The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts by Sibum Norm

Author:Sibum, Norm [Sibum, Norm]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2013-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

Blindsided

However it is that the laws of physics operate in dreams, one was certain that if Eleanor slept with Phillip nothing good would come of it. It would only bring her, as she worked her way through the treacheries of a maze, to some minotaur-like creature: Prentiss perhaps. I would have asked Moonface to the movies, but I knew she would not care for the bloody gore of a gladiatorial spectacle. I went alone to the old odeon. I would miss her body seated next to mine. I would miss the fact that no movie had yet been made of which she entirely approved. If I suspected that what she really liked were those old roadies Hope, Crosby and Lamour, I was gentleman enough not to challenge her on it. Still, to spot silver-headed Dubois seated four rows up from the front, a tub of popcorn on his lap, was something of a surprise.

‘Trust you,’ he observed, ‘to go for something Roman.’

‘It’s a good if historically inaccurate flick,’ I answered, the pedagogue in me rising to the bait.

‘I’ll bear it mind,’ Dubois promised.

And the lights dimmed, and then the movie. And we were presented with souls who touchingly believed in an afterlife. From this belief, in the cases of a few, stemmed conscience and honour. That a few men and women were capable of conscience and honour seemed awfully exotic to me, a cynic.

Afterwards, we walked in silence to the Blue Danube for a late evening libation. Dubois was stiff and unforthcoming. And when we arrived, Cassandra on shift, even her ravishing smile was not sufficient to dispel Dubois’s funk, Elias and Serge in the galley, a few regulars indoors, young revellers on the terrasse. Perhaps they put Dubois in mind of Moonface, he saying: ‘I guess she’s out getting serviced.’

He almost smiled. Cassandra brought wine.

‘Merci,’ Dubois said, extending to her his better manners.

I raised my glass to the woman. And Cassandra turned, her ample buttocks cantaloupes, and she went back inside among such regulars as Blind Musician and Gentleman Jim in his stupor. There he was, sockless, slightly astonished at the tricks life plays on one. Then Dubois guffawed, yes, for no reason at all, and especially as there was no Eggy about; and then he got serious.

‘It’s hit me recently: I’m going to die, some day.’

His eyes, glittering with intelligence, were making something like an appeal. Those words of his seemed to go against the grain of an arch-materialist’s catechism that death was only to be expected.

‘What,’ I somewhat cheekily responded, ‘and you haven’t made your peace with your Maker?’

‘That’s below the belt, Calhoun.’

‘I assume most of us think we’ll be in our right minds at the moment of death, everything squared away, nothing left but a few regrets to inconvenience one’s spirit. I figure it’ll be so much emptier than that, that we’ll see we’ve lived to no particular purpose but to extend the gene pool and the like—’

‘Who’s the cynical materialist here?’

‘Why, it’s yours truly.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

I had no idea Dubois was even capable of troubling himself with the question.

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