Sean Dixon - The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

PART ONE

ONE

18 March 2003, 7.08 p.m .

When Runner Coghill fell through the ceiling, she interrupted what we can only call a domestic quarrel.

Of the arguers in question, the young man’s name was Dumuzi, though his name has been changed to protect the innocent (that is, Dumuzi). Moments before, he had been huffing and puffing from the cold, for which he was wilfully underdressed, and standing with his sometimes girlfriend Anna, inside the front entrance to the warehouse at 5819 St-Laurent, a building that, against all probability, she owned.

Anna had called him, out of the blue, on what he thought was the first warmish day of the year, although that had turned out to be an illusion propagated by the phone call and Anna’s attention; in fact, it was cold, but Anna was bored and looking for company to walk around downtown. They had met in the early afternoon and walked down the hill into the late afternoon. Anna telling him about her classes – a bit of philosophy, a bit of English, the only thing she liked was anthropology, or at least she liked the idea of anthropology, though the reality of anthropology was boring and more boring. The sound of her voice so soothed his chronic spikes of sexual anxiety – brought on by her arbitrary pattern of granting and withholding affection – that he began to question whether he’d ever felt them in any serious way.

Now it was freezing raining and it was evening, and Anna, who was wet, wanted to go inside and find a clean corner where the two of them would be able to pile some remnants of her grandfather’s old shmatte 1emporium into something that might resemble a bed and a blanket, beside a pale beam of streetlight they could roll into when they were done. Her other conditions included a solid ceiling above their heads and no turds, human or otherwise, at least not nearby. She didn’t mind a little dust and dirt though, since, as Du had noticed, she hadn’t washed for some time, either her clothes or her person, and had embarked on a more animal form of grooming.

It was a slow negotiation, because Anna was offering Du what he’d been pining after through the entire winter, that is to say, she was offering sex, in a warehouse that suddenly didn’t seem so filthy because of the way the light filtered out of the darkness and the dust and the endorphins that were suddenly released into Dumuzi’s brain. But she wanted him to pay her for it. To see what it was like. And her proposal was slowing him down.

A little note about Dumuzi: his hormones were raging, but he tried to be polite about it. He was a big squarish guy, but when you looked at him you got the whole picture. He wasn’t a bobbing Adam’s apple or a collar or a grin. There was nothing about his maleness that was easily Atwoodian. It would be unfair to describe him like that, even though he was a boy and the reader might not like boys. 2He tried to keep tidy. He wore clean lines. He was a whole guy, albeit a young guy who just needed, very desperately, to get laid. Where Anna was concerned, he definitely did not like who he became when he was with her, but still he wanted to be with her and wished only to change who he was and how and what he thought.

1Yiddish: dress or garment. Literally a rag.

He asked Anna where she’d gotten the idea and she told him how earlier in the day an elderly gentleman had mistaken her for a prostitute and propositioned her while Du was buying gum. This shocked him almost as much as the proposal itself and he looked away, shuffling in a head-bowed, punch-drunk silence.

(Eventually.) ‘You like this place?’

She said, ‘Yeah, why not.’

He tried to speed up his thoughts. ‘Well, I don’t know about all this love of decay and dark dripping warehouses. I mean, you might try to take out your contacts every once in a while if you don’t want to go blind, and you might want to change your clothes every once in a while, and, yeah, this new obsession of yours is really going to help, although, although I think any dirty old man on St-Laurent would lose his erection if he was standing downwind of you and your –’

‘I doubt it.’

2We weren’t fond of boys ourselves, but our opinion here is not relevant.

‘Sure.’ He deflated. ‘Sure. Me too. Anyway, this place is falling apart. There must be a million squatters living here.’

‘I can’t afford to fix it. I’m warehouse poor.’

‘Oh.’

‘Dumuzi … I’m going to let you sleep with me.’

‘But you want me to pay you, Anna.’

‘So just forget about that part.’

‘Anna, you want me to pay you a lot of money.’

‘Let’s say you don’t have to pay me all that much. I’m only asking you to pay for what most men think they have the god-given right to get for free.’

‘So why shouldn’t I think that too?’

‘Don’t you think that’s a little arrogant?’

‘You think it’s good for men to pay for sex? Wow.’

‘I’m saying it might be good for me to get paid for sex. It might fulfil some sort of destiny.’

‘Oh, I can’t stand it!’

And this is when Dumuzi’s fist hit the pillar, compromising, it would appear, the integrity of the building, and that’s when Runner fell through the ceiling above and landed behind them, among a bunch of cardboard boxes. 3

3It might be of interest as well to note how, on this day, on the other side of the world from there, everyone who could was getting out of Baghdad, filling the outlying cities of Rawa and Anna. Water was scarce and the American dollar was worth 2700 Iraqi dinars. According to the Blogger of Baghdad. (Aline’s note.)

A new quality Du was beginning to notice about himself was his capacity to be grateful for events that reasonable people might find abhorrent or tragic, as long as these events deflected the attention of his tormentors. The truth is that he would have preferred the whole city to come down on their heads in that moment, but he had to make do with Runner Coghill, falling like debris. He unshouldered his backpack and ran over to the crumpled girl set like a small broken mannequin among the boxes and the stones. She was screaming, though Du realised as he got closer that she was shouting not incoherent pain so much as the name of a boy:

‘NEIL! NEIL! I’M HURT!’

The girl paused to reflect, loud enough for Du to hear, ‘Oh I don’t think a dose of Prozac is going to help this kind of pain.’ She was talking over his head though, aiming her thoughts straight for Anna.

‘Oh. Hi. I guess that came as a shock to you. I seem to have –’ Anna cut in, having forgotten her former business, and was trying to figure out uh what this intruder uh was uh doing here.

‘Well, I don’t really mean to be here. Upstairs is where I –’

Interrupted by Anna again, who meant to say, ‘The uh building. How did you come to be in the uh building?’

‘Cool it, sister. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.’

Now, Runner Coghill was not exactly a looker, not by any stretch of the imagination and certainly not to Dumuzi. Runner was small. She looked like a Grey Nun out on a day pass – you could imagine her in a wimple. She was almost weightless, with translucent skin, a haughty nose – a pig nose she sometimes called it in her own garment-rending arias of despair, which were private and known to us only because they were occasionally gossiped about in fits of envy of which we are not proud. And she let her hair grow more thickly over her bumps, to try and cover them up, though this practice only augmented them. They were called pilar cysts. She insisted that everyone know what they were called even though she was supposedly trying to hide them. That is the way she was. She boasted about her minor ailments while keeping the most prominent one – the actual life-threatening one – entirely to herself. We are still amazed to report that she kept it a secret, though the primary sign, the telltale one, would have been obvious to a medically minded person had there ever been one in the group – this primary sign being that her eyes popped right out of her head, more so with every passing month, so much so that you might think she was staring even when she was not, though she did sometimes stare. It was disconcerting to some, most immediately to Dumuzi, who felt a little Gordian knot of fear every time he caught her eye, even though he was literally twice her size.