by Alex Pugsley
~
Jeremy Horvath and Cyrus Mair were two of the latest in a long line of Halifax Smart Boys. The city was rampant and replenishing with prodigies, Brainiacs, wunderkinds. “There’s a lot of bright kids in this town,” said my mother. “Not all of them make it. Not all of them can handle being bright.” I’m not sure if it’s the isthmus mentality, or the presence of so many universities, but smarter and snootier young men you will not find for a thousand miles and I’ve often thought a fairly long essay might be in order to explain the subset of the smart-but-damaged Halifax guy. Horvath and Mair were two of the more fulfilled expressions but the traits and glistenings were manifest in many. I’m not talking about the amiable boy-next-door who rewires his phone to make a radio or constructs a practical two-man hovercraft out of balsa wood. That’s Tom Waller. The Halifax Smart Boys, the talent of six high schools, were young men of finicky brains, highly imaginative, often socially complicated—and sometimes projecting this complication into others, especially attractive contemporaneous girls. These fellows were needy and judgmental, derisive and awkward, sarcastic and insecure—snobby, funny, rueful, aloof—and existed in a space-time gamely managed by Monty Python, Star Trek, Tolkien, Herbert, Gygax, Devo, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Gail called them the Cyrus Clones and roundly considered them too-clever-for-their-own-good, pretentious, obnoxious, emotionally stifled, in a word—dysfunctional—and they were to a man as follows: Brian Bremner, Ying Lu, Henry Fleming Dunham, Mik Prsala, Ewan Gruber, Zal Glazov, David Feagles, Ian DeGroot, and Jeremy Horvath. Out of this swarm, it was only the last three who jostled for true preeminence and Cyrus reliably referred to these last three, for reasons never made clear to me, as Mr. Hoobalee-Boobalee, The Fabled Ian DeGroot, and Jeremy Fucking Horvath. They were a little older and a little more realized than Cyrus Mair and me. David Feagles was absurdly dour in an Old Halifax High Anglican manner, ever puzzling out philosophies he perceived as reticulate. The first person to use in my presence the word Hegelian, David would pursue notions of post-modern modernity at the University of Sheffield. Son of Symphony Nova Scotia’s concertmaster, Ian DeGroot was one of those slack-mouthed power dweebs, slave to some repetitive fidgeting pattern, who seems borderline autistic but who all along is picking algorithms out of the middle distance. Ian would win a Rhodes Scholarship, complete a post-doc in complex adaptive systems, and end up in Santa Clara, California. But Jeremy Horvath was the prince regent of these freaks and considered the smartest of the Smart Boys. He had a habit of frowning and the precise mind of a clever young fiend. He was withdrawn and watchful, intuitive and changeable—which may be why it is difficult to successfully pin into a display case a considered analysis of his character. There was something hinky about his eyes. They seemed double-lidded, sleep-deprived, his eyelashes pale and Teutonic-looking. “Creepily cerebral,” was how Gail described him. “There’s something weird about Jeremy. He’s not really human. He’s like this alien-human hybrid from the future. And he looks like the sort of guy who’s been sitting on the same piece of cheese since he was twelve.” Of Jeremy Horvath I was utterly emulous—I wanted to be as good as or better than him and his lot. But Jeremy Horvath was very good at being Jeremy Horvath. His teenage speaking voice implied a multi-speed intelligence, alert to ironies and switch-ups, and his smarts and moods, when taken with his musical success and other feats more assorted, made him a supremely accomplished eighteen-year-old. He captained Dartmouth High to the finals of Reach for the Top, a nationally televised quiz show. He was the only person I knew who was offered a full scholarship to Harvard. He pretty much invented a side-kinking on-beat style of dancing, as if he were being sort of rhythmically electrocuted, that would prove influential on male dancing in the city for years to come. He was the best rhythm guitar player for days and he was the first person I knew who recorded and released a vinyl record. That summer, the summer after John Lennon died, The Silver Hornets brought out on their own label a three-song EP called Girl Trap. Those three songs, “High Numbers,” “Radio Dial,” and “Girl Trap,” were not exactly everywhere in the city, but in my brain they were ever-present and astonishing. This was one of the first indie recordings to come out of Halifax, later cited in anthologies for its haunting post-punk soundscapes, and Karin Friday, I noted, the Changelings’ Karin Friday, our Karin Friday, was listed as guest vocalist on the last of the tracks.
~
Scene. Third floor attic of the Mair House on an August afternoon. Cyrus sits at a table covered with papers, reading a hardcover book. He wears a rumpled second-hand suit under a blue cashmere coat. No matter where he is in the calendar year, Cyrus is partial to winter coats, even winter coats, like this one, he may not grow into for another few summers. I recognize it as one of those previously worn by his father and exhumed from the clothes racks that once hung in this very attic. The space functions now as Cyrus’s bedroom, albeit a bedroom where five-sixths of the room is given over to bookshelves. They stand at right angles from the walls and form a sort of labyrinth. The remaining portion of the room contains a small bed, or berth, really, of the sort you’d see in a submarine, and it’s wedged into a corner beneath the room’s only window. A window resolutely shut. Outside the afternoon is anything but overcoat weather and inside, the way the heat is trapped within the almost airless attic—sunlight steeping through the dusty smears of the window—room temperature approaches something you might encounter in an incinerator. Cyrus does not appear to notice, however, and sits diligently reading, unaware of my presence, unaware of the flashing reflection from his watch crystal, and unaware of a single white moth that, like a dazzle of confetti, chases this reflection into the shadows of the far wall. One of Cyrus’s shirt collars has twisted with the knot of his tie and the collar kinks at an odd angle toward the ceiling, but Cyrus, being Cyrus, simply continues reading. Why? As earlier explained, the projects of the Common Room are financed by selectively pilfering and selling off the house’s surplus books—the doubles and triples and oversized volumes, anything spotted or mildewed, and all of the encyclopedia sets. Vast numbers of books from the house have found their way back into the world, dispersing into shops far and wee—Guzzie’s Book Exchange, Asher’s Antiquarian Bookmart, Schooner Books—and, in this way, after a quart bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream has been delivered as a surtax to Aunt Emlyn, bulky uniform editions of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens and multiple copies of The Vicar of Wakefield are transmuted into Peavey amplifiers, microphones, sound boards, pre-amps. Cyrus feels contrite if he’s not read a book before its departure and, even though I’ve pushed him to retire this system of read-and-release, often he withdraws, as he’s done these first weeks of August, into shut-in seclusion, sequestering himself to read through a stack of decrepit hardcovers. Deep in these ecclesiastical phases, he might read for days in a row, oblivious to food or weather, with wrinkled apples forgotten and teapots stone cold.
“That kid reads too much,” said my mother. “How’s he going to learn anything? He should get outdoors. Didn’t he used to play tennis? That boy, with his strange mind and reading too much, why is he always stuck up in some garret?” I explained it’s more of a turret. “Garret. Turret. Bell tower. Whatever you want to call it, get him out of it, Aubrey. He doesn’t need all those books. No one does. He could read from now till doomsday and never finish a fifth of that crap. They’ll be the death of somebody, I’m telling you.” But for Cyrus, each book became, in the very act of picking it up, the centre of the known universe. He was always reading as if an idea from a book might change his life forever and so he’s determined to steer his eyes through every line of text, even if, as my youngest sister once discovered, the volume in question was a Li’l Jinx Giant Laugh-Out which, borrowed from Katie one afternoon at an ice cream-splattered picnic table, Cyrus regarded as reverentially as a first translation of The Upanishads. So he continues reading, bent over, staring into the pages of the hardcover. But it’s a glazed, unrecognizing kind of staring, as if he’s
waiting for the right word or gesture to snap him out of his abstraction.
I want to tell him about “Girl Trap” and Karin but I’m never sure with Cyrus how to phrase my references to Karin—I am not clued-in to their recent goings-on—and there is an odd silence after I blurt about Karin singing on the track. With a quietude that speaks of a dozen ideas newly calibrating, Cyrus makes a snuffle but stays silent, as if he does not wish his run of thoughts to be interrupted, and I become conscious of a familiar sensation in the room. Moving further into his percipience has given Cyrus Mair an identity but it has also isolated him within that identity. And in his psychic vicinity, your thoughts become weirdly reoriented. You feel as if your ideas are being induced into a coherence Cyrus is slowly and stubbornly trying to generate. Immersion in this magnetic field does strange things to people. It mostly attracts Karin, beguiles Babba and Tom Waller, but repels Gail. She is very suspicious of its influence—in the Changelings she and Cyrus have been sort of vying for psychological control—and his strangeness makes her spiteful. And me? I sense there are contradictions present beyond my seventeen-year-old mind, but as I stand there, heat prickles starting on the skin between my shoulder blades, I feel that knowing Cyrus Mair will make me smarter—knowing him will make everyone smarter—and I do my best to integrate his charge and influence.
“That’s amazing,” says Cyrus, speaking with a conviction he will be completely understood. “That’s very amazing, actually. For Jeremy Fucking Horvath. And his silver hormones. But for us it’s completely irrelevant.”
“Irrelevant. Right. That’s what I was thinking. Know what else is irrelevant? Your collar’s messed up.”
Putting aside his book, Cyrus stands and moves to the bookshelves. “‘Moonfleet?’” he asks, taking down a Penguin paperback. “I don’t think so. Who wants to read that again?” He tosses the book to the floor. “And ‘Silas Marner?’ Print’s too small.”
“You should fix it. Your collar, I mean. The one on your shirt.”
“A Borges,” says Cyrus, tapping another book. “That’s a keeper. Do you know the Borges?”
“I don’t know the Borges.” My face drips with moisture. With my right thumbnail, I flick away the sweat from an eyebrow and say, “Could we maybe crank up the thermostat? Or could I get a scarf?”
Cyrus stops in front of a hardcover. It’s the copy of Watership Down loaned to him in our junior tennis days. “Richard Adams?” he says. “Isn’t this yours?”
I tell him he can keep it.
“But isn’t this where you record all your jokes?”
Because of my various drug-dealing connections, Cyrus grants to me an immense and purposefully absurd amount of street credibility, deferring to my expertise as if I’m someone who’s survived a series of stints as a professional street fighter in the Halifax Shipyards. “Cyrus, that was three years ago. You ever read it?”
Nodding, he lifts out the book. “Where did you get all those jokes anyway?”
“What do you mean? I invented every one of them.”
“But where’d you hear them?”
“From a guy in Gdansk. Guy Lafleur. I don’t know. Pliny the Elder.”
Cyrus places the copy of Watership Down on his table. He seems unable to leave it alone, however, and fusses with it so its edges are in line with the table corner. And I realize the personal force-field I’ve sensed in previous years has returned and seems to permeate all his goods and chattels. Watership Down, a tea cup, the pile of papers, a bottle of Quink—these seem possessed by a strange life force all their own. I stand very still in the centre of the room, wetly perspiring, pinpoints of sweat trickling down my spine toward the waistband of my pants, trying not to disrupt the room’s frittery hoodoo.
Cyrus takes the hardcover he was reading earlier and holds it above his head. “Do you know this book?”
“Is that the Borges? I don’t know the Borges.”
“No. The Mayhew.”
He passes me the first volume of something called London Labour and the London Poor—a collection of interviews with vagrants, mudlarks, and low-lifes published by Henry Mayhew in 1851. I open it at random and alight on the following fragment about a street kid. I decide to read the lines aloud, in a cheesy working-class accent, in my best Torben Fludd: “‘Yes, he had heer’d of God who made the world. Couldn’t exactly recollec’ when he’d heerd on him, but he had, most sarten-ly. Didn’t know when the world was made, or how any-body could do it . . . Didn’t know what happened to people after death, only that they was buried . . . Had heer’d on another world; wouldn’t mind if he was there hisself, if he could do better, for things was often queer here.’” I finish my performance and take a moment to appreciate the excerpt, and the larger idea of Henry Mayhew. “The kid’s right.” I return the book to Cyrus. “Things is often queer here.”
Cyrus is quiet, eyes quickening with new concerns. He steadies his gaze by following on the wall the reflected shimmer of his watch crystal. Then he murmurs, “We could do that.”
“Do what?”
“What Mayhew did. But for Halifax.”
“Interview homeless people? But there’s only two of them. String Bean and Crazy Maddy.”
“No. Put Halifax in a book. Like your folklore of jokes. But every person. Every thought. What everybody knows. Or not what everybody knows. What we know.”
“Everything we know? Sure. Here’s an idea. You’re insane. And that’s impossible.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it makes everything possible.”
“You mean put Crazy Maddy in a book or our experience of Crazy Maddy?”
“Isn’t it the same thing? Think about it.”
“I am thinking. I don’t get it.”
“Right now Crazy Maddy is someone we all know. But no one in the future will know her. It’s like the Borges. ‘What will die with me when I die?’”
“I don’t know the Borges. Just to be clear on that.”
“But if we put into a book everything we know, every little thing—”
“She does is magic?”
“Then it becomes what other people think is possible. Even if they disagree.”
“Still not getting it.”
“Exactly. It doesn’t have to make sense. Or be linear. It’s just an installation of moments. And the existence of a thing.”
“The existence of a thing?”
“The existence of a thing,” says Cyrus. “Because without it there aren’t any.”
~
It was called “The Halifax Book.” Other titles considered were “The Halifax Common,” “Haligonia,” and “Hafilaxity” but what was easiest was “The Halifax Book.” It was to be a living history of the settlement known diversely as Kjipuktuk, Chibouctou, Chebucto, Hali, The Fax, and H-Town, and it was to stand as a correcting intervention to all the bullshit, spam, and flarf that had come down to us about the place. For this was to be a record of our Halifax—not the place evoked by print media of oil rigs anchored off Georges Island, or postcards of lobster traps heaped under stormy skies, or brochures featuring gap-toothed fishermen with seagulls atop their Sou’westers. On certain days your hometown can seem like a cavalcade of suckiness and all of us in the Common Room were oftentimes worried for Halifax. I know Cyrus considered it a sort of tribal accident, hopelessly superstitious, heartbreakingly sectarian, and his general conception of Maritimers, that is to say those fellows in matching rugby shirts who tunelessly bellow “Barrett’s Privateers” while wavering at the urinals in The Seahorse Tavern, was linked with his general distaste for anything careless or incompetent—all the muddy corruptions and general mismanagements of thought at play in a city. Of course Gail thought the place its own little hell. But it was Babba who came closest to my own view. “Halifax is sort of frustrating and lovable,” she said the night we devised a first table of contents. “It’s sort of crummy and magnificent.�
� It was Cyrus’s inspired insight to embrace the crumminess—to realize that in your hometown crumminess and magnificence are inseparable—and to seize the given moment in the city’s life as moral fact. In the remaining weeks of that summer, Halifax became our religion, we its apostles, and the imagined book our scripture, creed, and Song of Songs. We drew it up. We sketched it out. We collated blueprints, histories, a bibliography of trees. We were going to keep at it till we got everything down on paper, every Pee-Wee hockey team, every Stadacona tattoo, every word scrawled in once-wet cement. And of course the thing never happened. Why? It was, in possibility and conception, the most ambitious of our ventures, but it was only one of many summer projects of The Common Room. There was our sponsoring of fifteen-year-old Huey Zuber’s guided tour of “Suicides of the South End,” a planned Super-8 music video for “Changeling Girl,” and comprehensive rating-and-reviews of the city’s buskers. I loved “The Halifax Book,” I daydreamed on its proofs and fascicles—it seemed something on the way to wonderful—and a plan to respond to the meanings of all those scheming and dreaming around us seemed the best of our pursuits. But the project was fated to be a perpetual work-in-progress and after a rush of disorganized optimism the thousand pages of “The Halifax Book” petered out in false starts, dead ends, and shared neglect.