Out To Lunch, Please Call Back
Again. Thank you. Duncan was late. His part-time secretary,
Julie, had already dashed off to her real job as a hair stylist and
placed the sign on the door, a sign she jokingly referred to as his
mullet sign, business in the front, and party in the back, the French
words in large bold letters above the English equivalent in smaller
letters below—although it seemed counter-intuitive to him what with
the English being famous for their Protestant work ethic, and the
French for their artistic laid-back savoir-faire. Cultural clichés
tended to keep them cozy in this ever changing city. He eyed the lock
as he groped for his green leather key case, noticing perhaps for the
first time, the inner circle—with its dark hieroglyph awaiting the
key—surrounded by the outer circles of the round lock as if it were
a large moon in relief upon a planet's surface. Once inside, he
locked the door again, and turned the sign over to provide an
instructional for potential—or metaphysical—customers to ring for
entry. Having checked his messages left to him by Julie concerning
the nothingness of the Monday morning enquiries, he made his way up
the stairs to Lafcadio & Co., feeling the emotional
attachments to the past bear down on him with the increasing gravity
of every step. What would he keep from all of this? What about the
cordage business archives? Donate the old ones to the McCord Museum?
Missing a year here Mr. Strand. Yeah, I know, tell me about it.
Storage? Stuff It and Store It would be a good name for a
self storage facility. Stuff it in and store it away, out of sight,
out of mind. Outdated garden furniture, boxes of family photographs
and slides, camping equipment used once, sets of dishes inherited but
kept for family reasons, old lamps, VCRs, boxes of cassette tapes and
video cassettes their labels fading along with their contents, musty books, years of weighty Martha Stewart magazines, pots and
pans, exercise equipment, memorabilia from vacations better off
forgotten, plastic bins with mysterious contents, chipped pressed
board bookcases, battered luggage, microwave stands, pneumatically
challenged bicycle wheels, window and floor treatments rolled and
standing up like fabric soldiers in the corner. Landfill layabouts
all. He could see the sign already, Clearance, Everything Must Go,
Going Out Of Business Sale....
He switched on the lights and
approached his desk surrounded with crisp boxes of fresh stock
purchased from estate sales on the weekend. One rich yuppie was
changing his decor. Duncan was his first call. Book sets the man had
said. Bindings. So he arrived to discover 20 volumes of a 25 volume
set of Waverley novels, centenary edition in a fine three-quarter
green leather with red labels and gilt titles with decorative gilt
thistles, marbled endpapers and edges. Fine condition. Worth
something if complete. In addition, ten spine-sunned volumes of a
thirty volume set of Ruskin's works, uncut, three-quarter green
levant morrocco, gilt titles and decorative devices, top edges gilt,
marbled endpapers. Worth a great deal if complete. The loft
yuppie was changing to a pastel decor and these green, golds and reds
would have to go. He was going ultra modern, shifting with the times.
No more pretentious bindings by the yard.
There had also been a strange painting
resting on the floor nearby and Duncan had asked if it was going too.
Most definitely Mr. Yup had said as if it were an embarrassing movie
poster like Risky Business, Pretty in Pink, or
Better Off Dead. He
had offered him 50 bucks for the books and the painting. The guy had
held out his hand without a word, happy to have the offending objects
removed—along with their dust—from his space.
The
painting was intriguing. Duncan sat at his desk facing the frameless
canvas propped against the bookcase facing him. A thin-surfaced
slightly distorted painting with tones of white through grey to
black, depicting Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic. Keanu/Johnny,
dressed in the character's white shirt, dark thin tie and dark grey
suit jacket with damaged shoulder seams, was staring out from the
canvas holding onto his suit lapels creating a classic triangulation
of form which directed the eyes towards the centre. Probably painted
from a photograph. In the upper left hand corner, dark black
lettering, imitating Renaissance inscriptions:
Anno dni aetatis
svae 30
1995
Ego volo cubiculum
servicium
Qvod me nvtrit
me destrvit
He liked it, but he
knew that Amelia would find it an undesirable if not unwelcome
acquisition. The books he could always sell to another upstart yup
looking for bindings by the yard, but he planned to keep this
painting for himself. Back of the door to the study perhaps, where no
one would see it. He remembered when they filmed scenes from the
movie below Jacques Cartier Bridge back in, what was it, '93 or
'94? the city rippling with excitement over the hip new star in
their midst. The scenes were probably shot over on Ile Ste. Helene, for he
remembered having noticed a fleeting, out of focus image in the background of the shot, of Molson's Brewery sign
glimmering in the deep distance.
The
inscriptions were interesting. Even with his weak knowledge of Latin
he could see the first inscription was a translation of I
Want Room Service! Johnny
Mnemonic's breaking point desperate cry for the upscale normality of
delivered food, laundered shirts and expensive female companionship
voiced atop a gravel pile as if he were Henry V calling out for a
horse. Possibly the rallying cry for that whole generation. What was
the rallying cry for his generation twenty years earlier? He scanned
his memory for his favourite movies from the 1970s: Three
Days of the Condor, Being There, A Fistful of Dollars,
Brewster McCloud, Harold and Maud, Day of the Jackal, Manhattan,
Network. “I'm as mad as hell,
and I'm not going to take this anymore,” from the movie Network.
Yes, perhaps that was the rallying cry for his generation. It was the
end of 1976, his first semester of CEGEP, he had gone to see the film
with his brother and their girlfriends and Gavin had come out of the
cinema manically screaming the line to the cold December air. Perhaps
that's what set him off into punk music, and aroused the divergence
in their tastes, Gavin the extroverted young man of action, and he,
the quiet introvert more interested in melody and harmony. Gavin had
written a song called Mad as Hell which
had a local following. What had he used to rhyme with more?
Rotten to the core, yes, rotten to the core. Was there a rallying
cry for the present generation? His mind failed him. Too many movies,
video games, and television shows, the great majority he knew nothing
about. He felt out of sync with the times. Too much information. Duncan
returned his attention to the painting. There was a signature in the
bottom right corner, but it was black on black, difficult to read.
Lac Pin? Lac something.
Facing his desk, descriptive cataloguing desires overcoming him, he reached down to a box of books he'd purchased from a retired
academic—scholarly volumes likely to be slow movers—and came up
with a decent copy of Alfred Russel Wallace's Natural
Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical
Biology, London, Macmillan,
1895. He dipped his hand down again and brought forth Mind
and Nature, A Necessary Unity by
Gregory Bateson. A third dip and . . . The Hunting of the
Snark by Lewis Carroll,
illustrated by Henry Holiday, Macmillan, 1898. Inscription on
flyleaf, “From one Snarkophile to another, warmest wishes. . .”
Duncan turned the pages skipping past the short preface and began
reading the first stanzas:
“Just
the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he
landed his crew with care;
Supporting
each man on the top of the tide
By a
finger entwined in his hair.
“Just
the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That
alone should encourage the crew.
Just
the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I
tell you three times is true.”
The
telephone rang. It was an old rotary dial desk model from Strand
Cordage days of yore, still managing to play a role as the
bookstore's designated silence interrupter in the twentieth first
century.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Was it the phone or the caller? “Hello, anyone there?”
Prolonged silence. “Lafcadio & Co. Bookshop here, can I help
you? Puis-je vous aider?” Nothing. “Are you all right? Are you
calling for help of any kind?” He held on a few moments longer and
hung up.
He
stared at the phone with his descriptive mind as if it was a divining
instrument: the clear plastic finger wheel with ten finger holes; the
ten white dots on the black phone like the motions of some stellar
object; the metal finger stop like a kick starter for a motorcycle;
the full moon in the middle of the dial, its white paper faded and
soiled like a cratered surface; the numbers and letters surrounding
the dial like a zodiac, the numbers One and Zero—which had become
King and Queen, or vice versa, with the digital evolution—were
alphabetically unchaperoned, while the Two through Nine boasted
triadic alphabetic bodyguards. And what about the space for two other
finger holes in the plastic finger wheel between the 1 and 0.
Pulseless phantom numbers. Heaven and Hell. Direct.
The phone rang again.
“Hello?”
“Wow, that's a quick pickup,”
Amelia said. “Were you about to phone me?”
“Sorry. The phone had just rung
before you and no one was on the other line. Was that you?”
“No, I just got in. Listen . . .”
and she informed him about having met Thérèse and Jerome and about
inviting them to dinner that night. “But that's not all.
Mélisande's Pavor is back in town and they are close friends with
the other two and want to come along.”
“That's crazy. I just met Pavor when
I popped in to see if the bag had been returned.”
Amelia was standing in the kitchen
looking at her Reading Woman calendar—October being a Danish
painting by Michael Ancher of a young woman reading. “Well the
calendar says it's a full moon tonight. And Hallowen's two doors
down.”
“Ah, yes, full moon. Halloween. Of
course.”
“Uh huh. Should be quite an evening.”
“What about food? Do I have to pick
anything up?”
“No. Supposedly Thérèse is a big
pizza lover and so they're bringing over her favourites along with
wine. Casual. Easy peasy. They even offered to bring paper plates but
I had to draw the line somewhere. I'll pick you up just after five.
Bye my love.”
Pizza. Wine. Full moon. He could almost
hear Dean Martin singing That's Amore.
He picked up The Hunting of the
Snark and walked over to the chairs near the front window. Not
much activity out there. Concrete blocks along the front of an empty
lot like fallen stones from a classical ruin, a homeless guy
scrounging for bottles and beer cans, last month's newspaper swirling
in the breeze like playful textual butterflies. He sat down and
looked towards the slightly overcast sky. Would they even see the
moon tonight?
Full moon. He put his feet
up on the small table and watched the clouds dissemble as he
remembered an incident from his childhood. The summer of 1969, the
beach at Cavendish Camp Ground, Prince Edward Island. He'd wandered
off to the west, as he usually did to be on his own, in search of
interesting shells, stones and possible glimpses of life beneath the
water, away from his family, the sun tanners, castle makers, ball
throwers and the cries of the swimmers echoing from the waves. After
a while, his cotton hat holding a small bounty of remnant shell life, bones of the sea, he had stubbed his toe in the shallow water against a stone,
and looking down, he discovered an unusual piece of red sandstone
shaped like a foetus—though at the time he hadn't recognised it as
such, being only ten years old and quite ignorant of such things—a
red stone with an absolutely perfect hole in the middle, drilled by
countless waves and perhaps a pebble for the grinding. He'd reached
down and pulled it away, separating it from it's sandy bed, leaving
behind the outline with a little tower of sand where the hole had
been. The gentle salt water wavelets had washed his bare feet as he
naturally brought the stone up to his eye to scan the horizon. A
charm of elementary particles. A sand-stone sextant. A new-found
amulet that fit under his eye brow like an Egyptian eye of Horus. A
future signifier of the yoni. A talisman against the disillusions
held in store. It had been a moment of still magic, as if he'd been
led away by some ancient spirit of the island to discover this very
stone.
And that night, they had joined their
neighbours and new acquaintances, a family from Atlanta, with their
ultra modern motorhome with all the comforts—so different from
their own privations in the tent trailer and separate kitchen tent
with picnic table—to watch on their small portable television a
broadcast of the moon landing, and how he had pulled out of his bunny
hug the magic stone to scope the sliver of moon above him, dizzy with the
thought of men walking on that distant light in the sky.
And yet, the next year, his Mother had
died. His attachment to the stone had dwindled. It's magic doubted.
It ended up resting on a bookshelf in the finished basement with
shells, stones, a pennant from Plymouth Rock, a small lobster trap in
balsa wood, a peace pipe from a wilderness village. He had left it
behind when he had moved out, and years later, when he was helping
his Father pack after having sold the family home for financial
reasons, he had taken up the stone and had placed it among items he
was going to take home with him, and his Father had told him it was
his. He'd discovered it he had said. Duncan had stood there speechless. It was as if a vital
organ had been torn from him. He'd let it go. Mystified, feeling sorry for his Dad.
But when he cleared his Father's small apartment out after his death,
it wasn't there. Gone.
Duncan breathed in deeply and exhaled
with a great sigh. Had it been a blessing to find or lose he'd never
know. A curse to have lost or found, his myth.
He shook his head to dispel the past
and opened Carroll's Snark, and remembering the disappearance
of the Baker at the end, he flipped to the last stanzas, spread the
pages out on his lap and read:
The silence. Some fancied
they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like “—jum!”
but the others declare
It was only a breeze that
went by.
They hunted till darkness
came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather,
or mark,
By which they could tell
that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met
with the Snark.
In the midst of the word
he was trying to say,
In the midst of his
laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly
vanished away—
For the Snark was a
Boojum, you see.
Duncan closed the book
feeling a sense of exhaustion overcome him. He lay his head upon the
soft chair back and fell into a light sleep.
© ralph patrick mackay
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