by Devon Code
“What time is it?” asked James, when he’d finished his account.
“Dawn,” I replied without having to consult my watch, for the sky had grown brighter in the time since we’d arrived on the uppermost floor of the mid-rise condominium, so that I could now make out across the street the dilapidated facade of James’s building from which his eviction was imminent, his claim to his home as tenuous as ours to the structure we presently occupied, and in the quiet that ensued I was almost certain I once more heard sounds coming from below, sounds more pronounced and less easy to ignore than they had been at first, sounds that to my ears resembled the clanging of a chain, the squeaking of a hinge, the idling of an engine, before James said that he was incapable of holding on to any of it, his livelihood and understanding, his sense of purpose. All that remained firm and unassailable were the aural traces, he said, sounds of a primal and prelinguistic nature, of pain, or pleasure, or yearning that grew monstrous in their increase as they laid claim to the kingdom of his inner ear. He wondered what might happen if the workmen were to discover us where we sat, for it was now Monday morning, the day of rest having come and gone. It was well known, he said, that the construction business was under the control of the criminal underworld. How might the workers react to our presence when they inevitably returned, he wondered. How would these men react to intruders in their midst? A construction site provides countless ways to do violence to the human body, said James. All our blisses are involuntary, he said, as are all our woes. Did I remember when Warren had argued this point in seminar, he asked, and I said I remembered it well. It had been a provocative theory, said James, demonstrating the depth of Warren’s understanding of the Peruvian novella and its notion of involuntary bliss. All of us had been taken aback by Warren’s discernment in this instance, the sonorousness of his logic. He’d tried to expand on it in his essay, said James, but his words had fallen flat. The two of us, said James, he and I, sat in this half-constructed mid-rise condominium and reminisced, whereas Warren would have staged a play. This half-constructed building resembles a stage, Warren would have said, the Latin Quarter a polis in need of exploration of pressing civic themes. The play would have been a musical, said James, in which an orchestra of mandolas would have been employed. There would have been a soliloquy, said James, that Warren would have delivered, incorporating memorable quotations from the Peruvian novella. Gradually, said James, in the burgeoning melodiousness of Warren’s delivery, this soliloquy would have swelled into song. None would have remained unmoved by the performance, said James. Though Warren could be unpredictable and brash, he was a gentle person by nature. So too was he himself a gentle person, said James. It is easy to romanticize, he said. Romance is attractive to young men such as ourselves, said James, and I agreed. That is why we are drawn to the music of Sam (the Man) Taylor and his Orchestra, he said, why he composed ballads on Warren’s mandola. We made up for the deficit of our wisdom with the depths of our ardor, he said. Did we have to give up one in exchange one for the other? he wondered. Who was to broker this transaction? What effect had his words had on the infants in the nursery of the Children’s Hospital? he asked. Would some of them one day read the Peruvian novella as we had done? Would it speak to them as it had spoken to us, in fruitful and productive ways? Would it comfort the afflicted among them? he asked. Would it distress those who found themselves at ease? That the Maestro was dismissive of the Peruvian novella only deepened its mystery, said James. Never would we take for granted our profound good fortune, said James, that we should have a professor who’d seen fit to include the Peruvian novella on her syllabus, a text on the outermost margin of the Cyclopean canon that she’d selected over all the rest, like a shepherd, he said, leaving her flock untended to seek out the lamb who’d strayed. How many national literatures were there? asked James, to which I replied there were many. How many of them dealt with Cyclopean themes? asked James, to which I replied almost all. From whence did our professor’s capacity for learnedness originate, the level of discernment that informed such a choice? asked James. From a bookish childhood, no doubt, he said. From the application of prodigious intellect to the process of sustained inquiry. Decades of study, said James. How many hours seated in a dreary carrel? he asked. How many sunny afternoons had she forgone, how many invitations from friends and lovers had she declined in order to commit herself to erudition, he said, to the refinement of her judgment, the perfection of her taste? Studiousness and diligence, he said, doggedness and determination. She’d cheated her own life, he said, in order to enrich our own. Scholarship was our professor’s paramour and her insights were the bastard offspring of their affair. They were our playmates in our seminar, he said, their squeals of delight indiscernible from our own. Some of us would go on to usher poems and songs and treatises into the world ourselves, he said, while others would perish before we reached our prime. Even in death, he said, the novella’s power would bind us together, all of us who had read it, appealing as it did equally to our emotions and our intellects. We were in dire need of harrowing, said James, and the novella was the plow. Our desires were insatiable, said James. Just ask the depraved patrons of the Auberge St. Eglise. Ask the chambermaids who cleaned up after them, he said. Our professor had known this, said James. The Maestro had known this, said James. Warren had known this. The infants in the nursery of the Children’s Hospital had known this intuitively, said James, the knowledge encoded deep within their genes. We nevertheless ended up encircling isolated peaks, said James, tormented by boredom and fear. Then James asked me the very question he’d posed to the Maestro, namely if I thought the end times were imminent, the signs of pending cataclysm so clear to him of late. It occurred to me then that James was conflating humanity’s fate with our own, as if his question was prompted by the sounds coming from below that were now undeniable, sounds of workmen conversing, of boots upon the ground, the two of us, James and I, trapped together at the highest point of the yet-to-be-completed mid-rise condominium. Though I endeavoured to remain calm, there was nevertheless an urgency in my reply as I remarked that any number of civilizations throughout history thought their era was the last and that this made their existence more grandiose and less mundane than it would have been otherwise, their individual troubles rendered meaningless in the face of inevitable apocalypse, which excused them from doing what they could to ameliorate their circumstances, reminding James of our Cyclopean Studies professor’s suggestion that we have become disoriented somewhere between our terror in the face of a calamitous future and our nostalgia for an oversimplified past, realizing as I spoke that I was no longer resting with my back against the concrete pillar, but had risen to my feet so that I stood now over James, my statements at that moment amounting to a sermon on a man-made mount, it later occurred to me, an improvised oration for an audience of one, to which James replied that he had little recollection of the many things our professor had said, having fixated on the ever-present sweat stains of her denim shirt, stains that burgeoned outward from the points at which they originated—the pits of the arms, the base of the neck, the top of the chest—eventually merging into one another as the shirt became entirely saturated with perspiration, imbuing the garment with irrefutable evidence of embodied cogitation, our professor’s remarks accented by her alarmingly violent gesticulations, her deliberately confounding contradictions, her obscene rhetorical flourishes, her fondness for denim having inspired a party the theme of which was denim and dessert. All those enrolled in our Cyclopean Studies seminar had been expected to bring a dessert to the party but more importantly to wear denim, more than simply denim trousers, but a denim jacket, a denim shirt if one could be had, or accessories composed of denim, Warren unable to find the requisite denim apparel until the eleventh hour, when at a thrift shop he happened upon a pair of denim trousers intended for someone of morbidly obese proportions. He’d torn a hole in the seat of the trousers through which his neck and head could protrude so that when he inserted his arms in t
he leg holes, he could wear the trousers as a kind of frock. James had insisted that I attend his apartment in advance of the party, so that I may inspect his ingenious innovation without distraction. It needed to be decided whether the (as James had dubbed it) should be worn backwards or frontwards, backwards winning out when I observed that if we were to cut away the flap of fabric that concealed the workings of the fly, the effect was not unlike that of a zipper along the back of a woman’s fitted dress. James, in contrast, was soberly attired in the fashion customary to our professor—in denim trousers and a denim shirt—save that the left breast pocket of his shirt was embroidered with the logo of a lumberyard at which the shirt’s previous owner had presumably been employed. I too was dressed in denim trousers, along with a form-fitting denim jacket with the arms and collar removed, and over this makeshift denim vest, another, roomier denim jacket, Warren pointing out that the outfit resembled a three-piece suit, though all three articles of denim apparel were of differing textures and shades of blue, suggesting that a few touches could significantly improve the ensemble, which prompted James to leave the room and appear again bearing a darkly tinted circular eyeglass lens. He presented the lens to me with the suggestion that I wear it as a monocle, while in his other hand he held a scrap of faded denim the approximate dimension of a handkerchief. Before I could protest, he held it to my neck. At first I thought he would tie it in the style of a bandana as worn by a cowboy or a , but instead he tucked it into the collar of the Oxford shirt I wore beneath the denim vest, and with surprising facility James fashioned from the scrap a denim cravat, as if I were a nobleman and he my devoted manservant who’d been tying my cravat for as long as either of us could remember. He sized me up and again left the room, this time entering the bathroom, where Warren and I could hear him speaking to himself though we could not make out the words. This was the first and last time, I realized, recalling as I did that moment some nine months hence, that Warren and I had ever been alone in a room together, James having extended the narrow boundaries of his inner sanctum to include us both in those few short weeks before the accident occurred. Then came the sound of something snapping like the string of a mandola, a sound amplified by the porcelain of the tub and the tiles on the walls, James emerging thereafter with a length of beaded chain attached to a rubber stopper. He approached me and opened my topcoat and passed the severed end of the chain through the buttonhole of my makeshift vest so that it hung across my chest, sliding the stopper inside the breast pocket of my denim vest as if it were a watch.
When I examined myself in the mirror there was little doubt in any of our minds as to the success of James’s efforts to improve my ensemble. But as I took in my reflection with the one eye whose gaze was not impeded by the monocle’s tinted lens, I became stricken with an unusual self-consciousness. When I mentioned the incongruity between my and my , it was Warren who took the matter most seriously, opening the bathroom cabinet to produced a fine-tooth comb and jar of pomade with which he proceeded to slick back my hair, and as a result of these elaborate preparations we departed James’s apartment much later than we’d intended. But before we left, we paused to admire one another’s costumes in the privacy of James’s living room, to bask in the sensual thrill of being adorned in denim from ankle to neck. This was to be one of many nights in each another’s company, we believed, nights that would unfold, in succession, for decades hence as what was to become a tripartite friendship ran what was bound to be its lengthy course, and it was not until we were within a few blocks of the party that we recalled the second aspect of the party’s theme—dessert!—necessitating a stop at a gas station convenience store where we purchased three mass-produced pies (blueberry, strawberry, lemon meringue) at least one of which made it to the party unscathed. After we had knocked upon the door and as we awaited its opening it occurred to me that all the nuances of my three-piece denim ensemble as well as the subtlety of James’s sober attire would inevitably be eclipsed by the ingenious vulgarity of Warren’s , which had in fact proven to be the case, I remembered, some nine months later, as I stood in the uppermost floor of the half-finished mid-rise condominium, listening to the unmistakable sound of steel-shanked boots ascending concrete stairs, a sound accompanied by the gruff garrulity of voices conversing in French, James remaining seated with his back against the wall as I implored him to rise, covering his ears once again just as he’d done when the sounds of Sam (The Man) Taylor and his Orchestra had ceased to issue from the speakers of his stereo, James refusing at that instant to face the proverbial music, as if the sounds were not a warning that could spur us to action but a cacophonous barrage that had already engulfed us and from which there was no hope of escape, I realized, nowhere to hide, as the first of the denim-clad workmen ascended the top of the stairs.
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Access Copyright Foundation. The author wishes to extend his sincere gratitude to Jay and Hazel of BookThug. Special thanks are due to my editor, Malcolm Sutton, and to Carolyn Code, Rob Sternberg, Jack Hodgins, Greg Hollingshead, Jaime Forsythe, Adam Honsinger, Moez Surani, Katherine Kline, M.A.C. Farrant, Susan Steinberg, Stephanie Sinclair, Emliy Nilsen and Jules Lewis for their generous and insightful readings of the manuscript in whole or in part. The author also wishes to acknowledge the Banff Centre, the Vermont Studio Center, Roberts Street Social Centre and Artscape Gibraltar Point for space in which to work.
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