Still Life with June
Page 9
Dear Brother Bacon:
We have received your letter about what you call the “Julian calendar drift against the solar year,” and find it very interesting. You will be glad to know that we have taken this matter under advisement and will be considering it at our next board meeting with God. Thank you for your time and effort in writing this letter, and keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
Pope Clement IV
What Bacon didn’t know is that Pope Clement wrote another letter to the monks who were keeping Bacon locked up at his abbey in Germany. This one said:
Dear Fellow Administrators:
Enclosed please find letter from Bacon. Please keep the locks on the door and don’t let him out, ever! This guy is as crazy as a shithouse loon!
Sincerely,
Pope Clement IV
LXXII
They eventually did listen to Bacon and adjusted the Julian calendar by eleven minutes to secure the drift. It was not Clement IV but his successor Gregory V who took the advice. Thus we now have the Gregorian calendar. Of course, Bacon was dead by the time they finally did it. That Roger! Had he been alive today, he’d be walking around on December 31, 2000, wishing everybody who celebrated way too hard and paid way too much for everything the year before a good old Year of Our Lord Happy Millennium!
LXXIII
Don’t ask me where the phrase “shithouse loon” comes from. I have no idea.
LXXIV
Instalment Number III
Boy Am I Glad I Took This Job or Selling My Soul
for a Hundred Dollars a Week
by Cameron Dodds
Dear Dagnia. Sorry about missing last week’s instalment, but that’s a hundred bucks you can keep. I finally had a date with the BIG BAD RECORDS boy. He couldn’t stop talking about his girlfriend. Thought I’d get that out of the way right at the start so you can vent your annoyance now and read on in unobstructed snoopiness. As for Dean the penis. We’ve reached a compromise. He plays anything thing he wants — Classical, Romantic, Baroque or something from the Consumeristic Period if he feels like it — but not until after twelve when I get up. When I leave for work at six he can play to his heart’s content until three in the morning when I get home. He came down one morning at eleven o’clock to apologize for playing so often and so loudly. I couldn’t be too mad at him. He is cute! My age, nice build, Clark Kent glasses. Cute! You never said so, you dog!
He stayed for coffee and bummed one of my smokes. I almost said, “I bet that bothered the piss out of Dagnia when you lived there,” then caught myself. I’m not used to spying on someone I’ll have to talk to occasionally. Gotta learn to keep my spy mouth shut!
We talked for about an hour, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes. I was doubtful when you said I’d like him but I do. He’s quiet — in a reasonably intelligent, good-looking kind of way — and kind of funny too, if you listen closely. Mostly he talked about music and I talked about writing. I admitted I worked long hours because of him and he thought that was very amusing. I told him I didn’t like him before I met him and he said the same thing about me.
“Why?” I said. “You couldn’t even hear me.”
“Exactly the point. Your apartment is so bloody quiet all the time. I’m a musician, and all musicians distrust vast amounts of silence. It’s just not natural.”
I like him, which makes me feel all the more sleazy about going through his garbage and following him around. I am following him, you’ll be glad to know. Not that I enjoy it. But first, the garbage.
Contents of Friday’s garbage, left sitting in a bag in the hallway outside his door for the weekly pick-up by Rose, and catalogued by general category:
1. Food — four empty boxes of Kraft Dinner (must be an artist thing); innumerable chunky soup and vegetable cans, with one noticeable variation from the peas, corn, carrot combo: parsnips. The guy eats canned parsnips. I didn’t even know they made canned parsnips. Christ, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a fresh parsnip, let alone a canned one. A few take-out containers from the Vietnamese place around the corner. One empty package of BIG BAD COFFEE and an empty orange plastic pill container with no label.
2. The usual bathroom and household stuff — empty toothpaste tube, a mostly used container of Right Guard stick deodorant, an empty quarter-litre bottle of Javex. (I had the same thing in my garbage when I moved in. You wouldn’t believe the grime.) An old toothbrush with worn bristles and faint traces of bloodstains on the roots. (Bad gums. He should watch that.) An empty container of Johnson and Johnson dental floss. (Obviously the bad gums are not from too little flossing. Chronic peritonitis, maybe?) An empty bottle of rubbing alcohol (which he already told me he uses on a Q-tip to clean between the keys on his keyboard). Paper coffee cups (from — you guessed it — BBC), used Kleenex and paper towels, cigarette butts, and one roach from a marijuana joint (naughty, naughty Dean and Dagnia). No liquor bottles, that I could see, and no used condoms or wrappers. So my guess is no wild parties with those bimbos you’re a’scared of.
3. Paper — by far the most telling garbage item is the paper we throw out. We think a garbage bag is a black hole from which nothing can return, when in fact everything can return from it. You wouldn’t believe what I found in Bob’s garbage. Credit-card slips with his number showing, cruel first draft notes to his mother, power bills that were so overdue they were threatening to cut him off. Even a form note from his doctor telling him it was time for all those with damaged immune systems to have their influenza shots again. Fortunately for you, there were no notes from Dean’s doctor. There was a letter from somebody named Harold, but Dean had torn it into little pieces. All I got, by piecing what I could find back together, is that Harold hates his “fucking wife” who visits his office every day. Just pieces. Nothing revealing. Dean’s also smart with his credit-card bills. He keeps the yellow copies and throws out the carbons torn into a million pieces. Other than that, flyers from BIG BAD DEPARTMENT STORE, BIG BAD PHONE COMPANY, some right-wing religious group selling a book called Millennium Prophecies Aborted that’s supposed to tell us why the Y2K disaster never happened and the world didn’t end. Same stuff I got in my mailbox and dumped in the first available trash receptacle.
As for what Dean does for the day. When he’s not practising, which is not often, he goes out for java at BIG BAD COFFEE across the street. He buys newspapers at the corner. He is obviously set up for money because he doesn’t work. He avoids BIG BAD BOOKS and shops instead at Desert Island Books And Records at 8th and Brighton. I checked it out. They have a good classical music section. On my one night off I followed him around for a bit. No biggie. He went to a movie — a repertory theatre rerun of Charade starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. (I liked it so much I didn’t even notice Dean had left halfway through the movie.) When I got home the lights were on in his apartment and he was practising again. (What’s he practising for, anyway? He never seems to play anywhere but in his apartment.)
The long and the short of it is there are no bimbos. I love the hundred bucks, but save it and renew your hope. He lives as pathetic a life as I do, and as you probably do. Let’s call this off, shall we?
LXXV
There was an e-mail from Dagnia when I went to work the following night after sending the report. I was not supposed to get e-mail on the work computer and was pissed off she didn’t call or send it to my home computer.
Subject: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 18:24:27 _0300
From: DagniaD@hotmail.com
To: treatment@boothcentre.com
CC:
Cameron: I’ll say when to call it off. And don’t you worry about the hundred bucks.
Dagnia
P.S. Why aren’t you at writers’ group anymore?
LXXVI
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 19:07:02 _0300
From: treatment@boothcentre.com
&n
bsp; To: DagniaD@hotmail.com
CC:
Dagnia: It’s your money, but I think you’re wasting your time.
Cameron
P.S. I’m not at writers’ group because I found something better to do with my Thursday afternoons.
LXXVII
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 19:23:56 _0300
From: DagniaD@hotmail.com
To: treatment@boothcentre.com
CC:
What? (Have you found that’s better?)
LXXVIII
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 20:02:36 _0300
From: treatment@boothcentre.com
To: DagniaD@hotmail.com
CC:
Visiting the retarded sister of a dead drug addict at a city mental institution and trying to make some sense out of this addict’s brief but brutal life. What else?
LXXIX
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 20:04:41 _0300
From: DagniaD@hotmail.com
To: treatment@boothcentre.com
CC:
Thank you for being honest with me. I think it’s time I was honest with you ...
LXXX
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 20:07:39 _0300
From: treatment@boothcentre.com
To: DagniaD@hotmail.com
CC:
Well, I’m waiting ...
Cameron
LXXXI
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 20:08:12 _0300
From: DagniaD@hotmail.com
To: treatment@boothcentre.com
CC:
Dean is not my ex-boyfriend.
Dagnia
LXXXII
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 20:10:12 _0300
From: treatment@boothcentre.com
To: DagniaD@hotmail.com
CC:
Well. Who the fuck is he then?
Cameron
LXXXIII
I was getting impatient with this electronic cat and mouse game. And I was late doing my rounds. Guys could be fighting upstairs and I wasn’t up there singing “Tomorrow.” Frankly, I didn’t give a shit who Dean was or wasn’t. I was tired of being a hundred-dollar-a-week spy scum. I was tired of collecting piss from guys who are trying to get better because they are hanging on to some little piece of fragile promise that would probably not do them any good in this world anyway. I wanted to have a lobotomy and move in with June at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope. I wanted to go crazy and be Roger Bacon obsessing about eleven minutes a year and solar drift. I wanted to know why the y2k end of the world disaster was aborted. I wanted a lot of things, but what I really didn’t want to know is what Dagnia sent by e-mail next.
LXXXIV
Subject: Re: Instalment # 3: Selling Your Soul Etc.
Date: Tuesday, 29 January 2000 20:12:32 _0300
From: DagniaD@hotmail.com
To: treatment@boothcentre.com
CC:
Dean is my brother. Dean won’t talk to me. Dean is dying.
Goodnight, Cameron.
Dagnia
LXXXV
Just when you think you will hate someone forever. Just when you imagine you are about to be injected with the Black Widow’s venom, she turns out not be a black widow after all. Just when you think you’re dealing with a dehumanized object, you blunder mindlessly into her humanity. The hateship was over.
Happy Millennium.
Goodnight 1999.
LXXXVI
In the Sally Ann Treatment Centre, when people finally start telling the truth, it’s called breaking denial.
In jail, according to Iroquois Pete, they call it ratting someone out and you can be shanked over it.
Prior to 1951 in the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope they called it confession.
After the city took over in 1951 they called it “the recession of delusional fantasy.”
Roger Bacon would have called it self-deduction or the beginning of enlightenment, depending on which hat he was wearing — the rationalist’s or the religious mystic’s.
The guys who wrote Millennium Prophecies Aborted would probably call it being born again or giving your soul to Jesus.
Nietzsche for Dummies would call it the first step to becoming the superman, or rising above conventional human morality.
Taoism for Dummies would call it becoming a part of the great Tao or way or that which has no name.
Feng Shui for Dummies would say it’s around the time you’ll start re-arranging your living room furniture.
And I say it’s the point at which a loser begins to realize she’s a loser.
Which is what Dagnia was, in my book.
LXXXVII
First of all, she wasn’t a writer. Which meant that the writers’ group at BIG BAD BOOKS officially had no successful writers in it — about par for open writers’ groups everywhere. She had looked at the local authors’ table on her first day and had chosen a name from one of the writers published there, taking care to pick one that, for whatever reason, didn’t have an author’s photo on the back cover so she couldn’t be caught too easily. The remaining details of her lie came directly from the “About the Author” blurb on the inside of one of the books. She didn’t do this to impress anyone. She did it because she was looking for me. More of that later. Dagnia laboured under the nonwriter’s misconception that writers’ groups are filled with successful writers — John Irvings and Stephen Kings and Alice Walkers and Margaret Atwoods.
“I should have known,” she told me. “Self-help groups are never filled with successful anybodies.”
By the time she announced her name as the author of two reasonably successful novels, countless short stories, and a series of articles about the coming of premature menopause it was too late to turn back, even when she realized how awful just about everyone in the room actually was.
“I would have been far less conspicuous as a bad writer,” she said.
She said it. Not me.
LXXXVIII
Fortunately Dagnia was a reader and an arts major in university, who taught English as a second language at the City Night School.
“Beginner level only,” she told me. “A is to Apple as blank is to Banana. That kind of thing.” So she had no problem pretending to be a writer. She had been teaching the basic mechanics of the English language for years and, if she could be permitted to say it, had a pretty good idea of what good writing was and, more importantly, why it was good. She had no trouble at all convincing the writers in the back room of BIG BAD BOOKS that she was one of them, and even took a perverse pleasure in slamming all the examples of bad writing she heard week after week.
“All my life I’ve been reading the most poorly-written stuff — bad magazine articles, bad novels, bad movie scripts, bad advertising copy for Christ’s sake. Suddenly I found a way to stop some of it at its source. Sometimes I got so carried away telling some fifty-year-old supposed writer why even a newly emigrated Somalian woman who barely spoke English would not write ‘Henry ate hot dogs faithfully’ that I forgot what in the hell I was actually doing there.”
What Dagnia was doing there, as I think I’ve mentioned, was looking for me.
It was at this point in Dagnia’s story (which was told to me over Italian sodas and decaffeinates in — you guessed it — BIG BAD COFFEE) that I realized her name was not Dagnia. She had stolen not only the author’s work but, in case anyone was to check up on her story and read her supposed novels, she had stolen the author’s name also. I knew. I had read the books, and the name on the cover was Dagnia Daley. I even remembered asking her once why she didn’t include an author’s photo on her books. Most novelist
s included a photo on the back cover of their books, in the hopes that someone besides their mother would one day recognize them.
“So I don’t have to deal with assholes like you,” she told me.
Good answer. So what was Dagnia Daley’s real name?
“Julie,” she said. “It’s Julie Lowell.”
If you don’t mind, I will ease into the Dagnia/Julie thing. This story is getting confusing enough as it is. I told Julie Lowell that, if she didn’t mind, I would just call her Dagnia for the time being.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I’ve got used to the name. Coming from writers at least.”
“Coming from bad writers,” I reminded her.