L (and Things Come Apart)

Ian Orti

Invisible Publishing
Halifax & Toronto

for L

“IS IT THAT HARD TO POUR WINE, HENRY?”
He wipes the dining room table with his napkin. “It will probably leave a stain you know.” Henry rarely makes eye contact with his wife anymore when she speaks to him. Her guests wait in silence for him to finish cleaning.

“Where is your place, Henry?” a guest asks, breaking the silence.

“Near the square,” Henry answers.

“Henry inherited it when his father died years ago. It was quite nasty you know. The old man died right there, mid-afternoon one day.”

“Was anyone inside when it happened?” a guest asks.

She answers for him. “No. It was dead inside. As always.” Henry smiles to himself, stares into his glass as laughter spills over the table and then takes a drink.

“Music,” she hiccups, “and more wine.”

The distance between Henry and his wife had begun even before he discovered her fondness for the salty taste of one of her colleagues. The gentleman in question is likely one of the men sitting at his table, or each of the gentlemen at the table, Henry figures, at different or simultaneous times. He allows his mind to go there. He puts them at this very table. Makes them into lions and they devour her. But the image dissolves and carries no weight. These are not his friends; she is hardly his wife. They matter very little. Their opinion about where and how he spends his time mean as much to him as the habitual orgasms his wife may or may not provide to one or all of these men.

As guests chatter amongst themselves, Henry's wife turns the record over, sets the needle on the vinyl with a scratch and the music starts again. He recognizes the piece, centres on its arithmetic arrangement, its geometry, its arpeggios. He smiles when the guests smile, laughs when they laugh. It's a game. The face mirrors theirs and the mind can be elsewhere. He closes his eyes, occupies himself again with the sounds from the record. Understands what it means to be a single note existing in isolation. Behind the guests, rows of books line the shelves. They are cells to him. For a moment he thinks he can hear the calls from inside of them. Above him, a fan rotates.

“Henry, he's talking to you.”

“I'm sorry, could you repeat?”

“You need to find the man who sells you coffee and have him shot.” His wife and her guests laugh. Henry laughs to himself and responds with a smile. He raises his drink, smiles to the guests, and empties his glass.

Life is a city where time has given up on itself so there are no beginnings and no end. His life is the same dry verse of a broken record spinning endlessly beneath a needle. The same lines read over and over. A bad habit. Wine is poured into the glass of the only other woman at the table. She arrived late, after Henry, and is the only other person there who hears the music the way he does, who understands it not as a sound, but as a place beyond language. They are two solitary notes of the same score and come from a place where one plus one is one. But only one of them knows this.

HENRY'S PLASE IN THE CITY,
his café or bistro, tavern or trattoria—each person had a different name for it—the hole-in-the-wall that was the subject of his wife's amusement was a two-storey building occasionally occupied by those passing to or from the square. It was a small hollow on the side of the street and seldom saw the sun. As a result it looked empty from the outside. He filled it with anything he thought, or was told, best befit the interior of the type of place he was trying to create. Thick vines arched over pots, stretching to the floor, buds he'd been told would bloom but were instead locked in a state of perpetual stagnation. There were remnants of his father's past, relics, photographs, books of which he had heard but had never read, posters of popular paintings from popular museums, and a discarded page he'd found one day while walking: black lines on top of words on top of more lines bending around one another settling on the shape of a woman with long black hair. There was the photograph of his father, wrinkled, with embers burning at the end of a cigarette hanging from his lips. An antique wooden chair. Old magazines and newspapers. He kept these simply because someone had once mentioned that people like to read old news, but he watched all of the regular visitors and none appeared noticeably moved or nostalgic about these magazines and newspapers. Instead they would ask about his finances since it appeared he couldn't afford current news. But Henry reassured his critics by telling them that he kept them because the only things that changed in most stories were the dates and characters. The stories were repetitive and the events of one year mirrored those of the last. And if, after all things were said and done, things remained mostly unchanged, then there was no reason to provide anything new, since old news was evidently as good, or as bad, as anything current. When people told him that his place, therefore, held no relation to any real place or time, he would smile and nod, and tell them that his was just a place outside of the news. It was an explanation that stifled his customers, and they responded by waving their hand, brushing off his explanation and going back to their business.

Things he excelled at were few, but if his experience with people had made him a master of anything, it was the nod. When a customer was adamant about how they wanted a drink prepared, Henry would bring his eyebrows close together and deliver a short firm nod. If someone came in to lament their low wage or to tirade against the rich, or the politicians, or just the ubiquitous “they” responsible for all things right and wrong, good and bad, Henry would close his lips firmly, slowly close his eyes and direct a sympathetic nod to the floor. He had no close friends but he would befriend whoever passed through the door. When the odd builder came in, he'd talk about construction and the rising cost of supplies in the country, and when an artist stopped in for something to eat or steal, Henry would tell them the real art was in the streets, not in their bourgeois museums, and when they pointed to the walls and asked him why he chose to dress his walls like a museum he would say it was to remind him of where the real art was found. He always knew who wanted to talk and who wanted to be left alone. And if he was alone for long he would invent characters to talk with. This was how he spent his days now, a solitary man beneath the high ceilings of a place he used to escape or embrace the lull of a life he saw drifting away with the passing wind of another season, accompanying himself with strangers—real or imagined—who passed through the open door of his life and signalled their arrival with a wave or nothing at all.

“I'M NOT HAVING THIS CONVERSATION AGAIN,”
said Lachaise. Lachaise was small and ambidextrous with a firm posture, a soft disposition and a wavering faith, which Henry exploited every once in a while. Henry enjoyed doing this. He would do this sometimes when he was bored. He would taunt the regulars.

Lachaise pointed a finger at him. “I'm late.” He paid for his two glasses of wine and, rising on wobbly legs, raised the glasses by their stems. “And I take these with me.”

Henry nodded and Lachaise walked out, passing Laplante on his way in.

“Laplante,” said Lachaise.

“Lachaise,” grunted Laplante.

Laplante was a lanky sort with a dry mouth, a light eater who drank mostly water. He leaned towards the espresso machine, and with a wiry arm pointed to a large cup. Laplante had arrived one afternoon with the intention of piecing together a growing collection of scavenged pages into a logical order, and it was from the early days of his collection that Henry's relationship with him began. According to Laplante the ragged papers he found on a near regular basis all originated from the same source. With the progression of the seasons came more and more pages. At first it seemed a coincidence to Laplante, but as the days progressed and the pages piled higher, the coincidence naturally grew into a pastime, and the pastime into an obsession; he often sat for hours attempting to order his scavenged pages. When they first met, Henry suspected Laplante was new to the area, a stranger who mistakenly believed it was somewhere in the hollow of Henry's barren place that the story would find life on the pages before him. Mistaken, Henry believed, because four seasons had passed since Laplante first passed through the door and though the pages mounted, the ending continued to elude him.

Henry eyed another loose page in Laplante's hand. “How's it going?”

“Oh, it's coming. It's coming along just fine. I'll let you read it when I'm done.”

“Very well,” said Henry, “but I could be dead by the time you've pieced all those pages together.”

Henry watched droplets of rain deflecting off the awning from the shop across the street. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the sun split through the clouds, which lingered like an illness over the buildings. As Laplante continued reading, Henry recalled the obsession many people had with this mysterious cloud as it, and the perpetual darkness it cast upon the city, seemed to shape almost each person who came inside. It had been awhile since anyone had come in without some sort of depleted expression. This cloud was carving hard lines into faces and no one seemed to recall accurately the last time there had been this many days without sunlight. Henry stared across the street and tried to think of the last time he'd had to squint his eyes to see. He nodded slowly as Laplante continued speaking.

“This person appears to have lost everything. There are chapters marked by glints of hope, which vanish as quickly as they appear. It's as though there are no heroes in this story. I suppose it's a story about hope,” he said, “or at least the illusion of it.”

Henry turned back to Laplante. “If you haven't found every page, how do you know you've even found the beginning?”

“It's perplexing, to be fair. Sure, sure, the pages are usually quite worn or damp when I find them. It's a colourless story and the characters are poorly developed. An early draft of something. The ink bleeds over the pages in places, and things are skewed.”

“Still wasting your time, Laplante?” said an old man sitting at the end of the counter. The old man was a regular. Or perhaps more of a fixture. He'd appear and disappear like a ghost. Sometimes he'd sit for hours in silence. Other times, he would hassle Henry or the other customers.

“Yes, hello old man,” said Laplante, indifferent to the interjection. “There's a passage I think you should hear…”

“I'd rather not.”

But Laplante continued.

As the two men argued over the finer or weaker points of Laplante's project, Henry turned his eyes to a figure in the back of his place sitting quietly in the corner.

“Don't you agree, Henry?”

Henry had a nod for these kinds of rhetorical questions. He widened his eyes, raised his eyebrows and seeing the slow upward movement of Henry's chin, the two men continued arguing. Their voices bleeding into one another, Henry leaned against the counter, sipped on something warm and finally recalled the last day he had seen the sun.

The humidity had been oppressive, and the streets had been closed on account of a recent fire, which had shelled four nearby buildings. Traffic congestion and construction had prevented most people from accessing the neighbourhood so he decided to leave early. Normally he would take a streetcar, or a bus, since he lived all the way across the other side of the river, which moved serpentine through the city. But on this day he carved a long and winding path between the two places. The bridge marked the halfway point and on days when he walked, Henry rarely went the same way twice. He'd cut through schoolyards and back alleys, collecting odds and ends he would clean or repair when he was alone or when things were quiet. Occasionally, he'd detour through the university campus, other times the long way through the shopping district or past the factories along the banks of the river. No matter which way he went, he was sure to stop on the middle of the bridge to mark his halfway point. It was the lowest part of the journey and the banks rose steeply on either side of the river; he liked to pause here before starting the slow uphill struggle of the second half. It was here he stopped to rest his legs and take in the passage of the river beneath him.

Henry had stopped in the middle of the bridge, wiped his forehead and squinted. Even the stones on the bridge seemed to emit heat, but this was the only place you could feel anything that resembled a breeze on days such as this. The sun reflected off the river and the windows of the buildings that stood upon its banks. The heat enclosed him.

Later, as he approached his house the sound of gentle rapping could be heard from inside and grew louder as he got closer. Unsure what he would find inside, what would pounce on him or what would overcome him, he gathered several wide rocks from the garden, and piled them on top of each other below the living room window. From where he stood the sounds intensified and were soon accompanied by a sort of eager chanting. Spiders and soil had gathered at his feet as he balanced on top of the rocks and pressed his fingers along the window ledge and peered inside. He could not see the face of the man inside his living room, but he could make out his wife's and her hair, damp with the occasion and the heat of the afternoon. And the images accumulated. Her furrowed eyebrows. The creases around her eyes. Her tightening limbs.

Henry stepped down from the rocks, looked around and wondered how far down the street the noise carried, wondered if anyone could see him standing as a voyeur into his own home. He placed the rocks back in their original places, crouched beneath the window with his back against the wall and felt the soil with his fingers. Then he walked the entire distance back to his café, only this time he did not stop on the bridge.

“Sir? Sir?”

Henry turned to see a man standing before him holding an empty coffee cup.

“May I have a…some fire?” He spoke strangely, as though his tongue, or some part of it, had been severed. Perhaps a nervous habit, Henry thought.

“I'm sorry,” Henry said, “I couldn't hear you over these two.”

“Which two?”

Henry saw they were alone. The stranger placed a cigarette between two cracked lips. Henry struck a match and raised it to the man's lips, illuminating a face drawn with dark lines and deep creases. The man continued speaking, talking to himself, mumbling something about something. Henry was used to this. Often people spoke to him for the sake of speaking. The man was occupied with his work and it seemed natural to Henry that he would speak of nothing else. As the stranger spoke Henry followed the slow ascension of smoke towards the fan overhead, charting a path along the edges of the fan blades. He began at its vortex and from there he traced its four blades; along the perimeter of the entire blade, to the blade across from it in a figure-eight motion, returning again to the centre, then moving to the next two blades and following the same trajectory.

As plumes from the stranger's cigarette blew towards the ceiling, Henry watched the slow rotation of the fan, assigning a season for each blade, a year for each rotation. As the stranger continued Henry focused on him, intent on the centre of his eye.