The SS Diderot (named for author of Jacques le fataliste) hits a storm so violent that character novelist Sigbjørn records the ship lurching and twisting in agony, wracked by clanks, rattles, whistles, thumps, and mad hammering, then jumping out of the water and shuddering from end to end, all the lifeboats smashed, no one at the wheel that spun wildly by itself, the rudder crippled, and gigantic seas, rising all above us as if we were in a volcano. Sleep impossible for being pitched from bunk, Sigbjørn can only cling to his desk for days distracting himself with comparisons of death to the rejection of a manuscript or the embarrassment his death would cause the skipper — character Martin imagined by imagined character novelist to find these thoughts idiotic attempts to short-circuit grief for Primrose.
Sigbjørn listens for six short and one long whistle, abandon ship, can’t tell what’s happening on deck at all, but absolutely nothing to be done about it. His character Martin tells him to put on your life jacket. This is a position all novelists find themselves in eventually. Sigbjørn’s imagined thoughts thrash through SOS signals, lines from “Frère Jacques,” and instructions to Go to your cabin, cover yourself warmly, put on your gill-netting of sauvetage.
Put your arms through the shoulder straps, Martin the character tells Sigbjørn the novelist, but he can’t. Nor can either of them put a life jacket on Primrose.
She’d seen it coming in Haiti, writing in the real Golden West palm-sized notebook of spiderwebs twenty feet high and scarlet poinsettias thirty feet across, writing how the sun thru the royal palms and the coconut palms makes their long blowing rustling stiff fronds glitter and sparkle like green patent leather, how the trumpette rattles its huge maple-like leaves, the banana trees flap, the mango, with its slender leaves like a willow but darker, richer green, and shaggy bark, flutters, how swifts and dragonflies and huge jet black bumblebees dart and flash… Ah how beautiful it is, how strange, she wrote, too easy, too perfect, the weather always the hot sun and cool breeze and people to pick up everything, do everything and how easy just to drink and let time and money slip away. Writing in golden flip-page reporter’s pocket notebook of M rising dramatically: my brother, I give you my shirt, to a refugee from Trujillo, likely to be killed by spies at any moment, everyone hushed as spy enters bar. Writing in real pencil, We drive to Le Rivier Froid thru the hot dark night, great palms and banana leaves starting out in the headlights, to stand on the bridge and look at the stars… suffering. Next day speechless gazing at blue sea, the rolling billows of whipped-cream clouds, birds like scattered bits of white paper, M carrying on about Voodoo, Baron Sandhi, the Lord of the Dead, demonical possession. Now at the river, she writes on faint blue lines in Golden West notebook, we dress behind a bush. I chased by a black pregnant goat step in its excrement. Good, says M, now you can go in the water and be purified. I am scratched and bitten, feet bleeding from the rocks. Friday awaken to amber and turquoise dawn but cannot face it, thoughts of what might have been. The market: people surging up, garbage in piles under foot, trying to buy cigarettes, haggling over centimes, the furious, gnarled face of the woman breaking into smiles as we have to cease haggling as the bus is leaving, horrible road, second and first gear, M’s exhausted swollen face and hand on mine from the seat behind. She writes of daturas and grass too emerald to be real, like the bright artificial grass in Easter baskets of childhood.
On the SS Diderot Sigbjørn the imagined novelist writes that his character Martin wanted above all things to be loyal to Primrose in life and even beyond life, loyal to her beyond death. Primrose, he would write in La Mordida, without whom he could see nothing. At least nothing out there. In Haiti, she’d seen it coming: the breakdown in Cassis — he tried to strangle her — and was confined to the American Hospital of Paris. In Rome he was again confined to a sanitarium, and tried again to strangle her. He spent months in Brook General and Atkinson Morley’s in London before his final attack on her, wielding the broken neck of a gin bottle she’d smashed trying to stop him from drinking, till she fled and he downed a bottle of sleeping pills.
Sigbjørn and Primrose Wilderness disappear from the manuscript of La Mordida carefully typed by Margerie, which she gave to the archive in 1986, two years before she died. Someone has made Sigbjørn and Primrose back into Malcolm and Margerie, each speaking in first person, as in a stage play, their dramatis personae announced as chapter titles, their voices reading from their notebooks. But Sigbjørn and Primrose lived on in October Ferry to Gabriola, where they were neighbours of the imagined reclusive once-successful criminal lawyer Ethan Llewellyn and his imagined wife Jacqueline: sometimes when Jacqueline felt like talking to Primrose they’d take his instrument down to the Wilderness’, who lived in a similar cabin in a similar bay about three quarters of a mile down the beach, and with Sigbjørn, who was an unsuccessful Canadian composer, but an excellent jazz pianist. They’d all have a jam session: singing the Blues à la Beiderbecke, the Mahogany Hall Stomp and heaven knows what. Or they’d play Mozart, after a fashion.
Moccasin Box
If I, No Reply, write of Christine Stewart,
inside I lives the now Christine next to long-ago Christine who cut pens from goose quills, the Christine who wrote, The servant who receives fewer gifts from her lord is less obliged in his service, the Christine of Pizan, who built a city for the giftless. Bridges and rivers of Christines enclose I. Crossroads of Christines play I. A scriptorium writes I among riverbanks, ancestors, Christine villages, Christine tribes, as deserts and wars of I. The I is nothing. Can never be nothing. I and Christine run through lanes, alleys, arcades, shops, bars, offices, cemeteries. We intersect in Cul de Sac Cafe. We despise its twisted stairs to Pink and Sticky but own them anyway: A pronoun cannot but witness its world. The doorman poses like the exterior of an acoustic muscle. We have no money. We back out through our cloth music as in beat and grief of an unlivable category. In room after room we find men, women, and dogs sleeping. Space does not go on forever, she tells I, It crushes. It curves the domain in its foreclosure. Finally I and Christine jump roof to roof like terraced rice fields to a regulatory nowhere. Watch out for the doorman, she warns, he’s everywhere: an unthinkable distance that folds you up like a tight square.
We write plays and perform them in the street. I plays she and she plays doorman. We have no money. To make nothing. To become nothing, she tells me, I became I. We squat in Other People’s Houses while they work and shop. We cannot rest; their I-beds poke into us. We run to the not-town. I is flooded. I is rapt, she says, and usually chained to the Human. Throw these categories in that ditch.