Nikolski (15 page)

Noah feels he is losing control of the situation on all fronts. Above him, the box refuses to move. Under his arm, the pile of paper is gradually sliding away. Behind him, Arizna is fighting with the zipper of her jeans and mumbling unintelligible statements about indigenous technologies. He feels he is the prisoner of a concentric series of enclosed spaces: a cardboard box stored in a closet built into a bedroom inside an apartment filled with Dominicans in the process of emptying bottles of rum.

All at once, something cracks dramatically and the box spills its contents onto his head.

“Case closed,” Noah mutters, as he brushes the dust from his shoulders.

Arizna, her hand clamped over her mouth, is bursting with laughter. The box’s contents have spread at her feet.

“What’s this?” she asks, picking up one of the books with her toes.

“Let me see. Oh, that. The Book with No Face. I haven’t seen it in years.”

“What’s it about?”

“Pirates,” he says succinctly, dropping down on the mattress beside her. “The same old story. The Spanish steal gold from the Native Indians. The English steal the gold from the Spanish. The Dutch steal the gold from the English.”

“How does it end?”

“The Dutch are shipwrecked and the gold ends up at the bottom of the sea.”

Her curiosity aroused, Arizna peruses the book. This is the first time Noah has seen her interested in anything but the Indian Act, numbered treaties, the Inuit or the Oka Crisis.

“Interconnected issues,” she explains. “Remember, your pirate story begins with the Native Indians’ gold.”

“That’s where their part in the story ends. Native Indians have never been great seafarers.”

“Wrong! Have you read
Moby-Dick?”

“A gap in my education.”

“Well, for your information, in the nineteenth century the success of whale-hunting expeditions depended on the skill of the harpooners that got hired on. And the best harpooners were indigenous. There are three in
Moby-Dick:
one is a Native Indian, another is from Oceania and the third is African. They were the most respected members of the crew and they earned the biggest share of the profits. Next to the captain, of course …”

She sighs and pops a few more buttons of her blouse while fanning herself with the Book with No Face. Noah wonders how many buttons it takes for a blouse to no longer constitute an enclosed space.

“Moby-Dick
was written in 18 51. That was the golden age of whale oil. After the introduction of fossil fuels, the whaling industry became mechanized. These days, the harpooners of the
Pequod
would be underpaid sailors on a container ship registered in the Bahamas or Liberia.”

“That sounds a lot like a pirate story.”

“Yes, it does. Can I borrow your book?”

Noah makes a little gesture with his hand as a sign of consent.

On the other side of the wall, the muffled pulsing of the
bachata
diminishes and stops. All that can be heard now are the faint noise of dishes and sporadic conversations. Arizna puts the Book with No Face down on the floor, stretches slowly and looks at her watch.

“Well, that’s it,” she notes, her voice imbued with implication. “I’ve missed the last Metro.”

MONDAY
,
SEPTEMBER 3
, seven-thirty in the morning. Rain is falling for the first time in months. The parched earth refuses to drink it all in and the drains spew back the overflow.

Noah is completely unaware of the weather. He is floating over a field of grain somewhere in Saskatchewan. It is hot and the breeze carves out waves in the barley. After a time, he sinks to the ground, plunges among the golden ears and wakes up in his bed.

He taps the empty space on the port side of the mattress, pokes his head out from under the sheets. Arizna’s clothes have disappeared, along with Arizna. Not surprising. Not once since she became a regular at the
jututo
has he managed to wake up beside her.

Resigned, he starts to get out of bed. But when his foot touches down, he discovers to his astonishment ten centimetres of brownish water covering the floor. He rubs his eyes, shakes his head. But the little waves continue to slap against his ankles.

He wades, dumbfounded, through the apartment. A few smelts are swimming around the living room, dreaming of the ocean, while in the corridor various objects limply drift about: three volumes of the
Encyclopédie Cousteau,
an issue of the
Organe des pois-sonniers,
a pair of shoes.

He discovers Maelo in the bathroom, bailing water into the toilet with a 250-ml measuring cup.

“Has the drainpipe given up on us?” Noah asks casually.

“The drainpipe has given up on us,” Maelo answers philosophically.

“What about the landlord?”

“
The party you wish to reach is currently unavailable.”

Noah watches for a minute as Maelo goes at it, and wonders if his efforts may not be wasted. He leaves the bathroom, half-heartedly perches a few objects above the waterline, then decides to do nothing until the deluge is over. Standing on a chair, he puts on some dry clothes, and navigates toward the front door with his feet wrapped in plastic supermarket bags.

As he leaves the apartment, he comes face to face with the postman. The day’s mail amounts to two letters covered with various blue and black seals, and addresses that have dissolved into purple anemones. End results for the summer: His mother did not stop in Little Smoky and there is no post office in Jean Côté.

As for the letter to Triangle, it has apparently vanished into thin air.

Noah dashes into the library, with the downpour close on his heels. The fall term starts tomorrow, and a line of dripping-wet students stretches back from the student loan desk like a throng of disaster victims at a Red Cross field station.

On the fifth floor, the Naval Sciences section is deserted.

Noah circles the table several times, staring at the emptiness with growing disbelief. Except for a precariously balanced pile of books, there is no trace of Arizna.

I MOMENTARILY REAPPEAR
in this story on the morning of Monday, September 3, 1994. The details are pointless and my intrusion will go unnoticed, overshadowed by the equinoctial storm that is descending on Montreal three weeks ahead of time. Outside the bookstore, ten million litres of water are cooling the asphalt of St-Laurent Boulevard in a vast hiss of steam.

This staggering low-pressure system is in proportion to the heat wave that preceded it. Two weeks earlier, the thermometer rose to over 50 degrees Celsius, an absolute record after which we stopped keeping track, the mercury having erupted from its glass column. Now fall has arrived—an abrupt, cataclysmic fall. Twirling my thumbs, I look at the water etching sea serpents on the windowpane while I wait for improbable clients. For who would be insane enough to risk his neck by coming here on this end-of-the-world Monday?

Just then, the little bell over the front door, apparently wishing to prove me wrong, chimes out. I immediately
recognize the raincoat with the blackened seams and the old blue sailor’s duffel bag. A regular customer. She nervously pulls back her hood and fluffs her short-cropped hair. I greet her with a little wave. She answers with a smile.

I’ve often tried to get acquainted with this mysterious client, to no avail. She smiles politely but forestalls any attempt at familiarity. I don’t even know her first name. I should mention that I’ve always found it hard to establish ties with people. It seems I’m too withdrawn, too much of a homebody. None of my very few lovers was ever able to understand why I was content to make a living selling books. Sooner or later they would end up asking themselves—and, inevitably, asking
me
— why I didn’t want to travel, study, pursue a career, earn a better salary. There are no simple answers to these questions. Most people have clearly defined opinions on the subject of free will: Fate (no matter what you call it) either exists or does not exist. There can be no approximations, no in-betweens. I find this hypothesis reductive. In my view, fate is like intelligence, or beauty, or type z+ lymphocytes—some individuals have a greater supply than others. I, for one, suffer from a deficiency; I am a clerk in a bookstore whose life is devoid of complications or a storyline of its own. My life is governed by the attraction of books. The weak magnetic field of my fate is distorted by those thousands of fates more powerful and more interesting than my own.

While this may not be a very attractive appraisal of my situation, at least I can’t be accused of being pretentious.

The girl unbuttons her raincoat, wipes her glasses on her sweater and heads toward the computer section. I’ve never seen her show an interest in any section other than Cooking or Computers. In the first section, she buys all the best books on fish and seafood. In the second, she unobtrusively hides her books under her arm, behind her belt, against her back. Perhaps she thinks of computers as a nasty habit. I’ve been on to her for a long time, but I pretend not to notice. There are certain thieves one would prefer to stay in touch with.

In order to give her a free hand, I decide to go do a little housekeeping in the Abyss.

Every bookseller cherishes a favourite lost cause. Mine involves arranging the dark little storeroom where for decades my predecessors would toss unclassifiable books pell-mell (before quickly slamming the door behind them for fear of an avalanche). This long accumulation, resulting from denial and procrastination, became the
id
of the bookstore—its unconscious, its hidden face, its unspeakable and chaotic cesspool—in a word, the Abyss.

It has been four years since I began to devote my free time to the psychoanalysis of this incredible place, an undertaking which, in reality, involves digging my way through layers of compressed paper. Progress is slow, as I can work only when the bookstore is deserted. What’s more, I must interrupt my labours for three months every year, between June and August, because the thick mantle of mineral wool that insulates this former cold-storage room makes it unendurable.

On the door, an unknown hand has carved a pompous warning:
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Inside, the stifling air smells of warm tow. I sit down on a pile of
People’s Almanac
and inspect the environs. The excavation site is as I left it last May. There’s even a little yellow bookmark indicating the stack of books I was working on. I look at the backs of these tomes. Typical unclassifiables: an
Atlas of Whale Geometry,
a
Catalogue of Familiar Objects
and the
Directory of Potential Poets in Ungava.
As soon as I budge the stack, a bundle of old
National Geographic
maps drops on my head.

I examine them as I rub my skull. I could, of course, put each of them back in its corresponding issue, but the operation would require several days—a questionable use of my time, considering that we retail issues of
National Geographic
at twenty-five cents apiece and that, in spite of this ridiculous price, we haven’t sold even one in the last five years.