Red herring: Charles Cros and the invention of the phonograph

Charles Cros inventor of the phonograph

This is just one of those back-into-it-sideways pieces. I don't even know exactly how I found it, but I stumbled across a bizarre poem about a herring.

Was it a kid's poem? I don't know, but it was full of repetition, and didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The original had been in French.

The name Charles Cros came up.

Or did it happen another way? I've been on yet another of my Edison-cylinder-inspired hunts on YouTube. There are now exactly one billion, give or take a million, posted there, unlike the first time I hunted for them in 2003 (for my novel Bus People, "now showing on a blog near you!"). Did I stumble onto Cros and his strange story of near-greatness while trying to dig up stuff about early recording technology?

Everyone knows Edison scooped other people's ideas by patenting them before anyone else (I mean people less savvy in the ways of business, or just less ruthless/arrogant, or more ethical than Edison). Cros was one of the contributors to the technology that eventually led to the phonograph, to which he gave the delightful name paleophone. The name reminds me of that song Telephone to Glory: "you can talk to Jesus on his Royal Telephone" - something that connects you to another time and dimension of reality.

Alas, the paleophone was not to be. It never really got off the drawing board.  I think a lot of people contributed to the invention of sound recording, not the least of whom was Emile Berliner, whose disc system (grooves on one side only!) eventually usurped Edison's unwieldy wax cylinder as the accepted format.

Anyway, this guy Cros, whom I had never heard of up 'til now, sounds more like a surrealist/Dada artist than an inventor. I've lifted this little piece from a site (link above! I'm being more conscientious about posting links to originals now, though I assume that if anyone actually read this blog, I'd be in trouble for it anyway) which tells it in fewer words than I ever could. It leaves a multitude of questions unanswered, for example, why did Cros only live to be 44? And to be honest, I don't want to look it up.

The kipper poem - the herring - the RED herring, some people call it - is supposed to have some sort of hidden meaning. Cros wrote a lot of other poems besides, but I don't have time for them here.

In 1877, Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, self-publicist and notorious elephant assassin invented a sound reproduction audio contraption called the phonograph.

Or did he? Was it perhaps - as some claim - the poet, inventor, surrealist and visionary Charles Hortensius Emile Cros that gave the world this new invention in sound recreation?

Charles Cros was born 1st October 1844. A precocious boy, at the age of 16 he was teaching Hebrew and Sanscrit, and two years later was a Professor of Chemistry.

His imagination and genius for invention was unstoppable. At the Universal Exhibition of 1867 he presented his automatic telegraph system. He proposed a solution to the problem of processing photographs in colour. And on 30 April 1877 he delivered to the French Academy of Sciences a sealed envelope containing a document describing a procedure for the‘registering and reproduction of phenomena perceived by the ear’. He gave his invention the poetic name of Paleophone - Voice of the Past.

Poetry, indeed, was in his soul. He was friends with Paul Verlaine, and with Arthur Rimbaud, who Verlaine once shot with a revolver in a moment of drunkenness. He rubbed shoulders with Manet, Renoir and Sarah Bernhardt. And in one of his surreal and visionary moments, he became convinced of the existence of large cities on Mars and Venus, and tried to persuade the French government to construct a parabolic mirror in order to communication with our extra-terrestrial brothers and sisters.

But it was his Paleophone that most preoccupied him. He tried to find financial backers, but without success. On 10 October 1877, an article in a publication La Semaine du clergére named the invention 'the Phonograph'. But rumours were circulating that the famous Edison was also developing a system for recording sounds. Did he see the article in La Semaine du clergé? That modern-day Repository of All Human Knowledge, Wikipedia, says not. But Charles was taking no chances.

He rushed to the Academy of Sciences and requested that they open at once the sealed envelope in order to make public his indisputable claim to the invention. The envelope was duly opened on 8 December. But sadly it was two days too late, for the great Thomas had already given the first public demonstration of the recording of a human voice. Then on 17 December Edison registered his patent.

In the years that followed Charles became more immersed in his poetry. He gave public readings of his poems, and many decades after his death in 1888, one of his verses, Sidonie a plus d’un amant, was recorded by screen icon and tireless campaigner for animal rights (elephants included) Brigitte Bardot.

Le hareng saur

Il était un grand mur blanc – nu, nu, nu,
Contre le mur une échelle – haute, haute, haute,
Et, par terre, un hareng saur – sec, sec, sec.

Il vient, tenant dans ses mains – sales, sales, sales,
Un marteau lourd, un grand clou – pointu, pointu, pointu,
Un peloton de ficelle – gros, gros, gros.

Alors il monte à l’échelle – haute, haute, haute,
Et plante le clou pointu – toc, toc, toc,
Tout en haut du grand mur blanc – nu, nu, nu.

Il laisse aller le marteau – qui tombe, qui tombe, qui tombe,
Attache au clou la ficelle – longue, longue, longue,
Et, au bout, le hareng saur – sec, sec, sec.

Il redescend de l’échelle – haute, haute, haute,
L’emporte avec le marteau – lourd, lourd, lourd,
Et puis, il s’en va ailleurs – loin, loin, loin.

Et, depuis, le hareng saur – sec, sec, sec,
Au bout de cette ficelle – longue, longue, longue,
Très lentement se balance – toujours, toujours, toujours.

J’ai composé cette histoire – simple, simple, simple,
Pour mettre en fureur les gens – graves, graves, graves,
Et amuser les enfants – petits, petits, petits.

The Smoked Herring

Once upon a time there was a big white wall — bare, bare, bare,
Against the wall there stood a ladder — high, high, high,
And on the ground a smoked herring — dry, dry, dry,

He comes, holding in his hands — dirty, dirty, dirty,
A heavy hammer and a big nail — sharp, sharp, sharp,
A ball of string — big, big, big,

Then he climbs the ladder — high, high, high,
And drives the sharp nail — tock, tock, tock,
Way up on the big white wall — bare, bare, bare,

He drops the hammer — down, down, down,
To the nail he fastens a string — long, long, long,
And, at the end, the smoked herring — dry, dry, dry,

He comes down the ladder — high, high, high,
He picks up the hammer — heavy, heavy, heavy,
And goes off somewhere — far, far, far,

And ever afterwards the smoked herring — dry, dry, dry,
At the end of that string — long, long, long,
Very slowly sways — forever and ever and ever.

I made up this story — silly, silly, silly,
To infuriate the squares — solemn, solemn, solemn,
And to amuse the children — little, little, little.

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Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART NINE

This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Nine

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel



Szabó

Things are happening for Szabó, or to Szabó, things he never could have counted upon or even hoped for.

The first session with Kaplan is a shock. The man is treating his ravaged crater of a face as a potential work of art, a miracle of restoration akin to lifting the centuries-old veil of grime from the Sistine Chapel. And yes, Dr. Levy was correct, he is willing to do it for nothing, even bring in a team of consultants, something like separating conjoined twins, a medical challenge, a privilege and an education.

He will have to endure painful surgeries, there is no way around that, and it will take time, Dr. Kaplan estimates a full year. He will never be able to see the results, of course, and that is deeply frustrating. But he will have some semblance, surely, something that will at least stand in for a face. He will be able to show himself again.

At his last session with Levy, he knew something was different, the good doctor was up to something, he didn’t even have to say anything, he could feel it in the air.

He led Szabó into a quiet room, sat him down at a table, and placed his hands on something.

Something large, cold, wet and pliable.

He worked it a bit with his fingers.

Dr. Levy quietly left the room, and shut the door.

It was an enormous lump. Szabó had never sculpted in his life before; it had never even occurred to him to try this medium. His hands worked and worked the lump. He broke small pieces off and toyed with them, rolled them, manipulated them.

Time disappeared.

Two hours later, Zoltán Levy entered the room.

The figure of a human torso sat on the table: armless, legless, headless, but so anatomically accurate in every detail of the musculature that the inert grey material almost gave the illusion of breathing.

“Szabó, that’s. . . Szabó.”

His hand reached out, groped, clasped Dr. Levy’s hand, and shook it, and shook it. He held on for a very long time, trying to convey by touch what he could never put into words.

Aggie

Portman Hotel

November 28, 2003

Things have changed so fast in the past couple of weeks that I don’t even know how to describe it, or what to make of it all. I feel like I’ve blundered onto a treasure beyond anything I ever could have dreamed possible.

If you could find a book of knowledge so rich and full of meaning that it seemed to read your very heart, the kind of book you dream about but can never find in real life, it wouldn’t be half as powerful as the experience I’m having in listening to Sebastian talk to me every day.

I can’t even tell you how beautiful it is, like poetry, only it isn’t just pretty pictures, there’s all kinds of other stuff in there too, like warnings about what could happen to us as a species if we don’t change our ways. It’s like he could actually see straight into the future, predicting World War I and World War II and Hiroshima and the Holocaust and overpopulation and terrorism and environmental meltdown. He doesn’t call these things by their name, but I know what he means, I know what he’s talking about, I get it. It just blows me away that somebody from 1887 could know all of this. And the beauty of the language just amazes me, he’s just so eloquent, it pours out of him clear and strong, and you can tell none of it is written down, he’s just saying it right out of his head, made up on the spot. He’s a genius. And lonely – I can feel it. No one understands Sebastian, in fact they all think he’s a little bit crazy, and I don’t think he ever found anyone special to share his life with.

I wonder what he looks like. Somehow I see him as looking a little bit like Dr. Levy, not feature for feature, of course, but in his expressions, his energy. Sometimes Dr. Levy has what I call his “mother giraffe expression”: a tender, dark-eyed, nurturing, leaning-down-to-gently-nudge-you-with-his-nose look. I see Sebastian as having the same look. And it’s lonely, it’s terribly lonely being a man born into the wrong time, he must feel a lot of pain and frustration.

Something happened today that just freaking amazed me, but maybe it shouldn’t have, maybe it’s just the next step in all this. He was talking about war, the futility and brutality and waste of it, and the primitive mindset that drives it, and I thought to myself: one hundred and seventeen years later, all this is every bit as true. It just fucking floored me.

There was a little pause in the recording, and I found myself thinking out loud:

“When are we going to get past all this waste and destruction? When are we going to break through to something better, so we can put our energies into goodness, not evil?”
And this is what Sebastian said.

“We will move beyond. . . all this waste and destruction. . . when enough individuals realize. . . the deep futility of war. . . as a wasteful and deranged human enterprise. It is only then. . . that we will break through. . . to something finer,. . .something splendid and strong;. . . and it is at this precise moment. . .that the fortunes of humanity. . . will change, and we will be able. . .to direct our collective energies. . . into the pursuit. . . of goodness, not evil.”

My heart nearly stopped.

He answered.

He answered.

I want to tell somebody about this, in fact I’m bursting to tell, but I don’t know who to trust. I even worry about telling Dr. Levy, as he might get worried that the schizophrenia is returning, we’ve held it off for such a long time now, I haven’t heard voices in years, hardly ever I mean, the medication really seems to be working, and I don’t want to disappoint him.

But this is so freaking powerful, just so awesome, and I can’t even talk about it to Porgy, I mean Sly, I don’t think he’d be able to comprehend it. I still have about a dozen cylinders left, and I’m trying to make them last, I’m rationing myself, because quite frankly, I don’t want this experience ever to end.

All my life I’ve wanted to meet somebody like this, someone who understands how I feel about things, and now I meet him and he’s 117 years in the past! It’s so bloody frustrating, but so exciting too. When I was a little kid, old recordings used to scare me half to death. They frightened me so badly because I thought they worked like a time machine, and if I stayed in the room too long I’d be sucked right back into another century, another era, and never find my way
home.

Now I’m starting to wonder if I was right about that. I want to be with Sebastian, see him, sit in his presence, touch his face, tell him I get it, I hear him, I understand. I wonder why he chose such a strange person to connect with. Because that’s how I see this: it was a choice, he selected me, it took him 117 years but he finally found the right person, someone who would really hear him and get what it all meant.

It’s a miracle, and a puzzle, and a gift, and at the same time, yes, it scares the shit out of me too, it’s a little bit creepy, like listening to the Edison Doll reciting nursery rhymes in that strangled-child voice, a voice from another time, but he is the man I have been looking for and waiting for and longing for my entire, lonely, fucked-up life.

Zoltán Levy

When Zoltán Levy gets home that night, after a very long day with more than its share of catastrophes, a fatal heroin overdose, a bloody suicide attempt, a flip-out with an enraged man wielding a knife, an elderly man found dead and foetally curled in the alley, his body caked with excrement, a beautiful young Asian woman weeping and weeping in his office, so ashamed that she ended up on the street, he is very tired, profoundly tired in fact, and not for the first time he wonders if this work he does every day has any impact at all on the hell that is the streets, the place of no return.

He is immensely weary, and wanders into the kitchen for a beer to take the edge off the day.

That’s funny.

There is a greasy spot on the floor, as if something has been dropped.

He bends down to take a look.

He sees tiny fragments of something, something red. His brow furrows. He doesn’t remember dropping anything on the floor.

He looks around the place. Something feels different, but it is hard to see anything amiss, anything moved or disturbed.

He goes into the bedroom, his heart beating a bit faster, though he is not sure why. The bed looks a little too neat, almost made, and he never makes the bed.

He looks in the closet.

Something’s wrong.

There is a shirt missing.

Normally he would not even notice it. But that hanger there, it’s empty, and it had a shirt on it, he could have sworn, a dark red shirt. And it’s not there any more.

He stands there for a moment.

Call the cops? But he can’t be completely certain. And it seems silly: “I wish to report a missing shirt.”

He wonders whether to let it go.

Maybe he will, for the moment, but will keep his eyes and ears open.

He goes back into the kitchen, downs a shot of Glenfiddich and two Valium, and crawls into bed, plunging into a profound sleep in less than half a minute.

The bus

Bert Moffatt believes that it is only a matter of time until something happens with Isobel Chaston, something so bad they’ll have to come with a big net and take her into custody at last.

Let them take her, and throw away the key.

She’s a professional pain in the ass. Calling herself a “dissident”, when all she is is a raging racist crackpot, a nut case on the loose, randomly abusing every person she runs into.

The situation has simmered and simmered for years. But Bert knows these things have a way of foaming over. Maybe it needs to, maybe she needs to step over the boundary of respectable little-old-ladyhood that has so far protected her from any real consequences.

She has been forcibly ejected from town council meetings and seems to enjoy the attention, ranting about her rights as the local news photographers snap her picture. She has run for public office any number of times, as big a joke as that idiot who ran for the “Party Party” with the slogan, “Choose Booze or You Lose,” and got 557 votes. A monkey could run in Vancouver and get hundreds of votes, in fact it has probably already happened.

It’s one of those full-moon days, whether it’s really full or not, an antsy, crazy, volatile day, a day when people hurl abuse at him for no reason (not that that’s anything unusual), a day when nasty scraps break out in the back of the bus and have to be extinguished like so many brush fires.

Yes, here she comes, and she’s in a real state today, he can tell as soon as he sees her, full of hot air and billowing in the breeze, hostility inflating her puffy face.

“Fucking Pakis! Get out of my way. I’m a senior, don’t you have any respect? Fucking asshole Chinese, taking over the country, there’s too many of you around here. Git!”
“Knock it off, lady.” A slight young Asian woman surges out of the aisle and forces her body in front of Isobel Chaston, blocking her path so she can’t get on the bus.

She plants herself, her legs braced. For some reason Bert thinks of the old protest song, “We shall not be moved. . . “

Isobel Chaston’s huge umbrella comes up. Bone handle facing out.

It comes down.

On the young woman’s skull.

Crack!

Then again: Crack!

And again.

Bert lunges, tries to stop her arm. The young Asian woman falls forward onto the steps of the bus. A slow trickle of blood begins to worm its way along the sidewalk.

I take it all back, I wish this had never happened! Nine-one-one, nine-one-one. . . call the supervisor. . . grab her, she’s out of control. . .”Fucking Pakis! Fucking Chinks!” Isobel Chaston wields her bloodstained umbrella until a big hand appears and stops it in mid-swing. Two burly guys materialize out of nowhere as if by some signal, grab her and hold her in a grip she knows she can’t escape. In spite of Bert requesting, then commanding, then begging them to stay in their seats, the passengers are stampeding out of the bus. When the cops finally arrive, along with the paramedics and the fire department, a crowd has accumulated on the sidewalk just to take in the thrill of live theatre.

Could it get any worse? Yes, it could: the media! Cameras. Did they smell the blood? And because it happened on his watch, he knew he’d be interviewed. This could have serious repercussions, he might be out of a job.

It all seems to stop at once when Isobel Chaston is dragged off, spluttering and shouting racist epithets. The crowd loses interest, realizing the show is over, and disperses; the cameras seem to vaporize.

A couple of passengers, teenage girls in tight, glittering Britney Spears tshirts, whine that they can’t get downtown.

“Take the next bus.”

“I don’t want to pay again.”

“Use your transfer.”

“It’s expired.”

“Here’s another one.”

“Hey, I want one too.”

But it isn’t over, not by a long shot.

Bert Moffatt spends the rest of the afternoon in Emergency at Vancouver General with Mrs. Wong. He can’t forget the way her daughter crumpled on the steps and hit her head on the pavement. It was sickening. At one point he embarrasses himself by praying, which he hasn’t done in 20 years, then decides that, under the circumstances, it might be worth a shot.

After an interminable wait and innumerable cups of bad coffee and tea out of the vending machine, a doctor comes into the waiting room.

Bert and Mrs. Wong look at each other. Then at him.

The doctor does not even have to wait for the inevitable question: “Is she OK?”

“Yes,” he says to them.

Yes! 

“Yes, she’ll be okay. Just opened up a blood vessel in her scalp, they can bleed like crazy, she must have fainted from the shock, and there’s some bruising and a slight concussion, but nothing really serious, if she gets lots of rest she’ll be back to normal in a couple of weeks once the stitches come out. You can go in and see her now.”

Mrs. Wong stands on tiptoe and kisses the doctor on the cheek; he blushes, though it’s not the first time he has been kissed. Bert Moffatt wishes he could do the same thing.

The “dissident” is now behind bars, formally charged with assault. Given her connections, which may or may not actually exist, she might get off with a slap on the wrist. Then again. . .Valleyview, which has been saving a bed for her for years, might just end up as her retirement home.

Bert goes on stress leave for three weeks, flies to Maui with his wife Sherry, drinks mai tais beside a kidney-shaped pool, goes for massages, eats pupus and pineapple and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, and flies home wearing a tshirt that says Just Hang Loose, returning to work with his soul restored.


Sly

As for Porgy, he is no more; Sly has killed him off.

Now he’s beginning to look like Sly; now he’s beginning to feel like Sly. Now he wears a cracked black leather biker jacket covered with studs and a picture of an eagle that he got for six dollars at the Salvation Army store. Now he walks differently, talks differently, oh yeah, he’s Sly, he’s Sly, and Porgy’s never coming back.

Dr. Levy won’t leave him alone, though, and it bothers him.

He wants him to talk about stuff.

“You need to tell me about what happened in those foster homes, Sly. You’ve never told anybody about it, have you?”

“There’s nothing to tell.” He looks at the ceiling, then at the floor. “I was abused and shit. That’s all.”

Dr. Levy, dark-eyed and obsessive, may be known as a kind man, but that’s not true. He is absolutely without mercy, and takes no prisoners.

“I think it’s time you looked at this stuff. It’s ruling your life without you knowing it. I realize it’s painful, it may be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but you won’t have to do it alone. I think you’ve carried it around with you for long enough.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can. And I’ll help you every step of the way. You’re strong enough now, Sly, you know you are.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Sly.”

Oh-oh.

“Sly, would you do something for me?”

“Uh. . . I guess so.”

“Look at me.”

Sly’s eyes dart all over the room.

“You never look at me, Sly. Right here. Look.” He points to his eyes with two fingers.

Sly doesn’t look people in the eye because it’s too painful and he is scared. Dr. Levy has these penetrating eyes, everyone knows that, they call him Svengali on the street. He feels like he’ll be sucked right in. He glances, then looks away, and Dr. Levy does that weird gesture again.

“Just look at me, Sly.”

He doesn’t even know why Dr. Levy is doing such a stupid thing. It’s like hypnosis or something. “Look into my eyes.” But it’s more than that. It’s a – gaze or something, a –

Something happens, he sees something, someone, God he doesn’t want to look. He sees Dr. Levy and those funny-looking, black eyes, those weary eyes, those fierce eyes, but he sees something, someone else, and he knows who that someone is.

If you look at a chunk of obsidian that has been polished and polished until it becomes an indestructible mirror, what are you going to see? Will all the light just come back at you, or will you see something you absolutely do not want to look at? Why does he see the parade of wretchedness: an eight-year-old boy who can’t get away from his stepfather, a little kid bloody-nosed on the edge of the playground, all beat up just because the others can smell the difference on him? 

The scenes continue to flash, seemingly endlessly, and the sight is overwhelming, he can’t get away from it now even if he closes his eyes. Then he is not even seeing any more but feeling, feeling dirt shoved up his nose, feeling a man’s weight on his body, his clothes being yanked at, pulled down. And the bizarre thought this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening because it couldn’t be happening, a thought that will seal away and entomb the damage at the core of his being.

When he can’t take it in any more, when the reflecting pool finally goes dark, he – cracks. Just like that. Bends over like he has been stabbed in some vital part of himself, run through.

“It’s okay,” Dr. Levy murmurs. “It’s okay.” He holds Sly’s shoulders as he shudders and heaves like a vessel tossed in a storm, holds him steady so he won’t capsize.

It’s not okay, but that’s what you say when this happens, when someone just falls to pieces in front of you. Sly groans. The room spins and he feels like throwing up. He hates Dr. Levy, hates him and all his cheap stupid magic tricks.

“I hate you,” he says, his eyes pale like acid, for once looking at him full-on. He has been struck by lightning, undone, and all this freak can do is tell him it’s okay.

“You have your reasons. But now we can start.”

“Start what?”

“You’ll find out.” Dr. Levy treats him to one of his rare smiles. Sly/Porgy/Sylvester/Whoever-he-is-now stares back at him, not smiling, feeling like he has just vomited and is completely emptied-out.

Aggie

Portman Hotel
December 7, 2003

I love my talks with Sebastian, and I don’t want them ever to end. But I’m getting near the end of the cylinders, there are only three of them left now, and I don’t know what to do about it.

The last one I did was so awesome, he just answered every question I ever had about life, it was freaking amazing. I finally had to tell somebody, I was going to explode if I didn’t. Sly (I’m really trying to think of him as Sly now, even though he looks pretty silly in that stupid leather jacket) just looked kind of baffled when I took him for coffee at the Potluck Café and spilled the beans about Sebastian.

Like he wasn’t sure what I was even talking about.

“You mean. . . he talks to you?”

“Well, yeah, sort of. If I have a question about anything he says, he sort of answers it.”

“Uh, Aggie. That’s kind of. . . “

“Kind of what?”

“Kind of nuts.”

“Oh, I see. Nuts, is it. Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle cracked?”

“Now wait a minute.”

“Which one of us is going to see Dr. Levy every week? Which one of us is on antidepressants? Which one of is is. . .”

“Aggie, hold on a minute, I’m not saying you’re crazy.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying. . . I’m saying you’ve got a hell of an imagination. I think you’re hearing what you need to hear. That guy made no sense to me at all. It was just one big garble.”

“Well, maybe you weren’t listening.” I’m really ticked now, but actually not that surprised. Nobody’s going to get this, nobody’s going to get it at all.”

“Maybe you should see Dr. Levy.”

“You really think I’m nuts, don’t you.”

“I think you need somebody to talk to. And Levy’s good, he’ll help you deal with this.”

I can’t believe how the situation has reversed itself.

“I don’t need to see Dr. Levy.”

“What do you do when the cylinders run out?”

“Start over again.”

“Oh, and they’re going to be different this time?”

“Maybe.”

“Aggie!”

“Look, Porgy, I mean Sly, or Whatever-your-name-is-now, this is something I just have to do. It’s the biggest, the most significant thing that has ever happened to me, I mean in my whole life. I didn’t expect you to understand it.”

“Fine, then.” He looks hurt, his lower lip quivering a bit.

“I have to go.”

“Don’t be mad at me.” He looks like a seven-year-old, but then he always looks like a seven-year-old.

“I’m not.” I kiss his cheek, and he brightens a bit. “Nice jacket,” I lie.

“Bye, Aggie.”

“Bye.”

“I love you.” He looks as innocent as a baby in his leather and studs.

“Porgy.” I crush him in a hug.

So I guess we’re okay.

But I’m still not sure what to do. On top of that, there’s another custody hearing coming up in a week, the social worker wants to interview me, and if I come across okay, maybe I’ll get to see my kids again for Christmas. I know there’s a lot at stake here. I can’t blow it now. And when Porgy/Sly said all that stuff, it did make me wonder a little bit. He’s my best friend in the whole world, and knows me better than anybody. What if he’s right? What exactly is going on here? Is this the Chatty Cathy doll all over again?

Do I need to see Levy?

What’s on those last three cylinders?

What?

I have to find out. Somehow, I think I’ll get my answer in Sebastian’s final message. I have to trust him now, trust him completely.

I surrender into his hands.


Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART EIGHT

This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Eight

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel


Zoltán/Szabó

The day Zoltán looked at Szabó’s face, or what was left of his face, the degenerated crater that used to be his face, he did not gasp, he did not feel sick, he did not take an inadvertent step backwards, because he was not seeing a crater, not seeing a crater at all, but the unmistakeable dotted outline of the face that was, and even, perhaps, the face that might still be.

Szabó knows this, in some way he can’t even explain. He only let the blanket fall to the floor because he knew Dr. Levy would not gasp or feel sick. He knew Dr. Levy would do something else. He wasn’t sure what, but that didn’t matter; he only knew in his core that it was time for him to reveal himself.

Behold: Szabó! Or rather, the ruins of Szabó, which Dr. Levy examines in medical fascination, looking at him from this angle and that angle like he’s studying a great sculpture, perhaps Michelangelo’s David; seeing potential in three dimensions, not in cold inanimate marble, but in flesh.

“Tamás, I have an idea.”

His head jerks up.

“There’s someone I want you to talk to. His name is Robert Kaplan, a reconstructive surgeon. He puts faces back together. I’ve seen his work.”

Szabó’s whole posture indicates shock.

“You might have enough bone here to work with, Tamás. There’s more left than you realize. It’s been years since the accident, and surgery has taken huge leaps since then.”

If Szabó had a mouth, it would be hanging open about now.

“Tamás, may I have the honour of booking you an appointment with Dr. Kaplan?”

Szabó does not move.

It’s as if he has frozen in his chair.

Seconds tick by. Dr. Levy begins to think that this will never work out, that he has wasted his time, that he -

Then the tightly-wound spring inside Szabó, the wellspring of hope that he has sat on for years, suddenly lets go, and he leaps, leaps at Dr. Levy, even though he can’t see him, leaps like he is flinging himself into what might be a bottomless canyon and what might be his resurrection.

Dr. Levy stumbles back a couple of steps, but saves himself in time, does not fall over backwards. He supports Szabó’s whole weight for a moment as the man crushes him in his arms.

“I take it that’s a yes.”

Szabó makes a sound he’s never heard before. Not a moan or a cry, or even singing. Dr. Levy realizes it can only be one thing, something neither one of them ever expected to hear from him: laughter, that defiant sound that thumbs its nose at despair.

Aggie 

Portman Hotel
November 15, 2003

So much has happened in the last couple of days, it feels like my head has been turned all the way around.

I lugged all the cylinders home with me, the great big bulging orange leaf-bag full of pink cylinders in plain brown containers, and I thought: where do I start? Which one is first? What’s on these – more of that voice I heard, that man, whoever he is, or is it music, or - ?

I fished around in the bag and grabbed. This seems like a good one. Looks just like all the other cylinders, but maybe there’s an invisible “#1” written on it somewhere.

I load it on, crank it up, and start listening.

A sound like frying bacon; ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita. . .

And then: words.

It’s so bloody frustrating, as I can only make out bits of it here and there. But it’s the same guy, I can tell that much, the same voice, speaking slowly and deliberately, but with a kind of sureness, like he knows what he needs to say. It makes me feel weird, like I already know him or something.

And after a while, it gets a little easier to tell what he is saying.

I fill in the gaps with my imagination.

So it goes sort of like this:

“When I set out to send. . . this message. . . into the future, it was with very little notion. . . of who would be able to receive it. Nevertheless, . . .I had a strong and abiding faith. . . that the message. . . would not only be heard, but comprehended. . . and acted upon.”
Okay, so maybe he didn’t say exactly that, but close enough, it’s the gist. I’m getting on to this now, it’s coming easier, like a language I always knew, but didn’t know that I knew:

“In the time. . . in which I am living, the message. . . I have to impart. . . will never be completely comprehended,. . . never be heeded or understood. It must be directed. . . into the unknown . . .with a sureness and steady (something-or-other? Faith?) that someone. . . will be prepared to receive it,. . . and more importantly, . . .to act upon it, . . .on the other side of the future.”

I wonder if I am hearing this right.

“So it is with great excitement. . . that I record. . . these thoughts, in trust. . . that the message. . . will fly to its mark. I hail thee, Listener,. . .for what I am about to impart. . . will leave you changed forever. And out of this transformation. . . will flow the beginnings. . . of a great movement. . .for human change.”

Ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita – stop.

I sit there for a while, stunned by it all, my head spinning, feeling a little bit sick.

I have forty-eight more cylinders to listen to. I’ll ration myself, only listen to one per day. I think that anything more than that would freaking overwhelm me.

I wonder about letting Porgy in on this (I mean Sly – I just can’t get used to calling him that), but – no. This is private, it’s personal. Somehow I know it’s meant for me alone.

He needs a name. He isn’t going to identify himself, somehow I can tell that. So I think hard, and then the perfect name just comes to me out of the blue.

I think I’ll call him Sebastian.


Porgy/Sly

The transformation is not yet complete; Porgy still thinks of himself as Porgy, but now he corrects himself, changing it to Sly whenever he thinks about it.

The ten good things are racking his brain. Aggie said he can fix things. That’s one. What was the other one?

Porgy/Sly goes out more now than he used to. Part of it is out of necessity, because he has to go see Dr. Levy, he made a promise to himself that he’d do it. And he is sick of feeling this way, so burdened down with guilt. He wants Dr. Levy to remove the load, just heave it off his shoulders forever. What would you call that – a guilt-ectomy?

Now he stares at the computer monitor. On the screen is a picture of bones: an x-ray of a woman’s foot.

The foot is three inches long. The arch is buckled and folded in on itself like a train derailment, or a pile-up of solid rock pushed in on itself by the inexorable forces of a glacier. The toes are crushed under, the entire foot folded in half, impossibly distorted and deformed.

Porgy reads in horror and fascination. When this woman was only four years old, her mother took her vulnerable little naked foot in her hands and gave it a ferocious wrench, breaking the toes. It took several wrenches, in fact, to break them all. Then the small broken foot was bound up in bandages which were pulled tighter and tighter each day, until the foot finally yielded.

That little girl would never have normal feet again. All her life she would hobble, her small deformed feet encased in gorgeously-embroidered silk shoes, wooden-soled so she would not topple over: the coveted “three-inch golden lotus” that drove men wild with desire.

Her feet were bound in order to make her marriageable. A girl with normal feet was a disgrace, an embarrassment, a useless parasite, with no sexual prospects, no future, and no hope.

The destroyed feet were, to all intents and purposes, dead. Blood circulation was minimal, and gangrene often set in, with decayed toes sometimes dropping off. Many little girls died from the procedure, from blood poisoning, infection, septicemia. The smell from the crushed feet was appalling, something like a rotting corpse, but it turned men on, it made them hard as the tiny shoes the women forced their feet into every day, it was arousing to them that their women couldn’t walk, couldn’t run, couldn’t escape.

Porgy reads about Chinese footbinding, how it went on for something like a thousand years, and though it was officially banned in 1911, it went on for decades in secret. Some older women in China still hobbled about with folded, deadened feet.

Porgy/Sly wonders: can the same thing happen to your mind?

Porgy/Sly remembers foster homes where love was something you did not hope for, foster homes where alcohol hung over the family like a palpable curse, foster homes where men fondled his private parts as if they owned his body, foster homes where he wanted to die of despair.

But he did not die. Something else happened to him, or didn’t happen, some vital part of him was stunted and could not grow. He hobbled through life, “always on the outside of whatever side there was”, like the Bob Dylan song says, a stranger to everyone, even to himself.

He wonders if it’s too late. He is twenty-eight, and he feels old, his future a blank. In school he was assessed with higher than average intelligence, but he could not learn. His mind had been bound, and it buckled. Eventually it yielded, it had to under all that force, something just had to give.

He wonders if this new name will help. A fresh start in a new direction. He doesn’t want to be Porgy any more, because all Porgy brought him was pain. He has some hope now, at least a little bit of hope from seeing Dr. Levy who has been through so much himself, everybody talks about it, how he came through the war. It’s part of his legend as the rock star of the dispossessed.

Aggie thinks he’s a hero. He wonders how Dr. Levy got through, if his mind ever slid and swayed and collapsed in a heap like a house of cards.

He wonders if he can trust Dr. Levy enough to tell him what he did. When he was about fifteen, he began to experiment a little bit with fire. He would build little bonfires in the alley behind his apartment, roast marshmallows and hot dogs. One day he was in an abandoned building with his friend Shad Johnson, an older boy of about seventeen, another Halfrican, halfling, creme brulée, café au lait, mulatté. Friend may be the wrong term, since Shad Johnson tolerated Porgy more than anything else. Shad needed someone to feel superior to, someone to boss. Porgy wanted to do something to make Shad like him, admire him, or maybe even fear him a little bit, but he didn’t know what.

Then they were crawling around in the ruins of this place, creepy as hell because there was still all sorts of stuff in it, wrecked furniture, an old refrigerator with stinking rotting food in it, even a tablecloth on the table, and dishes.

Porgy was seized with a brilliant idea. He looked at Shad.

“I’ve got a lighter,” he said.

Shad looked at him in disbelief as he set fire to the tablecloth.

It caught. The line of fire quickly snaked up into the draperies, and they exploded into flame. Soon the sofa was on fire, then the chairs, and the room was filling up with thick black smoke.

“Run!” Shad said. They ran and ran. They ran like hell, seemingly for miles, until their lungs ached and felt like they’d explode. The best part of all was reading about the fire in the paper the next day. It had spread to several adjoining buildings, and done thousands of dollars worth of damage. Porgy felt like he was famous. It gave him self-esteem for the first time in his life.

But he doesn’t know how to tell Dr. Levy about this, or all the other times. The other times, when things happened, awful things, consequences. Except that he was never caught, and he never told anybody. A man died in one of Porgy’s fires. He can’t forget it. It gnaws at him all the time.

And then there was the last fire he set, or he hopes it’s the last, pray to God. Nobody died in that one, but what happened was almost worse, because a man shot his face off in despair, all because of what Porgy did.

Maybe next time, once he gets the ten things out of the way, he will make his confession.

Or not.

Mavis

And then: a breakthrough so powerful that it transports Mavis Potter to an entirely new level of euphoric devotion.

She can hardly believe her audacity in planning the break-in. She has never done anything like this in her life before. She has to be sure Dr. Levy isn’t home, of course. She has studied his movements, his comings and goings, and by now she knows his patterns. She spent one entire evening in a parked car a block or so away, watching him move in and out of view through the frame of his living-room window. Now you see him; now you don’t. She wonders if he has music on, what he’s listening to, which one of his stolen CDs he’s playing while he gets mildly drunk on dark beer. And what he had for dinner tonight. Probably heavy on the vegetables, judging by what she found in his garbage can.

She has never seen a woman in the place, and wonders if he ever has sex, casual sex, just for the sake of having it. He’s probably sixty-five years old now, but still. Men can go on forever. Charles hasn’t slowed down at fifty-eight, in fact he seems to get randier with every passing year. She tries to imagine Dr. Levy having sex, but it’s as embarrassing as imagining anyone else having it, it just seems completely impossible.

Mavis has come prepared with tools, a few things to help her get the back door open. It’s the middle of the afternoon, so she has to watch herself, make sure nobody is looking, but coming at night is out of the question, he’d be home, he’d hear her. This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where people worry too much about break-ins, however, and she just doesn’t look the type, she looks like a nice middle-aged librarian, no one would suspect her.

Every once in a while she stops to think about what she is doing, and a wave of shame rolls over her, so potent it feels like an illness. But she can’t stop now, she can’t, the research is going so well, she only needs a little bit more and she’ll be finished. This is going to be her masterpiece, her breakout book. She even has a title for it: Eastside Story, with photographs and accompanying text by Mavis Potter. She fantasizes about accepting the Governor-General award, tries to picture what she will wear, what she’ll say to the reporters.

Getting in is ridiculously easy. It turns out the lock on the back door pops open with only a little manipulation with the screwdriver. The good doctor is too trusting, it seems. Or else he feels he doesn’t have anything worth stealing. He lives on a different plane, that’s why she loves him so much.

Reading his personal notes was thrilling; she sat up late with a glass of scotch and spent hours going over the sheaf of pages, losing all track of time. Most of it was reflections on addiction, no doubt a rough draft to be worked into the book he would never finish, but some of it was more personal, almost like a diary.

“Szabó fascinates me,” he wrote, “as I suspect that his reasons for attempting suicide go far beyond losing all of his paintings in the fire. Aggie Westerman likes to talk about the ‘purple dot’: ‘People who were traumatized as children have a purple dot on their forehead, but only another person with a purple dot can see it.’ That was brilliant, and so true. I have one, Szabó has one, and I suspect the underlying trauma is very similar. And we are about the same age. He was there in Budapest in the mid-‘40s; I know he’s not a Jew, but it didn’t take much to get you in trouble back then, his family may have been persecuted for any number of other reasons. He can’t tell me any of this, of course. He can only write, and what he conveys in writing is rather limited. But I watch him, I see how he reacts. Hope has just been ignited in him, and now there is no turning back. All that remains is to return him to his reason for living, his creativity. But how? A blind painter seems like an impossibility, just too great a leap. But then I think of the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, a phenomenon. That seems impossible, too. And Beethoven composed his most original and powerful works in total deafness. I must find a way for Szabó to create again.”

Leaf, leaf, leaf. Mavis takes another sip of scotch, then drains the glass and refills it. It’s starting to go to her head, or is it the effect of these papers, his private thoughts exposed, his spiky forward-rushing handwriting giving off such vibrant energy she can practically feel his presence in the room?

Her pupils dilate: this looks like a diary entry, personal stuff, the mother lode. She reads on in rapt fascination:

“I try to forget about Annie, but how can I? She has been pushed to the back of my mind, but she won’t stay there, I think about her every day and the way I treated her. We had terrible arguments and I think there was another man, but why didn’t we try to work it out? Why did I leave Annie? And my son. Abandonment! At the time I told myself, tried to make myself believe, that he was better off without me. Such bullshit. No one is “better off”, that was just an excuse for me to leave. I walked at the worst possible time, left her alone with the baby, and since then I haven’t been able to connect with her. No, that’s wrong, I haven’t tried to connect with her. Every day people come to me, they count on me to help them deal with the struggles and frustrations and difficulties in their lives, to help them get clean and sober and get their kids back, and I do my best to help. I help them out of depression, I help them out of despair, and sometimes even keep them from committing suicide. I wonder how they would feel if they knew I was a bigger fuckup than any of them.”

Mavis has long suspected that Zoltán Levy is alone in himself as few other human beings are. Part of it is his intellect, of course (he’d probably agree with that himself), but it goes far beyond that, back to the war, almost a cliché by now, the horrors of the camps, but the thing is, the horrors of the camps really happened, and some people are still having a hard time believing it.

Now she peers into the back end of Zoltán Levy’s house, a modest bungalow, probably at least 50 years old, surely he could afford better than this, but probably doesn’t care much about his surroundings, living on such an exalted plane of existence. She is entering from the rear, the anus of the building, a dark and cluttered place full of old boots and bicycles and ski poles and an old floor lamp, an obstacle course she must stagger through to gain entry. She flips on a light, and finds herself in the kitchen. Suddenly the fine hairs on her face rise and prickle: there’s someone in the house. No: something. 

A black shadow hurtles down the hallway and surges into the kitchen, barking ferociously: the Rottweiller! Mavis backs up and backs up until she is pressed against the wall. But she thought of this in advance, she knew there was a dog, she is prepared, and she fishes around in her pocket, pulling out a handful of raw hamburger.

Soon Rosie is whining with pleasure and licking her fingers, wagging her stump of a tail in gratitude.

So the investigation continues. Living room, sparsely furnished, looks like Ikea, clever man, he can put furniture together, I always suspected he was good with his hands. CDs – God, look at all the CDs! Seems like thousands, just piled up everywhere, in no particular order. She wonders how he ever finds anything. Then she sees a shelf, already packed full. These are alphabetized by composer, all of them still pristinely wrapped in cellophane. This was how they started out, she assumes, but eventually they overflowed like anything that is contained for too long.

Then. . .the bedroom. This is where she has longed to be, where Zoltán Levy sleeps, dreams, blows his nose, masturbates, gets dressed in the morning. She pokes around in the walk-in closet, pulling down and smelling shirt after shirt; she draws one of them on to her body, and of course it doesn’t fit, it’s way too small on her top-heavy frame, but for one instant she has the thrilling sensation that she is Zoltán Levy, and it creates a pure panic of exhilaration.

Then, the bed.

It’s unmade, of course, a bachelor bed, and the sheets likely have not been changed in quite a long time. She pulls back the tumbled covers and eases herself in. The smell of him is everywhere: a dark European smell, not like North American men at all, this is like very dark chocolate, the kind you can only get overseas, intoxicating and somewhat bitter, with a silken, sensuous mouthfeel, melting slowly, gorgeously in the mouth like a great liquefying gob of butter.

She rolls from side to side, wallowing in the essence of Zoltán. Her hand creeps southward, and she begins to touch and explore, teasing herself, not yet, not yet. In a few minutes she is close to orgasm, but tries to hold it off, resisting. It is nearly impossible, but she makes herself wait, and wait. Then she thinks of his face when he saw her on the street, the look of slight confusion, a “what’s this, do I know you?” look: and suddenly she cannot hold back another second, the orgasm rips through her body with spasmodic force, leaving her drenched in sweat, gasping, and shuddering with the frightening intensity of the pleasure.

It takes several minutes for her to recover sufficiently to get up and walk.

Then she makes her escape, having taken only one shirt, the shirt she has on her body, as her trophy.


Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART SEVEN

This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside

Part Seven

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel


Mavis

Mavis Potter likes to take a camera and stroll the streets of Zeddyville, snapping this, snapping that; a grizzled old homeless man, his pants such a miserable fit that he’s forced to hold them up with one hand; an emaciated hooker, body so wasted it looks like a rack of bones, sweating and fidgeting for an overdue fix; an offended tourist (“not my picture! I don’t belong here”). She loves to snap the murals, gory and gaudy and gang-marked, the violent graffiti, the strange signs (“Is It A Crime To Be Homeless?”), including her favourite sign of all, right there in the very asshole of Vancouver: 000 Hastings Street.

Zero, zero, zero. . . there’s those zeds again, she thinks to herself, adjusting her wool cap, a new accoutrement to her bag-lady persona. She started off badly, almost like a Downtown Eastside version of Carol Burnett, too cuddly and respectable-looking in her woollen layers to be believable at all. Then one day she hacked holes in the sweaters and ripped at them, forcing the fibres apart with her bare hands like she was tearing at flesh. The enjoyment she derived from this shocked her a little, but it did not stop her.

Mavis licks her lips, cracked and chapped, without lipstick or even Chapstick, for that would interfere with the Look. She hasn’t worn makeup in months, and her hair – her hair is beginning to smell, and looks so bad she has to keep her head covered with a scarf when she’s not “out”.

Zero, zero, zero. Almost a cliché, she thinks to herself (snap). Zee, zee, zee, or is it Ground Zero, or is it more of an “ooo”. . . the “ooo” of withdrawal, of I need a fix cause I’m goin’ down (like in that Beatles song she never understood).

Mavis wants to bag a big one today, but is not sure she’ll be able to pull it off. The trophy she’s after, the amputated animal head she wants to mount on the wall of her study at home, is the head of Dr. Zoltán Levy. Bring me the head of Zoltán Levy; bring it to me indeed, stare-eyed and blank-faced on a charger, surrounded with sprigs of parsley! But like most big game, he never appears when he is supposed to. (Snap. Fuck off, lady. Get out of my face. Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else.)

Charles saw some of the photos, and in his mild studious way, his mild studious way that hides the heart of an absolute asshole, he asked her, “Mavie, what’s this?”

“Oh. . . just some shots I took for a project I’m working on.”

“This?” Pictures of spent syringes, a pool of vomit, a dead rat beside an overflowing garbage can, a passed-out man, another passed-out man, an aged Native face seamed by weather and wood alcohol, a hooker, another hooker, another hooker. . .

“I’m doing a book.”

“Some book.” That mild, quizzical look. Charles Potter’s students thought he resembled a big, ruffly brown owl. The owl fucks his students, unfortunately, fucks them blind, lures them with poems and promises and leaves them spinning around on their ass on icy black pavement.

“It’s a departure for me, yes. Downtown Eastside images, to illustrate a cycle of poems.”

“Really. You go there?”

“Only to do research.”

Professor Potter clears his throat and goes back to his papers, the grades in direct proportion to how much sex he gets from each of them. Cunnilingus? B+, maybe. Blow job? A-minus. All the way up the ass, with leather pants, a riding crop and spurs? A+. Or so Mavis imagines, when she thinks about it at all, for it’s easier for her to just lose herself on these streets and forget that she is married to anyone.

Mavis thinks she sees him. Quivering, she jerks the camera up to her face. But it’s not, it’s not him, it’s some other dark Ashkenazic-looking face, a poor substitute, just some schlub who happened to wander in front of her camera, and her heart plummets like a shot sparrow, dead feathers hitting the sidewalk with a sickening thunk.

She will get her photograph of Dr. Levy if it takes her a month of perseverence. She has started to do a little investigating about his habits, there are ways of finding out. She already knows where he lives. She knows he has a Rottweiller named Rosie, she’s seen him out for his little walks with her in the evening. She knows he likes a dark beer now and then, has even glimpsed him in the Jolly Taxpayer wiping foam off his upper lip. Women she’s not so sure of, but there was somebody, she is sure of it. She’ll find out. Who and when and where. Details. She hoards them, sorts them, shuffles them lovingly, and pastes them in her ever-growing scrapbook of Zoltánia, exotica, paper dolls made of cutout magazine-photos that she toys with, turning them over lovingly in her hands.

Porgy

Porgy is fascinated. For he has found out that it’s not just an internet myth: it really is true what they said about Elvis.

Maybe the 60 pounds of impacted fecal material was a bit of an exaggeration, but when he found the report, the actual Elvis autopsy report, on a site called The King is Dead: Long Live the King!, he was gratified to read that Presley’s colon was indeed choked with masses of undigested deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, burnt bacon and Moon Pies.

Elvis did not take a crap for at least ten years. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the autopsy report, which Porgy reads with rapt fascination:

“The colon is approximately five to seven feet in length in a person Elvis’s size and should have been about two inches in diameter. . . however, Elvis’s colon was at least three and a half inches in diameter in some places and as large as four and a half to five inches in diameter in others. . . (T)he megacolon was jam-packed from the base of the descending colon all the way up and halfway across the transverse colon. It was filled with white, chalklike fecal material.”

Like a lot of drug addicts, Elvis just stopped going to the bathroom at a certain point, and everything backed up like a sewer. Peristalsis ground to a halt, his colon blew up like an enormous bratwurst, and he couldn’t pass anything but the odd rabbit pellet. Didn’t he die on the toilet? It’s enough to send Porgy back to the purging pills and potions.

“Sylvester,” Dr. Levy says to him at their last little session, “you’re in danger of doing serious harm to yourself. There’s nothing wrong with your colon, I’ve examined you, it’s completely normal. You’re not all bunged up with shit like my heroin patients. So why do you do it?”

“Ah, I dunno,” he says, bashful, ashamed. “Makes me feel better.”

“But why? You’re going to develop a dependency on those pills. Pretty soon you won’t be able to take a normal crap without them.”

Dr. Levy leans into him, gazes at him with his penetrating dark eyes.

“Why, Sylvester?”

“Ah, I just. . . “ He looks at the ceiling, then the floor. “It’s just that I feel so. . . guilty.”

Guilt Dr. Levy knows about. Guilt he absorbed with his mother’s milk. He ate it and drank it and slept with it and breathed it for more years than he cares to admit.

“Sylvester.”

“Doc, why you call me that?”

“Because it’s your name. And you just told me you hate being called Porgy.”

“I do. It’s a nigger name.” He looks up from his floorward stare to gauge Dr. Levy’s reaction to the word.

He says it again.

“Nigger.”

Dr. Levy looks at him, unflinching, unblinking.

“Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

Dr. Levy doesn’t move.

“Did anyone ever call you that, Sylvester?”

“Did anyone ever call me that.” He looks up at the ceiling. “Did anyone ever call me that.”

“You’re angry.”

“No I’m not.”

“Angry feelings can turn into guilty feelings, Sylvester, especially if we don’t express them.”

“Doc, why you call – “

“Because it’s your name, Sylvester. You have a name, a real actual name your mother and father gave you. You don’t have to go by that awful handle they gave you in high school.”

“I was fat.”

“Did you try to lose weight?”

“I took laxatives.”

“Sylvester.” Dr. Levy looks a little weary. “You don’t have to do this to yourself any more. It’s unhealthy, and an abusive way to treat your body.”

“But I feel like shit.”

“That doesn’t mean you are shit.”

“I feel like it.”

“You’re a human being, Sylvester, a unique individual. In all of human history, there has never been anyone else exactly like you.”

“Good for human history.”

Dr. Levy smiles a bit. Porgy feels a warm flush rise in his face, a good feeling.

“There’s only one of you, Sylvester, you’re absolutely unique, and you have value and worth, just like every other human being on the face of the planet.”

“Even Saddam Hussein?”

“Look, Sylvester, I don’t know why some people turn evil. It’s beyond me. I only know you’re not. There’s a sweetness about you, a goodness. It’s time you started treating yourself like you mattered.”

He doesn’t want to cry, but feels like crying anyway, big baby that he is. He wants Dr. Levy to wrap him up in a warm fuzzy blanket, kiss his forehead, take him home.

“Doc,” he says, his voice a bit choked.

“Yes, Sylvester.”

“Can I ask you a favour?”

“Name it.”

“Can you call me Sly?”

“I’ll call you whatever you want to be called.”

“It’s just that. . . you know, Sly Stallone is so cool. And Sylvester, it just sounds too much like a cat.”

“Yes, I’ll call you Sly, on one condition, that you stop taking all those capsules. You’re going to perforate your colon if you don’t watch out. Promise?”

“I promise.” He knows he’s lying, but he has to agree to it or Dr. Levy will never let him out of here.

“I want to see you in a week.”

“Sure thing.”

“Try to go a week without purging.”

“Okay.”

“Sly.”

“Yeah, doc.”

“I want you to think of ten good things about yourself.”

“Ten?”

“Work on it. See you in a week. Now get out of here.”

On the way out the door of the Portman, he notices he feels different: less guilty, and somehow lighter, his head full of the rarefied helium of hope.

The bus

The people on the bus go up and down. Up and down. Up and down.

Bert Moffatt notices a difference in them today. They’re restless; antsy. He doesn’t see Szabó. Something is definitely out of whack here, as Szabó always gets on at the same time every day. Where his he? Is he all right?

But Aggie’s here, looking preoccupied, kind of like she’s on a mission or something. She gets on with that half-black boy, what’s his name, Porky or something, nice kid but always looks a little lost, like Aggie has to lead him around by the hand. He always looks terrified on the bus.

Today it’s different, for some reason she’s calling him by a new name, but keeps breaking into giggles.

“Sly. I can’t get used to it, Porg.”

“But I hate my name. Porgy. It’s a slave name. Besides, Dr. Levy says. . .”

“You saw Levy?”

“Yeah.” Porgy/Sly looks a little uncomfortable, but pleased too. “I saw him. I’m s’posed to think of ten good things about myself.”

“Sounds like him. He’s always going on and on about how we’re all unique and irreplaceable. . .”

“He told you that?” Disappointment clouds his face. He looks like a slighted child, shut out of a circle game. He thought maybe he was the only one.

“Oh, don’t worry, he means it, Porg. I mean, Sly. Is that really your name?”

“Well, kind of.”

“So. Ten things.”

“Yeah, ten. I’m kind of getting stuck on one.”

“You’re Porgy; you’re Porgy; you’re Porgy. . .”

“But I’m not Porgy, Ag, I’m Sylvester. My father named me after a Graham cracker.”

“No shit.” Aggie sees she has hurt him. “Sorry. . . Sly. It just takes some getting used to, is all.”

“Yeah, well, I’m brown like a Graham cracker, so what can you expect.”

“So. Ten things. I can think of a few right off the top. Just to get you started, I mean. You’re good at fixing things. Hell, you even got my Edison Bannerfront Standard going again after a hundred years. That ain’t bad. You’re a whiz at doing research. Just look at all you found out about cylinder recording on the internet. I learned everything from you. You’re a walking encyclopedia. Hey, only eight more things to go!”

Porgy/Sly wonders if Dr. Levy said ten so he’d think of one, or maybe two. He hopes Aggie’s small list will be enough.

They get off the bus at the flea market, making their way through the milling crowds to the table where they bought the cylinders and the player. But everything has changed. There’s nothing on the table now but a clutter of old junk, teacups and tacky figurines. The fat bald man who sold her the player isn’t even there any more. A grandmotherly-looking Chinese woman smiles at them from behind the table.

“Uh, excuse me. . . I bought some cylinders here a couple of months ago.”

“Cyrinder?” The word is obviously unfamiliar to her, it would be to practically anyone, and Aggie’s hopes begin to sink.

“Uh. . .old recordings. You know, gramophone. . .” She mimes a cranking motion, and sound flowing out of a horn. The woman looks puzzled.

“Cylinders. I bought one that was pink.” She feels her excitement sagging into disappointment. Porgy/Sly tugs at her hand. Let’s get out of here.

“Ah. Cyrinder. Come this way, pleass.”

She takes Aggie and Porgy/Sly down a corrider into a cluttered storage room.

There, in a large coardboard crate, is a huge collection of cylinders in plain brown containers.

There must be four dozen of them, at least. Aggie looks at Porgy/Sly in wild excitement.

She opens one of the canisters, slides the cylinder out, and holds it in her hand.

It’s pink.

“How much for all these?”

“Oh, you take, you take. Man leave them here, he don’t want, you have them.”

“Really? I should pay you something for these.”

“Oh no. We get rid of, you take, make some space back here, eh? Have a nice day.” She beams at them, then hurries back to her table.

The trip home is a wild ride, as more than once somebody tries to rip off the huge orange leaf-bag crammed with pink cylinders from 1887, thinking they are pop cans gleaned from the dumpster. Nobody has any idea, nobody but her and Porgy (I mean Sly), that what they carry is a bag of magic so potent it will allow them to transcend the maddening obstacle of time.

Szabó

Szabó shows up as faithfully in Dr. Levy’s office as he used to show up in his studio every morning.

Some progress has been made. He writes his messages, sometimes in Hungarian, sometimes in English, very messy because he can’t see, but just legible.

It becomes apparent that he believes he has lost his reason to live.

Not for him the “everyone is valuable” message; Dr. Levy knows that won’t play. He won’t accept it; he’s too complicated, too subtle, too smart.

Dr. Levy always addresses him in Hungarian, which gives him a warm feeling in his centre, something he hasn’t felt in years.

“Tamás, I realize you feel like you’re lost. You may have lost your way temporarily, but you are not lost. You lost a great deal, it’s true – in fact a staggering amount, all your work, your relationship, even your face. But Tamás is still here. You still have your mind.”

Szabó scrawls: That is the hell of it, doctor, my mind lives, I remember what I was, and I see what I am now, I am beggar what lives on street, I sit on corner and wait for alms.

“Your eyes are gone, Tamás, it’s true. But not your creativity. Your creative mind is as intact as it ever was. It’s just that the energy has nowhere to go.”

Dr. Levy can tell from the inclination of his head that he has hit home.

“Tamás. I want to ask you something. And this is very important. You can say no if you want to. Tamás. . . can I look at you?”

His head turns with a start.

“Can I look at your face?”

Face? What’s left of it, the crater, the mass of deformed scar tissue? No one looks at Szabó, they would die if they looked. They would turn to stone.

Szabó sits in horror, which slowly turns to awe.

He realizes something, something powerful, something surprising.

He wants Dr. Levy to look.

It takes a few minutes before his hand will move. This is worse than a year of streetcorner-sitting boiled down into a few seconds of desperate hope.

He wants to live, doesn’t. Wants to take the chance, is sickened by it. Feels Dr. Levy standing near his chair, almost feels the heat from him, and thinks of a dog about to be euthanized, how it will suddenly relax into the veterinarian’s hands.

He drags the old blanket up over his head, holds it above himself like a fetid woolen tent for a few seconds, then lets it drop with an exhausted sigh on the floor of Dr. Levy’s office.


Mavis

It’s after midnight, and Mavis Potter is rummaging through Zoltán Levy’s garbage.

To someone else it’s garbage, a bunch of smelly discarded old food and broken junk; to her, a treasure trove: coffee grounds, probably from some expensive Sumatran roast; vegetable peelings and tops (it appears the good doctor is largely vegan, though the odd chop bone spoils the effect); dog poo, or at least she hopes it’s dog, assuming Rosie must have had an accident somewhere in the house; an old paint shirt full of stains and splotches and holes, which she lifts up to her face and lovingly, lingeringly smells; inexplicably, a classical music CD still in its original plastic wrapper (a Deutsche-Grammophon recording of Brahms’ Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2, performed by Maria Joao Pires, Augustin Dumay and Jian Wong; this she confiscates, looking forward to listening to it later); a Hungarian newspaper, damp and crumpled; and oh. Papers. Handwritten papers, masses of them, perhaps notes, a rough draft for this book he is trying to write? Or something more personal: a journal, perhaps? His private thoughts? Thank God it’s written in English. She quickly crams them into her bag, looking around, wondering if anyone has seen her, feeling the thrill of shame.

She saw him out with his dog the other morning, Rottweiller, Nazi dog, such a strange choice for a Jew. For this expedition she wore her normal clothes, civilian garb, a tweed suit, skirt and blazer and brown oxfords, sexless shoes, she’d keep the other ones for later, and walked around and around the neighborhood in North Vancouver carrying a brown leather briefcase and hoping she looked like a Jehovah’s Witness or something, or as if she were canvassing for some worthy cause, a social issue, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, rape crisis centre, whatever. She tried to look purposeful, and she certainly was, like any predator, single-minded, alert and focused on the task, the task of capturing Zoltán Levy, of making him her own.

She even passed by him on the sidewalk that day, her heart hammering wildly, and he glanced up and for a split-second looked a bit puzzled, a “do I know you? No, I guess not” look that lasted a fleeting instant before he walked on.

Score.

Mavis cherishes these moments, recalls them when she is lying in bed at night beside her snoring hulk of a husband; her hand will steal down to the sensitive place between her legs, and she will begin to caress herself, and caress herself, until she has to bite down hard to stifle the groan when orgasm rips through her shuddering body. The dark and downtrodden Messiah of the streets, her damaged saint, has ravished her once again.

The CD rests under her pillow, still faintly garbage-scented, still unplayed. She wonders what made him pitch it out: guilt? Turning over a new leaf: I’ll never steal again, starting now? Oh, she knows how that one goes. Every trip to Zoltán Levy’s neighborhood is her last, this time she really means it, she’ll stop, she can stop any time she wants to, it’s just that she needs to find out just a little bit more about him so she can put it all in this book, this cycle of poems, or maybe she should write a novel, that’s it, she’ll publish at last and get some long-overdue recognition and respect, the Giller prize maybe, no, that’s asking too much, but all this research she’s doing right now has a purpose, it does. She’ll show Charles, show him she can write at least as well as those nubile young women he samples like so many hors d’ouevres when he feels a bit peckish. Fuck Charles, she’ll write a bestseller, she’ll win the Booker Prize, Dr. Levy will have to take notice of her then and not look askance at her like she’s some demented freak detective prowling the neighborhood for clues.

She has stopped taking the Remeron and the Seroquel, they were only dulling her thinking, and besides, she doesn’t need them any more, her depression is completely gone, she has better orgasms without the pills, and her life has a sense of mission, of purpose, a hurtling forward momentum she has never experienced, an intensity, it’s just like that poem from Yeats, a terrible beauty is born, it’s exhilarating, it’s noble, it’s furiously fine, and it speeds her forward into an accelerated state of bliss the likes of which she has never known before. Like Clara Schumann with her feverish illicit love for Brahms, her Johannespassion, Mavis has her Zoltánnespassion, an involvement, a commitment, a devotion so complete it wipes her mind absolutely clean of the shadows of the past.

The bus

The people on the bus are drunk and stoned. Drunk and stoned. Drunk. . . and. . .stoned.

Three kids about fifteen years old get on the bus at Broadway and Granville. The two boys are stocky, dressed in black leather with a lot of studs and chains, pale and a little bit puffy in the face like habitual drinkers. Alcohol fumes surround them in a nearly-visible nimbus. The girl is emaciated, sad-eyed and plaintive of voice, with multiple facial piercings and dry, three-colour hair.

“That’s because you never do any fuckin’ work around the place. You never even stack the fuckin’ dishes.”

“Ah, ya fuckin’ whiner. Make me sick. Always fuckin’ complaining.”

The two boys squeeze into a seat at the back. The girl sits next to a bewildered-looking pink-faced elderly woman in a navy coat and a white plastic rain hat.

“Yeah, talk about bein’ a fuckin’ loser, try pulling your own weight around the place.” The girl begins to sniffle and rubs her nose. “Fuck, I need some coke.”

“I need a fix, ‘cause I’m goin’ down. . . “

“Mother Superior jumped the gun.”

“My Mum does coke.”

“Fuckin’ A!”

“Loser.”
“Fuck off, bitch.”

“You’re a loser. That’s why you always talk that way. You talk like a fuckin’ loser.”

“Yeah, well at least I’m not a fuckin’ addict.”

“No. You’re a fuckin’ alcoholic.”

“My Mom’s an addict.”

“My Mom’s a slut.” Stoned laughter. The girl covers her face with her hands. The bigger of the two boys grabs her backpack and holds it up and away from her, then tosses it to to the blonde boy who wraps his arms around it. Screaming bloody murder, the girl lunges at him and slashes at his face with her black-painted fingernails.

“Hey, fuck off, bitch!”

“Driver! Driver!” The little old lady is in a panic. “Driver, do something about this. These young people are fighting back here. And their language is simply appalling.”

The driver, a beaten-down-looking East Indian man in a dark blue turban, has a wife and five kids at home. He doesn’t want to call the supervisor, it holds up the bus and makes everyone angry and makes him late, and he doesn’t want to pull the kids off the bus because he might get hurt, or worse, hurt them – but the old lady is agitating now, and the girl is clearly out of control, screaming and slapping the two boys on the side of the head with terrifying force.

“Fuckin’ Christ.”

“Bitch, you are losin’ it!”

“Order, order please,” the driver says mildly.

“Give me my FUCKING bag!” The girl yanks the backpack out of the blonde guy’s arms, falling over backwards into the aisle of the bus. The two boys in the back convulse with laughter. Blood is trickling down the burly boy’s face, and the blonde boy has an angry red hand-mark on the side of his head.

As if performing some elaborate break-dance manouevre, the girl twists and turns her wasted body around and somehow wrenches herself into an upright position. She flings the backpack over her shoulder and leans her face in so close to the two boys that they can smell her blue lipstick.

“Fucking. . .losers.”

She wheels around and strides to the back door, almost knocking down a nicely-dressed old Chinese man in the aisle, a standee.

“Ho-ly shit.”

“Hello, Valleyview? Get a bed ready.”

“That bitch is fucked.”

“Language,” says the old lady.

“Jesus Christ,” murmurs the driver.

The well-dressed old Chinese man picks himself up, leans out the open exit door and stares fiercely at the girl, who stands splay-legged at the side of the street. The passengers strain to hear what he will say.

“You die.”

“Eat shit, Chink!”

“You die, then fuck off.”

The door wheezes shut and the bus pulls away from the stop.


Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

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