Precious by Douglas Glover

Author:Douglas Glover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

Outside, it was still black as a pit pony. The streets were littered with snowflakes, big as goose feathers. More were zooming down every second, crash-landing with an eerie lapping sound like waves on a lake.

Barrett was nodding at his desk, looking like an alcohol abuse ad, when I climbed the newsroom steps. He was shaky and at pains to excuse himself for coming to work three hours early. His alarm clock had had a fatal seizure, he explained, leaving him wide awake like a whale beached on a reef in an ocean of night.

My company acted on him like a tonic. He was after me like a terrier. Could I do him a big favour? No, I said. Spandrell wanted a column on ice fishing for the weekend edition. Barrett had all the facts; he just couldn’t seem to assemble them into sentences anymore. I said I couldn’t help unless he thought the publisher would be interested in a long think piece on Tantric ice hockey. Barrett shook his head doubtfully. Then I told him he could nap on the spare desk in the sports department, and I would wake him when it was time to start flagellating his typewriter keys in earnest.

An hour later Barrett was snoring tragically, and Wishty drifted in with a story written in what he considered to be the best contemporary sports-reporting mode. I couldn’t even figure out what game the teams were playing. “Even Dostoevsky had to give the score,” I said. Then I put in a vivid half hour jigging the copy into shape for deadline.

At nine a.m. I put the last of my pages to bed, pointed Barrett toward the newsroom, and dealt Wishty and Kunow their night assignments. Gratz still had two hours before the compositors locked up front and local. So the clatter of typewriters and the thump and whoosh of pneumatic tubes continued beyond the office dividers long after I had propped my feet on the desk and lit a meditative cigarette.

My mother had died at fifty-nine. The first time. She was technically dead after inhaling the pop-top from a beer can when an alert nurse noticed her heart was still beating. It took her eight more years to do the thing properly, in bed with the lights out, as in making love, and so quietly no one knew until morning. Uncle Dorsey had collapsed in the press room when he was seventy-two, a testament to the medicinal properties of rye whisky and Cuban cigars.

Seeing Damon Barrett reminded me of the ends of things: ends of worlds, ends of lives, ends of relationships. I harboured no exalted ambitions. I wanted them to be able to write my life story on an aerogram form. But I was suffering from an inability to keep things the way they were, which I found discouraging. Dorsey would have understood what ailed me. Before dying, he had visited one of the new computerized newsrooms in Toronto and returned home puzzled at the alteration in what, for him, had been a way of life.

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