BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Nikolski
Apocalypse for Beginners
PUBLISHED BY VINTAGE CANADA
Copyright © Éditions Alto and Nicolas Dickner, 2015
English Translation Copyright © 2017 Lazer Lederhendler
Published by arrangement with Éditions Alto Inc.,
Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Vintage Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dickner, Nicolas
[Six degrés de liberté. English]
Six degrees of freedom / Nicolas Dickner; translated by Lazer Lederhendler.
Translation of: Six degrés de liberté.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780345811189
eBook ISBN 9780345811202
I. Lederhendler, Lazer, translator II. Title. III. Title: Six degrés de liberté. English
PS8557.1325S5913 2017 C843’.6 C2017-900584-7
Book design by CS Richardson
Cover art © Tom Gauld
Cover design adapted from an original by Tom Gauld
v4.1
a
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF
LARRY WALTERS.
Contents
Cover
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part Two Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Part Three Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
LISA IS THINKING ABOUT MONEY.
Dust mask strapped to her face, pitchfork in her hands, she flings cakes of guano and gangrene, rhinoceros skeletons and moth-infested mink coats out the attic window—and she is thinking about money.
She thrusts her pitchfork into a pile of old Lundi celebrity magazines glued together with damp and excrement. She plunges into sedimented crusts of culture like a palaeontologist of bad taste. Boy George. Pop singers Michèle Richard and Michel Louvain when they were young. Drew Barrymore’s suicide attempt. Loto-Lundi, ten thousand dollars in prizes, weekly draws. Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery. Another Loto-Lundi ticket. Lisa must have shovelled five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Loto-Lundi. And to think that all that money was won and spent ages ago—and on what? Gadgets, clothes, trips, Christmas presents—all of it now buried in the landfill, burned as calories, dispersed in the atmosphere.
Lisa toils away at the pile. The magazines sail out the window, plummet, and thud into the Dumpster two floors below. Between thuds there are the sounds of the neighbour’s lawn mower, cars rolling down the road, bobolinks in the fields, and the New Holland car dealer’s dog barking at a muskrat. The white noise of summer, like the faint static of an FM radio.
Lisa feels as if she is stuck between two stations. From September to June she navigates the narrow scholastic channel on automatic pilot. No ambiguities, no decisions to make. Summer, however, constantly reminds her that she does not control her destiny. She devises Towers of Babel and voyages around Cape Horn, treks across the Sahara and particle accelerators, but there’s never any money—not even a modest sum—to carry out even the slightest project. The money needed to get a bicycle. Money to see a movie at the drive-in. Money to build a drone, buy a compass, a microscope. Money to take lessons in sailing and kung fu. Money to go out and conquer the world.
At age fifteen, Lisa is in an in-between place: old enough to conceive projects, too young to find anything resembling a real job—and it’s not as if the area is teeming with interesting positions. This summer she had her choice between picking strawberries with seasonal workers from Mexico or helping out her father for a nominal wage; now, as she cleans out the attic of the Baskine house, she wonders if she’d have been better off choosing the strawberry fields. At least she might have picked up some rudimentary Spanish.
For two days now, she has been defenestrating prehistoric pump shoes, coat hangers, rattan chairs with splintered seats, dress forms, peacock feathers, globes, folding stools, bundles of velvet curtains. On her pitchfork she skewers mouse nests, wicker baskets, stacks of the parish bulletin. A cradle adorned with pink and greenish rabbits. Dismantled furniture. A Grundig shortwave radio with its back panel missing, revealing a row of burned-out vacuum tubes. Hotel stationery, props for a stage play. Cap guns. Water guns. Bones.
Dozens of cardboard boxes marked Standard Oil and Чарльэ Баскин overflowing with travel souvenirs. Hand-painted maracas. A velvet painting depicting a full moon over a copse of coconut palms, with the caption Punta Cana at the bottom and Hecho en China on the back. Bottles of spiced rum (empty) and bottles of coconut oil (full). Diving masks, antique Indigenous craftwork blackened with shoe polish. Necklaces made from nuts, seashells, spices, small bones, feathers, Pepsi bottle caps.
The major trade routes of the twentieth century led to this attic, and as she wields her pitchfork, Lisa muses on the geopolitical madness that caused these objects to be desired, bought, accumulated, used, cherished and then piled up in this squalid space, layer by layer in a heap at times indistinguishable from the guano and bat carcasses.
Okay, one last push—another hour and she’s done here.
—
Nicknamed, first, the Haunted Mansion, then the Chemist’s Estate and finally the Fire Trap, the Baskine house is a colossal ruin located halfway between Huntingdon and the US border. Six consecutive owners had renovated it tastelessly and ineptly before it was abandoned to the elements. Its freestone walls, as thick as those of a fortified castle, are crowned with a pretentious cornice and a copper roof that has seen many an economic crisis come a
nd go. It was erected when the Dominion of Canada was spreading gradually westward, and even its current decrepit state exudes the brutal optimism of empires.
Robert Routier had had his eye on the Baskine house for years. For a professional renovator, it represented a sort of ideal, a sublime, artistic version of his renovation business—a kind of antidote to the string of nondescript bungalows he had been fixing up for years, the result being the financial straits in which he currently found himself. He had just turned sixty-four and felt that time was slipping away. He regarded the Baskine house as his last chance to accomplish something, to go out in grand style.
Alas, the thing he coveted belonged to a Chinese multinational. The Chinese were snapping up everything in the vicinity, from woodland to farmland and this heritage homestead along the way. They could be seen combing the region in rented Fords, armed with hard-shell cases and satellite telephones. This discreet annexation of the area did not generate any visible commercial activity or profit. It was a purely fiscal offensive, one that eluded common sense, but even in the realm of irrationality and tax strategy, the Baskine house could not be justified, and after languishing in a real estate portfolio for a few years it was finally put back on the market during the financial crisis.
Robert Routier pounced on the opportunity with the zeal of a drug addict.
The Fire Trap was sold without legal warranty, and a cursory visit was enough to understand why. While its appearance on the outside was unprepossessing, the inside was worse still. The place looked like a deserted squat, an impression amplified by the huge hazy mirrors that hung facing each other, thereby creating an infinite corridor flecked with nebulae and black holes and inducing nausea when contemplated for too long. Aside from this gloomy Hall of Mirrors, what characterized the building was the general absence of anything approaching a right angle. The whole place sagged and tilted. The air stank, the wallpaper was peeling, the floors were rotten. But the building’s condition in no way impinged on Robert Routier’s determination: love is blind, deaf and even a bit stupid around the edges. The transaction was notarized in forty-eight hours, as if there was an urgent need to founder once and for all.
Robert and daughter got down to business on la Saint-Jean, the June 24 civic holiday, and since then every day has brought its share of hidden defects. Now the work threatens to drag on until Christmas, and Robert has started to wonder under his breath if he hasn’t, by the by, just made the latest in a spectacular run of wrong moves.
—
The afternoon is drawing to a close when Robert pokes his head through the attic trap door, eyebrows white with plaster, eyes ringed with the outlines of his glasses. His daughter has done good work; the floor has been cleared, scraped and brushed to a relative degree of cleanliness. Lisa, whose grey silhouette can be made out in the dust-laden air, is busy inspecting the contents of one last cardboard box. Robert wrinkles his nose. It smells of soot and pulverized mummies.
“Five o’clock!”
Through the round, glassy eyes of her goggles, Lisa looks up at her father. Spread out around her on the floor, garage sale–style, are a dozen antique cameras. She pulls off her dust mask and examines the Leica in the murky light falling through the dormer window.
“Can I keep them? Please?”
He picks up the folding Polaroid and leans his nose closer. The camera stinks of carrion.
“What are you going to do with them?”
She shrugs. “Dunno. I’d just like to keep them.”
Robert rubs his moustache—he does this whenever he’s bemused—raising a small cloud of plaster. After a while he gestures magnanimously with his hand: having cleaned out the Augean stables, his Lady Lisa has certainly earned the right to keep a handful of knick-knacks if she so wishes. To each her spoils.
They go back down into the open air. Lisa has hitched her mask up onto her forehead like a warrior’s helmet and balances her box of foul-smelling cameras on her hip. She wears an enigmatic smile. Contrary to what she has just claimed, she knows very well what she intends to do with the cameras.
After pulling the garden hose onto the front lawn, they wash up with a broom and blasts of water. Lisa looks at the pile of carcasses brimming in the Dumpster, unable to believe she pitched all of it out through the window.
They drive back home in Robert’s old Dodge Ram with the windows rolled down. There’s a nice breeze, but Lisa feels congested. She coughs and blows her nose and curses. Stupid attic.
They ride through the woods and fields as if they’re going nowhere fast. Just past the road sign announcing Frontière É.-U. U.S.A. Border 500m, they reach their destination. The road on the right leads to a gravel parking lot edged with a row of mailboxes. A sign near the Dumpster proclaims Bienvenue au Domaine Bordeur. The sign was targeted a few years ago by an inspired vandal, and one can still see Bienvenue au Domaine Boredom—capitale mondiale de l’ennui spray-painted in Day-Glo orange.
The reason this insignificant trailer park bears the name Domaine Bordeur is unknown. It’s commonly thought to be a deformation of the word border. More disconcerting, however, is the term domaine, which suggests the inhabitants dominate something. No one harbours any illusions on that score.
The streets beyond the parking lot are laid out more or less haphazardly. The oldest houses were towed there as hunting cabins when the forest still stretched in every direction. Back then, the place was inhabited only during the summer. Gradually, the cabins gave way to summer cottages and the cottages to permanent homes. The most recent houses of the Domaine were mass-produced on assembly lines, wrapped in plastic like new iPods, delivered by truck and unpacked on site.
But old or recent, now the supposedly mobile homes all rest on concrete pilings and boast the hookups of modern civilization: electricity, telephone and septic tank. Yet, despite this, the Domaine has retained its transient character, its demoralizing fragility.
As soon as she gets home, Lisa hops down from the van with her box of cameras and makes straight for her father’s workshop, an old Maersk container sitting behind the house.
The fluorescent tubes flicker on and illuminate the walls lined with an astonishing set of tools: handsaws dating back to the interwar years but finely honed; screwdrivers the likes of which are no longer produced; chisels and gouges forged by anonymous master smiths. Lisa often wondered where the tools came from. When pressed, Robert would mention yard sales or obscure inheritances, but his stories always smacked of things left unsaid, kept secret. All Lisa knows is that on Saturday nights when his spirits are low, her father visits his tools as one might visit the altar of a malevolent divinity, or a box of dog-eared Playboys.
She spreads her cameras out on the workbench. She doesn’t know the first thing about cameras, but this looks like a good haul: a Kodak Retina IIa, a Leica III in its leather case, a Mercury Satellite 127, little black plastic Instamatic 110s, not to mention the patriarch of the box, the folding Polaroid. Lisa switches on the work light, takes out a can of methanol, some brushes and rags, and sets about restoring lustre to these ancestors.
As she brushes away, she can’t stop sniffling and coughing. What exactly did she pick up in that filthy attic? Asbestosis or neurotoxic spores, or remnants of the Spanish flu? Or maybe that disease the bats have brought up from the States, white-nose syndrome.
By the time her father calls her in for supper, the cameras are gleaming under the lamp, but they still reek of the attic. They’ll need to be aired out. She delicately stows them in the box and washes her hands three times with lots of soap.
On the table are two steaming platefuls of spaghetti à la Bob—tomato paste and imitation bacon bits—which they wolf down in devout silence. Lisa feels a gentle warmth radiating down her arms. She may not be learning Spanish, but she is knocking her biceps into shape.
Once she has gulped down her last mouthful, Lisa gives the dishes a hurried wash and announces she’s going out for the evening. On the way out, she grabs her grey hoodie and the
smelly box of cameras and shoots out of the house like an artillery shell. No need to say where she’s going.
Outside, the night is perfect in the way only an August night can be. Somewhere on the edge of the park a dog barks. Some neighbours are engaged in a shouting match. Venus has sunk low on the horizon. In front of the house next door, Mr. Miron labours away at his Datsun’s motor, a portable lamp suspended over his head. Focused like Kasparov up against Deep Blue, he seems to be asking himself if in the end he will take the lazy route and replace the whole engine block.
Lisa walks up Bonheur Street, dodges the young Evel Knievels killing time by jumping the speed bumps on their BMXs, cuts across the yard of the house that has been on the market for two years, and goes up Allégresse Street to the Gaieté cul-de-sac.
The Le Blanc residence sits at the end of the blind alley, where the strawberry fields of the Covey Hill farm begin. Dozens of Mexicans are flown in each summer. Mexicans, Guatemalans and soon Salvadorans, Hondurans—Olmecs of every description. They land in May. Harvest the lettuce, strawberries, cabbage. Leave when corn season is done. But this late in the summer, the strawberry fields are deserted and the Le Blanc house stands there like an outpost of civilization.
Lisa goes in without knocking. The screen door snaps at her heels.
Sitting on the couch, Mrs. Le Blanc paints her toenails while reading Danish for Dummies, held open in front of her with a hair clip. She is an attractive woman and, contrary to Lisa’s father, still has a substantial portion of her life ahead of her. Half turning toward Lisa, she greets her with a big smile.
“Hi there, sweetheart! Éric is in his sanctuary.”
Éric’s room actually measures up to its nickname. No dirty clothes lying around on the floor, no old socks, no pongy running shoes, though, truth to tell, Lisa can’t remember the last time she saw Éric wearing socks or shoes. The desk is free of clutter, and the books on the shelves are arranged according to a complicated system. In the corner of the bedroom the birdcage is open, and three utterly identical budgies are perched atop the bookcase, each on its preferred volume.
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