Emily St. John Mandel: Last Night in Montreal

“Okay,” said Geneviève, “he’s considered an artist. And? Why would that bother you?” She was sitting across from him at the café table with an incredulous look on her face. He had been lingering at the Third Cup Café with Geneviève and Thomas for years now, discussing art and their Brooklyn neighborhood and the meaning of life, but it had been some months since he’d spoken at all passionately on any one of these subjects.

“It’s the word, I guess.” He was silent for a moment. Thomas had put down his magazine. “Yeah, it’s the word. Artist is the word we use for Chopin, for Handel, for Van Gogh, for Hemingway, these men whose art required a lifetime and unprecedented talent and blood and sweat, these men whose art eventually rendered them dead or insane or alcoholic or all of the above, and we use this same word, artist, for a guy who smears honey on his skin and then sits around till some flies show up and then gets his picture taken and makes eighteen thousand dollars for his efforts. If he were mentally ill and did the same thing, you’d lock him up. But because he issues a statement saying that sitting there covered in flies is an act of, of subversion against the, I don’t know, some kind of political statement against Chinese communism or Western capitalism or whatever, you call him an artist. And they’re all like that. Every single so-called artist at this so-called gallery I get paid to stand around in. There’s this other guy who dances naked around his tripod with the camera on a timer, and it’s supposed to represent, I don’t know, his African heritage or his joie de vif, and . . ”

“Joie de vivre,” said Geneviève.

“Whatever.” He used a coffee-stained napkin to blot sweat from his forehead. “He’s just a blurred naked guy.”

“Maybe you just don’t get it,” said Geneviève helpfully.

“Jesus—” said Thomas, but Eli cut him off.

“No, she’s right. I don’t get it. I work in a gallery, I’m supposed to sell this shit, which I consider the work of frauds, I actually do sell this shit, which clearly makes me a fraud, and I don’t get it. I don’t think it’s good enough. I don’t believe we should be calling it art.”

“Then what is art?” Geneviève asked. “Let’s get to the bottom of this. It’s eleven A.M.; we can have this figured out by lunchtime.”

“Look, I’m not saying I know,” Eli said. “I’m not saying I’m any better. I just think you have to do more than take your clothes off in front of a camera. I think you have to have some talent, not just a clever conceptual idea. I think you have to actually create something. They’re artists because they issue statements saying they’re artists, not because of anything they actually do or produce, and that’s really where my problem begins. I’m not claiming to know the answer here.”

This quieted Geneviève — she only liked arguing with people who were willing to claim that they did know the answer, for the sheer pleasure of tackling them. At a loss, she got up and went to the counter for a coffee refill.

“And this is what’s been bothering you lately?” Thomas asked while she was gone. “You’ve been a little off.”

“I don’t know. It’s not just the artists in the gallery. They’re only part of it. I got a letter from my brother the other day.”

“Zed?”

“He’s the only one I have.”

“I haven’t seen him around in forever. Where is he these days?”

“Africa somewhere. Working at an orphanage. Before that he was building a school in some village in Peru. In between he went hitchhiking in Israel. And the thing with those letters is, they come from these unbelievable places, and you know why?”

“Because he’s somewhere else. Are you feeling okay?”

“No, look, what I mean is the letters come from these unbelievable places because one day years ago he decided to travel, so he travels. He doesn’t talk about travel. He doesn’t theorize about travel. He just buys a ticket and goes. It isn’t the gallery that’s been bothering me, it’s the inaction,” Eli said. He was watching Geneviève returning to the table with her coffee. “All the theorizing we do. Everyone talks about being an artist, everyone theorizes about their art, but no one actually does anything. No one ever takes the leap.”

“What leap?” Geneviève asked. She was considering him over the rim of her coffee mug.

“They never do anything. We never do anything. I’m not saying I’m exempt from this. I always thought that once the thesis was done I’d be a writer and write, you know, really groundbreaking stuff in my field, but let’s be honest here, I’m never going to finish my thesis. I’ve been writing my thesis for six years, and I’ve been a third of the way in for four and a half of them. All I can do is talk about writing, theorize about writing, but I can’t take the leap, I can’t just write . But I still call myself a writer. What the hell do you call that, if not somehow fraudulent?”

“And the rest of us?” asked Geneviève dangerously. She hadn’t painted anything in a while.

Eli realized he was about to step on a land mine, and retreated.

“Sorry. I’m rambling. Ignore me,” he said. He drew a long breath. “Look, I’m not naming names here, I’m not saying I know anything, it’s just hard not to notice that none of us are actually. . I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Forget it.”

“It’s cool,” said Thomas warily.

“Why is it bothering you now, ” Geneviève asked unpleasantly, “if you’ve been a third of the way in for that long?”

“It’s my birthday on Thursday. I’ll be twenty-seven, and it dawned on me: twenty-seven. It’s been six or seven years since I’ve been a promising academic, or a promising anything, actually, and I think my school’s actually forgotten about me. I always wondered what would happen when I failed to meet my last thesis deadline, and then when it happened. . my thesis deadline passed a year ago, and no one contacted me. No one. There was nothing. It’s like I’ve been struck from the school records, or like I don’t exist. And then when I think of Zed, doing things, I just don’t. . Look,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about this. I think I’m going to go for the paper.”

“You can get it here.”

“And then sit in the park for a bit,” Eli said, ignoring this, “and then maybe go home and not write. Ciao.”

Thomas waved. And he did hear Geneviève’s whispered What the hell’s wrong with him? as he walked out of the Third Cup Café into the brilliant sunlight of Bedford Avenue, but he ignored it. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment and decided not to go to the park after all, then walked slowly in a diagonal line across the deserted intersection and under the blue awning of the Café Matisse. There was a girl who read books there whom he wanted to meet.

HIS THESIS DEADLINE passed like a signpost through a slow car window, like the last sign before the beginning of a trackless wilderness. For several nervous weeks after the circled date on the calendar, actually several nervous months, he had a falling sensation in his stomach every time the phone rang. It took some time to realize that no one was going to call him. He wasn’t about to call them. He ceased any pretense of being just on the verge of completing the document and immersed himself as completely as he could in research.

Eli never felt particularly calm, or that he was moving even remotely in the correct direction. Still, he felt that the research in itself wasn’t without merit: he’d become somewhat of an expert in the study of absence. Specifically, dead languages, or if not dead, then at least terminally ill. He studied small languages on the edge of extinction: the oldest languages of Australia, California, China, Lapland, obscure corners of Arizona and Quebec, fading out for exactly the reasons one might expect — colonization, the proliferation of residential schools and smallpox, the dispersal of native speakers over vast distances, etc. He’d grown used to watching girls’ eyes glaze over when he started talking about it; that Lilia actually seemed to find the whole thing fascinating, watching him seriously across a table at the Café Matisse, came as a bright and exuberant shock.