The Dilettantes (16 page)

“Yes, that’s the standard line of critique. I suppose it’s valid enough. And now, the big one:
Volcano Dreams?”

“I haven’t seen it. I’m familiar with its thesis, but I haven’t seen it. Have you? I was under the impression it never made it out of Sundance.”

“It didn’t. Well, last year I was doing work study for Professor Penrose, and she knows someone on one of the committees there. Somehow she acquired a rough cut. Primitive, but watchable. I made a copy.”

“Smart. And?”

“Mm. How can I phrase this? It’s as if Eisenstein lived long enough to make
Ivan the Terrible, Part XIX
. It’s early Bergman on a steady diet of peyote and lemon Gatorade. It’s … who’s the director who makes those explosion films?”

“No idea, I’m sure.”

“
Bay
. It’s as if Michael Bay remade one of Ozu’s masterworks. It’s
Floating Weeds
at three hundred miles per hour—everything’s been sped up and edited into trite, barbaric ribbons.”

“Floating Weeds
. Seminal.”

“Indeed.”

“Which other of Holtz’s films have you seen?”

“Nothing lately, of course. The only other film of his I can even think of offhand is
The Last Troubadour
, which was what, 2004? Utter rubbish. What about you?”

“The same, the same.”

“…”

“You know, I didn’t find
Fang City
wholly repulsive when I was younger.”

“It did have its charms, didn’t it?”

Another advertiser jumped ship.

Alex took a swig of ultra-carbonated lime cream soda and tilted back in his chair. Surrounding him were more than a dozen annual volumes, their spines cracked, their pages crispy and the colour of old mustard. It was amazing, he thought, how even though technology got better and better, the newspaper’s content stuck to pretty much the same ten-year loop: a hyper-political editorial staff grew boorish and gave way to a new group of goofballs, who then went too far in the other direction and got usurped by a fresh batch of ideologues, who had no memory of the forefathers in whose footsteps they followed (and with whom they might or might not have even gotten along). Alex had studied these bygone eras for so long that by now he could spot whether an issue from the mid-nineties was helmed by a particular arts editor just by scanning the section for em-dashes. (Apparently she had a zero-tolerance policy that culminated in a rather petulant Editor’s Voice in her outgoing issue.) And when he read letters protesting a notorious columnist’s trilogy about fucking women of various religions, Alex smiled and flipped ahead to when said columnist followed up with an open letter to Durex condoms, accompanied by a half-page photo of his saggy dick. How amazing was it, he thought, that Keith had no idea this man even existed? They were soulmates, and Alex could find a new one with every decade he skipped backwards. These were the ghosts of
Peak
past.

When he’d first gotten involved with the newspaper, Alex had
unwittingly walked into the middle of a backlash against a group of rabble-rousing activists—guys who’d routinely taken aim at local politicians and thumbed their socialist noses at the
SFU
administration whenever possible. They were one of the first groups on campus to really push the Darfur issue on the general student body; in fact they’d been so solemn and reverential about it that, looking back, there’d been nowhere for the conversation to go but down. And the incoming editors, Alex included, had been all too happy to take it there. Still, it was hard to feel proud of a legacy that included quite so many fart noises and Vin Diesel jokes.

It was strange to think of who he’d forever be associated with in these crusty pages. There was Tracy, obviously. And Steve and Suze he’d worked with for a few years apiece, so that was fine. Yet there were also people like Keith and Chip, pear-shaped oddities whom he never quite figured out, but for whom he felt a kind of accidental, secondhand warmth.

And now the tides were shifting once more. Alex was about to become a relic himself. The disdain for his era and all they stood (or didn’t stand) for was getting louder and louder; its rumblings were distant, but unmistakable. He took another swig of the cream soda and put the bottle back down on the desk next to the Barbara Pym paperback, which he’d taken to carrying around in his back pocket like a talisman.

Whenever Alex had talked to his newer contributors lately, he could all but hear them thinking,
Sure, old man. Whatever you say. It’s not going to be like this much longer
.

They’d stopped listening to his suggestions for story edits. They’d started pitching him the same feature idea over and over again, until he finally accepted it. And whenever they did come to his office hours, they all smiled like hyenas, looking around at the kingdom they were about to inherit.

Two days after the celebrity was spotted reading the election posters, a small headline appeared in the
Metro’s
entertainment section. From page
14,
near the bottom of the page: “Holtz to run for
SFU
prez.” A Mack Holloway exclusive—the official list of candidates wasn’t set to be released for days. But his article quoted two sources, both anonymous, who claimed that the actor had handed in his nomination form and was now officially in contention for the
SFSS’S
highest and most visible position. Then, at the end of the piece, a cryptic statement from Holtz’s manager: “Duncan just wants to be the best, no matter what he does. Whether it’s movies or something like this—which I obviously can’t comment on, guys, be serious—you can expect him to give it his all.”

At which point Tracy threw the paper across the room. “If the answer was no, he’d have just said no,” she said, lighting a cigarette at her desk. “This is getting weirder and weirder.”

That day’s issue of the
Metro
sold out at
SFU
in less than an hour. The next day the daily ran a follow-up story, this time at the top of page twelve; the day after that, a half-page profile up front, next to the local news. By the end of the week another campus business had permanently suspended its ad account with
The Peak
.

The week after that, Mack Holloway was reassigned to Burnaby Mountain until further notice.

The Peak
, meanwhile, scrambled to stay afloat. Rachel went aggressively after the local beat, sticking to the SFU-centric issues that a paper based off the mountain couldn’t compete with: the opening of an all-soup restaurant in Maggie Benston, ongoing concerns about
SFU’S
plagiarism code, and Gung Haggis Fat Choy, the university’s
annual Robbie Burns Day/Chinese New Year celebration. Suze followed suit in the arts section. Whereas before she’d mostly relegated on-campus performances to the events listings, now she started writing about the
SFU
theatre and art gallery to a degree that even they found to be a little excessive. Every show, from the twenty-four-hour Aeschylus marathon to the guy who ironically painted a surfboard decal on the side of his car, got a preview and a review.

One thing the remaining staff agreed upon was that Duncan Holtz’s name would not appear in the paper’s pages. No gossipy letters to the editors, no easy jokes at his expense. He was just another student, and would be treated accordingly.

Let the
Metro
stoop to lowest-common-denominator tabloid journalism. For once in the
Peak
editors’ lives, they were going to take the high road.

Another advertiser disappeared.

Tyson looked over at Alex, who was studying with him in a rarely trafficked corner of the library, and said, “We’re going to Pub Night.”

Alex groaned but didn’t look up. “Like hell we are. I think I’ve had my fill of watching you hit on drunk teenagers.”

“You’re right.”

“Mmm,” he said, underlining a passage in his film textbook. “Am I now?”

“Indeed. We’re going to watch
you
hit on teenagers.”

Now Alex looked up. “We’ve been over this. Absolutely not.”

“Let me ask you this: have you had sex, even once, since the last time we talked about this?”

“I—”

“It was a
rhetorical question
, dick,” Tyson said, reaching across the table and slapping Alex clean across one cheek. Someone from a nearby cubicle shushed them. Tyson added in a whisper, “The answer is no and we both know it.”

Alex rubbed his face. “
Ow
. And how would you know this?”

“Simple. If you’d gotten even a fiddly little
HJ
by now, you’d have rubbed it in my face. You’re a prude, and self-loathing to boot, but I know you also want to prove me wrong. That’s what’s really killing you, isn’t it?”

Alex wound up to respond, but Tyson was right. It was, he realized, with no small whiff of depression, just like his writing career: Alex wanted the bragging rights that came with being sexually active more than he wanted to actually have sex. Even if just for his own private reassurance. The identities of his sexual partners, like the contents of his unwritten novel, were placeholders, their details
TBD.
This can’t be healthy
, he thought.

“No fucking way I’m going to Pub Night,” Alex whispered back, and waved his hand in dismissal. But his head was already alight with the dozens of covert trysts that no doubt took place there every Thursday night, when drinks other than the rancid mountain ale were on special, and where the social code for sexual attraction was relaxed even further than usual. The truth was, he might not get many more chances like this.

Another.

And another.

Rick went on stress leave.

The enormity of their mistake only gradually dawned on them. But once it did, the editors bailed, and bailed hard.

It was Tracy who first figured out the flaw in their new Holtz-free strategy. She was walking up the
AQ’S
main steps when she was cut off by members of one of the film crews, pushing wheelbarrows of props and equipment across in both directions. As she waited for them to pass, she overheard a group of students breathlessly gossiping next to her about Holtz’s run for president. All of them were going to vote for the celebrity, “because wouldn’t that be hilarious?”

“Suddenly it all clicked,” she told the collective that week. “We’ve never really been suppressing the story—everyone knew about it already. And now it’s a legitimate public
event.”

Alex dropped his head into his hands. Tracy was right. Somewhere along the line, the
Peak
editors had become reactionaries on a whole new scale. And snobs, too: the one thing
SFU
readers were genuinely interested in was the one thing their newspaper refused to tell them about. Because it was—what? Too obvious?
Oh no
, Alex thought, his imaginary ulcer about to pop.
Our coverage itself has become ironic
.

The rest of the room seemed to be thinking the same thing. Rachel stood up and announced, “I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want my section defined by the things I’m
not
writing about.”

“You know,” Alex added aloud, “the
Metro
is claiming that they broke this whole Holtz story. And that’s technically true—we didn’t report it. But we could have. We knew about it before anyone else did. It happened down the hall from the room we’re sitting in.” He was getting excited. It was the kind of riled-up energy he imagined was present all the time during
The Peak
’s political eras, and it felt
thrilling to tap into, even just for a few seconds. “Rachel’s right, guys. I bet we could still pull it off.”

“You mean—” Claude said, perched on the edge of his seat.

“I think it’s time to drop the embargo.”

Thanks to the
Metro’
s coverage, a wave of other, more respectable media had already started nosing around
SFU
. First Vancouver’s paid dailies and free weeklies, then local
TV
news and the
CBC
. By the time
The Peak
decided to dip its toes in the water, the story was getting traction on the national newswires.

But Mack Holloway remained the first reporter on the job. He was also the most visible around campus, chasing students for quotes and scribbling in beat-up, dollar-store notebooks. His was the face you’d recognize: creased but stoic, with a career newspaperman’s easy air of exhaustion. He commandeered a table next to the big-budget sci-fi production near the lecture halls; the crew assumed he was some suit from the studio, or more likely the haggard screenwriter. Whatever this shaggy dog was turning into—be it comedy or tragedy—Holloway seemed bent on bearing witness to it.

Another.
The Peak
was a sinking ship, more water than boat.

Alanis Morissette was right, you know
.

The truth about irony appeared in the summer of 1996, but nobody recognized it—even though it spent weeks on top of the charts. And nobody talks about it now. They all say, “Isn’t it ironic that ‘Ironic’ isn’t actually ironic?”

They’re all wrong, the bastards
.

A black fly in your chardonnay is ironic. It is. You expect fancy wine to be fancy, and your expectations get thwarted. Boom. A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break is
really
ironic—we’re talking hearty, old-fashioned, character-building irony here. And ten thousand spoons when all you really need is a knife? Don’t get me started
.

You hear the same argument trotted out a million times. In rez hallways late at night, or while lying on the hood of your buddy’s car, stoned out of your mind and waiting for airplanes that will never appear. It goes like this: the examples Morissette gives aren’t ironic—they’re just unhappy coincidences. Sure, I don’t
want
rain on my wedding day, but that doesn’t make me the victim of a fuggin’ poetic
device
over here
.

Alex took a sip of what he called swamp mud—all of West Mall’s six drip coffee flavours mixed together. He was clicking around Duncan Holtz’s IMDb page, absent-mindedly investigating everything the man had ever appeared in.