E-Book Overview
Remski's first novel is a love story of bizarre proportions set in Toronto. It is told from the point of view of a man remembering his life growing up with his sister whom he is in love with. It paints an unhappy and twisted childhood which leads to an even more unhappy adulthood for the narrator. The novel is rich with dark secrets and the intricacies of Catholic mythology and its collision with and submersion by North American culture.
E-Book Content
DYING FOR VERONICA dyingJfaoAr forX/^AxO^^CCdL veronica 0btA^>fy a sub-cabholic dream with mind music novel by matthew-ou ^naiia charge? , lighting one cigarette oft the last and another one oil that: one then she hangs up and wipes the counter with a brown j-cioi:h... and somehow you make your cofree last uiml morning... 40. Day trip to Elora Gorge, autumn of 1977. Mom was telling us about the fallen leaves. Maybe you can collect some and put them into a book. Once I made a book with birchbark covers, three'holed onionskin, bound with string, a leaf glued to every page, its name underneath in crayon. I'll show you how. She's at ease in the passenger seat, shoes off and her shins under the air vent, breathing fully, out of the city, all desperate words torn away in the slipstream. Our father just drives, a passenger of his own oblivion, a vague and pleasant worry of falling asleep at the wheel, eyes catching dying for veronica — 77 on the glyphs of treetops, then soothed by the belling of the road, his mind empty and open as the tires dub their hum over the slo-mo still life. Highway stripes as unreadable subtitles in a film without dialogue. He's hung over. A rosary hangs from the rear-view mirror; its crucifix banks with the curves. The canary sun moves across an iron ore outcrop. The radio fades to static. Our father turns the dial from left to right. He finds nothing but a recorded weather report on a state channel, wind directions, warnings for fishermen. You never ask Are we there yet? anymore: now you know the road always begins and ends in sleep. Even now you are dreaming. And you know that for dreaming travellers, the crash into the schist has always already happened, the beautiful sight none but the hawk sees, the metal twisting into the body like earth guided by furrowing rain. Late insects swirl for last blood through rows of crimson harvest. These places are the Beyond. Glass insulators on the crosses of telephone poles glint red in the sky. No one phoning home today. The robins sleep in electromagnetic suspension. We pass through a town. Our mother notices an antique shop, its windows strung with a dead woman's jewellery. If we had stopped there, you would have seen her ivory cameos, cutglass broaches. Stacks of brittle parlour music on the stand of a gutted piano. We sit quietly in the back seat. Dad's empties at our feet. You play counting games with the passing hydro poles, measuring space, measuring time, mapping while in the map, one compass point piercing the memory lobe, the other piercing Broca's area. Mom says to Dad Don't drink another one in the car, o.k. please, hon? Passing a chain of vacant fields now, one where weeds fondle the ruins of a fairground. In its grass-worn hub rises the skeletal piping of a circus tent, shreds of blue and yellow-striped vinyl dangling from the crossbar, the wires sloping upwards to the centre pole. A rusted slide. A carousel like a b-movie space ship, its metal canopy collapsed, pierced by poles that skewer horses of painted 78 — matthew d. remski wood at obscene angles. If Dad had stopped the car, pulled by some ruined magnetism, you might have seen the glass eyes of the horses scattered in a nimbus around the scrap disk, you might have seen bottles of JD lying empty under the empty awning of the ruined concession standing empty, you might have seen a do