by Glenn Grant
“Stardust Boulevard” is the first of six short stories and novellas written by Daniel Sernine between 1980 and 1989, all set in a never-ending Carnival in a postcataclysmic North American city, unnamed, but presumably Montreal. The whole cycle was collected and published in two volumes. This story, from Tesseracts, is the only one of them thus far published in English. “Influences on these stories,” Sernine writes, “can be tracked to Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the clip of Anderson & Vangelis’ ‘Friends of Mr. Cairo,’ the careers of Québécois racing-car pilot Gilles Villeneuve and American rock star Jim Morrison, black-and-white detective movies of the forties, Doors and Eagles songs from the seventies, as well as the general mood and certain events of the ‘peace and love’ era—and Sernine’s feeling of having missed something great because he was too quiet and a few years too young.”
* * *
Morning. Fountain Place. The square is in shadow and will remain so for long hours yet, because buildings border it on three sides. As I sit in the shade looking up at a boundless blue sky, the fresh morning air soothes the fevers of the night.
The Place is deserted. It couldn’t be otherwise: the morning calm, the morning mood implies solitude. I’d be startled to see someone else here. I wonder—was it possible to find yourself alone like this, to feel alone, at peace, in the days when there were billions of people on this planet?
My cough reverberates sharply between the façades.
It’s so vast here, the wind blows so freely I find it hard to imagine that it was once unbearably crowded; perhaps not in this neighbourhood of tall buildings and esplanades.
The concrete rim I’m sitting on is still cool from the night. I don’t remember deciding to sit down. That’s one of the benefits of being stoned: you don’t have to decide what you’ll do or say; some apparently independent mental mechanism looks after it.
Running water. The soft gurgle is that of city water rather than a brook. It rises within a thin glass wall and streams down the outer surface. With a little imagination it might be a curtain of water. From one level to another it has been cascading for decades, polishing the surfaces and rounding off the rough edges. I can’t find it in my heart to resent the person who dreamt up these concrete blocks, these rectilinear falls and square pools, a century ago. They have a beauty of their own.
The tall façades are lifeless. Just as well. The only time I saw them in motion they were bending over to grab me. Very unpleasant. Now they are empty, deserted. Not a face at any of the windows, not a curtain fluttering; there must be apartments that no one’s gone into for decades. I don’t know whether the architect who created this apartment complex had imagined it fully occupied; it can’t ever have been the case, anyway, since that was around the time of the Big Sweep. Now only the last two or three floors are lived in. And sometimes one of the unoccupied apartments—when teenagers from the lower town feel like a change of scene.
Well, what do you know. I’m not alone any more. Someone is coming down from one of the top floors by a rope fastened to a balcony. Maher Stelson, of course, unless someone else has had the same idea. He could use the elevator to do his shopping and take his daily exercise, but the rope is … more fitting.
Except that one of these days he’s going to go splat on the esplanade. Blood and brains all over the place. That’ll keep us amused for a while. Nice of him.
In the meantime I’m going in. I’m no longer alone with my morning.
* * *
Caught up in a farandole, a great motley caterpillar that gets longer with every wriggle. I was stoned before I came, and here I am on Stardust Boulevard cavorting under the Carnival lanterns without really meaning to.
Cavorting.… Perhaps finding.…
It isn’t very crowded—it never is, even if nearly the whole town is here—but the blare of the loudspeakers is deafening: music, laughter and exclamations, excited voices. You get used to the contradiction of hearing the noise of a lively crowd when there isn’t one; anybody not in the know would put it down to being stoned.
A little hand, tepid, soft, slightly limp, takes mine on the left. I turn and see a small woman behind me, a girl perhaps. She’s simply dressed: fringed jacket over a flowered blouse. Curly, blond locks over a white face and a sad smile. Deep, shadowed eyes that look elsewhere.
The hand holding my right is icy. The woman is tall and slender; greendelight has turned her into a double-jointed marionette. I see her capering about, pliable bones going every which way. She seems to be able to do anything with her body and still hold together by some miracle. Her face is mauve underneath the pink frizz, three green ovals surround her mouth and eyes. I can’t see her costume clearly; lots of veils and feathers, a train streaming out behind her as she rushes along. But her eyes … her eyes when she turns around and looks right through me, laughing wildly … I break the chain and leave the farandole.
I begin working my way against the flow of the parade. I’ll be able to see everyone this way. And perhaps I’ll find what I’m looking for.
Image after image. I don’t see them come, I don’t see them go. I live only in a very finished present that excludes all continuity. To keep it that way, I light up another joint.
The pageant goes on. Characters the size of elephants, escaped from a vial of greendelight. Floating in front of a brilliantly lit UFO, a large alien advances, toga white, hair silver, face blue with an enigmatic beauty. Around him little green men dance in a circle.
Here comes a grotesque lunar excursion module made of balsa wood and silver paper, supported by two trotting legs emerging from its blast pipe. Half a dozen ungainly midgets in space suits bounce around it with the comic slow-motion of astronauts.
A huge, silky dove, washbasin white, skims the ground. I pass under one of its stiff, slowly beating wings, coming out with my hair covered in confetti-sequins thrown by the Priestesses of Peace, their eyes perpetually turned heavenward.
Here is Christ. On his big cardboard cross he’s laughing his head off while some skinheads in orange togas prance around him with cymbal and fife.
The balloons have passed by. I watch them go, then turn to find myself face to face with a dragon.
It undulates, a thing of crepe paper and streamers with a fabulous head—a real oriental demon. It spits fire and people draw back, shrieking, excited.
A woman surges forward, twirling in the space cleared by the dragon’s breath. It’s the junkie I just left, the green and mauve one. Her laughter is demented, her eyes more glittering than ever. The long veils swirl around her, and the rosy hair looks as though electrified by a Van de Graaff generator.
People fall silent and watch. A reeling drunk bumps into the nearest loudspeaker stand and knocks it over. A resonant sputter: the music, laughter and exclamations drop a tone.
She dances, dances, a whirling dervish, twisting and turning, an eddy of colour.
In front of the dragon’s head.
That stops its progress and undulates where it stands.
Its ferocious eyes trained on her.
She dances, spins.
Throws herself down on her knees, back arched, arms thrown wide, throat proffered beneath the smoking muzzle.
With a roar of flame, it blasts.
* * *
I’m hazy about the time, but there’s no mistaking the sun’s noonday glare. I would have thought I’d sleep longer, and yet here I am outdoors again, still stoned, but coughing a little less.
Beneath the burning sun the city stretches out in lawns and esplanades, its harmonious buildings rising almost everywhere. All these uninhabited architects’ challenges, these sculptural dwellings of glass and concrete, have become monuments. Or memorials?
Their pinnacles pierce the clear sky like blades.
On the esplanade—which one? they have names, I think—Chris and Maryse are seated on the concrete border of an immense square flower bed in the full sunlight.
Should I go up to them? Th
ey don’t seem to be arguing—even that is too much.
I move forward.
As I walk towards them they remain motionless, apparently silent, looking vaguely at the horizon.
Something is placed between them. What? A candle.
Maryse becomes aware of my presence and recognizes me. A smile—tender? knowing?—lights her thin, angular face.
I draw near.
The candle is lit. In full sunlight. This mania for messages! I don’t think I’ll stay long.
* * *
Stardust Boulevard. The Carnival plays on. The cafés are on a parallel artery, Bloomgarden Street. Why this name? The only things blooming are the café terraces and, behind heavy doors at the foot of staircases, the dens.
No festoons of lights over the street here, only lamps on the café walls.
I come out of Life on Mars. I’d only found John, Guy and Cornelius, all three already half-stoned. We talked for a bit, with long pauses, like old buddies. Then I left them.
Moonlight Café. Faces I’ve seen before, a few I actually know. I pick a small table on the second terrace, the one overlooking the street on the corner of the Carouseway.
O’Reilly’s doublewhammy. Nothing better for my cough. The first shotglass still makes me wince. But the others slide down easily, and their heat decongests my lungs.
The Carnival music penetrates even here, of course. And the laughter, the exclamations, the excited voices. Powerful loudspeakers.
Now and then the sound of a firecracker, the faint whiff of laughing-gas. Occasionally, bubblelights go by, chased by children shrill with fatigue. It’s late.
The Carouseway is not lit. At the end of this dark trench I can see a slice of Stardust Boulevard. Like a stage set from the very back of the theatre. Brilliantly lighted.
Sarabandes. A cavalcade. But there is more noise than there are people. I muse on what Carnivals must have been like before the Big Sweep, when there were millions and millions of people in the cities. New Orleans! Venice! Quebec! Nice! Trinidad! Rio! It must have been delirious. I’ve never seen anything like that; it’s hard to imagine.… But it must have been hell to make them come to that decision. I’m not one to complain about the Big Sweep, anyway. How could you—how did you—merely survive in this city when there were a thousand times more people? It’s beyond comprehension, like trying to picture the immensity of the galaxy. In any case, no one complains about the Big Sweep these days, not even old people; they’re just glad to be able to breathe freely.
The thing is, if the Big Sweep had really succeeded there’d be no Earthlings left.
“Munchies, mister?”
Why not? The boy is perhaps twelve, thirteen. Dark-haired, pretty. His made-up eyes have an equivocal look. He carries his munchies in a basket like a flower girl her roses. I select a yellow one.
“Munchies? Munchies?”
He moves off, threading his way between the tables. I look away.
Well, now. There’s a face I’ve seen recently. On the first terrace, the one at street level. Beside the wrought-iron railing. Alone at a table.
The blond from the farandole.
That mop of hair like pale seaweed gathered on the shore. Bizarre: one long, curled strand; one long, frizzed strand; one curled; one frizzed. Two panels of alternating threads drape a pale, so pale, face.
Dark, unfathomable eyes.
Something strange. I can’t put my finger on it.
Flickering. The girl and her table are flickering like a candle flame in a draft. The munchy is working.
I look towards the Boulevard. The lighted scene stands out like a series of frames on a film strip.
More inflatable allegories. A large, rotund tree. Then another and another, prancing along. Next a cohort of flowers, their faces indistinguishable at the centre of their corollas.
Now I see only one frame at a time. The receding ones fade out behind one another, away from the present. The coming images are still blurred, transparent, ahead of reality.
Everything radiates gold. The golden gleam of the torches. The golden lightbulbs in the illuminated wreaths. The gold lamé of some of the costumes. The sousaphones and tubas of a brass band.
My camera eye reverts to the terrace. The pale-faced little blond has left. Is that her disappearing down Bloomgarden Street? Too bad.
The munchy is already losing its potency. It’s just candy.
Another shot of doublewhammy and I’ll be off to the Straynight Cabaret.
* * *
The sky has changed. No, not the sky: it has stayed blue, limpid. But what must be a wind of very high altitude is pushing big white clouds along. It creates an atmosphere, a very special light, a continual contrast between chiaroscuro and full sun. I don’t like this weather; the light is too harsh, too brusque in its variations, and I feel threatened, uncomfortable. Such days put me in a very odd mood. Not really depressive, a sort of aggravated consciousness. Of time fleeting. Time wasted. Of dabblings leading nowhere. Of the inanity of doing anything.
Uptown, where the daring but empty buildings are—empty, but carefully maintained for aesthetic reasons—robot-sweepers stream along the esplanades and automatic mowers whirr in the parks. On the lawns the idlers flourish. In Century Park I catch sight of Philip underneath the great trees.
Philip passes the time making art objects.
They’re fine. You can’t deny the things he does are fine. They’re difficult to describe. Sculpture? They’re more like three-dimensional collages. Stained glass and precious stones assembled on delicate metal frames.
He’s just finished one and is showing it in the park. Standing on its granite pedestal it looks to me like a cylinder in shades of sapphire, amethyst and garnet, set in silver. Apparently it’s supposed to sing as well, at dawn and dusk. Rapid variations of light and heat activate chords memorized in the very structure of crystal and gems.
I stop beside the artist in front of the pedestal.
“Has it got a title?”
“I’m open to suggestion.”
He’s almost bald, with a greying beard. And yet he’s not so old. But burnt out. Why? Because he’s put too much of himself into his works? They’re stale as dregs. Or so it seems to me. But perhaps that’s the way he’s made. Who am I to judge?
“So—what do you suggest?”
I think of the candle in full sun.
“Leisure Society.”
I don’t think he appreciates it. I move away.
Seated on the edge of the man-made lake, a little girl searches gravely in her bag of marbles. She’s having fun. Is she having fun? Perhaps; she’s too young to be bored. She’s having fun throwing them in the pond to make circles.
Passing close to her I notice that the marbles are jewels. Emeralds, diamonds, rubies, roughly cut.
They make a very ordinary plop as they hit the water.
* * *
The dens.
Smoky, sewer-dark.
Syncopated flashes above the sweaty, gleaming torsos, dancing, dancing. The music is a solid block. And a powerful rhythm, making the room a monstrous, engorged heart.
But it’s a trick: the room is tiny, the walls covered with mirrors. The crowding is an illusion, a few dozen seem like several hundred. Sometimes you find that after fifteen minutes of ardent looks, the face you’re eyeing is your own. Cruising yourself: the height of narcissism! Or just schizo.
In the dens the looks are heavy, the hands insistent. Here is a woman—or is it? Here is a man—or is it? Doubt blossoms in the shadows. The couples that form and leave give rise to the wildest speculation. For many, the doubt continues until they’re in bed. And even after.
I haven’t found what I’m looking for.
Haven’t even been able to get near the bar to have a drink.
I saw the little munchy-vendor, but someone carried him off. Too bad.
An eddy among the surrounding people brings me face to face with an Erymaean—well, I’m not sure whether he’s an Atropian, a
Psychaean, a Dissident or God knows what. I’ve never been able to figure out all these parties. But in general you can recognize Erymaeans by their subtly tragic expression, by their air of purposefulness. They haven’t that vacuous look we Earthlings get from being idle. But it’s something very subtle, something you feel rather than see.
This one really looks the part. There are people like that; Philip, for instance. They really have—or else they contrive to have, consciously or not—the face that corresponds to their calling or station. The stereotype.
He’s clothed in black with simple silver embroidery. Some Erymaeans like sombre colours. And he is sombre: black hair greying at the temples; serious eyes surrounded by a network of fine lines; thin, pale lips from having smiled too little; a lean face with something aristocratic in its features.
I wonder what he’s doing here? I wouldn’t have thought that Erymaeans frequented dens. But no doubt he’s here for a reason.
He’s already behind me, out of my line of vision.
I’m leaving because the smoke really isn’t helping my cough.
The air in the street seems cold, making me shiver. This isn’t very healthy either. The night closes behind me, peopled with furtive shadows.
Probing hands in the den have given me a furious desire to screw. Let’s go to the woods.
* * *
In the azure sky the moon is in its first quarter. Its texture by day is not at all the same as by night: this crescent, this demi-circle, looks as insubstantial as mist. Hard to believe it’s a globe of rock, especially the part you can’t see—invisible, therefore transparent?—and yet it’s tangible. But you see the clear blue of the sky where you know the other half of the globe exists. Come to think of it, do you know? Doesn’t its existence depend on the light it receives—and if not lighted, then non-existent? If the blue of the sky were behind the moon, you’d see a white crescent and the rest of the globe in black. Therefore the blue of the sky is in front of the moon: but that’s also an illusion, merely the effect of light and optics. Everything is illusion, Philip would say. Except that he deludes himself with words. I’ve tried to deceive myself with empty arguments, tried to make them dizzyingly metaphysical, but it doesn’t work: the moon is still there, concrete, whole, I know it. Even when smoking I’m not able to make reality abstract, to escape.