or 170,000,000,000?
– that constitute the world’s largest oil deposit, the Athabasca Tar Sands. Meanwhile I rode up to the twenty-second floor of the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel –
but why not the 220th, or a queered mezzanine between the second and third storeys?
– already straitjacketed by Canadian politeness.
Inside the room there were the little comforts, the scaled-down soaps, the cotton buds and the sewing set borrowed from the Borrowers. On the back of the bathroom door hung a terrytowelling robe with a monogram that implied the hotel and I were one. Outside a window that had been shut for thirty-three years genotypic skyscrapers stood about the lake front, awaiting the call to stand in as parts of New York or Chicago.
By way of unpacking I took off the loathsome Barbour; then I rode the elevator up to the penthouse suite, where I registered for the book festival and received my folder full of never-to-be-read info-sheets. The roomesque space was dominated by paper doilies, muffins and a tub of vicious poinsettia; in the corner a tablet computer linked to a desktop computer sitting on a workstation. ‘The LongPen,’ a functionary in a knee-length cardigan dripped (Canadian gushing). ‘You’ve heard about it? Peggy Atwood’s invention so that authors can sign their books long distance.’
‘...’
‘We’re very excited to have it here – Peggy herself will be doing some signing during the festival.’
I was excited as well–sexually excited. I felt my penis sleepily unfurl in its 92 per cent cotton, 8 per cent Lycra burrow. I hadn’t had any erotic thoughts in a while – or, rather, I had repressed them savagely, since the adrenalized counting of licks, tweaks and caresses was a torment, let alone the division of caresses by licks, or the multiplication of tweaks by ... grunts. But the LongPen could well be the solution, interposing thousands of miles between the infinitesimal motions of a single fingertip and the 8,000 nerve endings packed into a few thousandths of an inch of tissue.
Although why not ...?
‘Is the suite open twenty-four hours?’ I enquired innocently.
‘Uh, no,’ the cardigan rumpled suspiciously. ‘We’re staffed until midnight.’
‘Oh, OK.’ I filed the intelligence away.
For four days I lay in Room 2229, planning a trip out to have one of the eyelets on my left walking boot repaired. During the walk from the airport a metal grommet had become detached and the lace subjected to microwear – an aglet was splitting open. I lay there on the made bed and thought how strange it was that such a small thing could immobilize a grown man. And I thought about Nicholson Baker’s obsessive detailing of the microwear of his shoelaces in
The Mezzanine
, and I thought of Baker himself, with whom, a decade before, I had shared a stage at a similar book festival in Brighton. I remembered how pinheaded he had seemed – considering the size of his thoughts; and how later that night I had swallowed a powderywhite MDMA pill with a titchy dolphin stamped on it; and how still later I’d ended up in a boutique hotel room knockingback whisky miniatures with a man who will reappear at the end of this tale to confirm that my life has had no narrative – which implies a linear arrangement of events – but only spiralled either out of control, or into a vicious centrifuge of repetition and coincidence.
Enslaved characters from children’s classic literature shared Room 2229 with me – Stuart Little paddled up and down the bath in a birch-bark canoe, Moomintrolls trampolined on the pillows, the aforementioned Borrowers strung together climbing ropes out of my dental floss, then expertly tackled the four pitches necessary to ascend to the top of the armoire. Then they triumphantly rappelled back down with an individual UHT milk carton that they winched up to where I lay, pinioned by the invisible – yet unbreakable – hawsers of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. As they dribbled the
– that constitute the world’s largest oil deposit, the Athabasca Tar Sands. Meanwhile I rode up to the twenty-second floor of the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel –
but why not the 220th, or a queered mezzanine between the second and third storeys?
– already straitjacketed by Canadian politeness.
Inside the room there were the little comforts, the scaled-down soaps, the cotton buds and the sewing set borrowed from the Borrowers. On the back of the bathroom door hung a terrytowelling robe with a monogram that implied the hotel and I were one. Outside a window that had been shut for thirty-three years genotypic skyscrapers stood about the lake front, awaiting the call to stand in as parts of New York or Chicago.
By way of unpacking I took off the loathsome Barbour; then I rode the elevator up to the penthouse suite, where I registered for the book festival and received my folder full of never-to-be-read info-sheets. The roomesque space was dominated by paper doilies, muffins and a tub of vicious poinsettia; in the corner a tablet computer linked to a desktop computer sitting on a workstation. ‘The LongPen,’ a functionary in a knee-length cardigan dripped (Canadian gushing). ‘You’ve heard about it? Peggy Atwood’s invention so that authors can sign their books long distance.’
‘...’
‘We’re very excited to have it here – Peggy herself will be doing some signing during the festival.’
I was excited as well–sexually excited. I felt my penis sleepily unfurl in its 92 per cent cotton, 8 per cent Lycra burrow. I hadn’t had any erotic thoughts in a while – or, rather, I had repressed them savagely, since the adrenalized counting of licks, tweaks and caresses was a torment, let alone the division of caresses by licks, or the multiplication of tweaks by ... grunts. But the LongPen could well be the solution, interposing thousands of miles between the infinitesimal motions of a single fingertip and the 8,000 nerve endings packed into a few thousandths of an inch of tissue.
Although why not ...?
‘Is the suite open twenty-four hours?’ I enquired innocently.
‘Uh, no,’ the cardigan rumpled suspiciously. ‘We’re staffed until midnight.’
‘Oh, OK.’ I filed the intelligence away.
For four days I lay in Room 2229, planning a trip out to have one of the eyelets on my left walking boot repaired. During the walk from the airport a metal grommet had become detached and the lace subjected to microwear – an aglet was splitting open. I lay there on the made bed and thought how strange it was that such a small thing could immobilize a grown man. And I thought about Nicholson Baker’s obsessive detailing of the microwear of his shoelaces in
The Mezzanine
, and I thought of Baker himself, with whom, a decade before, I had shared a stage at a similar book festival in Brighton. I remembered how pinheaded he had seemed – considering the size of his thoughts; and how later that night I had swallowed a powderywhite MDMA pill with a titchy dolphin stamped on it; and how still later I’d ended up in a boutique hotel room knockingback whisky miniatures with a man who will reappear at the end of this tale to confirm that my life has had no narrative – which implies a linear arrangement of events – but only spiralled either out of control, or into a vicious centrifuge of repetition and coincidence.
Enslaved characters from children’s classic literature shared Room 2229 with me – Stuart Little paddled up and down the bath in a birch-bark canoe, Moomintrolls trampolined on the pillows, the aforementioned Borrowers strung together climbing ropes out of my dental floss, then expertly tackled the four pitches necessary to ascend to the top of the armoire. Then they triumphantly rappelled back down with an individual UHT milk carton that they winched up to where I lay, pinioned by the invisible – yet unbreakable – hawsers of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. As they dribbled the
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