Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

Lombardo WH Saphire St Imprl Mnt 878-4322

oologi dens Cnstntia

Lombat, D 34 Burrows Rd Blk Hl 642-1986

Lomnitz Z Refinery Rd Pkld Dl 486-0051

Just how the missing half of the Zoological Gardens had landed up in the L’s was anyone’s guess. He had been searching for it for five days; finding it by chance was an affront to his professionalism. He wrung the neck of the blue pencil in the sharpener and put its point down on the first o in oologi …

On second thoughts, he fetched some of Munnery’s catalogues off a shelf and found the section on animal life. He saw that Figg had already been busy among the marsupials. The cage must be bursting! Fluxman deleted a couple of bars in the reference material, a koala and the chubbiest of the kangeroos. And then he thought — what the hell — and put a line through the whole lot of them.

*

The campaign to recapture the Restless Supermarket had been intended as a trial run to prepare the Members for the war of attrition that lay ahead, and it achieved this end. A division of labour was established, and an armoury of weapons tested. A point was made. What remained now was to repeat the point over and over again on a grander and grander scale.

But the Restless Supermarket outdid itself, for Fluxman at least. It proclaimed itself the great offensive against error. It exhausted every potential, it surpassed every anticipation. From that moment on, everything that remained to be done became routine. The initial topographical work — arrangements for mountains, forests and streams, ocean currents and seasonal rainfall, reservoirs and dams, the restoration of mineral deposits and rock faces, the replenishment of slag heaps and landfills — all this could not but seem like a faint echo of flooring and shelving and plumbing.

When it was time for a bit of town planning, Fluxman’s interest quickened. The residential areas and office parks and industrial zones had to be unshuffled and restored to their proper places. There were green belts to loosen, highways to unravel, pylons to restring. The displaced masses of Alibia had flung down their makeshift houses in the buffer zones: now the appropriate social distance could be restored between the haves and have-nots, the unsightlier settlements shifted to the peripheries where they would not upset the balance, the grand estates returned to the centre where they belonged. There was wasteland to play with, and blasted veld, and dead water. The possibilities seemed endless. But when he got down to it, it was no more difficult, and indeed no more important, than the sorting and packing and pricing of boxes and tins on a shelf.

The city pulled itself together. Slowly, the recognizable outlines of Alibia reappeared, as street after street and block after block was knocked back into its familiar, ordinary shape.

It was not a riddle, a puzzle, a paradox, as many supposed. Every little victory had to be earned. The boffins of the Proofreaders’ Society worked overtime. Levered up by their acute pencils, whole paragraphs of the world came and went. Their eyes crossed and recrossed every line of the city streets until the most crooked found their truest delineation. With every hyphen that tacked a building to its neighbour, knit one, purl one, with every colon that suggested a passage from one block to another, with every dotted line that restored a highway to the symmetry of coming and going, the earth drew Alibia tighter to its bosom. It should have been a spectacle, but it was not.

In the corrosive solution of tedium that flowed from this realization, Fluxman’s qualms about his own excesses were dissolved. If ever he went too far, he told himself, and deleted more than was strictly necessary, he could always call on Wiederkehr to undo it again. He became ruthless. First it was dittographies in the Book, people and places, like the Lumleys. Later it was the minor irritations, like that Goosen who refused to answer questions about the price of eggs, and that Schneider who had to go setting up a business with a Sartorius. And then it was the human detritus he found in the margins of the city, the erroneous ones, the slips of the hand, the tramps, the fools, the congenitally stupid, the insufferably ugly. They were incorrigible, he reasoned, and doing away with them, at one painless stroke, was more humane than trying to improve them.

His colleagues shared these frustrations. First Munnery, and then Figg, and then all the others began to create their own amusements — which they passed off as ‘improvements’. In certain areas of Alibian life, they said, there was simply no point in returning to the past. Levitas, for instance, redesigned the Alibian Alps to allow for more pleasant skiing in the foothills and more hazardous climbing on the peaks. He put the General Hospital up on the snowline where the air was more salubrious, and he put the Hotel Grande down on the beachfront, with its wings stacked one on top of the other, so that every room had a sea view, and he gave it a casino and a Ferris wheel and a miniature golf course, because he himself was fond of simple pleasures. The people of Alibia were so grateful for these alterations that Banes, intent on eclipsing the example of his colleague, embarked on a public-spirited campaign of his own. He reappropriated mansions for the homeless, he reassembled the Royal Alibian Golf Course in the wilderness (Munnery was allowed to keep the eighteenth), he reunited families who had been separated by the upheavals. These acts made Banes something of a hero to the lost and the loveless, to widows and orphans, to the homeless and the unemployed.

Experience taught them that nothing is perfect. They reconciled themselves to the errors of judgement and perception that beset the best-planned operations. It rained loafs from Buurman’s Bakery and fishes from the munchipal reservior. The streets were littered with crutchers, rhinocerous products, muslin fundamentalists, celeried employees and their pardners, bonsai boababs, dawgs.

When the waste material piled up, they called for Fluxman. It was enough to make him feel like a street sweeper.

*

In time, everything was returned to its proper place, which sometimes was not the place it had started out, but the place it deserved to end.

Alibia basked in its imperfect glory. Even the Members of the Society — Fluxman aside — had come to consider one error in five pages acceptable. Who would notice the odd waterfall flowing upwards to its source, the icicles on the fronds of the palms, the gondolas marooned in a stream of concrete? Who would begrudge such flaws, or even perceive them, when there was a promenade beside the sea, a bandstand in the park made for old-fashioned melodies, a tavern at the end of a fogbound wynd? The bells of St Cloud’s rebuked the faithless on the hour, the waves kept beating against the quays, the metronome of a searchlight kept time in the absence of the sun.

When peace had been restored, the City Fathers afforded the heroes a victory parade, the grandest that had ever been seen, proceeding now on foot through the streets in a blizzard of ticker-tape, now on barges down the river, and now on sleighs across the frozen canals, and arriving finally at the triumphal arch through which they all passed, first the heroes and then those who had come to honour them, vanishing as they went, drawing the offspring of error after them, and abandoning the city to a state of flawed completion.

All except Fluxman, that is, who came behind in his dignified way, sweeping the last of the delenda up from the gutters with his hoop and stuffing them into his bag. When the streets were clean, he went down to the white beach in front of the casino, where his coracle was moored, rowed out into the bay, and emptied the bag into the water.