The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

Our third year was characterised by a more traditional approach: we began to calm down as a group and seek out a more or less permanent meeting place.

There’s an elongated little park just west of St-Denis on Laurier, north side, with a sandbox and small set of monkey bars.6 We tried to meet there for a while, since someone had noticed that there never seemed to be any children. But when we started going, so did the children. The park stayed empty throughout the week and even on weekends, as long as we weren’t there. But when we showed up, they were never far behind. And when we abandoned the place, so, again, did they.7

5 If the reader isn’t familiar with this particular novel, she might as well stop reading this book right now and go read that one. Or else dispense with the whole idea of reading altogether. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje is, officially, the Lacuna Cabal’s favourite book.

6 Later note: No there isn’t.

Eventually we found a beautiful warehouse on the waterfront, rumoured to have required rent – rent rumoured to have been paid by the wealthy father of our founder and president. There we felt safe from prying eyes and blessed with a view of the river.

But then, in the fall, someone in the Cabal died, and so we decided to move. We felt that the waterfront warehouse had lost its lustre and its luck. And when the general mood failed to brighten by November, we even decided to enlist a new member as a gesture of self-preservation – someone to push against the pall that had fallen over the group.

The Jacob Lighter Building was discovered in mid-December, during a well-needed Christmas hiatus, by Romy Childerhose, on one of her long walks. She tried the door by the loading dock for five days in a row and it was always open. She finally ventured into the building and bravely worked her way up through the darkness of the stairwell, floor by floor, finding that all evidence of squatter habitation – blankets and newspapers and washrooms that would have to be sealed off – ended on the third. Thinking it over, she felt that there must have been an instinct among squatters to be ready for a quick escape, although, if it had been her, she would have climbed as high as she could, like a squirrel with a nest, and kept her stuff near a window that could be opened so that everything might be hurled out and away, to be retrieved later. But it was clear that no one had lived here for quite some time.

7 It’s not there any more. Somebody must have dreamt it. Unless our abandonment of it, along with the children’s, caused it to fade away.

Up on the fifth floor, the flappable Romy found things to be clean, spacious and empty. Though very, very cold. There was evidence that someone had begun to renovate the building up there – presumably Anna’s rovingly entrepreneurial father – but the project had been abandoned. Drywall had all been ripped out and there was little or no insulation. We have long speculated that it might have been the general state of abandonment, by squatters on one side and developers on the other, that had so drawn Romy (who hailed from a city in Ontario which she referred to exclusively as ‘Bingotown’). The building was a book – a weighty tome no less – that nobody wanted, neither for pleasure nor pillage, a gargantuan testament to wasted lives, like hers, like ours, like this book itself, whose leviathan bulk is a reflection more of waste than achievement.

When we moved into the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, it was decided by vote that we had to acquire a portable heater with a scary-looking flame and two enormous and truly frightening propane tanks, rented with the benefit of Missy’s father’s credit card. We called it ‘the blue flame thrower’. Some of us wondered how Missy’s father could have allowed such a rental to be made by his daughter. Where paternal love was concerned, we could understand the silver Sunfire with its custom pull-down top, we clocked the purchase of the flat in Outremont and we appreciated the rent paid on our waterfront meeting place. But allowing a propane heater with an eternally flaming grill, like the burning bush except indoors and blue – this took parental indulgence to a new level and led some of us to wonder whether the man was paying any attention at all. What’s more, there was a period wherein Missy erected a large tent up there – also acquired by the divine grace of her father’s card – to try and contain the heat. So the blue flame was two times indoors, a fire hazard inside a fire hazard, at least until she pulled the tent down and returned it at the beginning of March.

We wonder, from the cool perspective of three or four years’ distance, whether we didn’t all share a funny latent death wish that one weird winter.

So we stayed on the fifth floor of the Jacob Lighter Building, 5819 St-Laurent, even though it did not provide us with the poetry of shelter from winter. Missy told us that we all had our respective homes for that. The readers of Don Quixote, she said, huddled shivering for centuries in cold places and still managed to get through the book. That book was present in point of fact, she added, all the way through the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution. You can only imagine, she said, what kind of horrors people must have endured between bouts of reading Cervantes’ book.

That’s the thing about born leaders. They convince you that you’re capable of doing – that you want to be doing – the craziest things. When they go too far, we suppose, is when you find yourself with a cult on your hands. And when they don’t go far enough, they come across as carping, opinionated, pain-in-the-ass purveyors of sloppy thinking. Missy fluctuated between these two extremes. How could she not? She was young and only beginning to experiment with holding the reins of power. Anyway, it’s no secret that the two primary writers of this book remained loyal to her and would have followed her anywhere except that point beyond which, according to the foundation principles of the Lacuna Cabal, we were expressedly forbidden to go.

Which brings us finally to the call of the role. The sitting members of the Lacuna Cabal as of 18 March 2003.

House left, stage right, in a semi-circle heading towards house right, stage left, books open in our laps, it goes as follows:

The first is one of us. One of the two of us. One of we two narrators or, if you prefer, glorified stage-direction readers. Missy liked to keep us separate so that her consolidation of power would not seem so obvious. So I, Jennifer, about whom the less said the better, sat at the farthest left, house left, all by myself, next to the newest member, whose name was (is)

Priya Underhay,

the aforementioned newest, the ray of hope and sunshine8, meant to combat the gloom that had followed a death in the club – about whom we knew, at the time, very little. She was, not coincidentally when you consider Missy’s motive for taking her on, a bit of a hippie. To us she seemed a little crazy and often could be overheard speaking in a low voice to – one could only assume – herself.

Priya, who carried a travel guitar with her wherever she went, missed the occasional meeting because she had the occasional commitment to play at the occasional small-time open-mike event. She called these ‘alt-country nights’, whatever that meant. Such events were never attended by the Cabal, for two, no, three reasons:

1 They would have blown our cover.

2 We were declaratively interested in the written word, to the exclusion of every other art form, and would pay attention to a ballad only if it were written in a book.

3 An example of Priya’s early song lyrics:

we are the fortunate ones, you and I,

who travel with the pelicans and the platypi …

‘goodnight’, lisp the smiling, dozing sarcophagi

as we pass them by.

8 There are several names here. These are presented in large print so the reader can flip back and refer to them from time to time. There is no shame in this. We’ve had to do it ourselves a couple of times.

we are the delicate ones, though we do not cry

when we wound one another with the lash of an eye …

‘and you think you’ll live,’ screech the dead sarcophagi

but they are out of earshot, by and by.

We’d like to meet some living sarcophagi.

(Allowing a folk singer into our ranks seemed, for the longest time, a very serious mistake.)

At the time when this story begins, Priya had written, by all accounts, upwards of thirty songs, most of them incomprehensible, and suffered from the occasional nosebleed, one can only imagine because of her nocturnal flights with fellow folksinging witches.

Next to Priya sat

Romy Childerhose,

the aforementioned squirrel in her nest, who hailed from the so-named Bingotown and had felt drawn to the epic seediness of the Jacob Lighter building.

We have no desire to present a negative portrayal of Romy in this passage, as we feel it might cause pain and would not be commensurate with the esteem in which we currently hold her. This presents a problem for us because, during the time this story takes place, we felt nothing but contempt for her, and this account would be nothing if it did not present something resembling the truth. In confessing this dilemma to the subject in question, however, a solution presented itself: apparently, not surprisingly, our contempt was nothing compared to how Romy felt about herself.

Here, therefore, is Romy’s introduction, in her own recently commissioned words. Characteristically, she has begun far earlier in her story than expected, and has included informa tion that we were perhaps better off not knowing:

I was born in a barn. I was. Just outside of Bingotown, Ontario, where my mother-to-be had been dropped in a field with her two older sisters, one of whom had vomited on the other two while their parents – my grandparents – were on their way to church in their Sunday best. They dropped the vomit-covered sisters in the field to wait out the hour while the clean ones – the younger boys and the parents – went off to do their churchly duty. It was just enough time to quietly induce labour, since the sisters were privy to the know ledge of my mother’s condition and the vomit had in fact been purposely induced. My mother (did I mention that my mother was very large?) had managed to conceal her pregnancy from her extremely Catholic parents. And then, for several months after I was born, she managed to hide me. You’ve heard the story of Kaspar Hauser? Living beneath the floorboards of a little house somewhere in Germany? Well, if I hadn’t been discovered, I might have been the small-town southwestern Ontario version of that poor kid. And in many respects, perhaps I was.

What’s more, Romy felt that this was one of the two seminal stories of her childhood, the other one being a Homeric narrative on the subject of fatness and responsibility:

People get fat through an act of will. Don’t they? It’s instead of a callus. The emotion is all nestled inside, like a pig in a blanket, and, as with calluses, the blows don’t land quite so hard. Is that why they do it? My mother was fat. She was a cement balloon sinking into the ocean, who held me by the ankles and pulled me down, like galoshes on a mobster who’d slept with the wrong moll. I was fat too, but my fat was an air pocket to try and keep me afloat, to try and stop my mother from consuming everything. When I was a kid I once purchased a mouse. A little white mouse. I bought it at a pet store downtown and took it home in a small cardboard box, with a big bagful of mouse food. It was in the middle of a particularly harsh winter. I don’t know what I was thinking. When I got home, my mother flipped out. Another mouth to feed that was not her own. But I have food for it, I said. A whole bag. I’m sure it’s not the kind of food that you would like, I said. Who’s to say? she said, and took the food. Besides, there was no place for the little mouth to live. My mother occupied everything. I found a little fishbowl that had belonged to a long-ago goldfish. And I put the little mouth in there. And then I watched in horror as he scrabbled around the small bottom and tried to jump free. He would leap into the air and catch a small paw at the lip of the bowl, spin his legs frantically and then fall to the bottom again. It was horrifying. Only a matter of time before he mastered the leap. I considered putting a pile of books there, at the top, to block the exit, but then he would have suffocated. I suppose I could have drilled some holes in the books, but I didn’t have a drill and you don’t treat books like that, do you? And besides, the goldfish bowl was way too small. It was way, way too small. There was a woodpile at the back of the yard. I gazed at the woodpile through a window, imagining that it might make a beautiful, spacious, multi-hallwayed new home for my little burden. No, said my mother, the poor thing will die out there in the cold. We have to return it to the store. But there’s a no-return policy, I yelled. It says so on a big sign right on the door! But we drove downtown with the mouse in the box. And when they refused to take the mouse back, my mother revealed her secret weapon, dragging a desperate, sobbing, sorry little me in through the jingling door. And they took back the mouse.

Romy on how she came to leave Bingotown:

Bingotown was not a colourful city in those days, though I haven’t been there lately. I remember reading somewhere that nineteenth-century municipal laws restricted the use of colour in the urban environment. This was true all over the world at the time, but Bingotown still had no colour over a century later. And so I left finally and came to Montreal, which, I heard, had coloured gables and coloured spiral staircases. I asked somebody, ‘What is the most colourful city in Canada?’ and they told me to go to Montreal.

Romy was, in the days of the Lacuna Cabal, a proverbial deer in the headlights, which suggested she always had something else on her mind. Still, she had one outstanding feature that made her, in our eyes, a paragon of womanhood: the most beautiful flowing locks of auburn hair you can imagine, which did much to mitigate the effects of the earnest demeanour they framed. She towered over the rest of us, trying always (and unsuccessfully) to keep her larger-than-life feelings to herself. Let’s see, what else? Romy had a soft spot for children’s literature – due, we hypothesised, to the arrested development that may have occurred as a result of not being allowed to look after that goddamned mouse – and tried to keep up to speed on its developments. She considered Harry Potter to be inferior to some book about a girl and a bear and atheism, the title of which we can’t recall, and the first book she recommended to the group (summarily rejected) was Shardik by Richard Adams, not really children’s literature at all but also somewhat intensely about a bear (though he had written more famously about rabbits). The trajectory from mouse to bear in Romy’s imagination remains a mystery to us.

Oh yes, and she found the building. The saddest, greyest, ugliest building in the city of Montreal. That was her single contribution to the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club at the beginning of our story, a fact that is, we suppose, nothing to sneeze at.

Romy sat next to

Emmy Jones,

offering her constant comfort, due to a heartbreak that had occurred in Emmy’s life at exactly the same time, almost to the day, as the death that had occurred in the Cabal the previous fall. Nobody was certain why Emmy continued to feel heartbroken six months after the fact, but the generous interpretation was that she had occasionally resumed torturous relations with the man in question. The primary casualty of this heartbreak, however, even considering her self-centredness during the season leading up to the new book, seems to have been her love of literature, which made a sudden and, it seems, permanent, exit.9

What’s more, speaking now of the present, she resents, apparently, very deeply, being depicted in the ‘exaggerated mytho-poetic realm of this account’, and will not read it, will have nothing to do with it, will barely even acknowledge its existence. She stuck it out with the Lacuna Cabal’s final book, she reports, out of loyalty to and concern for Runner’s health and feelings, but was otherwise finished with fiction. She has, in fact, challenged us, through the intercession of a third party, to entirely remove her from this account. But after deep consideration afforded by many sleepless nights, we have determined that we cannot do that – at least not altogether. Many of the decisions Emmy made during the weeks in which this story takes place – decisions which, granted, may have arisen out of heartbroken self-destructiveness – rendered her de facto the catalyst for many other events, events that go to the very heart of our story. Emmy’s private story is intertwined with the larger story of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, which fact renders it not exclusively her own. We’re sorry. We’re very, very sorry.

We considered changing her name, but that doesn’t seem to go far enough in the case of Emmy Jones. We feel, given her concern and our deep regard for the same, that we have to transform, somehow, her whole self. It’s a difficult dilemma because we can’t just replace her with a scarecrow with no past and no future, who merely commits the actions that are necessary for Emmy to commit in order to move ahead with our story. We also have to be careful to avoid becoming like the storied Islamic painter of the thirteenth century, who, having been told that he cannot depict Muhammad, begins to dream the Prophet in three glorious dimensions on canvas and so prefigures the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, depicting Muhammad and always Muhammad and only Muhammad. The last thing that we need to happen in this story is for us to become obsessed with depicting Emmy, holding up a mirror to reflect another mirror, casting Emmy forever and alone into infinity. We do not wish to be embraced by our repression, lest it bring forth monsters. We have therefore adopted a somewhat radical narrative strategy and decided to make Emmy a fictional character. And to make the fact of Emmy as a fictional character clear to the reader in every moment. In order to fulfil this mandate, we have determined to (ahem) make her striped. And to always comment on her actions and feelings with respect to the fact that she is striped.

9 As a playwright, her highest ambition, according to a recent interview published in the Mirror is to create a théâtre verité domestic drama in which not one word is spoken on the stage and all expression is made using only looks, small gestures and violence.

Emmy was striped. Like a zebra. Except saying she was striped like a zebra is like saying Einstein was smart like a fox. It does not convey the truth of the matter. Also, we should stress that her stripes were not of the zebra (or tiger, etc.) variety at all. We know that, because they did not fan out from her spine, as they do in most of the natural world, but were rather more uniform, running horizontally all the way around her body. And her stripes changed width, colour and shade, depending on her mood. Still, no matter how they changed, one shade was always lighter and the other darker.10 So, if you attended a very close eye, you would always perceive the stripes. Her mind in those days was a perpetual state of black and grey, but her skin was always projecting at least two colours, exquisitely matched. We wonder, under what circumstances would she mismatch? And was it an act of will that she didn’t? Or was it rather an act of nature? Colours always match in nature.

Her stripes manifested themselves with exquisite subtlety – if you met her on the street you would not notice that she had them. She managed, with some effort, to mask them from most observers by colouring her hair in a pair of tones and wearing brightly striped shirts. On regular days she had maybe four of them running along her face, six if you include her neck. On more intensely neurotic or desperately emotional days, there would be more. On the day that we introduce the Lacuna Cabal, 18 March 2003, there were plenty, but they were noticeable only to Romy.

So there. We have told of a body changed into a shape of a different kind. And we get to keep Emmy in our story. This does present a bit of an aesthetic challenge for us, since, as we stated in our portrait of Priya, we are interested in the written word to the ascetic exclusion of all other art forms, including all those that are rendered in colour. But we’ll do the best we can.

10 Formally, we should clarify that we’re speaking of the stripes themselves and also the spaces between the stripes. We leave it to the reader to determine which was which.

We might as well cut to the chase, let the cat out of the bag and say the thing that was obvious to everybody except Romy herself and perhaps Emmy as well: Romy loved Emmy. She would have loved her even without her stripes, but, as she was from Bingotown, Romy’s eye was involuntarily drawn to colour as something it had rarely seen. So Romy saw Emmy, and what she saw she loved, no matter how sullen was the object of her love. What’s more, despite the fact that her love was unrequited, Romy remembers it with wistful fondness and has offered her diary to be used for its edifying instances of self-loathing. We have, however, for the moment anyway, declined.

Emmy sat next to

Aline Irwin.

Aline was the most controversial member of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, for the simple reason that she was not a young woman at all. Not that she was old, or that we would not have been able to make some kind of exemption for elderly applicants, but we’re not entirely sure that we should have made an exemption for Aline Irwin, no matter what Missy might have wished.

Still, Aline was there at Missy’s invitation and Missy’s insist ence, and there were certain matters in which no one would ever dare to cross Missy.

Priya, who was new to the group, recalled once having seen Aline, sometime in the previous year, surrounded by friends (presumably including Missy, who did everything she could to protect Aline from the world) in a breakfast café on Parc Avenue. It was something Priya recalled easily for the simple reason that she had never before seen a person who looked so miserable as Aline did that morning, especially in contrast with her crowding compatriots. It was clear that her friends appreciated Aline, indulged her, allowed her to stay the way she was: sitting with her head down and peering through her makeup at the black dress, the stockings, the shoes. They accepted her without complaint and were heroically unaffected by his moods. The way you might sit with a sick friend when it’s many of you who have come to visit and not just one.

But even in this recollection we’ve managed already to make the error of referring to Aline in the masculine. We can’t even prop up the desired illusion of femininity in our own account.