Carbine: Stories

Architecture of the French Novel

 Architecture of the French Novel = Sunday afternoon in September, rain and the wood piled in the yard black in the rain. Not far, in the center of the city, were several well-known pieces of public art, so many and so well known, the city was sometimes known as the City of Public Art although he was not persuaded the sobriquet was not the result of a civic campaign rather than spontaneous coinage. The statues were, no doubt, as wet as the wood and stood in the rain like other statuary—well known relics of civilizations that remained after the belief which had engendered them. He thought years before life had a more industrial quality. The then industrial quality of life he remembered. After all, he had worked then— he’d been very young—for an industrial concern. A truck would come around, and from the driver one could buy cigarettes, sandwiches, soft drinks. The Mobile Chef. He wondered if mobile chef trucks any longer existed. It was difficult to know what to call such a truck; eventually he came up with canteen truck. Surely no one used such a phrase today—that language had vanished with the trucks and that more industrial quality of life and why would he feel even the slightest nostalgia for it. Because he had been there. Because he had been young. Dead, the past. Like the dead man. The dead man deader in the past as the past lived on in his memory. As did the dead man. While he was at the industrial concern, the dead man had worked at a store. He remembered going into the store and seeing the dead man—both youths then—the dead man was wearing an apron and bagging groceries. The store cleaner, easier work than the industrial concern. He suspected the store paid better than the industrial concern. The work at the industrial concern dirty and dangerous. In a sense that visit to the store his introduction to commerce. He wondered that day if the dead man were not more intelligent than he. On this rainy Sunday nothing on television but a cheap movie. Zombie movie. He’d seen it many years before on the late night horror show. Heard the dead man was found in a lake. Later, heard it was a pond. He imagined the rain falling in the pond as the body floated there. Another version the dead man found hanging. Rope. Red dart through the trees. Cardinal. A bird named for a medieval European concept. A bird an allusion. The wet leaves. The sexual texture of the world. Two murders in that morning’s paper. One had done it for love. The other for hatred. Because I hated everything the comment. The dead man had hated everything though at first it seemed the dead man had only hated everything at the end. Then he realized the dead man had hated everything from the beginning. The unburied. Of course the dead man was buried. Or cremated. Cremated quickly in shame. Abandoned. As the dead man had, in a sense, abandoned everyone. The one who did it for love said for me it was all an accident, something I could not prevent. He’d had the feeling the dead man would kill himself. If not that, the feeling of something else. When they were young, he wore a second-hand coat of heavy wool in the winter. He’d once slept on the dead man’s floor and had that coat for a blanket, he remembered. That was how it was in those times. They’d do anything as though they thought it were nothing. He thought of the dead man’s wife. Every myth a family drama. Her name was Penelope. Odd. Penelope the dead man’s wife her name now. If she were still alive he did not know. Dead Penelope the dead man’s wife if not. All of it too cumbersome. When he had broken with the dead man the  Architecture of the French Novel final time, he vowed he would never utter the dead man’s name again. The dead man, he thought, was at that time dead to him. But it was too cumbersome . He had to rename the dead man. Renaming the dead man a complicated thing. He ran through a number of names but they all were associated with other people—friends, relatives, coworkers...