Sean Dixon - The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal

So when this wreckage of a girl, crumpled up in a coat, having fallen through the ceiling seconds before, said, to the perfect Anna, ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,’ Du, after a moment’s uncomprehending shock, laughed, a sort of stunned laugh. And that’s when the girl noticed him for the first time.

Being broken in the presence of the male gaze would have made Runner feel overwhelmed under normal circumstances but, beyond a few fleeting thoughts 4, she was in too much of a hurry to be overwhelmed at the moment. Still, it was fortunate she’d got some warning, because a second later Du swooped in and was crouched very close to her, examining her, opening her coat, uncovering her, touching her leg. She gasped for air with a little yelp that she hoped sounded like an expression of pain and not its opposite, and squeezed her eyes shut.

‘Anna, I think she’s broken her leg.’

Anna swore. Runner drew a breath and let it exhale without speaking. And then drew another.

And then began to explain patiently to them – well, to Anna, still ignoring Du despite the temperance he’d suddenly inspired in her – about her ailments. She said that she was sorry, that she had a mild form of osteoporosis which, she felt, made a bad combination with her epileptic tendencies (which tendencies she was fabricating for the first time in that very moment), but that she was also really quite grateful for it, her osteoporosis, because it made her a very modern thinker. It forced her to think about the body in art and the world. Like, for instance, how was she going to get her body, broken leg and all, up to the fifth floor of this building, if she had willed herself already up to the second and it had brought her, of its own volition, right back down to the first? How was she going to get this useless shell of a body, this inattentive and ungrateful husk, back up to the second, and beyond to the third, fourth and finally to the fifth, especially when faced with such a pair of uncomprehending and unsympathetic faces as now looked down upon her?

4 His cheeks were stubbled, like the bark of a tree … the hair on his head grew thick as laundry … his beauty was consummate. He was tall! He was magnificent! He was terrible! He would scour [Runner’s] body in search of life and coax it toward maturity! He would dig from [Runner’s] most shadowy slopes the deepest well of pure water, out of which an ocean would spring, and he would cross that ocean to the sunrise beyond, arrive on some future morn when [Runner] was hale and adult and smiling fully in his arms, in the bedroom of a third-storey flat in [Montreal’s] Mile End! (From Runner’s notebook.)

Anna had kept her eye on the ball: ‘What’s up on the fifth floor?’

Runner took a deep breath and sighed, as if to say that these two were just not going to get it. When she spoke again, however, there was a green blade of hope in her voice: ‘Have you ever heard of the Lacuna Cabal?’

‘No.’

‘Well … it’s … a very exclusive … book club, and I’m sure … ’

Du, who was a devoted student of every mood that flickered across Anna’s face, here observed her try to imagine the possibility of a book club on the fifth floor of her Jacob Lighter Building.

‘ … and I’m sure it doesn’t interest you, but there are six women up there right now who at this moment are finishing up the last book and are about to launch into proposals for the next, at which point I have to make an entrance.’

Anna’s instinct of ownership kicked in. ‘But this is my building!’

‘I see you fail to see the bigger picture.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘I tell you, I need to get upstairs!’

‘I don’t care.’

Du recognised the expression that now came over Runner’s face. It allied him to her, at least for the moment, fellow recipient of the chill wind. The girl saw first that Anna didn’t care, and then she saw that, really, really, she didn’t care. It was an obstacle. It was a challenge. Runner launched in, like Churchill convincing an island to make war.

‘Kid,’ she said, addressing Anna, for how else do you address someone young in years who has revealed herself to be as jaded as a dead thing, except to appeal to the part of her that is still young, the bright shiny package that contains her, her skin? ‘Kid,’ she called her, and went on to ask her if she’d ever felt anything for a cause that was bigger than herself, if she’d ever wanted to throw herself behind such a cause, for the sheer bumfuckery of it, if she’d ever been curious about …

Anna’s uppercut in the microsecond’s lull: ‘I don’t care.’

‘Please,’ Runner said. ‘Those girls up there don’t expect to ever be caught by anything even remotely resembling the owner of a building. You’re missing a great opportunity here, for, believe me, they are far, far more deserving of your goddess-like wrath than I … ’

‘I don’t c –’ Anna had not expected that. Goddess-like wrath? For one moment she didn’t speak. And then another. Dumuzi could see that the broken-legged girl had hit pay dirt, found a weak spot he didn’t even know was there. He made a mental note: ‘goddess’. And then the girl on the floor went on.

‘Association with this club, which I now offer to you in defiance … ’

‘Who says I want –?’

‘– of our heartless executive, will expose you to the damaged masterpiece I am about to propose. That’s right, sister, I can see that you’re a bit of a damaged masterpiece yourself, aren’t you? Though you’re strong and beautiful and everything I’m not.’

Anna looked squarely at the girl. She was thinking that she did often feel like a damaged masterpiece. Quite often, in fact. Regularly. She gave sudden rein to the thought that this girl knew … she knew … what did she know? She knew something. Something about her. Perhaps … everything. Perhaps she was wise in all matters. Shit, man, Anna couldn’t even make her 8.30 classes. This girl, though, she obviously had it together. Anna had always wanted … Her eyes drifted up to the hole in the ceiling. Du’s, mystified, uncomprehending, followed. For a moment, considering the stranger’s words, Anna suddenly felt that she was not confused at all. She felt that she had been confused, but was, in fact, for this precious instant, pretty smart, pretty witty, pretty pretty, not dead. Gloriously defeated by the girl with the broken leg, on the floor.

But did any of this show up on Anna’s face? Nope. She was tough. She was tough as nails. The only indication of a change of heart was the gesture for Du to pick the chick up.

As for Runner, she had been relishing her victory until she saw Du’s hands zeroing in, getting closer and larger. She had a fit of sneezing. When that was through, she proceeded to lay herself bare before this boy’s deepest cell of shame: ‘Oh no, pal, not you. Her. Not you. If you touch me I’d have to ask you to fuck me, and if you said no then that would be humiliating for me, wouldn’t it? It’s been so long, I feel like a virgin. Really. Let’s be honest, I am a virgin, that’s not normal. And still you’re going to let this brute put his hands on me?’

Runner’s virgin status was not something she necessarily wanted to get rid of. But she did feel that the sexual act might just pull her flagging, barely post-adolescent body fully into the present, and force it to grow up. As for shyness around the opposite sex, her wreckage of a body had just led her to an epiphany. She decided, right here and now, anticipating the strong arms of Dumuzi, to fully explore the archetype of the foul-mouthed shy person and take it to new heights.

At least that’s what she decided deep down. On the surface she was screaming indignation that Anna was allowing a boy to lay hands on her.