Document 1

by François Blais

  Do you believe in God? No.

  What’s your computer wallpaper? A fat naked lady, put there by the neighbour. He finds that kind of thing funny.

  City or country? Country.

  Winter or summer? Winter.

  Where do you see yourself in ten years? Here.

  What are your aims in life? To spend two months in Pennsylvania.

  Name of your best friend. Tess. [That’s better!]

  Do you have a lucky charm? The TV remote.

  If you could meet anyone you wanted, dead or living, who would it be? Elizabeth Siddal.

  What’s on your walls? A sketch of Elizabeth Siddal, by I don’t know who; Elizabeth Siddal as Ophelia in Millais’s painting; Elizabeth Siddal playing the harp, with flowers in her hair, in a Rossetti painting.

  What’s under your bed? Boxes.

  Favourite meal? Tess’s mother’s bouillabaisse.

  Clothing style. Salvation Army.

  Do you like your job? Not applicable.

  Where would you like to be right now? Bird-in-Hand.

  Do you think we are alone in the universe? Who’s “we”?

  Who’s your hero? Um . . .

  What word or expression do you overuse? Good question, I’ll have to ask Tess.

  What are you afraid of? Tess dying. [Even though I’ve told you I’m immortal.]

  When was the last time you lied? Yesterday, when I ticked “yes” to the question “Are you actively looking for work?” on my monthly declaration.

  Do you think you have a supernatural power? I can communicate telepathically with the girl in the white coat who brings her dog to play in the yard at Laflèche College.

  Do you believe in soulmates? Of course!

  Which historical figure would you like to be? Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (If a pre-Raphaelite painter counts as a historical figure.)

  What would you get as a tattoo? Nothing.

  What are your political views? I read somewhere that Québec Solidaire was proposing an increase in social security payments. So Québec Solidaire.

  Who did you vote for in the last election? I’m not registered to vote.

  What is your biggest regret? I don’t do enough to have any chance of regretting anything.

  What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning? Pee.

  What’s the last thing you do before going to bed? Take out my contacts.

  At what age do you think you’ll die? I don’t know. How about 130?

  Are you happy? Why the fuck should I be?

  What time is it now? 3:45.

  Ò...22...Ò

  In Which We Learn The Extraordinary Way in Which Tess and Jude Met Their Idiotic Neighbour

  Okay, I know it shouldn’t really go here, but there’s nothing new to report right now and it doesn’t fit any better anywhere else either, so I’m going to tell you, since I’ve been asked to, the story of how we met the moron who lives in the basement. It’s a pretty amazing story, you’ll see. [A plethora of narrative units coming up! Well done!]

  At that time (we’re talking around three years ago here), I spent a lot of my leisure time smashing up Krauts and Japs in Call of Duty: World at War on Xbox 360. Early every afternoon I’d make myself some tea, fire up the machine, choose my team (red army, naturally: I tried to fight for the Wehrmacht once but my heart wasn’t in it, it was awful shooting the good Russians), and wait until there were enough participants to start playing. Although there were a lot of us on the network, I often saw the same names coming up because I logged on at the same time every day, and I flattered myself that I knew some of them pretty well. For example, Louvikov was a coward, the kind of guy who’d skulk in your shadow to make sure you’d be the one to take a bullet if you were ambushed; Scarface76, on the other hand, was a good team player, and would always leave you first-aid kits if he could see that you were more banged up than him; Badkid (who we suspected was a girl, for no particular reason: he/she didn’t even have a microphone) was a crack sniper but had a tendency to ignore the leader’s orders, etc. In Call of Duty, like all online multiplayer games, English is the working language, but you often end up finding out the nationality of your teammates, most of whom revert instinctively to their mother tongue in times of tragedy: “Putain! Fait chier!”; “Fuck!”; “Mrdat!”; “Schwanzlutscher!” (wow, we’ve got a German in the unit!) “Pukimak!”; “Horebukk!”; “Mierda!” I wasn’t exempt from this rule, and occasionally I let slip, for example if I had the misfortune to step on a landmine, a heartfelt “Hostie de calice!” before I gave up the ghost; or let out a “Kin, mon tabarnak!” if I managed to bayonet a particularly tenacious enemy. One day, when I was lying in wait with TheMidnightRambler behind a ruined church in a dangerous sector in Stalingrad, I took a bullet in the thigh when I thought I was covered. “Ciboire!” I exclaimed. I heard my companion guffaw. “What’s so funny?” I asked him, a bit peeved. “It’s just funny to hear someone speaking Québécois,” he replied. Well! I’d been on a team with this TheMidnightRambler for weeks without ever suspecting he was a compatriot. As the bullets whistled past our ears and mortar shells made rocks and clumps of earth rain down, we started up a conversation. “Where are you from exactly?” he asked me.

  “Grand-Mère. It’s about half an hour away from Trois-Rivières.”

  “Are you serious? I’m from Grand-Mère too.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “I’m really not!”

  I couldn’t see why he would have made it up, but it was too much of a coincidence for me to just take him at his word. Today 30 million Xbox 360s have been sold around the world (so let’s say a few million less if we go back a couple of years), and Call of Duty: World at War was one of the most popular titles in 2008. Around the world there were probably a few hundred thousand of us playing regularly. It was therefore highly unlikely, statistically speaking, that two guys living in the same godforsaken hole in Centre-Mauricie should find themselves next to each other under enemy fire, trying to stop General von Weichs’s troops from crossing the Volga. “All right, prove it: what are the first three digits of your phone number?”

  “Five three eight.”

  “And what’s your closest store?”

  “I’d say Videotron or Paquin Furniture.”

  “…”

  “Hey! JudeTheObscure, you still there?”

  “Um…yes. I’m just falling off my chair. You’re not going to believe this, but I can see Paquin Furniture from my window.”

  “You’re on Sixth?”

  “Fifth. Corner of Fourth Street.”

  “Now I’m the one falling off my chair… Hang on, let’s try something…”

  “What?”

  “Turn the TV volume down.”

  “Done.”

  “Right, now I’m going to bang on the ceiling three times. Well?”

  “Fuck me, I can’t believe it! You’re that long-haired guy who listens to Slayer…”

  “And you’re the guy who lives with the girl with permanent bitchface…” [Huh! You never told me that bit!]

  “Um…yes, that’s right. Tess.”

  “I didn’t know you could hear my music.”

  “It doesn’t bother us.”

  I invited him to come up, and five minutes later he was slumped on our couch, in the spot that quickly became known as “the neighbour’s spot,” his family-sized bottle of Carling Black Label between his legs. When Tess came home from work that evening, and I told her all about how I got to know the bum from downstairs, she was as blown away as I was. In fact, the almost supernatural nature of this meeting stopped us, for a long time, from seeing what a hassle it really was. It took a good two months before I dared admit to myself that, back on that gloomy afternoon, I’d have been better off letting the Battle of Stalingrad play out
without me. At worst, Hitler would have won, but that would have been a lesser evil. We have no defence against the neighbour; we can’t even pretend we aren’t in: he can hear us walking around. When I finally confessed to Tess how distraught I was, hoping to get a few words of comfort from her (like, “Come on, you couldn’t have known…”), she drove the knife in further by noting that the meeting defied the laws of probability to such an extent that if I’d bought a lottery ticket that day instead of playing Xbox, we’d be millionaires now. Woe!

  Part Three

  By Tess

  Ò...23...Ò

  Chevrolet Monte Carlo

  It tickles me whenever I think about it: since yesterday we’ve been the owners of a vehicle. More precisely, a yellow 2003 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. By the way, you’ll have noticed that Jude has just passed the torch back to me after coming up with almost exactly two thousand words (which includes his ingenious copying and pasting of my instructions), which contravenes the principles of balance between parties advocated by every literary theorist from Aristotle to Marc Fisher, and now you’ll think we’re ridiculous. But we’ve decided it’s better this way. Besides, we did some research and learned that in author pairs there’s usually one who writes. It guarantees stylistic consistency. (Although it would astonish me if you could detect any major differences between my writing and Jude’s, unless you’re one of those nit-pickers who imagines differences between 7UP and Sprite, between Molson and O’Keefe, or between political parties.) And above all, the thing is, I enjoy writing. (Whereas it frightens Jude a bit, who’s always afraid of getting it wrong.) If I was a real writer, with published books and articles about me in Lettres Québécoises, I wouldn’t be so keen to say such things; I’d say that writing hurts, that it rips my guts out, that it’s a painful but necessary act, that kind of nonsense. But I don’t see why I should try to fool you in this situation. Anyway, since yesterday we’ve been owners of a yellow Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and right now the neighbour is giving it condescending looks and trying to convince us that we’ve been screwed over. But we know it’s really because he’s stung to the quick that we didn’t ask him for his opinion even though he prides himself on knowing everything there is to know about cars. “Well, ’s none of my business, but you ought to have gone with Japanese. This is just a bundle of trouble, this guzzles twice as much gas as a Civic, and the parts on this one are always crapping out. At least in the old models you had an eight, but now they’ve come down to six. It’ll take you a good ten seconds to get from zero to sixty.” I let him talk. He’s barking up the wrong tree if he thinks he’s going to upset me with his Mr. Know-it-all blather. I have no idea what he’s on about with this stuff about six and eight, but I can’t even imagine a situation in my life right now when I’d need to get to a hundred kilometres an hour in under ten seconds.

  However, I must admit that the experts do agree with him. Among others, Amyot Bachand, from auto123.com, talks about the Monte Carlo in a rather lukewarm fashion, but, in my opinion, if your mother named you Amyot, you ought to refrain from public discourse. Without completely flaming the Monte Carlo, he just about gives it a passing grade and describes it as “a good comfortable touring car, blessed with good, reliable roadholding.” As for its good points, the size of the trunk means you can easily fit in two golf bags, apparently a major plus for Amyot. But on the performance side, things go downhill a bit: “A good twenty extra horsepower would would be nice, if not a supercharged engine like the one in the Pontiac Grand Prix coupe.” If you say so, Amyot, if you say so. But if you’re as pressed for time as all that, surely you could just leave your house a bit earlier. Apart from that, the Monte Carlo seems to have a comfortable and functional interior, and behaves pretty well (for a car, behaving means roadholding and braking), despite the brake pedal being too high.

  On the same site, one Éric Descarries provides a second opinion, which more or less matches his colleague’s, and finishes up his report by listing the Monte Carlo’s specifications. It’s like contemporary poetry or a spy film: you have no idea what’s going on, but from time to time it’s beautiful. Here:

  Engine: V6 3.4l

  Optional engine: V6 3.8l

  Horsepower/torque: 180 hp at 5200 rpm/205

  psi at 4000 rpm

  Optional engine: 200 hp at 5200 rpm and 225

  psi at 4000 rpm

  Transmission: automatic four-speed

  Optional transmission: none

  Front brakes: disk

  Rear brakes: disk

  Standard safety features: ABS, antiskid

  Front suspension: independent

  Rear suspension: independent

  Wheelbase: 2.807m

  Length: 5.026m

  Width: 1.836m

  Height: 1.403m

  Weight: 1515kg; 1535 kg (SS)

  0–100km/h: 9.6s

  Top speed: 190km/h

  Turning circle: 11.6m

  Trunk capacity: 447l

  Fuel tank: 64.3l

  Fuel consumption: 12.6l/100km

  Tires: 225/60R16

  Optional tires: 225/60R16 performance (SS)

  Average insurance premium: $950

  Overall warranty: 3 years/60,000km

  Engine warranty: 5 years/100,000km

  Rust warranty: 3 years/60,000km

  Bodywork warranty: 6 years/160,000km

  Head-on collision: 5/5

  Side-impact collision: 3/5

  Quebec sales of model in last year: 582

  Depreciation: 47%

  There are people on this earth for whom this business of 11.6-metre turning circle means something, who might exclaim, “Wow, 11.6 metres! Now that’s what I call a turning circle!” Jude’s father is one of those people. When we asked him if he’d like to advise us on the purchase of our car, he immediately replied, “Perfect, tomorrow morning we’ll go to Grenier’s in Saint-Étienne.” Two words made us frown: “morning” and “go.” We let the first pass without comment; we knew it wouldn’t be any use arguing. Jude’s father is one of those people who think that things should be done in the morning or not at all. So we gave in to his “morning,” but as for his “go,” we allowed ourselves to point out that these days it would be useless—if not absurd—to go in person to a dealership. I mean, what would we even find at Grenier’s in Saint-Étienne-des-Grès? A hundred machines at the very most, while 329,000 vehicles were listed just on autohebdo.net. But that didn’t impress him. According to him, there was only one way to do this: man to man. You never know what you’re going to get on the internet. And we didn’t need three hundred thousand cars, we only needed one. End of discussion.

  So we found ourselves—Jude, his father, and me—the next morning, in the J.-M. Grenier lot, on Chemin des Dalles, Saint-Étienne-des-Grés. A very enthusiastic gentlemen (probably J.-M. himself, Jean-Marc, Jean-Marie, or Jean-Michel) welcomed us as if he’d always dreamed of meeting us, and immediately started showing off his cars to us, starting with the most expensive. Since he was talking solely to Jude’s dad, we could wander around the lot as we pleased. We read the cars’ technical specs, trying to unravel the mystery, throwing out theories about what a drivetrain could be or a limited-slip differential, playing at making each other guess the prices. “How much do you think this one is?”

  “Okay…I’ll go with three thousand five hundred.”

  “Way off! Fourteen thousand, my girl.”

  “Oh. Right. But that red one over there is much more attractive and only costs five thousand.”

  “But the red one is a 1998 and this is a 2007.”

  The first time we went past the Monte Carlo, we didn’t even bother looking at its specs. In our minds, a car like that would cost an arm and a leg. They could have told us a six-figure sum and we wouldn’t have been surprised. It was only at the very end that Jude, out of curiosity, went over for a closer look. �
��That can’t be right!”

  “What can’t be right?”

  “Guess how much it costs.”

  “Sixty thousand?”

  “Ten times less! Can you believe it?”

  “Six thousand?”

  “Five thousand eight hundred, to be precise.”

  “That’s almost in our price range.”

  “Yes…only $2,000 over it.”

  “And we’re not the kind of people to go crazy over a car.”

  “No, we’re not like that at all.”

  “But you’ve got to admit it’s a damn fine machine.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “But obviously we’d be pretty ashamed of ourselves if anybody caught us swooning over a car.”

  “Yes, we’d have trouble looking at ourselves in the mirror for a couple of days. Remember how awful we felt that time we downloaded the Rihanna album.”

  “Yeah, that made us feel pretty soiled.”

  We were interrupted by Jude’s father, who was keen to show us a grey Mazda Protogé5, tagged at $4,900, but that Jean-Marie, in a splurge of generosity, would let go for $4,500. We wouldn’t find a better deal, the two gentlemen were adamant on that score, it didn’t even have a hundred thousand kilometres on it, and it’d had its rust coating done every year. We glanced at it quickly, but from our point of view it looked like any old car you might see on the road or in a parking lot. We nodded our heads with a great deal of conviction and spouted some enthusiastic onomatopoeia, just to show Jean-Marie that we weren’t ungrateful, that we recognized the enormous favour he was doing us with his $400 discount. We finished up by saying we’d come back to pick it up tomorrow, to give us time to get the money together, and we parted with a manly handshake. As we left, we asked Jude’s father what he thought of the Monte Carlo, for no reason in particular. He stared at the object for a few seconds, then just shrugged his shoulders and sniffed disdainfully. Jude says he used to have the same reaction when confronted with Jude’s report cards. It doesn’t make the top ten of his favourite childhood memories.