Involuntary Bliss

by Devon Code

  When we returned to the Main in the early evening of that same August Sunday, James opened his case and took out Warren’s mandola. I thought that he was going to busk once again, but instead he retrieved the bill that Eunice, the elderly American tourist, had left him, and when we saw that it was in the amount of fifty dollars, he decided that a celebratory drink was in order. He led me to a bar, which was dark and small enough to be cramped, although inhabited by no more than a dozen people, five of them onstage performing New Orleans jazz on trumpet, trombone, piano, banjo and clarinet as much for their own enjoyment as that of the half-dozen patrons drinking and conversing. Near the door a man sat alone at the bar. An old white dog lay asleep at his feet, so that we had to step over it to claim the only empty table. When we were seated with our steins of beer and had placed our order for plates of French fried potatoes with cheese curds and gravy, James directed my attention to the piano player. The man wore an oversized black T-shirt tucked into black denim trousers, which were in turn tucked into black cowboy boots. On his head he wore a wide-brimmed black straw panama hat, from the back of which lank black hair extended down past his shoulders. Even in the dim light of the bar, his skin was of a ghostly pallor. In spite of the apparent indifference of the audience, he played with a relaxed intensity and assuredness that bespoke a mastery of his instrument, James bringing to my attention that in the absence of a bass player, it was the piano player’s left hand that anchored the polyphonic ramblings of the ensemble, while he contributed to those very ramblings with his right. It seemed to James, as he explained it to me, that the piano player was a product of the sounds that filled the room and not the other way around.

  “How does this man exist outside of this bar?” asked James, raising his voice to be heard over the music. “In the absence of cigarette smoke,” said James, “he would cease to exist,” and I felt inclined to agree.

  “How does he sustain himself?” James loudly inquired after we’d been served our meal and had begun to eat. Then, answering his own question, he said that it was possible to imagine the man in a flat not unlike his own, a room with the window open but the blinds drawn, the man seated by the window on a kitchen chair, smoking a cigarette in the late hours of the afternoon, careful to blow the smoke through the slats of the blinds as he listened to a young pupil plunk out scales and on his piano, several such children arriving separately on various weekday afternoons, each handing the man an envelope upon arrival, the man imploring each in turn to practice, practice before their next week’s rendezvous.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “that could be imagined.” James said that sitting in that bar with me put him in mind of the last time he’d gone to a bar to hear a band, which had been with Warren. It was a great shame that I would not come to know Warren as he had known him, said James. Warren’s focus had been truly admirable, said James, his commitment to musical composition such that he was never seen without his mandola, which had been the external signifier of his inner life. He himself had his leather jacket and denim trousers, said James, the garb appropriate to a poet of our times, whereas I had my tweed blazer and my leather satchel, the outer expression of my innermost scholarly nature. Each of these was a sincere and noble expression of who we were meant to be and of who we were in the process of becoming. When he dressed in the autumn, winter and spring, he need not think what to wear, said James, but need only pull on his leather jacket and denim trousers. The durability and versatility of these garments made them indispensible. Were he to stop and think about what to wear, the outcome would be no different. Inevitably he would still leave the house apparelled in his leather jacket and denim trousers because they were the most appropriate and practical garments for him to wear, as a poet of our times. Ideally his denim trousers and leather jacket would be accompanied by his long hair and his beard, but his tenure at the Auberge St. Eglise had forced him to shave his beard and trim his hair, his poetic powers having been dissipated accordingly. The humidity of summer posed a challenge to well-dressed men such as ourselves, he said, and I was inclined to agree. In daylight hours, and often even on summer evenings, it was far too muggy to wear a leather jacket or a tweed blazer. This evening, for example, we were apparelled in short-sleeved shirts, he in his denim cut-offs and me in my khaki shorts, without my leather satchel. It was perfectly acceptable that we would dress like this in the humidity of summer, without a jacket or a blazer, respectively, yet nevertheless we were not entirely ourselves when we were dressed this way. He then urged me to extend my visit in Montreal, suggesting that I had only seen a fraction of the city that he now called home, and before I could reply, the dog by the door of the bar began to whine.

  Its eyes were open as we turned to discern what had caused its distress, the dog lifting its head, stretching its legs and slowly rising to its feet. Its whining sounded strangely like that of a small child, and when the dog’s owner said something sternly to the dog, the whining did not abate but rather intensified so that it rivalled in volume the sound of the music coming from the stage, which prompted the owner of the dog to make a gesture that seemed to indicate resignation, then to say something to the bartender. The bartender placed an empty bowl upon the bar, the dog’s owner filling the bowl with beer from his own stein and setting it before the dog. James raised his stein toward the dog, calling out a toast. So engrossed was the dog in its lapping that it paid James little heed. As soon as the dog had finished, it lay down once more and closed its eyes and by all appearances, fell back asleep. I too was suddenly overcome with a great weariness, and I managed to persuade James that it was time for us to leave. As we made our way back to his flat, I told him that it was not possible to extend my visit, that my seminars would begin on Tuesday, and I needed time to settle in. As a compromise, I agreed to sit with him on the second-storey roof outside his flat, to have another drink before we went to bed.

  As we prepared to climb out through his window, James put on his leather jacket and I my tweed blazer, for the evening had grown cool. We sat together on the roof in the dark, Señor Mosca stretched out at James’s side, the two of us sipping bottles of , as James recalled his travels with Warren the summer that they’d met.

  “There is a bookstore in Paris,” James explained, “with rooms upstairs, where you can stay for free as long as you’re writing.” I turned to see his face and followed the direction of his gaze toward a nearby low-rise. An iron fire escape criss-crossed from door to door, and a light was on in a fourth-floor window, where James’s attention seemed to be directed. I could make out motions behind the drawn blind, an androgynous silhouette making its way from one side of the room to the other.

  “Do you have to write in French?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “The bookstore is English. Just like the .”

  “What did you write when you were there?” I asked.

  “Postcards,” said James.

  “How do the booksellers know you’re actually writing?” I asked.

  “They can tell,” he said. “I didn’t complain when I ran out of postcards and they asked me to leave.” And then, as if prompted by the recollection of his expulsion from the bookstore, James confided that he was behind on his rent and would soon be facing eviction. It was of no consequence, he said, insisting that I shouldn’t worry about him, though he gave no clear indication why this was the case or how he intended to address the situation, remarking instead that once he’d been evicted if someone wished to send him a postcard, they’d have no address to which to send it. He suddenly rose to his feet and with his left hand, reached toward his chin as if to tug at the beard that was no longer there. With his right hand, still holding his half-empty bottle of , he gestured theatrically, sweepingly, indicating all at once the low-rise brownstone where the window was now darkened and indistinguishable from the wall, the fetid alley below, his own decrepit tenement and the half-constructed mid-rise condominium that lay beyond it on the far side of the street.


  “Then,” he said, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, his head cocked at a deranged angle, “I’ll be a citizen of the world!” As he made this declaration, he cast his half-empty beer bottle downward, it seeming for an instant as I waited for the inevitability of an impact that James had performed a sleight of hand by which he’d palmed the bottle into the sleeve of his leather jacket, or else that the bottle would hurtle indefinitely through the air, never meeting its mark. But then it collided with the tarmac and Señor Mosca, startled by the sound, leapt from the second-storey roof and retreated into the shadows of the alley, James remarking, as if he suspected he would not see the cat again, that his departure was for the best. He offered me his hand in order to pull me to my feet, suggesting it was time for us to pay a visit to the construction site across the street, something he’d wanted to do for some time, and when I saw the determination in his expression, I knew it would be pointless to resist.

  Though I persuaded him to leave Warren’s mandola behind, he insisted on bringing along the last two bottles of , which he stowed in my leather satchel. I suggested that before we attempted to enter the site, it would be prudent to circumnavigate the perimeter to ensure there was no night watchman. James agreed, somewhat amused by my caution and utterly inattentive as we walked the sidewalk along all four sides of the plywood hoarding, content as he was to trust in the watchfulness of my eye, our reconnaissance having the opposite of its intended effect as I grew increasingly anxious, detecting no traces of anyone inside, no lights or sounds to indicate the presence of posted guards. The only entrance was a gate of chain-link fencing, large enough, when opened, for a truck to pass through and secured by chain and lock. Not far from the gate we came across a plywood panel that had been partially dislodged, James deeming this to be a suitable point of entry, indifferent as he was to my observation that this breach suggested we might not be the only uninvited guests to set foot inside the site.

  James squeezed through the gap in the plywood so that I had no choice but to follow. I passed my leather satchel through the narrow opening into James’s hands before I slid through the gap. The scene inside the yard was desolate. It was difficult to tell at first glance whether the building was being erected or torn down. The structure rose up before us in the darkness, concrete walls working their way up steel girders, the site surrounded by bare earth turned to mud from the previous night’s rain. Beside the structure were stacks of piping, several dumpsters filled to overflowing, a portable latrine and two excavators parked side by side. It struck me that the excavators resembled arms, the articulation of their joints, shoulder, elbow, their buckets resting on the earth like a pair of simian fists curved inward at the wrists. I mentioned this to James and said I thought it strange that something so closely resembling a human hand was the best model for a machine that excavated. He replied that it might not be the best model at all but simply the one that came most readily to the inventor’s mind, as together we approached the nascent structure and entered not through a doorway, but through an opening in a wall where I presumed a large pane of glass would eventually be placed. We wandered about the ground floor, moving from room to empty concrete room as I endeavoured to discern what would eventually be the layout of the building, but aside from a long hallway and a set of stairs, the whole structure seemed largely shapeless, amorphous in its half-finished state, and something about this appealed to me, this being in a building which was not yet a building, an experience strangely similar to those occasions when I’d been inside buildings no longer fit for habitation—an abandoned farm house, a condemned low-rise in which James and Warren had briefly considered squatting.

  James called for me to follow as he ascended the stairs. The stairway was pitch black, with no openings for windows, and I placed my hand on James’s shoulder as he stretched his arms out before him so that he might feel with his hands what his eyes could not see. In this manner we ascended the first flight and then each subsequent flight until we came to the highest floor to which the stairs would lead us, a floor as yet without a ceiling, so that the diffuse illumination of the city sky at night, the muted radiance of street lamps and distant windows, headlamps and high-rises, the half-obscured stars and moon filled the floor with more light than reached the floors below. Through the window holes, we could see the outlines of nearby buildings, James’s building and buildings like it up and down the street, the silhouette of downtown to the west. Further to the north, toward what I presumed to be the mountain, stood a feature of the urban landscape I had not seen before, a great illuminated cross rising high above the city’s inhabitants.

  “There,” said James, “is the Auberge St. Eglise,” and I turned to see him pointing to a high-rise to the west, far below the hillside cross, a building so indistinguishable from all others that I would never have identified it on my own. James sat down, resting his back against a concrete pillar, facing east, away from downtown, toward the direction in which the sun would rise. I sat down beside him, my back against a neighbouring pillar as he took the bottles of from my satchel and handed one to me. We could hear the faint sounds of distant traffic, the pulse of music coming from a dance club somewhere down the street. James remarked that this structure, not so long ago, had been a drawing on a sheet of paper and that now we sat within it, a considerable distance above the ground, workers having operated cement mixers and hoisted girders in adherence to a plan under the direction of a foreman, the ability to construct a building even as conventional as this mid-rise still something of a marvel.

  “When was the foundation laid?” I asked, and James said he’d been told that shortly before he’d arrived in the city, the entire block had been occupied with squat, neglected tenements, not unlike his own, each then vacated in turn and eventually assailed by wrecking balls, discrete detonations, sledgehammers ad infinitum, the myriad machinations of demolition brought to bear upon the structures’ century-old sensibilities. The hoarding appeared around the perimeter as if overnight, surrounding what was no longer there, preventing prying eyes from gazing upon the void where the former tenements had stood, but James had still glimpsed it through a chink in the boards, the prodigious pit that descended far deeper than the provision of a firm foundation would seem to dictate, as if the excavators had not been able to contain their fervour. A puddle had obscured the uttermost depths of the hole, a polluted pool in which James could not help but imagine floating on his back, splashing ineffectually at the murky water, gazing upwards at the world.

  He’d applied for a position in construction shortly after moving to Montreal, and had he been hired, he might well have been employed as one of the workers who in daylight occupied the very site in which we found ourselves that night. His interest in construction had been prompted by his visit to Peru, said James, though the vulgar methods of the workmen employed in the construction of the mid-rise condominium could not compare to the Cyclopean elegance of the ancient Incan masonry, the method so-called by Europeans who’d believed that only a being of the Cyclops’ monstrous size was capable of securing the massive stones without the aid of mortar. He’d only seen the ancient ruins through a veil of rain, he said, but was nevertheless able to discern that living in the ancient citadel for any length of time would destroy the average person, who requires a considerable dose of banality and ugliness in order to survive.