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.
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.
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