Duncan fumbled for the shop keys in his
trouser pocket while he stared up at an x-shaped vapour trail, its
sharp outlines dissipating against the blue sky. Was it a sign? A
negative response, an omen? Or was it merely a visual outline
reminiscent of a game of noughts and crosses? He was uneasy in his
interpretations of late. A grand Nay? Or
noughts and crosses? Time would tell. The latter choice, however,
also held signifiers, the cross both a sign of negation and
salvation, so unlike the zero, a natural form, emblem of this
universe of spinning galaxies and their spinning worlds in orbits of
unending time.
Down the street he noticed the profile
of a surveyor leaning over a yellow tripod, his eye to the theodolite
like a submarine Captain at a periscope. Preparations were being
made, plans drawn, visualizations created. The surveyor adjusted his
stance and it occurred to him the technology was as ancient as the
Great Pyramids when compared to quantum computing, a subject Tom
Culacino had discussed over dinner a few nights ago, an
incomprehensible digression concerning multi-dimensional
simultaneity. He could understand the straight lines, angles and
points of the surveyor's art, but Tom's musings concerning the shift
from binary digits to qubits had rendered him dizzy—though it could
have been the wine.
Coins spilled over the edge of his
pocket as he withdrew the keys. Festina lente, he thought, festina
lente, the image of Aldus Manutius's printer's mark, the dolphin and
the anchor passed before his eyes as he stooped to retrieve the loose
change from their circular beds in the dusting of snow.
He locked the door behind him and
turned the sign around for customers to ring for entry, and then made
his way to the staircase to his bookshop on the second floor. Without
Julie working mornings in the cordage business, the building was very
quiet, every day feeling like a Sunday. She'd been playing the music
of Arcade Fire over the past
few months—a friend of his had called hip Montrealers in their
twenties, the Arcade Fire
Generation just as he
had once called their own The Men Without Hats
Generation—the rhythms
and driving beat wafting up through the old building like a
transfusion of fresh blood into the arms of an ailing valetudinarian.
She hadn't been surprized, nor disappointed when he informed her of
his closing the business. She had her job at the hair salon, A
combination of habit and pity had kept her working for Duncan. A
parting gift of a fine illustrated copy of Louis Hémon's Marie
Chapdelaine along with a DVD of the 1984 dramatization of the
book starring Carol Laure, had been his first choice for her, but the
more he had contemplated the gift, the more it seemed out of date and
irrelevant to a young woman of today. Louis Hémon, an author who'd
met his death between the parallel lines of train tracks west of
Chapleau in northern Ontario almost a hundred years ago, never to
witness the publication and later popularity of his novel, seemed to
him a bizarre choice as he looked out at the urban landscape they
shared, this rich diversity between the river and the mountain, this
metropolitan promise between the whirlpools and the cross.
He'd opted for a substantial iTunes
card instead.
He plugged the kettle in to make tea
and then sat at his desk feeling that he was settling into one of his
lows. “Concavities” Tom had called them, using his mathematical
metaphors with their subtle nuances of meaning beyond Duncan's
understanding. Ever since hearing of the sale of the land for
condominium development, his moods had been erratic, shifting back
and forth between a sense of freedom, to one of immobilizing
helplessness. His mind began to ponder the what ifs. What if Amelia
had not played with her sister in her uncle's dumb waiter as a child?
He might not have been called to replace the ropes, and hence, would
never have met her. She might have married someone better, a lawyer,
doctor, engineer, someone who could have provided a stable financial
existence. Had he ruined her life? What if he'd broken free from his
Father's business, gone abroad, pursued another career? What if he
hadn't been entranced by that first true book he'd bought from his
church bazaar when young, that small hardcover biography of Keats by
Sidney Colvin, the spine cocked, the former owner's name on the
flyleaf, pulling him into the vortex of literary magic? What if he
hadn't quarrelled with his brother? What if his Mother hadn't died?
What ifs were like unredeemed winning lottery tickets past their due
date. He breathed in deeply. Too many things had happened recently.
The discovery of the odd manuscript and its mysterious disappearance
from the shop; the switch of the laptop bags leaving him with
Kierkegaard's Either/Or instead
of the 1881 cash book; and finally, the condominium
development and his dilemma of how to deal with a lifetime of books
and a remnant family business. Three's a charm his Dad used to
say. What else did he say? There's nothing between the sceptre and
the spade but hard work Duncan. Nothing between the sceptre and
the spade. Spadework. Grave digging. Alas poor Yorick. Be
resilient Duncan he told himself. Be resilient. But as the water
boiled in the kettle, he was imagining himself lying down in an
enormous book, the text of the right hand pages cut out to fit the
contours of his body, the lines of text truncated by his form, and
his body inked to replace the missing letters and words. Then he
imagined the preliminary pages descending over him, followed by the
stiff green buckram binding revealing a gilt decorative emblem on the
cover of an ouroboros in the form of thick coil of rope, tail in
mouth, with an open book in the centre. A Life in Books -
Duncan Strand in gilt letters on the spine. Buried in print,
in a book shaped coffin.
The click of the kettle's automatic
turn-off feature brought him to his feet.
What would be the text he wondered?
What letters and words would cover his body? A teabag slipped
between his fingers and fell to the floorboards like a seedpod and he
quietly cursed the stiffness in the joints of his left index finger
and the fatty tumour growing in the palm of his left hand, an
enlarging knot pulling on the tendons of his fingers like a spider
the threads of its web. He stretched his fingers back feeling the
tension, and examined the small pale hillock between the head and
heart lines with its radiating shadow lines, just one of many that
his body seemed to produce with abandon—the one on his right
forearm was the size of a scallop. See the doctor Amelia had said,
but the last thing he wanted was someone digging around in the palm
of his hand possibly making it worse. Ever since he had turned fifty
years of age, his body had been setting off warning lights like an
old car.
He placed the tea cozy over the small
pot which reminded him of his Mother snugging his wool hat on his
head. He could see her at the dining room table for
her Tuesday morning teapot meetings with Mrs. MacSween and Mrs.
Brown, neighbours and friends—Edna and Agnes to her—and he could
hear her voice saying she'd be Mother and pour the tea. From the
bottom stair he would listen as the Queen Anne English bone china
cups would burble with delight, and he'd watch the vapour rising from
their delicate gilt rims and wait for the gentle plop of a sugar cube
and the clink of the spoon before the sublime silence of the first
sip.
Taking a deep breath to dispel the
memory, he turned around and walked towards the book stacks. There
was a time when he could have recounted the purchase memory of each
book—a church bazaar in 1990 for that volume, a hot summer's day at
an estate sale on Rosyln Avenue in '82, for that one—but the books
had outnumbered his casual recall for years now; and the books he'd
sold over the years had vanished from him completely as if he'd
packaged and shipped off their memories of provenance along with the
books themselves. He looked into the first aisle to his left and
scanned the colourful spines. Perhaps he could choose a text to
represent the page to surround his body in his imaginary book coffin.
He looked into the aisle to his right, the aisle of Sir Percivale
where the end of the alphabet graced the shelves, and thought Swift's
Gulliver's Travels seemed apropos. Voltaire's Candide?
Waugh's Brideshead? Wells's Time Machine? Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest? Woolf's The Waves? He turned
his attention to his left, the aisle of Sir Lancelot, and
looked up to see Kobo Abe's Women in the Dunes. He always
liked that book. Atwood's Life Before Man? Borges's Ficciones?
Conrad's Lord Jim? Such a wonderful opening passage. A heavy
quarto of Balzac's Les Chouans, with a hundred engravings? Or
the large edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy,
its gilt titles faded? A favourite volume of Keats he remembered. It
was a volume that seemed to have edged its way forward from its
shelf-mates as if eager to be picked. Taking it down, he blew the
dust off the top edge and dust motes floated in the muted light like
fecal matter in an aquarium. He brought the book back to his desk
thinking perhaps a more elaborate form of bibliomancy was necessary,
something greater than the Sortes Vergilianae, the divination by the
random placement of an index finger. Why not dip into that sub rosa
randomness that's been tripping him up of late. Why not use chance to
shine a light into the depths of happenstance. Why not avail himself
of the arbitrary to perceive the ultramundane and stimulate that
preternatural presence he occasionally felt when playing cards or
scrabble with Amelia, that sense of a whimsical, playful manipulation
overseeing the game. All mathematics Tom would have said, the math
behind the odds, the odds behind the math, but still, that sense of
something behind the curtain, an unexplainable shadow presence that
remained with him.
The large book lay unopened on his lap
On a pad of
paper, he wrote down the simplest of questions, “What Is Going On?” He
counted the letters, 13, added the spaces, 3, multiplied by the
number of words, 4, to arrive at 64, and then multiplied this number
by the three odd occurrences, leaving him with the sum of 192.
Picking up the heavy volume of Robert Burton's Melancholy to
seek out the 192nd page, he opened it and at once a large
bookmark for Grange Stuart Books fell out into his lap. The
bookmark had been living in the dark interstices between pages 304
and 305, Partition 1, Section 2, Member 4, Subsection 7, An heap
of other Accidents causing Melancholy. He read the first
paragraph:
In this
Labyrinth of accidental causes, the farther I wander, the more
intricate I find the passage, & new causes as so many by-paths
offer themselves to be discussed. To search out all were an Herculean
work, & fitter for Theseus: I will follow mine intended thread;
and point only at some few of the chiefest.
Was this the sign
itself? Not so much an answer, as an understanding? The words
reminded him of the quotes on the slip of paper that fell from the
Kierkegaard volume, quotes from the philosophers Wisdom and
Wittgenstein, and he sensed there was a resonance between them and this Burton passage. But what about page 192? Checking it, he
discovered a mundane description of how diet affects the humours, all
carps, lobsters, crabs, cowcumbers, coleworts and melons, and quickly
dismissed it as insignificant. It was almost as if there was a dual
nature to this preternatural presence, a good and an evil, one of
helpful guidance, and one of mischievous misdirection. He turned back
to page 304-05 and once more read the opening passage. Everything
was somehow connected.
The phone rang. Silence greeted him on the other line. He didn't repeat his initial hello, but sat there listening to the fuzzy static, feeling like he was staring into a dark haunted house waiting for a ghost to appear.
*
To the sound of the surveyors pounding stakes into the ground, Duncan looked out of his window and sipped his tea, the residuum of unreality leaving him with
the bitter taste of his cross-grained and self-aggravated existence.
© ralph patrick mackay
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