The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. Sean Dixon
revealed her secret weapon, dragging a desperate, sobbing, sorry little me in through the jingling door. And they took back the mouse.
Romy on how she came to leave Bingotown:
Bingotown was not a colourful city in those days, though I haven’t been there lately. I remember reading somewhere that nineteenth-century municipal laws restricted the use of colour in the urban environment. This was true all over the world at the time, but Bingotown still had no colour over a century later. And so I left finally and came to Montreal, which, I heard, had coloured gables and coloured spiral staircases. I asked somebody, ‘What is the most colourful city in Canada?’ and they told me to go to Montreal.
Romy was, in the days of the Lacuna Cabal, a proverbial deer in the headlights, which suggested she always had something else on her mind. Still, she had one outstanding feature that made her, in our eyes, a paragon of womanhood: the most beautiful flowing locks of auburn hair you can imagine, which did much to mitigate the effects of the earnest demeanour they framed. She towered over the rest of us, trying always (and unsuccessfully) to keep her larger-than-life feelings to herself. Let’s see, what else? Romy had a soft spot for children’s literature – due, we hypothesised, to the arrested development that may have occurred as a result of not being allowed to look after that goddamned mouse – and tried to keep up to speed on its developments. She considered Harry Potter to be inferior to some book about a girl and a bear and atheism, the title of which we can’t recall, and the first book she recommended to the group (summarily rejected) was Shardik by Richard Adams, not really children’s literature at all but also somewhat intensely about a bear (though he had written more famously about rabbits). The trajectory from mouse to bear in Romy’s imagination remains a mystery to us.
Oh yes, and she found the building. The saddest, greyest, ugliest building in the city of Montreal. That was her single contribution to the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club at the beginning of our story, a fact that is, we suppose, nothing to sneeze at.
Romy sat next to
Emmy Jones,
offering her constant comfort, due to a heartbreak that had occurred in Emmy’s life at exactly the same time, almost to the day, as the death that had occurred in the Cabal the previous fall. Nobody was certain why Emmy continued to feel heartbroken six months after the fact, but the generous interpretation was that she had occasionally resumed torturous relations with the man in question. The primary casualty of this heartbreak, however, even considering her self-centredness during the season leading up to the new book, seems to have been her love of literature, which made a sudden and, it seems, permanent, exit.9
What’s more, speaking now of the present, she resents, apparently, very deeply, being depicted in the ‘exaggerated mytho-poetic realm of this account’, and will not read it, will have nothing to do with it, will barely even acknowledge its existence. She stuck it out with the Lacuna Cabal’s final book, she reports, out of loyalty to and concern for Runner’s health and feelings, but was otherwise finished with fiction. She has, in fact, challenged us, through the intercession of a third party, to entirely remove her from this account. But after deep consideration afforded by many sleepless nights, we have determined that we cannot do that – at least not altogether. Many of the decisions Emmy made during the weeks in which this story takes place – decisions which, granted, may have arisen out of heartbroken self-destructiveness – rendered her de facto the catalyst for many other events, events that go to the very heart of our story. Emmy’s private story is intertwined with the larger story of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, which fact renders it not exclusively her own. We’re sorry. We’re very, very sorry.
We considered changing her name, but that doesn’t seem to go far enough in the case of Emmy Jones. We feel, given her concern and our deep regard for the same, that we have to transform, somehow, her whole self. It’s a difficult dilemma because we can’t just replace her with a scarecrow with no past and no future, who merely commits the actions that are necessary for Emmy to commit in order to move ahead with our story. We also have to be careful to avoid becoming like the storied Islamic painter of the thirteenth century, who, having been told that he cannot depict Muhammad, begins to dream the Prophet in three glorious dimensions on canvas and so prefigures the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, depicting Muhammad and always Muhammad and only Muhammad. The last thing that we need to happen in this story is for us to become obsessed with depicting Emmy, holding up a mirror to reflect another mirror, casting Emmy forever and alone into infinity. We do not wish to be embraced by our repression, lest it bring forth monsters. We have therefore adopted a somewhat radical narrative strategy and decided to make Emmy a fictional character. And to make the fact of Emmy as a fictional character clear to the reader in every moment. In order to fulfil this mandate, we have determined to (ahem) make her striped. And to always comment on her actions and feelings with respect to the fact that she is striped.
9 As a playwright, her highest ambition, according to a recent interview published in the Mirror is to create a théâtre verité domestic drama in which not one word is spoken on the stage and all expression is made using only looks, small gestures and violence.
Emmy was striped. Like a zebra. Except saying she was striped like a zebra is like saying Einstein was smart like a fox. It does not convey the truth of the matter. Also, we should stress that her stripes were not of the zebra (or tiger, etc.) variety at all. We know that, because they did not fan out from her spine, as they do in most of the natural world, but were rather more uniform, running horizontally all the way around her body. And her stripes changed width, colour and shade, depending on her mood. Still, no matter how they changed, one shade was always lighter and the other darker.10 So, if you attended a very close eye, you would always perceive the stripes. Her mind in those days was a perpetual state of black and grey, but her skin was always projecting at least two colours, exquisitely matched. We wonder, under what circumstances would she mismatch? And was it an act of will that she didn’t? Or was it rather an act of nature? Colours always match in nature.
Her stripes manifested themselves with exquisite subtlety – if you met her on the street you would not notice that she had them. She managed, with some effort, to mask them from most observers by colouring her hair in a pair of tones and wearing brightly striped shirts. On regular days she had maybe four of them running along her face, six if you include her neck. On more intensely neurotic or desperately emotional days, there would be more. On the day that we introduce the Lacuna Cabal, 18 March 2003, there were plenty, but they were noticeable only to Romy.
So there. We have told of a body changed into a shape of a different kind. And we get to keep Emmy in our story. This does present a bit of an aesthetic challenge for us, since, as we stated in our portrait of Priya, we are interested in the written word to the ascetic exclusion of all other art forms, including all those that are rendered in colour. But we’ll do the best we can.
10 Formally, we should clarify that we’re speaking of the stripes themselves and also the spaces between the stripes. We leave it to the reader to determine which was which.
We might as well cut to the chase, let the cat out of the bag and say the thing that was obvious to everybody except Romy herself and perhaps Emmy as well: Romy loved Emmy. She would have loved her even without her stripes, but, as she was from Bingotown, Romy’s eye was involuntarily drawn to colour as something it had rarely seen. So Romy saw Emmy, and what she saw she loved, no matter how sullen was the object of her love. What’s more, despite the fact that her love was unrequited, Romy remembers it with wistful fondness and has offered her diary to be used for its edifying instances of self-loathing. We have, however, for the moment anyway, declined.
Emmy sat next to
Aline Irwin.
Aline