The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

ONE

RUNNER’S FALL (I)

18 March 2003, 7.08 p.m.

When Runner Coghill fell through the ceiling, she interrupted what we can only call a domestic quarrel.

Of the arguers in question, the young man’s name was Dumuzi, though his name has been changed to protect the innocent (that is, Dumuzi). Moments before, he had been huffing and puffing from the cold, for which he was wilfully underdressed, and standing with his sometimes girlfriend Anna, inside the front entrance to the warehouse at 5819 St-Laurent, a building that, against all probability, she owned.

Anna had called him, out of the blue, on what he thought was the first warmish day of the year, although that had turned out to be an illusion propagated by the phone call and Anna’s attention; in fact, it was cold, but Anna was bored and looking for company to walk around downtown. They had met in the early afternoon and walked down the hill into the late afternoon. Anna telling him about her classes – a bit of philosophy, a bit of English, the only thing she liked was anthropology, or at least she liked the idea of anthropology, though the reality of anthropology was boring and more boring. The sound of her voice so soothed his chronic spikes of sexual anxiety – brought on by her arbitrary pattern of granting and withholding affection – that he began to question whether he’d ever felt them in any serious way.

Now it was freezing raining and it was evening, and Anna, who was wet, wanted to go inside and find a clean corner where the two of them would be able to pile some remnants of her grandfather’s old shmatte1 emporium into something that might resemble a bed and a blanket, beside a pale beam of streetlight they could roll into when they were done. Her other conditions included a solid ceiling above their heads and no turds, human or otherwise, at least not nearby. She didn’t mind a little dust and dirt though, since, as Du had noticed, she hadn’t washed for some time, either her clothes or her person, and had embarked on a more animal form of grooming.

It was a slow negotiation, because Anna was offering Du what he’d been pining after through the entire winter, that is to say, she was offering sex, in a warehouse that suddenly didn’t seem so filthy because of the way the light filtered out of the darkness and the dust and the endorphins that were suddenly released into Dumuzi’s brain. But she wanted him to pay her for it. To see what it was like. And her proposal was slowing him down.

A little note about Dumuzi: his hormones were raging, but he tried to be polite about it. He was a big squarish guy, but when you looked at him you got the whole picture. He wasn’t a bobbing Adam’s apple or a collar or a grin. There was nothing about his maleness that was easily Atwoodian. It would be unfair to describe him like that, even though he was a boy and the reader might not like boys.2 He tried to keep tidy. He wore clean lines. He was a whole guy, albeit a young guy who just needed, very desperately, to get laid. Where Anna was concerned, he definitely did not like who he became when he was with her, but still he wanted to be with her and wished only to change who he was and how and what he thought.

1 Yiddish: dress or garment. Literally a rag.

He asked Anna where she’d gotten the idea and she told him how earlier in the day an elderly gentleman had mistaken her for a prostitute and propositioned her while Du was buying gum. This shocked him almost as much as the proposal itself and he looked away, shuffling in a head-bowed, punch-drunk silence.

(Eventually.) ‘You like this place?’

She said, ‘Yeah, why not.’

He tried to speed up his thoughts. ‘Well, I don’t know about all this love of decay and dark dripping warehouses. I mean, you might try to take out your contacts every once in a while if you don’t want to go blind, and you might want to change your clothes every once in a while, and, yeah, this new obsession of yours is really going to help, although, although I think any dirty old man on St-Laurent would lose his erection if he was standing downwind of you and your –’

‘I doubt it.’

2 We weren’t fond of boys ourselves, but our opinion here is not relevant.

‘Sure.’ He deflated. ‘Sure. Me too. Anyway, this place is falling apart. There must be a million squatters living here.’

‘I can’t afford to fix it. I’m warehouse poor.’

‘Oh.’

‘Dumuzi … I’m going to let you sleep with me.’

‘But you want me to pay you, Anna.’

‘So just forget about that part.’

‘Anna, you want me to pay you a lot of money.’

‘Let’s say you don’t have to pay me all that much. I’m only asking you to pay for what most men think they have the god-given right to get for free.’

‘So why shouldn’t I think that too?’

‘Don’t you think that’s a little arrogant?’

‘You think it’s good for men to pay for sex? Wow.’

‘I’m saying it might be good for me to get paid for sex. It might fulfil some sort of destiny.’

‘Oh, I can’t stand it!’

And this is when Dumuzi’s fist hit the pillar, compromising, it would appear, the integrity of the building, and that’s when Runner fell through the ceiling above and landed behind them, among a bunch of cardboard boxes. 3

3 It might be of interest as well to note how, on this day, on the other side of the world from there, everyone who could was getting out of Baghdad, filling the outlying cities of Rawa and Anna. Water was scarce and the American dollar was worth 2700 Iraqi dinars. According to the Blogger of Baghdad. (Aline’s note.)

A new quality Du was beginning to notice about himself was his capacity to be grateful for events that reasonable people might find abhorrent or tragic, as long as these events deflected the attention of his tormentors. The truth is that he would have preferred the whole city to come down on their heads in that moment, but he had to make do with Runner Coghill, falling like debris. He unshouldered his backpack and ran over to the crumpled girl set like a small broken mannequin among the boxes and the stones. She was screaming, though Du realised as he got closer that she was shouting not incoherent pain so much as the name of a boy:

‘NEIL! NEIL! I’M HURT!’

The girl paused to reflect, loud enough for Du to hear, ‘Oh I don’t think a dose of Prozac is going to help this kind of pain.’ She was talking over his head though, aiming her thoughts straight for Anna.

‘Oh. Hi. I guess that came as a shock to you. I seem to have –’ Anna cut in, having forgotten her former business, and was trying to figure out uh what this intruder uh was uh doing here.

‘Well, I don’t really mean to be here. Upstairs is where I –’

Interrupted by Anna again, who meant to say, ‘The uh building. How did you come to be in the uh building?’

‘Cool it, sister. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.’

Now, Runner Coghill was not exactly a looker, not by any stretch of the imagination and certainly not to Dumuzi. Runner was small. She looked like a Grey Nun out on a day pass – you could imagine her in a wimple. She was almost weightless, with translucent skin, a haughty nose – a pig nose she sometimes called it in her own garment-rending arias of despair, which were private and known to us only because they were occasionally gossiped about in fits of envy of which we are not proud. And she let her hair grow more thickly over her bumps, to try and cover them up, though this practice only augmented them. They were called pilar cysts. She insisted that everyone know what they were called even though she was supposedly trying to hide them. That is the way she was. She boasted about her minor ailments while keeping the most prominent one – the actual life-threatening one – entirely to herself. We are still amazed to report that she kept it a secret, though the primary sign, the telltale one, would have been obvious to a medically minded person had there ever been one in the group – this primary sign being that her eyes popped right out of her head, more so with every passing month, so much so that you might think she was staring even when she was not, though she did sometimes stare. It was disconcerting to some, most immediately to Dumuzi, who felt a little Gordian knot of fear every time he caught her eye, even though he was literally twice her size.

So when this wreckage of a girl, crumpled up in a coat, having fallen through the ceiling seconds before, said, to the perfect Anna, ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,’ Du, after a moment’s uncomprehending shock, laughed, a sort of stunned laugh. And that’s when the girl noticed him for the first time.

Being broken in the presence of the male gaze would have made Runner feel overwhelmed under normal circumstances but, beyond a few fleeting thoughts4, she was in too much of a hurry to be overwhelmed at the moment. Still, it was fortunate she’d got some warning, because a second later Du swooped in and was crouched very close to her, examining her, opening her coat, uncovering her, touching her leg. She gasped for air with a little yelp that she hoped sounded like an expression of pain and not its opposite, and squeezed her eyes shut.

‘Anna, I think she’s broken her leg.’

Anna swore. Runner drew a breath and let it exhale without speaking. And then drew another.

And then began to explain patiently to them – well, to Anna, still ignoring Du despite the temperance he’d suddenly inspired in her – about her ailments. She said that she was sorry, that she had a mild form of osteoporosis which, she felt, made a bad combination with her epileptic tendencies (which tendencies she was fabricating for the first time in that very moment), but that she was also really quite grateful for it, her osteoporosis, because it made her a very modern thinker. It forced her to think about the body in art and the world. Like, for instance, how was she going to get her body, broken leg and all, up to the fifth floor of this building, if she had willed herself already up to the second and it had brought her, of its own volition, right back down to the first? How was she going to get this useless shell of a body, this inattentive and ungrateful husk, back up to the second, and beyond to the third, fourth and finally to the fifth, especially when faced with such a pair of uncomprehending and unsympathetic faces as now looked down upon her?

4 His cheeks were stubbled, like the bark of a tree … the hair on his head grew thick as laundry … his beauty was consummate. He was tall! He was magnificent! He was terrible! He would scour [Runner’s] body in search of life and coax it toward maturity! He would dig from [Runner’s] most shadowy slopes the deepest well of pure water, out of which an ocean would spring, and he would cross that ocean to the sunrise beyond, arrive on some future morn when [Runner] was hale and adult and smiling fully in his arms, in the bedroom of a third-storey flat in [Montreal’s] Mile End! (From Runner’s notebook.)

Anna had kept her eye on the ball: ‘What’s up on the fifth floor?’

Runner took a deep breath and sighed, as if to say that these two were just not going to get it. When she spoke again, however, there was a green blade of hope in her voice: ‘Have you ever heard of the Lacuna Cabal?’

‘No.’

‘Well … it’s … a very exclusive … book club, and I’m sure … ’

Du, who was a devoted student of every mood that flickered across Anna’s face, here observed her try to imagine the possibility of a book club on the fifth floor of her Jacob Lighter Building.

‘ … and I’m sure it doesn’t interest you, but there are six women up there right now who at this moment are finishing up the last book and are about to launch into proposals for the next, at which point I have to make an entrance.’

Anna’s instinct of ownership kicked in. ‘But this is my building!’

‘I see you fail to see the bigger picture.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘I tell you, I need to get upstairs!’

‘I don’t care.’

Du recognised the expression that now came over Runner’s face. It allied him to her, at least for the moment, fellow recipient of the chill wind. The girl saw first that Anna didn’t care, and then she saw that, really, really, she didn’t care. It was an obstacle. It was a challenge. Runner launched in, like Churchill convincing an island to make war.

‘Kid,’ she said, addressing Anna, for how else do you address someone young in years who has revealed herself to be as jaded as a dead thing, except to appeal to the part of her that is still young, the bright shiny package that contains her, her skin? ‘Kid,’ she called her, and went on to ask her if she’d ever felt anything for a cause that was bigger than herself, if she’d ever wanted to throw herself behind such a cause, for the sheer bumfuckery of it, if she’d ever been curious about …

Anna’s uppercut in the microsecond’s lull: ‘I don’t care.’

‘Please,’ Runner said. ‘Those girls up there don’t expect to ever be caught by anything even remotely resembling the owner of a building. You’re missing a great opportunity here, for, believe me, they are far, far more deserving of your goddess-like wrath than I … ’

‘I don’t c –’ Anna had not expected that. Goddess-like wrath? For one moment she didn’t speak. And then another. Dumuzi could see that the broken-legged girl had hit pay dirt, found a weak spot he didn’t even know was there. He made a mental note: ‘goddess’. And then the girl on the floor went on.

‘Association with this club, which I now offer to you in defiance … ’

‘Who says I want –?’

‘– of our heartless executive, will expose you to the damaged masterpiece I am about to propose. That’s right, sister, I can see that you’re a bit of a damaged masterpiece yourself, aren’t you? Though you’re strong and beautiful and everything I’m not.’

Anna looked squarely at the girl. She was thinking that she did often feel like a damaged masterpiece. Quite often, in fact. Regularly. She gave sudden rein to the thought that this girl knew … she knew … what did she know? She knew something. Something about her. Perhaps … everything. Perhaps she was wise in all matters. Shit, man, Anna couldn’t even make her 8.30 classes. This girl, though, she obviously had it together. Anna had always wanted … Her eyes drifted up to the hole in the ceiling. Du’s, mystified, uncomprehending, followed. For a moment, considering the stranger’s words, Anna suddenly felt that she was not confused at all. She felt that she had been confused, but was, in fact, for this precious instant, pretty smart, pretty witty, pretty pretty, not dead. Gloriously defeated by the girl with the broken leg, on the floor.

But did any of this show up on Anna’s face? Nope. She was tough. She was tough as nails. The only indication of a change of heart was the gesture for Du to pick the chick up.

As for Runner, she had been relishing her victory until she saw Du’s hands zeroing in, getting closer and larger. She had a fit of sneezing. When that was through, she proceeded to lay herself bare before this boy’s deepest cell of shame: ‘Oh no, pal, not you. Her. Not you. If you touch me I’d have to ask you to fuck me, and if you said no then that would be humiliating for me, wouldn’t it? It’s been so long, I feel like a virgin. Really. Let’s be honest, I am a virgin, that’s not normal. And still you’re going to let this brute put his hands on me?’

Runner’s virgin status was not something she necessarily wanted to get rid of. But she did feel that the sexual act might just pull her flagging, barely post-adolescent body fully into the present, and force it to grow up. As for shyness around the opposite sex, her wreckage of a body had just led her to an epiphany. She decided, right here and now, anticipating the strong arms of Dumuzi, to fully explore the archetype of the foul-mouthed shy person and take it to new heights.

At least that’s what she decided deep down. On the surface she was screaming indignation that Anna was allowing a boy to lay hands on her.

Anna said, simply, sorry. She wasn’t going to lift a finger for this girl. Maybe she felt a bond with her, but she sure wasn’t about to show it.

Dumuzi, blushing pink, gathered Runner into his arms and picked her up. She was as small and light as a beanbag full of little bones, and she relaxed into his arms. As he swept her up she felt a sharp pain in her leg but ignored it. That is, her voice responded, practically bursting Du’s eardrum, but her mind ignored it. She launched again into her protests and was in mid-aria when she suddenly remembered.

‘Don’t forget those.’

Those?

There at Du’s feet, surrounding him like a toy rampart, were several irregularly shaped slabs of stone. They looked fragile, though none seemed to have broken in the fall. And they were marked all over, front and back, with tender notches of writing, presented in columns with a symmetry and order that nearly took Du’s breath away. They looked old. Really old. She must have been carrying them when she fell through the floor.

Anna clapped eyes on them too. Ten of them. Looked like she would have to lift a finger after all. No idea what this crazy chick needed them for, but she didn’t feel the need to question. Anyway, they were manageable. Weird. But small. Ish. She gathered them up, and they carried on, toward the stairs, and up, and into a bygone era.

And then Neil appeared.

He’d seen Runner negotiate her way through this sort of accident before, and knew she would survive it, this time at least, even if it wasn’t clear that she wanted to. Earlier, he’d watched, on the second floor, as she gave herself freely over to the fall and disappeared into the floor with all ten tablets. It made him tired. He knew she would apologise when he saw her next, and that upset him and made him even more tired.

He’d been here on the first floor for quite some time, through the negotiations, having made his way quietly around the perimeter. When he finally appeared, though, you would not have imagined him capable of such stealth. He looked awkward in his clothes, which were old and badly fitting, and he wore a pair of large round-rimmed glasses without lenses, and his head was buried in a book even when he walked. It was a notebook, which he held open with his right hand, crooked in his elbow, while writing from time to time with his left. As he crept across the floor towards Du’s backpack, he stopped to jot something down no fewer than five times, creating the impression of a time-lapse photograph or a Noh stage show. It seemed he had a running commentary going on the passing moments of his life.

If we were to have stood over him, in this moment, and peered down into his book, we would have seen the following entry as it emerged from his pen:

Once so strong she was … now so … crazy … accident-prone, and Neil … He carried the bag.

And then Neil bent over and with some effort picked up Du’s bulky backpack, slung it over his shoulder and crept towards the stairs.

TWO

THE LACUNA CABAL

The Lacuna Cabal had not always met on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building at 5819 St-Laurent. In our efforts to keep moving, we tried cellars, garrets, walk-in closets and bell towers, with very little account given to our general welfare and comfort. Priority was given rather to the idea that the location should suit the book, the book the location. It went beyond re-enactment and into the realm of living out, as much as possible, the story of the book, in the hope that its experience would rub off on us. Thus we considered ourselves to be the premium reading club of the English-speaking world.

This method took some refinement. An early example: we once conducted a spontaneous public reading of a novel in verse called Autobiography of Red at the airport, for which we all painted ourselves top to toe for the occasion. It was later agreed, however, that we did not absorb a great deal from the presentation, beyond a bit of pigment, some skin rashes and a charge of public mischief (dismissed).

And another time, early on, we kidnapped the aging poet Irving Layton for four hours from the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Côte-Saint-Luc and took him for an excursion up the mountain – a trip from which he was reported to have reappeared sporting a diadem of autumn leaves and looking immensely satisfied. That one made the papers. And the evening news. Still, it had been dangerous and seemed like a cheat to meet the poet himself rather than the words in his book.

In our second year, when our methods had acquired some clarity, we once headed down to Place des Arts on a Sunday and tried to depict the scene of the nun swinging from the bridge-builder’s broken arm in In the Skin of a Lion.5 One of our members nearly hanged herself. Accidentally, of course. But it was memorable and satisfying and we declared that book a success.