Read Online A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnston - Free Book Online Page B

lavish furnishings were not things that he lacked, or was excluded from or deprived of, but were glittering spectacles in which all who merely witnessed them could share. He waved at everyone, even those he knew would not wave back. To him, everyone seemed equally deserving of attention.
    Even the story of his father’s death had not inclined him against Captain Druken. The point of the narrative might simply have been to relate a series of events that the two men had been equally unable to avoid, the allotment of blame being the prerogative of no one and nothing.
    Landish tried to leave unposed the question of how he would get along without the boy if he had to. But he thought and dreamt aboutit. He woke from dreams and, finding himself alone in bed, roared out Deacon’s name.
    “Here I am,” said Deacon, who’d been sleeping on the floor. Landish gathered him up into a hug and walked about the attic with him, saying “I thought you were gone. I dreamt that you were just a dream. I dreamt there never was a Deacon and that I lived alone.”
    “I’m here,” Deacon said.
    “Pull on my ears to make sure,” Landish said.
    Deacon pulled on his ears until Landish said he was convinced.
    When the boy was asleep, Landish would walk about the middle of the attic, the only part in which he could stand up straight and fully stretch out both his arms. At night, when he’d been drinking, he thought about the early lives of famous writers—Dostoevsky standing at the foot of an open grave, waiting to be shot, his death sentence commuted at the last second by the emperor to seven years’ hard labour in Siberia. It would take more than an emperor to convince a firing squad of Newfoundlanders that a man named Druken should be allowed to live. And they would think it a strange form of punishment that consisted of seven years of regular employment.
    Having children hadn’t kept Charles Dickens from becoming a writer. Paid by the word. How lucky for his wife and ten children that he didn’t choose to be a poet. There would have been fewer copies of his books in the stores than there were of him around the house. He imagined Dickens the poet trying each week to build a readership. Cliffhanger endings. Leaving his readers to wonder which word he would use to rhyme with “doldrum” in the next instalment.
    Tolstoy had sense enough to wait until he had his fill of one kind of life before moving on to another. A womanizing bachelor, drinker and decadent layabout for almost twenty years, he married, stopped drinking, became affrontingly industrious and began to rail against those whose careers as womanizing bachelors, drinkers and decadent layabouts had just begun. A world-famous writer whose fame wouldendure forever even if he never wrote another word, he realized and began to preach the virtues of obscurity, unable to find fellowship except in the company of writers who, having despaired of ever getting published, had given up writing.
    He had recently written of the emptiness of all pursuits, declared himself outraged by any man who upon reaching his allotment of three score and ten continued to fend off death by consuming food and drink, but he was over seventy and very much alive.
    Landish would lay a page flat on the embers and watch it ignite, scorching outward from the middle, curling up at the corners. He wondered if it was just a pose, this burning of everything he wrote. The great, uncompromising artist who accepted nothing less from himself than perfection. He took the pages he wrote and reread each one before he fed it to the fire. Everything he wrote struck him as a failed, forced imitation of something he had read. Sometimes, somehow without his noticing until he was reviewing what he’d written, phrases, even whole sentences from his favourite writers made it into his night’s work.
    What would have been the point of keeping the pages, storing them in some ever-growing pile, the accumulated futility of years, there,