Self (23 page)

I was at the library on the main campus, nestled in a comfortable chair, an open but idle book on my lap. I noticed a student, ill-shaven and dishevelled, who was looking at books in the stacks. He had small gold-rimmed glasses and was wearing an array of clothes that seemed to have come to him by storm rather than by intent. It was a little past two in the afternoon and my day had started over six hours ago; he looked as if he had got up a minute ago, and awakened forty-five seconds later. He was rocking back and forth on his feet, eyeing the book titles. From his expression, it looked as if the books were all shouting at him. He was slim and handsome, his sandy blond hair a mess. Perhaps sensing my gaze, he turned his head a quarter and gave me a smile. I smiled back. In nearly a whisper he said, “It’s easier in a church. Only one book.”

I replied, “You should try a swimming-pool. No books at all.”

He chuckled and turned back to his search. After a few minutes he picked off three books. As he left: “Bye.” With another smile.

I realized how far I had gone when the thought of kissing him, and being kissed in return, was not only conceivable but acutely desirable. To kiss
him
— no man in the abstract, but specifically, particularly,
him
. To see
him
naked, and wanting
me and plainly showing me his lust. My heart began to pound. I brought my legs together.

Thus did my imagination take possession of men.

One of the signs of spring in Roetown — or one that I was quick to pick out, sooner than the buds in the trees — was the appearance of posters and leaflets announcing “Canadian Images”. Those brightly emblazoned words, usually with a loop of celluloid making out the year, told me that soon the cold of winter would end.

Canadian Images was a one-week outbreak of cinematic culture that took over every available venue at the university and in town. It came and went like a springtime shower. For the duration of a week the clouds were made of celluloid and, to the furious clickety-click of projectors, they pelted the town with movies.

Every year I bought a program and went through it carefully, trying to guess on the basis of words what the images would be like. It was a process of elimination that was sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. The end result would be a large piece of paper with a tight schedule on it, a feat of diplomacy that reconciled the imperatives of interest, transportation and hunger. Festival pass in hand, excusing myself from school and even from writing and swimming, I would disappear. Though the days were getting longer and brighter at that time of year, for me there would be darkness at noon — on some days, in fact, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Hungry, tired, eyes sore, dying to pee, I would sit and take in every conceivable kind of movie. The only criterion for being shown at Canadian Images was that a movie be Canadian. It mattered not a jot what it was about or how long it was. What flickered on
the screen went from the staidly documentary to the weirdly arty, from the realistic to the surrealistic, from one minute to feature length, everything and anything that was made in the Canadian shadow of America. There were in fact few feature-length movies, such orchestral productions being beyond the capacity of most Canadian filmmakers. Those that were shown were usually awful — pale, cash-strapped imitations of American formulas. The majority of the fare was short-length and medium-length movies — solos and chamber pieces, one might say — fuelled by originality and passion rather than dollars. And bound for limbo. For besides a festival or two there was nowhere else they would be screened.

Which was a true pity. At Canadian Images I saw obscure feats of creativity that have radiated in my memory ever since.

A man leaned over and whispered to me, “This is my movie coming up.”

It was called
Snowflakes
. There was no plot, no narrative, no music. The man beside me had taken hundreds of close-up shots of snowflakes and strung them together. Three or four flashed by every second. How he had managed to magnify his starlets without them melting under the heat of the attention, I don’t know. But he had done it, there it was, in a sequence: five hundred mugshots of snowflakes. Each one pure, sharp and delicate, yet powerful enough to break up light so that pinpoints of spectral colour sparkled here and there. Every crystal was the same size and had six points, but at that the similarities ended. The configurative variations — in the barbs, in the flying buttresses, in the concentric hexagons — were all perfectly geometric and seemingly endless. I wondered about that, endless. Is it true that snowflakes are unique individuals, with none like any other? After three minutes,
when it was over, I asked the production team beside me if this was so.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “There were too many.”

He was still looking at the screen, now blank. He was clearly enthralled by his own work. There was applause — not quite enough to make a ripple, but a few good sonorous drops, I’d say. He didn’t seem to notice. I found this touching. He was the only spectator he needed. He had done something, found it beautiful, was happy. A perfectly circumscribed creative act. As the lights were going down for the next movie, he got up to go. I leaned forward and said, “That was very good. I enjoyed it.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

He stood for a second.

“I’m working on sand now,” he revealed. And then he was madly running up the steps before it got dark. I would like to say that he had a good daytime job, that he was a dentist, but I don’t know.

Another jewel under ten minutes was
A Study into the Damage Done to Dictionaries by Firearms
. It was shot in black and white, with that excruciating visual sharpness that the absence of colour seems to confer upon objects. A string piece, gentle and introspective, played very quietly throughout. It wasn’t overlaid — every crack and thunder of firearm silenced it — yet it always came back, as quiet as a whisper, and with a similar magnetic insistence.

The movie was what its title promised. On a pedestal in a field,
The Shorter Oxford Dictionary of the English Language
stood like a soldier at attention. A man dressed in a lab coat holding a shotgun in his hands stepped into our view and blasted the lexicon from a distance of about four feet. The
noise was a fierce, compressed roar, an angry lion given only a second to express itself. The book, a good ten pounds, sailed through the air and crashed to the ground. A flutter of paper butterflies danced about. The blast was shown again, only this time in slow motion, that cinematic elixir of life that allows a second to live for twenty. Everything was clear: the shotgun’s rebound, the tensing of the man’s face and the involuntary closing of his eyes, the blurry vomit emerging from the gun’s mouth and reaching for the dictionary, the crash of the pellets and the pulverizing of the front cover, the jolting departure of the book along a horizontal line, the explosion of paper, the heavy, awkward crash to the ground, which would break bones in a human. And always that string piece coming back.

In the following minutes we witnessed similar executions with a variety of shotguns, handguns and rifles. Each firearm looked more fearsome than the last. The final weapon was a piece of machinery that seemed driven more by electronics than by gunpowder, with a curious chamber, a telescopic sight and the daintiest trigger you could imagine. It made only a restrained
tuc
sound when fired.

The movie concluded with close-up shots of the wounded dictionaries, each laid out on a white table next to the firearm with which it had been shot. The mutilations were varied. Some dictionaries were faceless corpses lying supine. Others had had their backs blown out and lay awkwardly on their sides. A small number appeared only moderately disfigured, but had massive internal injuries. The last dictionary, the one hit by the gun with the innocent-looking trigger, was little more than a devastated front cover with bits of pages clinging to it. The rest of the body, what was found of it, was nearly a powder.

The string piece was by Schubert, said the credits. The movie ended with a dedication:
In Memoriam Marie-France Desmeules
.

It was at Canadian Images that I met Tom. Tom of the gratifying ten days. I arrived for a showing of three medium-length movies at the Tecumseh amphitheatre, Ellis’s largest venue, just as the lights were dimming. It was on the festival’s third day, I believe. I don’t recall the time of day; my mind had already habituated itself to a timeless Arctic-winter darkness. I quickly scanned the amphitheatre for a seat. There was a good attendance. I saw a waving hand. It was Joe; there was a free seat beside him. By the time I got to the seat it was pitch-black, and it was Joe’s extended hand that guided me to it.

“Hello, sweetie,” whispered Joe.

“Hello, dearie. Thanks for the seat.”

It was the way we always greeted each other.

“Hello, darling.”

Oh. It was Egon.

“Hello, Egon. I didn’t see you.”

“My sad fate,” he replied.

“Hi,” came yet another whispered voice, this one unknown.

“Hi,” I replied into the darkness.

The movie started. A scream of a little comedy. A young man is looking down at another young man lying in bed. “Frank,” he says, waking the young man, “there was a dirty plate in the sink. I’ve had it. I’m leaving you.”

“What?” says Frank. He props himself up and in a deadpan voice, looking straight at us, launches forth on the unpredictability of human relationships. The rings of Saturn, the disposal of toenail clippings, the continual pregnancies of
male sea-horses, the dimples that reduce the drag on golf balls, the importance of good posture, Buster Keaton’s dentition and the history of doughnuts in North America are all pertinently mentioned.

Between Frank and his fastidious boyfriend and the next movie, there was a lighted pause of a few minutes. I met Egon’s neighbour, the unheralded greeter, Tom. He stretched his hand out and we shook hands. He was from Halifax and was billeted with Egon and his roommate. He went to Dalhousie and worked for an alternative movie-house which, thanks to the partial sponsorship of a local travel agency, had — but the lights went out, and it’s strange how darkness inhibits speech, as if spoken words had colour.

A movie went by, less successful than the previous one since I’ve clean forgotten it, and I found out that his alternative movie-house had sent him over to check out this year’s crop of Canadian movies. He was to see as many as he could and make a selection that the Halifax Slocum-Pocum Movie-Shmovie House would show (I asked about the name. Joshua Slocum was the first man to sail around the world solo, in his thirty-seven-foot boat, the
Spray
, in the 1890s; he was from Nova Scotia). Tom had a schedule that was even more crowded than mine. I asked him if he had seen
A Study into
— but the lights were dimming and bossy Joe was shushing us.

“The one about the dictionaries?” asked Tom at the lifting of darkness.

“Yes.”

“I loved it. I’ve already written to the filmmaker. We’re showing it for sure.”

Joe and Egon hadn’t seen it so we had to explain. They played hard-to-please, though Egon said that he liked Schubert.
Joe, who was tone-deaf and was irked by knowledge and appreciation of music, retorted, “Well, I prefer Webster to Oxford. I can’t help it. I adore modernity. I’m sorry.” And he looked at Egon and away. If looks could be hooks, Joe’s would have been big and sharp, with a fat, juicy worm on it with its thumbs to its temples, waving its fingers and chanting, “Come and get me, na-na-a-na-na.” Egon opened his eyes wide and swallowed hook, line and sinker. “Now, now, Jo-Jo, just because you’re as musical as a can of tuna doesn’t mean you have to take it out on Oxford,” he said — and they were off, out of nowhere, Joe-Blow-Usage against Egon-Blow-Historical-Principles, with a few jabs thrown at poor Schubert for good measure, and it was my turn to shush them for the next movie.

Which I barely watched. My mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about Tom. Vague, titillating thoughts.

When it was over the four of us got up.

“I think we’ve had our fill of celluloid today,” said Egon.

“Yes,” agreed Joe.

After the merest fraction of an uncertain pause, felt only by me, perhaps, they were gone, just goosey-goosey happy to be with each other, not giving a fuck about dictionaries, only Egon turning and saying, “You’ve got a key, right, Tom?” Tom nodded, and got a smile and a wave back, and the two of us were left standing there.

“What movie are you seeing next?” I asked, my answer to his answer already prepared — “Oh, so am I” — even if it had to be the documentary on the P.E.I. potato again.

“Uh” — he unfolded his program — “I was thinking of seeing
The Wars
.”

“Oh, so was I.” Which was true. It was one of the much-trumpeted features at the festival, with director Phillips and
author Findley in attendance. It was playing downtown. A bus ride away.

“Oh, good.”

Without a further word, just like that, we started walking together, our strides matching perfectly.

We talked, went about that curious, demanding task of meeting someone new and trying to extrapolate a personality from a few points of words. He was very organized, he said, had to be. At the end of every day he sat down and wrote to the filmmakers and distributors whose movies he wanted for the Slocum-Pocum. I saw his stack of letters, sometimes ten a night; on the portable he had brought he banged them out flawlessly on Slocum-Pocum letterhead (Joshua on his sloop, his hand on the rudder, but it’s a projector and his sail is a screen. “You can’t make it out, but it’s supposed to be
Citizen Kane
on the sail,” said Tom). The paper was heavy bond, and stiff (“corporate gift”), and it gave the envelopes a thick, spongy quality. The maker of
Snowflakes
would be thrilled to receive such an envelope. Tom hadn’t seen the movie, but he took my word that it was worth it. I volunteered to be the stamp-licker.

After
The Wars
(so-so), Tom was seeing a movie I had made the mistake of saying I had seen on the first day. For me to see it again two days later would have strained the credibility of casualness, so we said goodbye. I added that I would probably bump into him again the next day since we were both such avid cinephiles.