Transits (4 page)

It is then Roy happens upon the Wolverine Lounge. There is a brightly lit marquee and he can hear the sounds of swing coming from inside. It is precisely the sort of place he imagined he would find in New York. He thinks, if the night had turned out differently, how he might have taken Alice here, and told her the story of how a talented cornet player named Bix Beiderbecke found his way to New York fifty years before, only to drink himself to the grave at the age of twenty-eight. And as he passes under the marquee, a man and a woman emerge from the club. The man is older than the woman, and dressed entirely in black.

“Roy!” says the woman, who after she smiles and speaks, is so obviously Alice. “This is Roy,” she says to the man, who also smiles, coyly, and extends his hand.

“You'll never guess who I happened to meet, Roy.”

“Dean Glasner,” says the man. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Roy's throat constricts as he shifts the weight of the parcel onto his left arm, and extends his right hand to meet the hand of Glasner. The parcel slips slightly. The old newsprint gives way and Alice screams as little moist red bits resembling teeth and severed fingertips clatter onto the sidewalk under the flickering neon light of the Wolverine Lounge marquee.

by Pablo Strauss

I don't know how to start this so I'll look out the window and tell you what I see. The force of the wind is such that the snow does not fall, but blows horizontally. The café sign that reads
Au Bonnet d'Âne
swings on its axle until it too is parallel to the ground. A father walks by with two child-size bundles; like the other walkers they look brave and determined, leaning into the wind. It looks bad and it's going to get worse. It's January 30th and this is Québec, and we haven't suffered enough. I write in this dollar-store notebook whose cover pattern makes me happy, drinking coffee at a table by the window and the heater.

Yesterday was different: clear and sunny, not so cold. The wind had packed the snow to an eggshell smoothness that made me feel like an arctic explorer as I walked through a vacant lot. What would it do to you, I asked myself, to live ever in such flatness? The word “eternity” came to mind, but once there didn't do much, as I continued
on my way towards my friend Florence's. My route was circuitous. From my job at the bakery I had gone almost all the way home, and now I was doubling back. I didn't mind. The first leg of the trip I made with Mafalda Nisot, mother of the bakery's owner; the second would take me by seventeenth century graveyards, Victoria Park, the Rock City Tobacco Co. and two apartments I occupied in previous lives. Walking, streetlights, slowly falling snow, my walkman playing something sad, old brick buildings, crooked and patched with rusted tin—here's all I need to feed my nostalgia and to make it more acute, this being my main occupation these days.

Mme. Nisot, Jean Claude, Fabien, and I clean the bakery. It's a lot of work, and Mme. Nisot goes at it with a particular and unyielding vigour, leaving no appliance unturned, gleefully proclaiming that “Nothing is easy in life!” and that “Nothing is free!” She lives near me and she lives alone, and I think our walks home and the kisses on the cheek when we part are important to her. They're important to me. Either way, we walk home together. Last night we talked about whether it is in fact getting warmer each year, the alarming speed with which these years pass, and the desire to go back in time.

“Oh yes, I'd like that,” says Mme. Nisot. “To go back in a time machine. Me, I'd like that. Where would you go?”

“I don't know.”

“I could see you in Roman times.”

“I don't know,” I say. “Violent and ugly, too many engineers and soldiers.”

“Thanks a lot! My family's Italian, maybe I have Roman blood.”

“That would explain a lot,” I say, and we laugh.

“I know! How about the Aztecs?” says Mme. Nisot, excited like she's really got me there. Me, I can't see myself as an Aztec, not at all.

With such smoothness our conversation carries on as we cross the cold bridge and pass First, Second and Third streets, along Third Avenue. I don't know why of all the people at the bakery, most of whom are my own age, it is Mme. Nisot I get along with best. Most people don't, but I do.

When I get to Florence's I look in my bag. There are two notebooks, two novels, tapes, pens and markers, a zine I got in the mail yesterday, a bag of muffins, and four unwrapped loaves of bread. The way everything is randomly shoved in pleases me. Plato says that when things are rubbed together understanding comes forth like sparks, and this looks a lot like what's happening in my bag. I give Florence a loaf of bread and some muffins. Free bread tastes good, but giving out free bread feels better.

Florence has made salad and put olives in a bowl; we eat. She tells me about a girl she met, a boxer. The French word
boxeuse
is nice and she knows it, repeats it, breaks into a laugh. She sounds like she might be in love. She explains to me the workings of RRSPs, interrupting me when I protest that the chances of my buying RRSPs are slim. She kicks my ass at Scrabble as we drink beer. We're playing bilingually, so I can't blame the language. I want to blame my letters, first all worthless vowels, then fastidious consonants. The truth is she's just a better player.

Florence was the first friend I made in this town. We haven't seen each other for a long time, but it's as if no time had passed. Does that mean that she's an “old friend?” Can it really be that I have old friends here? And if so, is it time to go?

The night before last, I found myself at a party. Lately I've been staying home more than usual, but when my roommates came home I was at the kitchen table by myself, drinking a 40 of Black Label, so I couldn't pretend I had anything better to do.

I don't normally drink by myself, but it happens. I have that thirst that is never quite quenched. I can keep it in check because I can usually find something more compelling to do. Sometimes I can't.

The party was at one of my roommates' lover's house. The boys and girls who live there are anarchists, meaning they don't believe in monogamy, steal their toilet paper from the university, and throw a wicked party. I'm being cheap; many among them find ways to turn their beliefs into practical, meaningful action. I admire their
convictions. My politics go deep but they are quiet, private. Yes, I know politics is by definition public.

“I wonder what it would be like to not be politically gelatinous?” my friend Luke asked me in a letter once. I wonder what it would be like not to be riven by doubt.

Someone complains: “Why didn't you make the punch with real oranges? It tastes like McCain's. It tastes like capitalism!” Everyone laughs. These people know how to negotiate taking themselves too seriously and not seriously enough, and that's probably why they get things done. And the punch sort of does taste like capitalism — oily and artificially sweet, concealing the taste of the poison we love because it helps us forget there was something we were looking for, something we haven't found yet.

Working is the best thing to do when you're hung over. Where would you be otherwise? You would be lying in bed, sleeping, holding your head, complaining or just feeling sorry for yourself. Cool. Working is better: not only have you gotten up but you even get paid for your troubles. Then there is the added challenge—whose job couldn't stand to be made more interesting? And finally, there is the suspense. Will you pull it off, or will someone notice? Will Betty the matronly Salvadoran bust you like she does every time, all “So, what were
you
up to last night?” winking knowingly, but sweetly, even though you would never catch
her
going out on a work night.

Today I am up to the challenge. Mine is a busy bakery, today even more so than usual. I've only been working up front serving customers for a month or so, and that only once a week. Using a cash register, talking to customers, making pleasant conversation while keeping things moving — these things don't come easily to me. Yet today I wrap my head around transactions both simple and intricate. I'm on, and it feels good.

I don't know how I choose the places I work. I'm not really looking for money or status. I just want a place where everything is as it should be and my efforts are essential, not superfluous; a place where I don't have to use hateful jargon or lie.

My co-worker Mélanie leaves and I'm alone. It gets busier. Some
people want time-consuming things to drink on site, hot chocolate made by melting real chocolate pieces in hot milk or café-au-lait in bowls, while other people just want loaves of bread. These two classes of people share a single line-up.

The best part of my tape arrives. A song called “Nie” comes on slow and dirge-like, tearful and sweet, and brings on a change of pace and feeling in the room. It makes me see the bakery as if in slow motion, like a party in its sweet spot: people gliding radiant across the kitchen and no one has ever been funnier or more beautifully themselves, and you can almost
see
the connections between them, like lines in a drawing, and no one is thinking of elsewhere. OK, this isn't a party; it's a bakery, but still. Now “Nincompoop” comes on, a bit faster and more rhythmic, but still wistful. (I remember this song played once at the
Bonnet d'Âne
. It was snowing and I was somewhat in love with the waitress, and the traffic light, the only non-white thing outside, changed colour in time with the song: green, yellow, red.)

Here, though, three women, old friends, are having coffee and catching up, their happiness effortless and measureless. A kid climbs on precarious stools but he will never fall or burst into tears, he will just keep climbing and in the long line up people wait patiently and smile at each other, and there is no waste in my movements; nothing spills, nothing drops, nothing breaks.

A woman in line looks at me curiously.

“I like your shirt,” she says.

“I got it at a thrift store, in Vancouver; I don't know what it means.” The shirt shows a red phoenix and underneath says in a clear sans serif, “PHOENIX.”

“Oh, you're an anglophone?” she says in perfect English. Only then does it register, that trace of accent I heard in her French. Or maybe I did notice before. Maybe that's why I mentioned Vancouver.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“I don't know,” I answer, truthfully. “Trying to learn French?”

She's no longer looking at me according to the demands of the client-server relationship, but the way that you look at a friend you love when you listen to them completely. Some people seem to look at everyone that way, all the time, but I am not one of those people. She's looking me directly in the eye, and though I can't always do
that, this time I look right back at her. The music is still perfect and the other customers shift position in harmony to our melody, background to our foreground, as in a film when the main characters are in focus but not the others, the extras, who yet provide colour and shade. I get this strange woman her bread.

“Well, it's working,” she says.

The feeling that has been contracting in me to a single point now expands. I smile and say “thanks” while this feeling moves outward in concentric circles, like the ripples on water whose calm you've interrupted, or like a body stone, or like falling in love (though that's not what's happening here). It's as if she
knows
, though what she knows I can only make crude guesses at; as if she were sent to tell me this—it's working—because when I marshal the available evidence it doesn't look to be working at all. You will be twenty-nine and you live in a room in a basement and wash dishes for money, sometimes, and that love you once had has been gone for some time now. You have learned to speak French so that people don't guess right away that you're English—they think you're Bosnian—and you have friends who love you, and you will have lovers again, and some (if not all) of your projects will bear fruit. Everything is going fine; she sees this even if you don't, and she was sent to tell you.

I've been trying to quit smoking for about as long as I've been smoking. I've never really accepted that I'm a smoker, and I've never really been able to stop. When I am depressed, I need to savour this depression thoughtfully, to drink it in, and cigarettes are just the thing.

Tonight my roommates went out to the bar, full of high spirits and big plans. I didn't want to go. I don't do well at bars, don't like to talk to strangers. I stayed home in my basement, reading. As soon as they left, I felt it coming on, that feeling, that need. I went to the gas station, and came back and sat on my stoop.

It is a cold night, foggy. Across the street is a tree whose black outline corresponds to my mood—if only I could draw it!—and on one of the old brownstones a chimney, and from it a plume of smoke rising, mirroring the smoke of my cigarette, the smoke from my lungs, and the whole conspiring to intensify and shape this feeling inside of me:
one part longing, one part not having; one part loneliness, one part love of these foreign surroundings and people I don't know and never will. I cultivate this feeling; it is pure and visceral and deep, made of the same stuff as the sagging former factories and forlorn trees bereft of leaves, the minor-chord song I can hear (but not sing), the drawing I can see (but not put down on paper). I have worked on this mode of feeling for years—but what's the use if I can't render it? Where is the form? What use these inward epiphanies?

by Ian Colford

The plane went down at night in a thunderstorm, almost a mile short of a rural landing strip somewhere in Northern India. Everyone was killed. I heard the report on the radio the next morning while I was eating breakfast. The news did not make much of an impression on me. I forgot about it as soon as the newscast ended. It was only when I arrived on campus that I learned that one of our students, along with her entire family, had been on the plane.