox centre wait to see how events will play out. The situation is confused. International observers fear that this is an incipient Guatemala.

  Joyce listens to the reports distractedly. Hunched over the circuits of a computer, she adjusts a few connections with the manic precision of a brain surgeon. Using a felt pen, she writes a name on the machine’s dented shell: William Kidd (No. 43).

  Hunting down a computer was not easy. Joyce spent weeks of sleepless nights combing the business district. She scoured hundreds of bins, split open thousands of bags, endured countless stenches. She sprained her ankle, bumped her head, scraped her elbows. A number of times she came close to being nabbed by security guards. She ran, climbed, crawled. Worn out and limping, she lugged the precious carcasses from one end of town to the other in the small hours of the morning.

  Now, her tiny apartment looks like a bazaar. Everywhere there are piles of broken-down computers, display screens smudged with fingerprints, keyboards with missing teeth, modems, printers, hard disks, floppies, fragments of printed circuits—all of it crowned with a hodgepodge of electric wires and colonies of mice. All of it so obsolete, so covered in grime, that Joyce often feels she has stepped into the shoes of an archaeologist.

  Equipped with various handbooks and a screwdriver, she dissects the cadavers, salvages the best organs and grafts them together into a single machine. Lacking the instruments needed to test the condition of each part, she is obliged to proceed by trial and error—and there are many, many errors. With each attempt, a new surprise lies in wait. The computer pretends to work, works, then stops working. The power supply spews out smoke and sparks. The motherboard sizzles like a trout in a frying pan. Printed circuits explode, transistors flying in all directions. After being subjected to this merciless treatment, most of the machines are quickly sent back to the garbage heap, with their circuits slightly more charred than before.

  Anyone else would have given up long ago. Not Joyce. When she feels herself flagging, she looks at the clipping about Leslie Lynn Doucette tacked to her wall, a little gospel forty lines long. She repeats to herself that she must not doubt, does not have the right to doubt. Faith is a fragile thing. You start by raising some innocuous questions and soon you lose control and throw everything into question: the privation, the sleepless nights, the legendary ancestors, the memories, the hope, the raison d’être.

  Better to put your head down and push on without questioning, night after night, printed circuit after printed circuit.

  On the radio, the news report is over. “It’s 11:07 p.m.,” the announcer says, “and you’re listening to CBC.” Joyce shuts off the radio and anxiously plugs in William Kidd, the forty-third avatar to undergo an attempt at revival. She never knows what to expect. Yesterday, for example, Redbeard (No. 42) blew up due to a premature short circuit, nearly setting fire to the apartment. A few weeks ago, Edward Teach (No. 37) melted down to a compact block of plastic. As for Samuel Bellamy, Francis Drake, François L’Ollonais, and Benjamin Hornigold—No. 03, 09, 13 and 24, respectively—they more prosaically popped all their fuses.

  Joyce crosses her fingers, says a brief prayer in memory of Mary Shelley and pushes the switch. After a few seconds, the circuits come to life.

  Leaning over the computer’s entrails, Joyce listens closely. The power supply’s ventilation fan purrs like a tomcat. The BIOS duly enters into action. The RAM sticks seem to be intact. The hard disk boots up flawlessly.

  Everything is going too smoothly. Joyce steps back, ready for the worst.

  Suddenly, nothing happens.

  No explosion, no fizz, no flashes. Only the steady purring of the fan. Incredulous, Joyce watches the cursor blinking on the screen.

  William Kidd patiently waits for instructions.

  Thomas Saint-Laurent

  NOAH HAD JUST FINISHED his third term in archaeology, and was finding it hard to keep the flame alive. Actually, he was convinced that he had left Saskatchewan and travelled thousands of kilometres to study one of the most boring disciplines in the world.

  He made a show of finding the courses interesting, but the truth was that digging techniques left him cold, analytical archaeology put him to sleep, and problems of nomenclature seemed to him to be utterly tedious. And as if all that were not enough, he was traumatized by Professor Scott’s Indigenous Peoples’ Prehistory course.

  Edmond Scott came straight out of the nineteenth century. The backbiters even claimed he had personally known the great chief Sitting Bull. Seated in a near-empty auditorium, he had been steadfastly giving the same course since 1969, presenting the panorama of the Algonquins, the Sioux and the Nootkas as though discussing a collection of dead fish floating in jars of alcohol.

  This scientific coldness had shaken Noah.

  For the first time in ages, he had thought of the old, wrinkled Chipewyans who haunted his mother’s trailer. He recalled with disturbing accuracy all the names of the reservations, the convolutions of his genealogy and the finer points of the Indian Act. This approximate, patchwork knowledge, redolent of hay and engine oil, had no place in the classroom.

  Noah was afraid that in taking Edmond Scott’s course he was committing an unspeakable betrayal of his Aboriginal origins. He consulted various works on the ethics of archaeology, but there was no mention anywhere of such conflicts of interest. He would have to deal with his scruples on his own.

  He was toying with the possibility of dropping out of university when a friend advised him to register for Thomas Saint-Laurent’s course, which, he said, was “the one course you would have to take if there was only one course to take before the end of the world.”

  Naturally, Noah had heard of Thomas Saint-Laurent, an enigmatic character who specialized in the archaeology of trash. His résumé was impressive: full professor of archaeology, head of one of the most prestigious research centres in the country, in charge of digs on a number of major prehistoric sites in Nunavik, and author of a dozen books. As well, his work on garbage dumps had been the subject of numerous articles, three documentaries and several television reports.

  Among Canadian archaeologists, Thomas Saint-Laurent was the one with the highest media profile, thanks to trash.

  Saint-Laurent’s colleagues were far from unani
mous in approving of this bizarre specialization. Some of them accused him of fomenting rebellion in an already divided faculty, of upstaging his colleagues with his sensational press releases, and of instilling in his students a distorted image of archaeology.

  Saint-Laurent himself could not care less. He continued to frequent the dumps and alleyways, to write articles on post-industrial archaeology and to train the next generation of researchers.

  The course that Noah signed up for (Order and Disorder: A New Reading of Sedentarism) began with two key principles:

  Everything is garbage.

  The study of archaeology began last night at the supper table.

  In the months that followed, Noah discovered the stratigraphy of waste-disposal sites, the history of garbage collecting, the expansion of North American suburbs and the petroleum polymer industry. He studied the influence of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the lifestyle of the Inuit. He dissected the contents of garbage bags. He compared the fluctuations of the TSE 300 with the increased volume of domestic trash in the suburbs of Toronto.

  His view of the world was turned upside down.

  Which explains why he has mustered all his courage and, like an unworthy son nervously preparing to ask for his father’s blessing, has come to Thomas Saint-Laurent’s office to make known his intention of pursuing an M.A. in archaeology under his direction.

  “That’s great!” Thomas Saint-Laurent exclaims gleefully. “And which subject are you planning on working on?”

  “I was thinking of comparing the development of the road network and the expansion of refuse dumps in the 1970s.”

  A brief pause. Thomas Saint-Laurent nods his head thoughtfully.

  “A very exciting project, but a very bad idea. Even if your approach is brilliant and your methods are irreproachably logical, it wouldn’t get past the evaluation committee. They reject all projects concerning garbage dumps. It’s a prohibited area.”

  “But your courses?”

  “I’m tolerated because they can’t get rid of me. Look, I have a proposal for you. Are you interested in the prehistory of the indigenous peoples?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Noah stammers.

  “This university is a conservative institution. To survive you need a respectable specialization. You want to work on garbage dumps? Well, first you have to make the grade in a less contentious area. Indigenous prehistory is an excellent training ground. Besides, I happen to be in need of an assistant!”

  Noah can feel his head start to spin. The irony seems to be just too much.

  “I adore indigenous prehistory,” he hears himself answering.

  The Sea Serpents’ Floor

  NOAH IS ROOTED IN FRONT OF A MAILBOX. He is closely examining the strata of graffiti and stickers covering the sides of it. Punk’s Not Dead ¡Viva Zapata! Lose Thirty Pounds in Thirty Days—messages that go to the heart of North American civilization. He wonders what archaeologists will think when they unearth this mailbox in three thousand years. Will they grasp the function of this object, or will they believe they have found an altar of some obscure, minor sect?

  There are pedestrians hurrying by, brushing past him. A bad spot for daydreaming. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and pulls three envelopes out of his shirt pocket. He has written more than five hundred letters to his mother over the last four years, and he knows by heart the postal code of even the smallest post office between Lake of the Woods and Whitehorse. According to his calculations, Sarah must right now be prowling the vicinity of Lesser Slave Lake, so the three letters are addressed to General Delivery in Little Smoky (T0H 2Z0), Triangle (T0G 1E0) and Jean Côté (T0H 2E0).

  He throws the letters into the mailbox and crosses the street, wondering what the weather may be like in the southern Yukon. Behind the heavy glass doors of the library the temperature is decidedly Greenlandian. The door closes slowly and the heat wave is soon reduced to a faint simmer on the other side of the glass.

  Noah crosses the deserted hall and passes the book-loan counter, where the clerk is reading La Route d’Altamont. Near the photocopiers he chances upon a big bearded man occupied with some strange business. He has emptied the recycling bin onto the floor and is in the process of arranging hundreds of spoiled photocopies into different piles.

  “Tom Saint-Laurent!” Noah cries out happily. “What are you doing?”

  “Well, as you can see, I’m analyzing the recycling bins.”

  “I thought you were in the Laurentians on a fishing trip.”

  “I was,” he confirms, with a troubled look. “But wouldn’t you know it, yesterday afternoon, while I was waiting for the trout to bite, I began to think about paper. Have you ever asked yourself what ratio of information these recycling bins contain? What it is that people photocopy? What they throw away and why? What proportion of virgin paper goes directly into recycling?”

  He waves a thick stack of paper that has gone through the viscera of the photocopy machines without receiving a speck of polymer-carbon.

  “What fascinating refuse—virgin paper! ‘Anti-refuse’ would be a more accurate term, seeing how it ends up in the trash without having been used. And not just anti-refuse but ‘anti-artifact’ too—an object that in itself conveys no information.”

  “So what you’re saying is, you jumped into your four-by-four and drove back to Montreal to do some anti-archaeology in the recycling bins.”

  “Actually, I was just about bored to tears. Fishing isn’t really my thing … What about you? What are you doing here in the middle of July?”

  “This is the best air conditioning in town,” Noah says, leaving Thomas Saint-Laurent to his research and heading up to the fifth floor.

  As an apprentice archaeologist, Noah would ordinarily be expected to work in Section EF (American History) or Section G (Geography and Anthropology), but he prefers the tranquility of Section V (Naval Sciences, Travel Narratives and Sea Serpents). Even during the worst end-of-term rush, this forgotten corner on the last floor remains the most underused part of the library. Once the term is over, hardly anyone ever goes there—not even a librarian or a janitor—and you can spend weeks there without meeting another soul. No busybodies or snoops or spies. You’re free to gaze at the ceiling and daydream, scribble a few poems, doze off on the table, read anything you like any way you like, including shirtless.

  Noah has made a personal haven out of a large mahogany table located in the very centre of the floor. For months now he’s been leaving his books, papers, pencils and glasses there, as if this piece of furniture were reserved exclusively for his use. But today, quite unexpectedly, Noah finds that a girl has dropped anchor at this very spot.

  Stunned, he stands motionless. He glances around in every direction. The floor is deserted, a veritable Sahara of empty tables. Why has this girl chosen to sit right there and not somewhere else? Noah becomes suddenly aware of harbouring certain territorial instincts, a paradoxical feeling for someone who was raised at an average speed of sixty kilometres per hour.

  Why has he become so attached to this table?

  If Sarah were to pop up, like a genie rising out of an old silvery trailer, she would advise him simply to share the space with the girl, or else to collect his books and go colonize another corner of the library. After all, there are four more floors available, not counting the stairwells, the closets and the washrooms. But Sarah isn’t there, and Noah approaches gingerly, wondering what the best way to handle this might be. Make himself at home? Beat a retreat? Fake indifference? Act like a tormented intellectual? Claim his territory?

  He sits down.

  No reaction. The table floats on a sea of silence. Noah fidgets in his chair and coughs. The girl finally looks at him, greets him with a brief smile and immediately reimmerses herself in her reading.

  Okay, Noah soberly says to himself.

  While pretending to sort his papers, he observes his new neighbour. She has long black hair, somewhat almond-shaped eyes, and little reading glasses. A model
student. She has scattered a number of bulky volumes over her territory: La souveraineté canadienne dans le Grand Nord, The High Arctic Relocation, Culture inuit et politique internationale. Clearly, no one on this floor takes the least interest in sea serpents.

  The day passes uneventfully. Noah reads, or rather, Noah pretends to read, unable to take his eyes off the girl’s olive-skinned forearms, her angular wrists, her restless hand penning what looks like old Italian, backwards, in a small notebook. “A lefty!” he thinks jovially.

  A little before noon, the stranger goes away, leaving her things behind. Noah watches her disappear behind the stacks, hesitates for a moment and then grabs the notebook. To his great surprise, everything is written in Spanish. Noah can’t help smiling.

  A Spanish-speaking student doing research on the Far North in the Naval Sciences section?

  Well, why not?

  After that, the girl arrives every morning with the regularity of a celestial event. At eight a.m. she walks through the library’s glass doors and sits down at an Internet station. She reads the international news, paying special attention to South America and Chiapas, and jots down some notes in her little spiral notebook.

  At eight-thirty she consults the library catalogue and transforms the issues she wants to focus on that day into bibliographical citations. Then she crisscrosses the library, moving from one section to another with a pile of books rapidly growing in her arms.

  At around eight forty-five, she comes to Section V with her loot. She piles the books on the table, puts on her glasses as though she were putting on a diving suit, and plunges into her reading.

  When Noah shows up, fifteen minutes later, all that can be seen of the girl are the air bubbles frothing at the surface. She gets up from her chair only to renew her supply of books, to stretch or to get a quick sandwich in the basement cafeteria.