by Alex Pugsley
“Identical in every way.”
“His name’s Dr. Something.”
“That’s me. That’s modelled on me.”
“And where’d you get that suit?” He examined it. “That one of your father’s? Nice colour. Nice suit. Why are you so hot-to-trot?”
“I’m supposed to be at some wedding later.”
“Yeah? I’m really busy, too. I’m supposed to be meeting someone before the airport.”
“Who’s that?”
“Well—” Cyrus twirled his fingers in another circle. “I haven’t worked out all the specifics.” As he was screwing the top on the flask, it fell from his fingers to the sidewalk. He glared at it. “Fucking Scandinavians.” He picked it up and screwed it down tight. “Jesus, Harold. If you think I’m going to stand here to be stripped naked and beaten to death by some fucking Scandinavian, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“I’m not really thinking that.”
“Just wait till you’re drugged and fondled and left for dead in a bucket.” Cyrus was having trouble getting the flask back in his coat pocket and made room by jerking out a paperback. “See how you like it. It’ll be a little late to take it up with the vice-provost then, I’ll tell you that.”
“What’s the book?”
“This?” He gave me the paperback. It was a tattered copy of The Twelve Caesars by someone named Suetonius. “Total fucking genius. History of the Roman Empire written by a guy at the time. It’s not only dates and battles but how people burped and farted and how impressive their toupees were and just all the insanity of being human. Here.” He took the book and flipped through it. “Where is it? Oh yeah. ‘Parricides were sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a snake, and a monkey, and thrown into the sea.’” Cyrus cackled, somewhat sinisterly, and found another page. “I love this, too. The Emperor Tiberius used to train little kids, minnows he called them, to swim between his legs and nibble at his dinger.” Smirking, Cyrus shook his head. “But Tiberius did have some pretty admirable qualities. One day, when meat got a little scarce at the zoo, he was thinking how horrible it was for the animals. So he lined up some convicts and said, ‘Everybody from the bald guy to the other one.’ Meaning kill them and feed them to the animals. Because there were some pretty terrific panthers in the Coliseum that day.” He pushed the book back into his pocket. “Tell that to your Scandinavian friends, why don’t you? While you’re off at the Norwegian Consulate guzzling all your aquavit.” He jumped into Barrington Street, in search of more change, presumably, and picked his way through puddles of flooding slush, a straggling scarf end, wet with snow, already beginning to freeze.
~
The afternoon was veering cold—a December day that began brilliantly sunny, dimmed with storminess, flashed again into sunlight, was with the turning of the tide becoming gloomy and freezing. The North Atlantic was very much in the air, replacing the city’s mildness with rough winds that seemed to breeze in from icebergs eight hundred nautical miles away. I was shivering at the intersection of Argyle and Sackville streets, watching a very full moon float over the city of Dartmouth, when Cyrus appeared with his briefcase below. He darted up the sidewalk like a madman. He was smiling to himself and I guessed some plan was beginning to move forward in his imagination. What it was, of course, I didn’t know.
“I got the right phone number!” He waved a slip of paper above his head. “Better get you that drink.”
“I think there’s going to be a snowstorm. You might want to get to the airport.”
“One drink never hurt anybody.”
“Not sure about that. Plus I have to go to some wedding.”
“What? You’re coming. We have to storm the battlements!”
“Which battlements?”
“And if you don’t come, you’re a quitter.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “It could get grim. There could be catapults and stinking pitch—”
“I’m not sure that’s for me.”
“So you’re saying no?”
“No—”
“Certainly sounds like no. Quitter. Quisling. Harold! Sometimes these things are about belief. And the prologues all have ended. We have to choose—”
“Wallace Stevens. Right. You told me that.”
Cyrus looked perplexed. “No, I haven’t.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yup.”
“Impossible.” Cyrus stared at me, mystified. “I’ve never told anyone that in my life!”
“Okay. But you did. Maybe in a letter.”
“In a letter? You sure it was me?”
“I’m sure. Wait. It was a guy in a soap opera.”
“There it is!” His eyes leaking with excitement, Cyrus pulled on the door-latch of the Seahorse Tavern. “Finally you’re you again. How long did that fucking take? Learn to understand your secret self why don’t you?”
“I’m not sure drinking will do that.”
“Are you kidding?” He dropped down the stairs of the Seahorse. “Things are going to change forever.”
~
The Seahorse Tavern was the oldest alehouse in the city and it was, in the years we knew it, a very tolerant and undefined underground parlour pub where, within its refectory tables and church pews, you might find articling clerks, divorcing teachers, squabbling art students, laid-off stevedores, off-the-clock drag queens, able seamen on shore leave, a women’s rugby team—all of whom would be welcoming the idea of draft beer and intrigue and drunkening. In December, the Seahorse was that feeling of being in a crowded local with winter winds outside, your face flushed after three drinks, the gusts from the opened door like something you’d brave on a fishing trawler, and at Christmastime, during Boxing Day Week, the Seahorse was a perpetual get-together and homecoming. A sampling on this Friday included Finlay Chaisson and Peter Dooder, two of the crew from Canada’s America’s Cup Challenge, back from Perth and drunk off their asses; Lee and Lolly Barkhouse, waitresses from The Keg having a pint before their shifts; Mowbray Morris and Fid Jumbee, two staffers from The Chronicle-Herald across the street; Palmer Von Maltzahn, only twenty-three and the most attractive bailiff in five counties; Jim Pitblado, a junior tennis coach, known to some as Cuddles because of his penchant for bleaching his hair platinum and taking thirteen-year-olds to the movies; Peter Noseworthy and Bug Corkum, laissez-faire pot dealers; Ally Buckley and Pip Hartling, two young women from the folk band Pony DeVille who would go on to form Shriek Records; Dawson Redstone, artistic director of nearby Neptune Theatre, in close parley with lighting designer Astrid Whynot, soon to fatally overdose. All of these were present circumambiently as I found some space in a corner of the main room. Dropping my duffel coat into a vacant pew, I noticed there was, somewhat unaccountably, a Trivial Pursuit card face-down on Cyrus’s briefcase. I picked it up as if it were exactly the item I was looking for. Clarence Darrow was one of the answers and seeing this name, and not being able to recall the other lawyer in the Scopes Monkey Trial, and watching Cyrus return from the bar with multiple glasses of draft, all of this had the cumulative effect of dissociating me from the moment. For the last few minutes, a mix of impressions, little fact-thoughts and half-thoughts, had been sliding in and out of my mind—that I was feeling obscurely depressed, that my sock was wet inside my shoe, that a song whose name I’d forgotten was sort of repeating in my mind—but, watching Cyrus put his purchases on the table, I had a sense that all the scattered details of the day might come together if only I could realize their proper pattern.
“So—” Cyrus passed me a glass of draft. “Here’s to the rest of this thing.”
I clinked the glass against his and sipped at the foam-top. “So how’ve you been, Maestro?”
“Little burnt out. Might have an ague. But I got my canticles.”
“Where’d you say you were?”
“Ge
tting a phone number.”
“No. Why are you sunburned?”
“Just second.” He rubbed the chill from his nose. “I have to apologize.”
“For what?”
“See those people over there?” He nodded toward the bar. “One of them was talking and he said this guy’s nose was too big for his face—”
“Which guy?”
“And for a second I thought he meant you.”
“Which guy said that?”
“The thing is, I was sort of glad he said that—”
“I don’t know those guys.”
“But then I felt bad. So I wanted to apologize.”
“Was the guy talking about me?”
“No! But I thought he was and I agreed with him in my brain and that’s why I’m saying sorry.”
“So who was he talking about?”
“I don’t know—” Cyrus drank from his draft. “Some idiot with a big nose. Who fucking cares? The point is, I was out of line. Let’s face it.”
“Right.” I wiped some beer-slop off the table. “You see Cuddles over there?”
“I did see him as a matter of fact. I thought, My God, I know that man. I am that man.”
“Uh-huh. And Pete Dooder and the boys?”
Cyrus turned to Pete Dooder’s table, attentive to Dooder’s hair-flips and head-nods, the what-are-you-going-to-do smile easing into the isn’t-that-hilarious laugh. Pete Dooder lived in a world of Gore-Tex and sport humping and in high school we’d loathed the sort of chump he represented. But I could tell, from the way Cyrus was watching him, that he didn’t need to hate Pete Dooder anymore and, in fact, in what was a very signature switcheroo, Cyrus now felt very fondly toward him, as if he felt a better Dooder lived within the one we knew and took for granted.
“Dooder’s good,” said Cyrus. “He gets so excited for himself. Remember when he was goosing everyone at Cathy Charles’s party? It’s so perfectly Dooder. He’s just a guy trying to make his hair go right.” Cyrus leaned to one side and reached into a coat pocket. “Now where’d I put that fucking phone number?”
“Again with the vice-provost? I bet she has nice tits.”
Cyrus brought out a clutter of effects and spilled it on the table. My speedy cataloguing of these goods was as follows—the silver flask, a durable-looking fountain pen, the Suetonius book, an expired boarding pass scribbled over with inky handwriting, a rip of paper similarly scribbled over, a Golden Pippin apple, a paper bag of postcards from the Fitzwilliam Museum Shop, two unused airline tickets, Ganong Double Thick Mints in a torn cellophane wrapper, several crumpled English pound notes, and a bottle of prescription pills.
“What’re those?”
“What’re what?” Cyrus quivered. “The pills?”
“Those for your ague?”
“Oh—” Cyrus tapped his temple. “I’ve been crazy. Did I tell you? Ever been crazy?”
“Maybe a little.”
“You’ll know when it happens. If it does, you just take these.” He grabbed the bottle and showed it to me, the word chlorpromazine on its label. “These are de-crazy pills. You take them and you’re not crazy anymore.”
“You’re de-crazy?”
“Exactly. De-crazy.” A loose mint rolled toward the table-edge. Cyrus popped it in his mouth and resumed his investigations.
“What are they for—depression?”
“For being a proleptic weirdo.”
“What’s that?”
Snatching up the looked-for rip of paper, Cyrus confirmed a telephone number. “Well, it’s when—” He penned the number on the back of his hand. “You’re sort of trying to extrapolate every moment to its most plausible conclusion within an infinitude of possibility.”
“Sure.”
“Sounds easy enough, I know, but you’d be surprised. On account of—” He dabbed some sweat off his forehead with his coat sleeve. “Being crazy. It’s like when you’re tracking a bunch of observable data-values in three-dimensional space and looking for some kind of optimific configuration but the input variables are changing so fast in some fluctuating series of algorithms that the latticed topology of space-time starts to morph and twist and collapse on itself because Cartesian coordinates don’t really apply anymore and all the outpoints are becoming sort of ridiculously self-intersecting and unworkable and transfinite.” He sucked on the mint. “Sort of like that. But with human thoughts.” Stuffing his belongings back into his pockets, he sprang up and reached for his draft. “The anxiety of that can really mess with you. Especially if, you know, you haven’t worked out all the specifics.” He downed his draft, plunked the glass on the table, and marched off to find another payphone, his coat, fastened by a single button at the neck, swaying this way and that.
~
It was just generally held that Cyrus Mair was one of the smartest people any of us would meet. You could talk to anyone, med students plodding away to be neurosurgeons, math nerds doing post-docs in Zürich, or know-it-all drop-outs setting high scores on Asteroids, there was just a vividness to his presence, a manic playfulness, and a readiness for quick thinking that you felt, that you registered, that you remembered. As a kid, I was almost afraid of his capacity to be conscious because complicating the interaction was Cyrus being so smart and sort of operating on the assumption that all moments—past, present, future—are more-or-less equally present that he often responded to questions you may have asked in any of your conversations with him. Which put you in the odd position of hearing answers to questions you no longer remember. Or haven’t thought of yet. His were the smarts that made a boy strange. Many who considered him a prodigy also thought him peculiar and there was a gaining minority who believed him trending toward outright psychopathy. I was never sure how far to credit such assessments because, as much as he was keeping Quirk and Possibility alive in Halifax, and he was, Cyrus Mair also answered to the city’s need for Failed Promise and Unrealized Talent. Halifax slashes its tall poppies as routinely as Dunedin or Dundee and the idea that some kind of philosopher prince was living on Tower Road, in the attic bedroom of the Pigeon Lady’s house, was not a proposition the vast majority of Halifax was willing to entertain. The truth is, his character implied contradictions that did not resolve easily into a coherent unity—a unity that might allow the observer to settle comfortably with a sense of definitive conclusion. It was, I think, the opposite. So, rather than deal with his enigma variations, many simply dodged the provocation and were done with it. Of course there were others, this being gossip-ridden Halifax, who did not. Fairly Random Remarks: “This the guy who disappears from his own birthday party? Who’s always in a suit? Pretentious doesn’t begin to describe the motherfucker.” “I made out with him once at a party, didn’t see him for a year, then he rings my doorbell with a bottle of Pernod and wants to talk for two hours about music theory? Yeah. That happened.” “There’s something special about that dude that’s weird and amazing and maybe not there.” “He’s the other guy in your band, right? Foppy McFopperson with the suits and guitar? That little fucker gave me chill-bumps. I saw him throw himself into a mosh pit and get back on stage bleeding like nothing happened. You punkers, man, you crack me up.” “To be honest I didn’t know what the fuck was going on there. I thought maybe the guy was just gay.” Babba Wells, née Zuber, was, as always, more reflective. “What do you say about a guy like that? So weird. So deeply weird. Such a weird human being. And I’m not going to pretend I understand him or anything because I know he thinks of things I don’t but I do feel that he’s sort of not like other people. He’s very curious. About things. But, my God, Aubrey, don’t you want to have back all the hours and days we discussed the weirdness of Cyrus Mair? Because everyone always talks about him and every time it’s like I don’t want this to turn into another Cyrus conversation because I always feel I’m the worst, most cynical person whenever I talk about him and it makes
me feel embarrassed that he creeps into every conversation. I mean, Cyrus is really gifted and smart but it can be a problem when he’s doing well and it can be a problem when he’s not because everything’s so fucking personal with him. And he’s the kind of person who, once you get to know him, you sort of realize you don’t get to know him, you know? You’re only getting close to what he wants you to think. It’s complicated. He’s complicated. And with Karin, I don’t think she’d ever met anyone like him. She really hadn’t. And maybe they weren’t the right match but I always liked the way they looked at each other. You certainly saw the sparks there. And with her, I think he was searching for something that made him feel—I don’t know—I don’t know what it was exactly. Do you?”
~
In the back room of the Seahorse Tavern, beyond the pool tables, was the subject of such commentary, a young man in an old coat, asleep on the floor, sitting slumped beneath a payphone, the handset for which dangled an inch or two off his sunburnt ear. While I’d been concerned by his disappearance, we were all familiar with his sudden exits—he bailed, he bolted—and I wouldn’t’ve been surprised if he were on his way to Singapore. But here he was silently sleeping. I’ve always been intrigued by silent sleepers, given that I’ve been described to my face as a “snoring fucking wildebeest,” but, further, the way his mouth was closed there was a Mona Lisa quality to his expression, Cyrus looking almost seraphic, as if his telephone call had sent him into some new rapture. Close by was a young woman—hair cut in bangs, Western shirt, ripped jeans—style choices which on most would signify Backwoods Hillbilly but the sureness of gaze and point of view indicated a young person of substance. Longtime readers of this column will recognize September Abbott, daughter of Wes and Vivien, once a kid with a ukulele singing Joan Baez, lately a folkie in a band called Pony DeVille, and soon to relocate to Vancouver to become simply September, singer-songwriter superstar, internationally famous for her fabulist ballads and six-octave vocal range. But at the moment she was just another lay-person noticing a sleeping Cyrus Mair.