CHAPTER TWENTY

Every once in a while G found himself sitting in a chair in a classroom while a professor tried to interest a room full of poorly-dressed youth in some ideas he had jotted down for a class a few years ago. G was jotting notes himself, sometimes some pearly information about the structure of the Department of External Affairs, and sometimes about fist and stomach experiences closer to home. Closer to the Vancouver Public Safety Building than to home. What is home anyway, he jotted, making a question mark that looked like an unknown script on a brewery wall or the newest stain on D's favourite and only tie.

He was a young man in his twenties. He often thought things like this: what is home, anyway? Erstwhile classmates back in Lawrence, B.C. would have been impressed, had they escaped the orchard for the coast and the uni on the ocean. "Shut your face, asshole," they would have exclaimed in their admiration.

G was not happy that he had signed up for this course in Political Science. He had to take something outside his major, and he did not fancy Physics or Fish Farming 101. So Political Science it was - Ottawa in the International Community. There was really only one reason he had settled on Polysigh, and that was A. A had signed up for the course, and at the time that the school year had started, while the last tennis plocks of the summer/fall were to be heard, G was still a swain, not an accomplishment. He longed for A. He craved her from afar. As was his habit, he had been craving her for almost a year. After seven months he had managed to croak a stupid remark to her, one he regretted all that night while he tried to read an Eighteenth century novel. After twelve months he was prepared for drastic action - he enrolled in Polysigh 445.

A week into class he got the nerve to borrow two sheets of lined paper from her.

Three weeks later she got impatient with all this waiting and maneuvered him into his own bed. She managed over the next month to do this three more times. On the fourth occasion she persuaded him that she would not hate the sound of his name for all time if he put his poor shy thing right there. Yes, there. Okay, now hold still, I'll show you something.

And so on. It was not long till G was walking around with a smirk on his face. Got me a special, he was thinking. I am the man with a high feathered hat. Don't get in my way.

Till a few months later he found himself in his striped pyjamas on the Upper Levels Highway. A was at home correcting his essay on Eighteenth century fiction.

What the heck was he doing in this PS class while the world was on fire? Well, part of the world was on fire. D's tie was covered with barbecue sauce.

Now this was a very boring class because A was not attending. G tried to remember how to ogle women. There was a dark-haired, honey-eared beauty next to the window, but he could not ogle. He rolled his near eye. No use. He looked at the expanse of smooth dark skin between her short skirt and her white boot. Nothing. He needed A. The very thought of A and what she had done with the four rawhide belts stirred him. He uncrossed his legs. The short fat man with the white moustaches that seemed to emerge from his nostrils was explaining what he used to think about the post-Korea era. There was a knock at the door.

You usually didn't get knocks at classroom doors. You got students skulking in or out with a squeak. But not a formal knock at the front door. The man with the nostril moustaches did not know what to do. A petite creature with a bun of brown atop her skull got up, and without straightening to a stand-up, sidled over and opened the door. A man in an overcoat without a stain asked for G.

Happens all the time.

G walked to the back door and out into the hall. There were now three overcoats, not a mark on them.

"What's this all about? You boys from External Affairs?"

"Shut up," was all the information he could pry from them as they walked, as if by agreement, toward the east stairs of the Gorp Building.

"I should warn you guys that I have a blue belt in Wing Ho."

Halfway down the stairs one of the men in black belted G across the back of the neck with the back of his fingers. This induced G to make his own way to the ground floor, on his knees. He managed to hold onto his notebook and the liquid in his stomach. Here we go again, he thought. At least this time I will have my regular clothes on the highway.

His regular clothes would have made a mother weep.

But they did not want him to go motoring with them. They had just wanted him to get the message.

"We've got A," said the one who had come to the door.

"Will you spell that?" asked G.

Fingers on the bridge of his nose.

"If you want to see her in one piece, be at the Sylvia Hotel at eight o'clock tonight. Come alone."

"Where in the Sylvia?"

"The bar, asshole. You think we rented you a room?"

"Where is A?" he asked, feeling for blood on his nose.

"She's with Louie," said one of the natty trio.

Then they were gone. He tried to follow them but they were experienced movers and he was just a Political Science student. It was five hours till eight o'clock.

He could go to the police. That would be the intelligent thing to do. He decided to try to contact D and M.

Where was M?

That wasn't hard to figure out. This was Wednesday afternoon, and on Thursday morning the campus newspaper, The Bad Seed would regale the fortunate and casual reader with the latest effulgences from the mind and memory of M, most acerb and genial critic of his generation. The deadline for his copy was five of the clock on Wednesday afternoon. At a little after three he would be at the Seed offices, sprawled in one of the old spilling leather chairs with a young female journalist placed in his care in the experimental apprenticeship programme created by Donald McDonald, editor in chief.

There wasn't anything carnal about the entwined figures in the chair. M was due to pounce upon an Underwood in half an hour or so. What he was doing in the chair, this time with the afore(a long time afore) mentioned Miss Take (at least that had been her name in dramatic-fictive life in yon Seattle) was what he called "warming up," or sometimes "priming the pump." Miss Take had the end of her tongue in M's left ear, but this was only a symbolic gesture, her tongue meant to suggest the spoken word brought to its greatest acuity, and M's ear the intelligence honed by his verbal skills. Miss Take had her right hand resting upon his groin, but there was nothing of crudity in this disposition. She was, as instructed by literary minds more trained than hers, representing the grip on essentials that M would attempt to exhibit in the quick words he would be typing in less than half an hour. The columnist and his apprentice lay quietly curled on the old upholstery, the picture of dedication, the anticipation of fiery creativity. At the moment that G entered the dank below-ground office, the apprentice was heard to offer some pre-linguistic sounds, and G knew that his old buddy would convert those sounds into wisdom, bashing out seven hundred and fifty words that would etch the feathers of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

"On your feet, scribe," said G. "We have some saving to do. The bad guys have A."

M would get to his feet eventually. At the moment he was engaged in cataloguing the body parts of veteran newsman and tyress.

"Your descriptive efforts are succinct, but at the price of elegance," said M, attempting to dry his ear with his sleeve.

"I'll hold that," said G. "You get your column done, and then off we go."

But Miss Take only looked at him as if he were a broadcast journalist. She pouted, then sneered, then picked up her briefcase and climbed the circular staircase.

M pounded the Underwood while G tried to get D on the phone.

"I'm sorry," said the sweet voice on the line. "That is a number for which you have to dial long distance."

"Impossible. D lives in a coach house in the hoitsy-toitsy district right here in town."

"Do you want long distance?" asked the voice.

"I want my sanity," said G.

"I only work here," said the voice.

G hung up. The phone rang. It was D.

"We are in serious trouble, old chep," said D.

"Where are you calling from?"

"I'm calling long distance, so I can't talk long," said D. "Can you and M make it to the Cecil Hotel at eight o'clock tonight?"

"We have to be at the Sylvia Hotel at eight," said G. "They've got A."

"I said the Sylvia Hotel," said D. "Who has A?"

"I distinctly heard you say the Cecil Hotel," said G. He was trying to reach a rather long cigarette butt in a brass ashtray on the desk he was leaning on.

"This is long distance," said D, his voice beginning to sound peevish. "I don't have time to argue about hotels."

M stopped bashing the Underwood long enough to listen to half of the conversation.

"Where are you calling from?" asked G. "Can you make it to the Cecil by eight o'clock?"

"Not the Cecil. The Cecil is where all the Caribbean poets and actors drink. I am talking about the Sylvia Hotel. Over by the water."

"Well, just about any Vancouver hotel you can name is pretty near the water," said G.

"Let me talk to him," said M. "You finish my column. Mention Jean Paul Sartre."

"I'm not that crazy about Jean Paul Sartre," said G. "What about Samuel Beckett?"

He sat himself in front of the Underwood. He could hardly understand the dark letters on the scruffy paper in front of him. M was not a meticulous typist.

"Hello? Is that D?" is what M shouted into the cracked black bakelite.

"Is that M?" came the reply, thin and long distancy.

"Just the sort of question I was addressing in my column before you interrupted," said M. "What is all this about the Cecil Hotel?"

"Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia!" It was as if D had decided that the constraints of long distance called for one-word sentences.

"What is all this stuff about being and dung?" asked G, turning the platen and squinting at the yellow paper with the random-looking dark marks.

"Being and doing, you dolt."

"Sylvia! Have you got that?" asked the voice on the phone.

"Who is she?" asked M, his eyes rolling with delight.

"No, what is she," said D. "Who is Sylvia, what is she?"

"Who is who?" asked G, typing all the while. "Tell D that we have to save A from someone. Got to be at the Sylvia at eight p.m." He typed a period, hit the backspace, and hit the apostrophe. Someday they were going to have to make typewriters with exclamation marks already on them. The future belonged to exclamation marks.

M was listening to D shout the name of a hotel, and looking over G's shoulder as the latter typed faster and louder. Seven hundred and fifty words were far back on the side of the road.

"Frustum? What the hell is a frustum? There's no such word," he said.

"Ask D. He's an Englishman. He has a large vocabulary," said G.

"Hey, D? Have you ever heard of a frustum?" said M into the bakelite.

There was a Beckettian pause on the telephone. Then D was heard to say: "A frustum, my dear chep, is what would remain were I to saw off the topmost part of your head. I know that you have been quite sensitive about that part of your anatomy of late - "

"That just goes to show how much you know, Mr. Smarty English Remittance Man," said M, with an insincere smile in his voice. "Not a half hour ago the topmost part of my head was being held in the long hairless arms of an apprentice reporter."

"In any case, I can't stay on the line, because I am speaking long distance," said D.

"Where are you?"

"Where, indeed. I was mulling that very question not more than an hour ago. Where are we all? Where is Sylvia, what is she?"

"She's a hotel," said M.

"No, my Arctic-born acolyte," said D in his Christopher Plummer voice. "You will some day learn that Leonard Cohen, the young Montreal poet and actor, is a hotel. Sylvia is simply the name of the woman on my lap. Say hello to M, my dear."

"Hello, M." It was the kind of voice that could strip words from the page.

"Make sure that she comes to the Sylvia with you. Apparently we are meeting there for drinks tonight."

"-30-!" shouted G, and ripped tomorrow's column from the Underwood.