Document 1

by François Blais

  Credit where credit’s due, let’s start our overview with a famous name: Paule Doyon, whose works will, I hope, be familiar to you. If not, abandon your current reading and rush to your bookstore to acquire Ms. Doyon’s complete works. If your bookstore claims not to have it in stock, change bookstores. After all, life hangs by a mere thread: you could easily get knocked over by a truck as you come out your front door, you could be struck by lightning, suffer an aneurysm, and you’d be dead without having read Paule Doyon, which is really not the done thing in the afterlife, or so I understand. So, which one should you start with? (We have before us a particularly abundant oeuvre.) I suggest you begin with her sapiential writings, such as her famous Livre M (Éditions En Marge), in which she responds definitively to those questions with which the greatest minds have wrestled for two and a half millennia. (What is the meaning of life on earth? Where do we come from? Where are we going?) And all this in a little book of 122 pages, in which she also deals with telepathy, automatic writing, and the possibility of communicating with other planets. Now you know the universe’s biggest secrets, you can die in peace. But I implore you to do no such thing and instead make the trek to the author’s novelistic universe with We Need to Talk about Albert (Stanké), which was a finalist for the Gérald Godin Prize in 1997, and about which Réginald Martel (who is never wrong) said, “This novel has a lot of character, a little humour, and the definitive proof that Ms. Doyon knows how to make her stories exciting right to the very end.”

  Now, since I like you a lot, I’ll tell you a secret (but don’t go spreading it around): a significant portion of Paule Doyon’s work is available without you even having to get off your ass or lay out any cash: by going to her site (www.cafe.rapidus.net/anddoyon/index.html), you can read poems, tales, short comic pieces, and even a whole novel! You don’t believe me? Go and see! Look, just as a teaser, here’s a snippet I chose randomly. A little piece in verse written on the occasion of the loss of a loved one. Hold back your tears if you can.

  No more little dishes

  On the parquet floor

  Nor black hairballs dozing on the carpet

  All the armchairs are empty

  And the doors stay closed

  The house misses you everywhere . . .

  Noir-Noir the cat has softly gone

  Far from pain…

  In the invisible universe he now sleeps

  His velvet paw still trying now and then

  To pat my knee . . .

  I’ll give you a few moments to pull yourself together and then I’ll go on with another literary heavyweight, Mr. Bryan Perro. (Speaking of heavyweights, and you’re going to accuse me again of losing my grip on the subject, especially as we’re already in the middle of a digression, but I have to go with it when I think of it, otherwise I lose my ideas. So, speaking of heavyweights, have you noticed that you often hear that writing is a starving-in-a-garret sort of job, but most of the writers you see on television are pretty chubby? Bryan Perro [since we’re talking about him]: heavier than all of Alexandre Dumas’s characters put together. Victor-Lévy Beaulieu: all the usual words people use to describe his work [“Immense!” “Vast!”] apply equally well to his trousers; Christian Mistral: luckily, coke acts as an appetite suppressant, since without that he’d be big enough to qualify for his own postal code; Michel Brûlé [yes, I am including him as a writer; it’s important to be kind]: should be on the blacklist of every buffet owner in the metropolis. There are of course some exceptions, but by and large I’m right.) Anyway, let’s get back to the topic at hand: Bryan Perro. The towns of Shawinigan and Saint-Mathieu-du-Parc could argue it with us, since he was born in the first and lives today in the second, but he’s important enough in our great town’s cultural life to be considered an honorary Grand-Mérois. Since I am not among his target audience, I haven’t got much to say about this author (but for anyone interested: www.bryanperro.com), except that he’s a perfect example of the saying that the apple never falls far from the tree, Bryan Perro being the son of a certain André Perreault, who wrote for the Saint-Maurice newspaper and amazed us every week by his astonishing ability to cram four hundred adverbs into a five-hundred-word piece.

  The Descôteaux family is another Grand-Mère literary dynasty. You’ll all remember that famous TV show about the Mauricie region, Entre chiens et loups, written by Ms. Aurore Descôteaux between 1985 and 1993, which delighted everyone who found the historical soap Le temps d’une paix too intellectual. You will also remember that in this production, the role of Arthur Grandmaison was played with great panache by Gilles Descôteaux, son of the author, whose serious voice and handlebar moustache made him a retirement-home pin-up. What few people know, however, is that when the acting profession dropped Mr. Descôteaux, he reinvented himself as a singer. What does that have to do with literature? I hear you ask. You’ll understand the stupidity of that question when you’ve taken the trouble to read the lyrics of his songs (www.frmusique.ru/texts/d/descoteaux_gilles/descoteaux.htm). We might have to wait until after he’s dead, as is so often the case, for this poet of the everyday to get the recognition he deserves, but for now, the fact that he’s sold as few CDs as Stendhal sold books during his lifetime only makes him seem better in the eyes of those elite few who understand him. And since I am of course including you in that category, I can’t stop myself from ending with a few choice extracts for you. Such as this quatrain, taken from the incredible “To Love You Better”:

  I see you everywhere now in a child’s grin

  In the lonely tears of a cripple’s heart

  I see you in the sky I even hear you in the wind

  In the greeting of a friend in the song of a bird

  And these two, from his masterpiece, “Your Child Is Not Ours”:

  I pick up the things he leaves lying around

  I make his bed and fold his clothes

  I cater to all of his dietary whims

  As a thank-you he laughs in my face

  Your child is not ours

  But I’ve accepted him out of love

  I wouldn’t want to live with another

  So my dear let me bring him up.

  Ò...10...Ò

  Sébastien Daoust

  So that’s pretty much it for the Grand-Mère literary scene. Impressive, right? (I hope in future you’ll keep your lips zipped instead of calling us all rednecks.) It’s not even an exhaustive list, but the ones I haven’t named are just too obscure for me to bother with here. The most obscure of all is undoubtedly Sébastien Daoust, and the only reason I’m including him now is because, as I mentioned before, he plays a part in this story.

  The back-cover bio on The Death of the Pterodactyl is about as laconic as you can get: “Sébastien Daoust was born in 1972. He studied literature and linguistics at the University of Montreal. He lives in Grand-Mère. The Death of the Pterodactyl is his second published work.” Having the honour of knowing him personally, I am in a position to be able to fill out this summary with the following information: he lives on Seventh, he works for Doral Marine, and he’s in the habit of stopping off at Subway almost every day on his way back from work and slowly savouring a combo while reading the Journal de Montréal. And if you really want to know everything, I might add that he has a marked preference for the foot-long meatball sub with a Diet Coke and a macadamia-nut cookie. You’re starting to figure me out, so you know I’m not really the type to flirt with customers, and if it was left to me, I’d never have discovered that this big, placid boy, with his glasses and his receding hairline, had earned a PhD in literature when he defended, in 2002, a thesis entitled Time in Paul Valéry: A Poetics of Perception (talk about a man dealing with real problems!) and that he had since published two critically acclaimed books.

  If I do know all this, it’s because Mr. Daoust has a bit of a thing for me. I’m really not saying this to puff myself up, but I have the kind of look that intellectuals and artists like. I look kin
d of angular and dumb, a combination that seems, for one reason or another, to appeal to intelligent, anguished, annoying guys. I’m never going to be asked to model for a truckers’ calendar, but I could be quite the heartbreaker at a poetry soirée. I hadn’t been working at Subway for two weeks before I had signed copies of 13 Mechanical and The Death of the Pterodactyl.

  To begin with, he was content to glance at me over his newspaper, looking just long enough to make the message clear, but not so much that I was uncomfortable, and to put just a little too much intensity in his voice when he answered my banal questions (What kind of bread? Do you want it toasted? Swiss or cheddar? etc.). Then, one day, he gathered up all his courage and, with the brazenness of the very timid, broke the ice and initiated a conversation (or, more accurately, a soliloquy) comprising mainly of nervous laughter and poorly disguised bragging. Knowing himself to be entirely devoid of personal charm, he essentially tried to pick me up by bombarding me with his talents as a doctor and writer. He stopped just short of coming right out with, “I write books, do you want to sleep with me?”

  I don’t know what you think, but I don’t reckon it’s really the done thing to give your own book to someone. It’s borderline rude. If you write songs or paint, you can always say, “Come on, I’ll show you my painting,” and even if your song’s terrible or your picture’s dreadful, it’s no big deal, you’ve only wasted a few minutes of your victim’s time. But reading a book takes much longer, and surely you’d have to be pathologically self-obsessed to ask someone to spend four or five hours of their life in your interior universe. At least Sébastien’s books are short. That’s what I told myself as I thanked him for his kind thought. In sixty minutes, stopwatch in hand, I could be all done and dusted with my suitor’s literary output. “You don’t have to read it, you know…” he said with forced indifference. But you only had to look at him to see that he would be suspended in unbearable uncertainty until I’d reassured him of his genius.

  And what exactly is this meatball-sub-loving writer’s prose like? How can I explain it? Let’s just say, to keep things brief, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a guy who wrote a thesis on the poetics of perception in Paul Valéry. It’s nothing like Agatha Christie, if that’s what you’re thinking. In fact, it’s not even anything like Alain Robbe-Grillet. Next to Sébastien Daoust, Samuel Beckett is a total lightweight and James Joyce looks like Patricia MacDonald. The Death of the Pterodactyl comes to just 146 pages. Taking into account the blank spaces at the ends of chapters and the fact that the work proper doesn’t start until page seven, it wasn’t asking the impossible. But still it dragged. To give you some idea, here’s a brief extract, which I’ve copied word for word:

  We were at Jim’s, and Jim was talking to me about antimatter. We were in the purple living room. Jim claimed that it would have made no difference if our universe had been made from antimatter. I was having trouble following the conversation, so absorbed was I in gazing at the walls. Why had Jim chosen such an ugly colour for this room? “But then,” I threw out randomly, “could it be that the universe actually is made of antimatter and we just don’t know it?” Jim said no, everything around us is matter because we have decided it is so. It’s just a matter of convention. “So you’re saying that if our universe was made of antimatter, we would call antimatter matter and vice versa.” Jim replied that that was it exactly. So one fine morning Jim had gone into a paint shop and chosen, from among the millions of available shades, this purple. How strange. “Since we systematically designate everything around us by the word matter, surely that’s the same as saying that antimatter can’t exist.” Jim was going to reply, but was stopped mid-flow by the doorbell. We sat in silence for a long minute, sipping our drinks. The doorbell rang again. “You should go and answer it,” Jim said to me.

  “Why me?”

  “If it’s someone selling something, they’ll want to speak to the master of the house. And since we’re at your house…”

  That seemed logical to me. I got up and went to open the door. It was Quentin. He seemed amazed to see me. “Hello, Quentin. Jim and I have been waiting for you in the purple living room.” I helped him off with his coat, all the while wondering why he’d rung the doorbell at his own house. But people have their little ways.

  This was page thirty-four of The Death of the Pterodactyl, but that’s really neither here nor there, given how much you could mix up the pages without affecting the work’s comprehensibility in the slightest. In it, there is no sign whatsoever of what my guru (Marc Fisher) calls a “narrative arc.” Worse still, there isn’t even the tiniest reference to a pterodactyl. Of course, the next day, once he’d finished working with his boats, he came up to my counter in a tizzy. I pretended not to notice his questioning looks as I prepared his feast. After all, there was no reason I should have read his books already; surely he could give me a few days’ grace. I was hoping another customer would show up, but, as I mentioned earlier, we weren’t the busiest franchise in the chain (to the extent that we wondered, every month-end, how we were going to make ends meet).

  “Well?” he asked at last, as I was giving him his change.

  “Well what?”

  “Well… have you had time to start my books?”

  “Oh! Yes. And I’ve finished them too.”

  “And?”

  The previous evening I’d gone to bed with the firm intention of telling him the truth, which would go something like: “Listen, Seb, I’m sure your books are as good as the guy who reviews for OVNI claims. First off, who am I to dig my heels in against an OVNI reviewer? It’s just not really my cup of tea. And you must have noticed it’s not really anyone’s cup of tea when you got your royalty cheque, right?” But when you’re a hypocrite like me, your firm resolve to tell the truth quickly flies out the window. And, anyway, what right do I have to wreck his day? He’s just made it through eight hours of hard slog making fibreglass hulls and now he just wants to enjoy his juicy foot-long while reading Richard Martineau’s column, after being assured by the girl of his dreams that he totally crushed Kafka. I’m not claiming to be kindness incarnate, but neither am I a superbitch. So I bullshitted. And since I was bullshitting, I wasn’t going to do it by halves. I told him about his virtuosity, his daring; once I got going, I bandied about the names of Broch, Gombrowicz, Buzzati, Zeno of Elea (uttered for the first time in that Subway, no doubt). I’m pretty good at knowing what people want to hear; it’s a kind of gift. Just for good measure, I finished up with a couple of flaws, clearly attributable to the limits of my own mind and to the gaps in my education. I listened to myself talk and I almost managed to convince myself that I had liked his books, forgetting that I’d skimmed them while watching Ghost Hunters on TV. Say what you like, but I offer a damn good service for nine forty-five an hour.

  However, after he left, I thought it over again and wondered if maybe I’d overdone it a bit. I mean, he already had a crush on me, but now he’d be imagining that I was sensitive to his art, which might make him so obsessed with me that I’d never know a moment’s peace again. Perhaps he’d start waiting for me after work, asking me out, constantly begging me to go back to his place, that kind of thing. What would I do then? Quit? Tell him straight, “I lied, I don’t know what got into me, your books are as boring as watching Living Faith Television, and anyway I don’t even know who Zeno of Elea was, I just pulled it out of the air”? I didn’t need to resort to such extreme solutions. The following day, as soon as I set foot in the restaurant, Annick—the girl who opens—told me I’d received a letter “with no stamp on it.” In fact, the only thing on the envelope was my name. When Annick undid the bundle of newspapers, she’d found it slipped between two copies of the Journal de Montréal. It must have been put there between the paperboy coming round and the restaurant opening, and I must admit that I, the world’s laziest person, found it very sweet that someone would get up early for me. The missive went like this:

&nb
sp; Tess,

  I think I won’t come here to eat anymore. It’s a shame—your subs aren’t bad, it’s affordable, and it’s really close to where I live. But I’m in love with you and I think it’s a pretty safe bet that you don’t feel the same way. To carry on seeing you day after day would only make me suffer needlessly, and I’ve long since passed the age when needless suffering seems entertaining. I hope I’ll be able to forget you quickly. However, if for one reason or another you would prefer me not to forget you, you can contact me at this address and this number: (…) But I don’t think you will, so I bid you adieu.

  Sébastien

  He kept his word and never again set foot on our premises. (And I’d be fired on the spot if my boss found out I’d driven away one of our only regular customers.) As far as I was concerned, he was right: I had no desire to tell him not to forget me. If it hadn’t been for this Idea of the Century necessitating his participation (passive but crucial), there’s a strong chance he’d already have done so. Instead, I worry I’ve reignited the flame. I do feel a bit guilty, but it was an exceptional situation. In any case, he would have all the time he needed to forget me for good once I’d made it to Bird-in-Hand.