CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Breakspear & Co had left the door ajar. The door gratefully tippled from it. "Can't beat that corn likker from Abbotsford," Door said, wiping the back of its hand across its door-y mouth, before setting the jar back in its rightful place in the semantic chain. The Hotel Sylvia surrounded it. Exegesis might commence.

Impervious to this S.J. Perelman surrealistic sideshow, which was not for all eyes after all, D trained his attention down the fairway of Breakspear's track. What he now witnessed stunned him. He was very stunned, and could only repeat the mindless "Birds?" phrase so popular at the close of the previous chapter. For the elegant and lordly Breakspear was now covered by a large net. It was held in place by the two monklike attendants and by the three thuglike intruders, who must have been waiting in the corridor.

As he struggled to escape, Breakspear began to chirrup. "Thus perish all Dei Ex Machina," D murmured, a touch unsure of his Latin. He gestured to his alphabetical fellows, who came to stand side by side slackjawed at this latest development. G's was the slackest, D figured, glancing along the row that formed on his left. Of course, M's mighty beard - what might it not conceal?

Birdsong interrupted or realized this thought. But such birdsong as had seldom graced the living air. It continued to emanate from the enmeshed guru. Looking up from their difficult task, one of the attendants smiled apologetically at the four A- students, and their hangers-on, who were by now peering over their shoulders - their own, or MAGD'S, according to their builds.

"Wanted to spare both him and you this embarrassment. Hoped he'd come quietly. It was good of you to humour him. We'll have him back in Essondale before you can say Adrian Leverkuehn."

The entire crew vanished around the bend, net and all.

A was the first to speak.

"I'm f-f-fucken f-f-freezing you j-j-jerks. And, this isn't the r-right r-room."

M looked puzzled.

"But, but, 6, 1...."

G looked mortified.

"Hey, A, take those wet things off!"

He began to help her.

"Take your public hands off me, you loony. I'll find something when we get to the right spot. Room 5-5-522. F-F-Follow me."

They took the stairs. The Management demanded their immediate return.

"Fire code," they said, shortly. But the action had already moved a floor lower.

"Keep your rotten old stairs," G told them. Then "But Hey, A, you can't just barge right in there. What if someone's checked in?"

"No one will have checked in, but someone might have checked OUT," A replied, with grimly humorous emphasis.

She took a key from her reticule and inserted it in the lock. The door sprang open. She was right. The suite was empty. Everyone crowded in. D beat M to the refrigerator.

"It's gone," A wailed. She pointed to the north wall of the sitting room-cum-master bedroom, to the corner behind the small round table. All looked (except D, who had his head in the fridge). A was right: there was nothing there.

"The Osborne Ray Machine. It stood right there!"

Ham Meatfist and Jack Strop and Nels Nailbender drew up and parked on Gilford. They had heard it on the grapevine that Feather McFiddle-dee-dee and Peaches Dobell had been seen shinning up the Virginia Creeper whose main stem next the north wall winds thick as Hunk Hogan's biceps to the Dine in the Sky atop the fair Sylvia. Party, they had chanted at one another. McFiddle-dee-dee and Dobell were members of the sorority that belonged to their fraternity. The three dufusses - dufi? the Coming of the Dufi? - began their huffing puffing ascent.

"But Read," Euardo Pink-Meadow was saying, as the pair hurried along Beach, "Brahms might not want us there. He might want to handle this alone. What say we sit in the beer parlour with a couple of beers until he happens by?"

"Hee's risponseebl fur thi wreck uv thi Hisperas," Only replied, alluding to his late yacht.

Pink-Meadow wasn't sure whether the boat was still in good shape and was christened "The Wreck of the Hesperus," just as Hopkins's poem is titled "The Wreck of the Deutschland," or whether the boat was now a late boat, and had been titled "The Hesperus." If the former, he thought, muzzy with drink, why, remarkably prescient of Read! Jolly good fellow, Read. Let every man dance attendance on Read Only, he thought. Excellent thought! - He tried it out loud.

"Let every damn man's son tend ants at Ramadan." It had sounded better when, like Keats's unsung melodies, it. . . his inner monologue vanished inside a tunnel. He followed red-haired Manadan, aka Read Only into the lobby of the Sylvia, and began pushing buttons beside the elevator door.

Fee McMannic was slumming. He was out with the cousin of a future Prime Minister of Eire, and the son of a Vancouver high school principal. The reason Fee was out with them? They were the outgoing (in both senses) editors of the campus litmag, Jackdaw, and Fee's poem had won the Poetry Prize.

His prizewinning poem, "The Truck Farmers of Dewdney," was disarmingly simple. "The truck farmers of Dewdney/ How yellow in the snow/ I am pale/ My famous tan raincoat is torn at the shoulder/ When we meet/ You will take my disgust/ And pour it over your fields."

"The editors like your work," the two had written, "for its announcement of Minimalism, a movement in which all the 'i's sound the same." But they did not know the poem would be more famous one day thanks to Leonard Cohen plagiarizing - and misquoting - its longest line. The editors had handed Fee the $50 cheque that afternoon; now they were sticking with him till it was all spent.

If he must drink with jerks, Fee figured, he would at least avoid the embarassment of being seen with them in his favourite haunts. Thus it was that these three, who otherwise never ventured bayward of the Dev (and then only when someone they owed money to was already in the G), prepared to enter the terra incognita of the Sylvia beer parlour at the precise moment McFiddle-dee-dee and Dobell were ascending the vine. McMannic, checking the sky for portents (his famous tan raincoat WAS torn at the shoulder, and elsewhere besides), glimpsing them from directly beneath, recognized both at once. They were the women who had posed as ex-cons in the house by the golf course.

Hmm, thought Fee. Another three or four brew, another ten Black Cats, and he would look further into this.

Montgomery Incline drove down Denman in his bug. The passenger seat had been removed to make space for props. He procured props for the local TV station. This meant that his passenger had to sit in back. His passenger today was Tamara Nevers. Turning round to talk to her in an uninterruptible spate of phrases, Incline scattered denizens to right and left. Smoking, looking boredly out the window, his companion ignored the mayhem. Suddenly she spotted the Sylvia. She had an impulse.

"Drinkies."

The distinguished members of the English Department panted over the logs on Sylvia Beach while reassuring one another of the complete propriety of their prurient interest in the doings of the Alphabet Four.

" Shouldn't that be the dongs," G put in.

" Impossible," A pointed out.

But this was in the Utopia of the Text, while we have a story to complete.

"Owe it to the young people to check up on them," said Dr. Lyons.

"Absolutely. We have a reputation to be worried about already." Thus Dr. Tyger.

"Today's students have started taking drugs," added their junior, the callow Mr. Bearass. "I don't know where they get them. But I intend to find out."

"I'm just here for the fun," giggled Wystan Bucket, to the disgust of the others. Except possibly, Mr. Bearass.

They disappeared into the Hotel Sylvia.

Mary Beth Hansen batted her big blues at Soyez Mysterieuse.

"I wonder where Fee is this evening," she mused.

Her midnight-brunette friend (whom Mary Beth had recently rescued from a suicide attempt in the Roundtowner Motel) cancelled her instinctive scowl (Fee was using Mary Beth as a subject for his undergraduate thesis, "A Comparison of Brassiere Sizes Among Aryan-Looking Sophomores at the University of British Columbia in 1960-61") and smiled sweetly back, thinking "I owe her one."

"I heard there's a boat-wreck just offshore Sylvia Beach. Fee's bound to be down there scavenging."

The mothers of the future took some quick pulls on a pint of Jim Beam as Soyez cut some tight corners in the car D alluded to as her MGM. Shortly, the towering edifice that was The Sylvia loomed above them.



Romany Intense was barefoot, her sandals having finally disintegrated in the course of her hike over the seaweed and the oyster shells. A tall building loomed before her. Naturally, she went in. There were bound to be people she could offend.

Marion McLuster had completed an unusually taxing paper. She stretched and yawned. Her phone, the bill still unpaid, hadn't, of course, rung. A little intercourse would be welcome - or a lot, actually. It felt like days since the last incident. She recalled a lively desk-clerk who'd wanted to exchange, among other information, DNA. But what was the name of that hotel? She stabbed into a phone directory at random. Her firm finger probed the name "Sylvia." Having no phone, she set off down the street like one of her ancestors striding the heather, singing a capella, something about feeling pretty, o so pretty. . .

"Handsome rather than pretty," observed Barry Gary, a teenager vacationing in Vancouver that week.

"Wellset jello on springs," commented Gordon Jordan, his companion.

"If I could get three like her a day," Barry replied. "Just three, that's all."

Pablo d'Oliviera was in town with his high school R-n-B band from Palos Muy Altos, California. Their bus was stuck in traffic on Denman.

"Sumthin shakin here, bro," Pablo told the driver, a certain Rey Charles from Seattle. "Reckon we'll go take a look-see." Turning towards the back of the bus, he called out to his musicians, "Hey! I know you'd be a fool to trust me, after what's been done to you - but I don't think this is gonna be somethin we'll want to miss!"

Instruments slung over their shoulders, the unruly ninth-graders piled off the bus and into The Sylvia.

Another ninth-grader, Ray Rockaway from Brooklyn, N.Y., at fifteen already wearing a full, russet beard, slipped his hands out of the hands of his vacationing parents and darted into the venerable pile. Entering, he collided with d'Oliviera.

"Hey, watch it, Buster," Pablo told him.

"Be sure you know my name before you reprimand me," Rockaway sauced back. "Or it won't be long before you say 'Oi Weh'!"

D'Oliviera roared with laughter. Encouraged, Rockaway continued to speak as the band stood there pressing buttons for both elevators. "So you're from Palos Muy Altos," he said, reading their jackets. "Where the palm trees touch the skies? And a thousand Pee Aitch Dees are asking 'Why?'"

"These are the words that confuse what we feel we are," the band-leader told him. "I guess love just comes by surprise."

They took a chance on the South elevator.



Other, less attractive, less savory types were closing in on the Sylvia too. But as they drew near, they shrank back. An invisble radiance beamed from that site, more good than bad, and it rendered them into shadows, arms crabbedly aloft as though to ward off these benign rays. They stopped, rooted to the spot, then began to fade back into the encroaching night.

They watched with stony hearts as five men bundled a sixth into a van with "Essondale Hospital" painted on the side. It was the kind of thing they saw. The kind of thing we were born to report.

Lorraine Tartan had to investigate a complaint that the West End's most noted hotel was paying above union scale. That's what brought her to the Sylvia, where she bumped (Ooff!) into a lot of people she knew, and rode up with them to Room 522.

One of these persons was Beth. Returning from her afternoon with Phyllis Only, she had found news in the mail that D had been awarded a fellowship so that he could go to graduate school. She had been wondering where D could be. She knew he would be pleased by the news, and she wanted to share this pleasure with him. Then on the radio that evening she had learned of the wreck of "The Hesperus." Of the somehow-connected with this (the newscaster was vague) gathering at the Sylvia.

Outside the Sylvia, she ran into Arthur Maguey, who was trailing his customary garland of stage-struck handmaids.

"Incline just went into the Sylvia," he told her. "In fact, there's quite a lot of people inside there now. I suppose it's one of Ink's non-events?"

"I'm looking for D," Beth told him, with that uncustomary impatience for which she was actually quite well known by longterm acquaintances. Screw you! But she kept smiling. It was a Velvet Steamroller.

"So is D," quipped Maguey. "He thinks he's the worm at the bottom of the bottle."

"I'm going in there."

"Why not?" Maguey purred. And so that little lot went into the hotel too.

Prester John loped up Gilford. He was late. He had been sitting too long in his UBC office advising Amanda Tunefork and now was late for a cocktail party at the flat he shared with his spouse not three blocks from the Sylvia.

As he passed that establishment he spotted one of his better students, Romany Intense. She was prancing barefoot up the steps and into the lobby. Acting on a poetic intuition, he followed.



Jacques Derrida strode broodingly down Beach Street. All this deferment and delay was no mystery to him. It was inscribed in the code. An ugly brick cube stood in his way. He went around it and on into the Park to feed the black squirrels. He was surprised by the raccoons.

D inspected the inside of the refrigerator. A square gray box of what looked to be generic cereal was its only content. What a racket there was in the other room! A was going on about having been a spy for the federal government which had been conducting experiments with a secret weapon, the Osborne Ray, in the course of which it had been directed at D, G and M, and about how she had been told to study its effects on them, but how she had fallen in love with G and switched sides. No, Breakspear wasn't a spy, he was someone she had run into one night at the Blackstone where she had fallen somewhat under his unlikely spell and had allowed him to keep buying her drinks while he told her about the birds, how they were mysterious messengers from the other world, and how we would perish when they disappeared.

"Well," D could hear her saying defensively to the people in the other room, of whom there seemed to be more every minute, "I owed him a tale too, so I told him the tale of all of you. That's how come he knows what he knows about us. But he's nothing to do with the plot."

"Mmm," D thought. "This stuff tastes good." He continued to eat it with his hands, shovelling it in and chewing. Meanwhile, he wandered back into the other room. Some fifteen or twenty people were gathered there. A was in the center, naked beneath a blanket she kept forgetting was all she had on. Well, she had to gesture. It was vehement information. The duffel coat had been appropriated by M, always one with a quick eye for fashion. No doubt he was doing the gentlemanly thing, for A must have been sodden when the coat was wrapped around her by the mental hospital attendants, and the coat must have quickly become wet also. M stood there steaming with chivalry.

But now A's series of disclosures had hit a wall. She could come unravelled no further.

"What about the hieroglyphs?" G wanted to know.

"What about D having Fee's sexual experiences?" asked M.

This raised the mutter-level among the uninitiate in the room.

A could only gesture helplessly, raising her hands in the air. G retrieved the blanket.

A reporter from the Vancouver Bun barked his question. "If you had a penis for a day, what would you do with it?"

"I'd show it to all my friends," A responded.

D realised he himself was quite wet. He began to disrobe. And as he disrobed, he began to speak.

Who was this glamorous woman seated on the thwarts of this beat-up old boat moored in Coal Harbour, doing three crossword puzzles at once while discoursing on Wittgenstein, listening to Stan Getz on the beat-up old turntable and meanwhile beating Paxton Coppersworth at Scrabble? Sophia Loren, surely! But no, she was Deirdre Fuller, she whose genius-class mind had been further shaped, long arm of coincidence, when she was still named Deirdre Littlewood (no relative of the ex-Mrs D), by highschool teacher Percy Delsing, G's progenitor.

Game over, Paxton - he whose fund of anecdotes concerning one Swatow Smith, entrepreneur of the South China Sea, could hold listeners spellbound at a table in the "G" for hours - found himself uncharacteristically tongue-tied. So he suggested taking a little cruise.

"In this thing? No thanks. I have a brilliant career ahead of me."

"How about a little spin in the windowcleanermobile, then?" Paxton squared his already square jaw against further rejection: his van, faded apple-green where paint remained, lacked a muffler, and rattled even in Park. But Deirdre thought this was a risk worth taking: better odds.

So it was that they came to be passing by The Sylvia when the crush to enter the hotel was at its greatest. Like the man of action he so ably simulated, Coppersworth laid his ladders against the north wall, and the couple shinnied up and through the window of 522.

Douglas Faun and Dundee France went up the ladder a minute later. At first confused as to the location of the hotel ("Is a beach a street? Is a street a ford? Is a man, even a dun man, a thoroughfare?" queried the habitually looped Faun; and, told by Dundee "Den-man, Den-man!" responded "What is it dow, chick?"), the skinny linguist and the voluptuous librarian - neither known to have missed a party since arriving at UBC - leaned in the window like - the light behind them - satyr and nymph in D's now whacky vision. D began to slip into his fin-de-siecle mode.

And those attending marvelled at the transformation in D's bearing and appearance. Later, they were to say it was as though the Holy Spirit had descended from Heaven to touch him with its fire. Well, Barton Martlett said that. Others had more secular explanations to offer. But all agreed that they had witnessed a miracle. Room 522 filled with the charisma.

The poison of all-knowingness from the Omniscient Narrator's Bulgarian umbrella was coming on, but so was the "oatmeal," and D naturally confused the cause of these effects. D of a sudden could know what everyone present was thinking. This alone would have made it impossible to speak with any coherence, except that he could also edit and extrapolate in some extraordinary way. A golden glow burned all over his skin. Waves of energy pulsed through his what were then called loins and are still called armpits.

"Then this is the explanation which I am at this moment eating," he began. "This stuff in this box must have been inadvertently left behind when the Feds cleaned up and cleared out. One of them had earlier given some to A, telling her it was loaded with vitamins and to give it to her friends so they'd get better grades, have better sex, write better poems."

("Far fucken out," asided A. "How'd he know that?")

"The rime part had nothing to do with it. False conclusion. Merely coincidental. Fee's sexual escapade? An extreme case of my uncanny ability to 'get inside' another person, to get them on my wavelength and let the river answer."

("I don't know why he puts 'get inside' in quotes," sniffed several of those present.)

" As for Brian Stewart and friend, G and I pumped them in the Georgia and concluded they were hapless victims of the class-war. They had heard us on "Youthless " and wanted so badly to see some middleclass, beatnik phenomena of their own, that they projected it - I speak of psychological dynamics, not Incline-tricks - onto some harmless graffiti, scrawled on the Hastings Street walls by that downtown poet, Gerhardt Gildart. The engineers on the beach with their sheet of tin were likewise responding to our appearance on "Youthless." They were attempting to simulate the Great White Flash.

"When the Feds trained the Osborne Ray on the Burrard St Bridge as we crossed it, we faced directly into it. Although it was only a narrow band, seeing it head-on that way made it look like an atomic detonation.

"It threw our shadows on the brewery wall."

D virtually sang this sentence. Dan Daniells began to play his ukulele. Pablo d'Oliviera unslung his guitar. Harmonicas were produced by Barry Gary and, astonishingly, Prester Johns. Ray Rockaway opened a drawer, stole a sheet of paper that said "Hotel Sylvia" across the top, and folded it over the business end of his rat-tailed comb. Hans Geiselglobe came in with his bongos. Barton Martlett produced an amazingly large portable organ and began to finger it, to everyone's entertainment.

But before they could do more than tune up, D concluded.

"But at the very instant when the ray of light struck us, a flock of birds started up, startled out of their roosts beneath the bridge by the unwonted illumination.

"These birds shattered our reflections, no, shadows, no, uh, yes, shadows, into the hieroglyphs of Sicks."

Everyone began to chatter to his and her neighbour, the volume rose, the excitement increased. The band began to play. People began to dance, a new kind of dancing, the kind of dancing you can do while removing your clothes.

It wasn't always pretty at first, but it was real.

D, divested of clothing, an Etruscan in the mind of D.H. Lawrence, kept right on talk-singing, but nobody was listening any longer.

"It has been our own shadows, broken by contingency, we have been struggling to decode throughout this episode in our young lives! Breakspear was wrong, but he was right too! What can madness signify to us, but divine rightness? He was gloriously right! And what's more, stylistically right! And Yes and I said Yes and Yes I said Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes !"

The noise reached a crescendo, and then another, and another. The contact high from the Government oatmeal foretold lysurging acid as it sped through the crowd; but in addition, the oatmeal D had not eaten was being eaten now, had been being eaten for some little while. People were blending - merging and moving through boundaries become shimmery and opalescent, in couples, triples, quadruples, quintuples - taking on colour and form from one another - sexier than the most abandoned of merely physical orgies. It was Eleusis come again. The entire gathering began to move in this strange new dance.

G danced with A. M danced with Serena Rapt. Romany Intense merged and emerged with and from the Downtown Poets. One of them got off his bicycle...

Use your imagination! You know their names by now. And you've seen your share of orgies. Well, this wasn't like that. This was in another league. Its like shall ne'er be seen again. The Government "lost" the formula. Oh, maybe in Massey Hall...

Peaches Dobell found the corpse of Pat Boone in a closet and polka'd around the carpet with it. It quickly came alive, like Bernie in the second "Weekend at Bernie's" movie when the Reggae strikes up. And Pat Boone turned out to be a marvelous dancer! Too bad these were post-mortem effects. . . .

"Let it rip, citizens!" cried the indistinguishable and unattendable D. "This is the last party of your youth! This is our final Hurrah! Tomorrow, diapers and diaspora!"

The assembly heard this last phrase and took it up in an eerie chant as the band hit a heavy rock beat:

DIAPERS N DIASPORA DIAPERS N DIASPORA DIAPERS N DIASPORA

What beauty in that gracious room - what tsunami energy! The gathering was entering eternity.

Then every single damned light. Went out.

"-30-!" came G's voice out of the darkness.