The Journey Prize Stories 25 (3 page)

It’s also fitting that the Journey Prize should mark the beginning of a journey for the writers included in its pages: the impact of James A. Michener’s donation of the Canadian royalties for his novel
Journey
has clearly set many careers in motion.

And how was it behind the closed doors?

Like any jury, ours was one with argument, humour, complaint, and the occasional attempt at horse-trading, coupled with the knowledge that this is an anthology with real heft and value. The decisions mattered. We were three individual jurors
making difficult, careful choices – but in the end, our choices were only the opinion of three people, three readers. This is not a yes or no judgment on new careers as a whole – for all of us, what mattered was that the talent in the individual stories was humbling.

And where do they all come from? That’s critical, too. It’s worth noting that the eighty-one submissions were initially selected by this country’s literary magazines, a segment of the literary world that is among the most financially precarious. They are out there, picking and publishing new and emerging writers; they are the farm teams, the incubators, the discoverers of Canada’s writing future.

Remember that when you get a chance to subscribe to any one of them – to these magazines that are carving out the new frontiers – you will see things there that you will see nowhere else in this country.

And the greatest wonder for all three of us? Seeing the names, finally, of the people behind this crop of stories, and welcoming them to a great fraternity.

Here’s to twenty-five years, and then twenty-five more. The literary industry is changing in many ways: it might not even be fair to call it solely the “book publishing” business much longer. But there will always be new voices, new talent, and in whatever form, this anthology will continue to shine a bright light out into the darkness and reflect back new and hungry eyes.

Miranda Hill

Mark Medley

Russell Wangersky

June 2013

There is so much work to be done.

Rain has been pounding Paris for weeks. Whole swathes of pavement have come untied, sidewalks once ribboned into four-way intersections, ravelled now with seams exposed, ragged hems no longer travelled by bicycles, sedans, wandering feet.

They say my blueprints will pull us headfirst from this emergency.

In my office, an eight-by-eight cork cubicle on the eighth floor of the Institut de la Ville, I hunch over an early draft I’ve called “Centre City Contingency,” using a line gauge to lay out a series of stormwater drains. Until I sense my boss hovering.

Digging my heels into the linoleum, I turn slowly to face him.

—We are in shit, Serge, he says.

––

Two days ago, I saw a girl lose her life in a lemon sundress. She was crossing avenue de Choisy, past dusk on a Thursday, parting smoky sheets of rain. I was the only one near her when she was hit. Strangers crowded against the smoggy glass of dim sum restaurants, Hong Kong bakeries, stared hollow-eyed from the whale’s belly of the 183 bus.

Her skin barely held her bones together.

Time passed, who knows how much of it, before those same strangers poured onto the wet pavement. A man with pock-marked cheeks folded his nylon windbreaker in half, angled the makeshift pillow under the crown of her head. A woman in a silk turban knelt beside the body – marking with fluttering eyelashes the moment when
her
body became
the
body – and let a storm fall down her cheeks.

At some point, an ambulance arrived. Two young medics pressed their ears to the girl’s chapped lips and waited for breath that never came. Every evening for the past two years, I have followed the same ritual: rolling my blueprints into a drawing tube, buttoning my vinyl raincoat, and fording avenue Kléber to my suite at Hotel Raphaël.

The greatest joy of living in a hotel is that hardly anything you use belongs to you. The bed you sleep in, the tub you bathe in, these are tools you do not have to maintain.

With my forearms, I iron my plans flat across the suite’s Victorian dining table. Bicycle boulevards, civic squares, aquatic reserves, the barbed wire of railroad tracks – a miniature city balances on the Carrara marble.

My boss has fixed a slew of pink sticky notes like chicken pox on the plans.
Remember, downtown is our town; the Seine is the yolk that flavours the egg of Paris
. I tear them off one by one.

Tonight my hands migrate south on the blueprint, to Chinatown, the shaded elevations of trauma centres, pediatric hospitals. And, as there must be, the depressions.

—You’re unbearably vague, Colette is saying to me. I’ve been with her once, maybe twice. She has deep-set eyes that are at once inviting and distant, like a memory just beyond reach.

She picks up a vanity jar of ground cardamom from the bedside table and rubs the fine powder in the flexures of her palms. I flash to lamb tagine, my Formica mother in a Formica kitchen, shag-rugged and minimal, her slack lips forming unreadable words,
proud
or
pound, love
or
loaf
.

—You’re not handsome enough to get away with being vague. If you were better looking, you’d be mysterious.

I’m lost in a long-gone Christmas, cardamom braids rising in a redbrick oven, an autumn-haired woman riveting her arms around my neck, ornamenting me with eggnog kisses, while Harry Belafonte croons “Glory Manger” on our worn-down record player. I say nothing. Colette turns her back on me.

—You’re afraid, she sends over her shoulder. You’re a hunter with no heart.

And how beautiful her bare spine looks, straightened as if to underline her unkindness. I think I’m beginning to love her.

It seems that my boss has been crying.

—Avenue de Choisy? he asks from the doorway to my office. His hair is rumpled with stress and humidity; he is a stray dog, river-eyed and wild, his matted coat licked against the grain.

—I know what I’m doing.

His cheeks burn red. —If there are sinkholes in rue de Rivoli because you want to pump all of our efforts into Chinatown, you’ll be out of a job. I won’t think twice.

Through my office window, I make out the north face of Hotel Raphaël – the lace balustrade, the limestone carvings of pomegranates and lions’ heads – and I want, badly, to go home.

My boss lowers his gaze to his polished Valentino loafers. On his left toe, he notices a pigeon dropping and looks as if he might cry again. He is a tweed suit with no man in it; his body has slipped out, vanished into tedium, rain poised to wash away any trace that he may have existed.

In any flood, there are abandoned vehicles. I have flown to Chongqing, Queensland, and Cologne to plan for rebuilding after natural disasters, and seen miles of sedans deserted, dead headlights wired to dead batteries.

Down de Choisy, the water is low enough to walk through – or, we walk through it because we can’t be still – but nothing smaller than a bus can clear the overflow. I follow the road like a salmon going downriver, netted by the quiet pull of magnetic fields, to Chinatown. At some point, the wind picks up, and I huddle under the domed awning of a magazine stand.

I settle beside the gossip glossies while the proprietor, a man with a puddle for a chin, clears his throat over and over. From there I look out into the street, to an imagined chalk outline overwhelmed by the flood but not washed away, the nipped waist and tulip hem of a sundress.

Here, it takes work to filter beauty from the ugliness, the vibrant trains of mounted paper lanterns from the ones that have fallen, detritus scattered in the ocean, taking on the
shapes of pried-open clams, sunfish bones, red coral caked in salt. How to find anything beautiful while sadness folds itself around us, a beach blanket of steel wool?

Before stepping out from under the awning, I raise a newspaper over my head. Two steps into the road, the newspaper is already soggy. Still I cling to it; not for shelter, but for its semblance of structure, as something I can hold in my hands.

Colette paces the Alcove Suite, an architect surveying her building site, industrious but aware of its limitations. I perch on a red-velvet bergère, watching her luminous face as she decides what, together, we have room to construct.

—I can’t believe it, she murmurs. Hotel Raphaël.

While she slips off her slingbacks, I unseal my rainboots from my calves and peel away my socks. We line up side by side on the king bed, each half-starfished on the silk duvet, nowhere touching.

—I went on a vacation once, Colette says, after so much time has passed that I thought she was asleep. When I was twelve, my father and I took a charter flight to Dakar.

Across my mind runs a panorama of a clammy city, the opening montage of a New Wave movie: high-rises sweating like leather, women ripe on hot-waxed mopeds, men with rickety carts hawking dried plums and chevron beads. In this world I expect Colette’s words to be silver floss, to glisten.

—He grew up there, but he was ashamed of growing up without money. When we visited, he rented a hotel room for me to stay in, alone, while he stayed in his childhood home.

—Bet your hotel wasn’t like this one, I answer, unsure of the shades in my voice.

—It was a Radisson. No shred of personality in that place. Not a single honest smell or mismatched piece of linen. Who can stand beige throw pillows?

The sun, which had, for a spell of fifteen minutes, poked out from behind the cirrus clouds, disappears from view. Colette fits her palm to mine, and the darkness we are left in doubles for the low light of intimacy.

Hell or high water, the suggestions have trickled in. Alternative routes for public transit, wider boulevards, new fountains. The people want to revive Old Paris.

I refuse to reshape this city into its own shortcomings. Wider boulevards will only increase traffic; pigeons will drown in new fountains. I will not suffer for someone else’s nostalgia.

The public doesn’t understand. Simply because the city is broken, and we are forced to rebuild, doesn’t make this an opportunity to carve out a dream world.

I uncap a 0.18 millimetre pen – with it, I could perform surgery – and steady the nib in the heart of Chinatown.

In the next room, my boss is singing Josephine Baker in a vaudevillian boom, filling each wordless bar with the mimicked lilt of an accordion.
Paris! Paris! Paris!
For people like him, this city is a Vincente Minelli movie – Leslie Caron sipping from a champagne flute, lovers picnicking on the Seine, Gene Kelly serenading a baguette.

As I’m plotting pedestrian crosswalks at the south end of de Choisy, I can almost hear his voice.
For the love of God, focus on the downtown core
.

A feeling steals into the bones at the base of my skull, not a
pain but an awareness, blood pulsing over and over against my temple, like a madman throwing himself endlessly at the same idea. It must be a shift in the weather.

Before Colette, I loved someone as hard as anyone can be loved. Claire called herself Ourson, the masculine of little bear, because she said she felt like a little boy hibernating. She was twenty-six when I met her, and by that time had already lived ten years on the street.

Cities work in a different way for people with no home to return to – subways, gravel alleys serve a distinct utility; sycamore-treed parks far outgrow aesthetics – and I knew that. In my head, I knew that.

We dated for months. We went to second-run movies, and she kissed me in the dark. I often tried to get her to stay overnight, without sounding lonely or expectant. And when I finally bought a place for us to live together – lofty popcorn ceilings, a claw-foot tub that looked like it might run away – I still felt the weight of that trying.

She would wear jackets inside the apartment, two or sometimes three, double her jeans, pile on extra socks and sweaters, no matter how many times I would say,
Make yourself comfortable
. On her body, she carried everything she owned.

She fled after midnight on New Year’s Eve, while I slept, champagne-tongued. I wish I had been surprised when I woke up alone.

—You really don’t have to stay, Colette says, passing a turquoise ring from one finger to another as she waits for her tailor to finish hemming one of her pantheon of yellow dresses.
I unbutton the front of my overcoat to indicate my intention of remaining with her.

—When the rain stops, I will wear nothing but sundresses, she says. I will be a little sun myself.

She tilts her face down and looks up at me, the coy angles of a child. I can tell she is looking for a response, so I search the hurricane of my brain for a way to please her.

—Lovely as Saturn, but close as the sun.

These the tailor’s words, spilling out as he rises to his full six feet. He hands the dress to Colette, who studies the seams, makes sure no golden threads have been left loose. The little sun needs secure hems.

—Oh, Ray, she tells him, you are a dream.

She leads me outside. Or maybe just walks ahead of me.

—I need to buy persimmons, she says, again twirling her turquoise ring. Will you walk me to the Peking Market?

My nod is a mechanism no more thoughtful than a sneeze. Satisfied, she squeezes my hand.

She begins to walk south, her feet fragile as glass under all the flood water, and suddenly I draw her to my chest, moor the ferry of her body so it does not float – it must not float away from me – but catch her palm in the swing of my arm, knocking her delicate ring to the ground.

My boss sits with legs crossed behind his seagrass-teak desk, imported from Copenhagen on the city’s tab, and flutters visibly between comedy and pain, as if a shadow puppet show is playing on the crystal stage of his cornea.

—I looked at your plans, he begins, amusement deepening
his laugh lines. And then, darkly, —Do you think nothing of our city’s golden past?

I imagine he is watching two paper cut-outs scale the lattice of the Eiffel Tower, propelled by the power of love, belting out a duet that, at some point, rhymes “bébé” with “mais oui.”