In Distrait

Monica Datta

The trajectory of the rain had begun to rotate so quickly that by the time Xq finished university it poured in parallel with the Earth’s surface; when the silver nitrates of the Far Orient sprang into the atmosphere to mitigate the drought, they left a fine filigree skeleton for the water molecules but no one imagined the rain would in fifty years’ time move in orthogonal slabs of translucent gelatin, like the swiveling carpets and dry cleaning Xq had seen in old photographs. The saturated rugs slapped and shook the library for its secrets; the glass screeched soft.

Xq took every stair in the well—pausing at times to pull down the croaky beady lamp chains—oscillating seasick into and away from the building so it accordion-filleted the encircling birch forest like a field of distended hives. The wall panels corrugated round, broomstick branches with snapsnug shelves; the upper floors bled from a wide stair—soft rosewood and cold-blooded purpleheart—in cheesecake tribute to the Laurentian Library, falling like a doomed card house in midcollapse. The walls were a heap of failed parachutes, heptagon dying to pentagon dying to triangle; the floors a glossy, garish peacock that suited only the cacophonous café at which one could drink cavity-inducing spiced tea and shatter stray molars with hard salted chickpeas.

Out the window cedar courtyard walls, smoky in rain and sun, draped brittle, like concrete. A motorcycle jacket of Cranbrook brick in Roman slabs and leather-tanned mortar sealed the volumes with glass toothzipper of covered terracing without which they might form a bad bank, despite the glossy reclaimed mango timber door and verdigris yarmulke. The monsoons of the upper Midwest had churned the trees to arches; the sky dark blue at midnight, tufted with cotton flowers.

And then there was the forest enclosed within the courtyard that threatened to spread its roots and perform a bouleversement on the whole building; Xq’s eldest sibling, Zq, had spent months in blazing forty-nine-degree summers chunking asphalt gasps, purging dry earth to accommodate an actual forest of birches and poplars in the interior courtyard but if one wanted a building in the bleeding forest one should put it in the bleeding forest but nearly all the trees were in Distrait, cars and homes given a lavish burial by the same Woolfian nature deity wailing over the youth who inspired the Corinthian order.

No: no forest in Hameçon, restored to dignity from its consonantrich Lechitic ending; the population—as well as that of Islande, its west bourgeois mothwing (by ordinance all bourgeoisies were west)—had increased a hundredfold over the past seventy years; the city limits of both municipalities were chamfered and filleted in the early sixties to make precise elm-leaf imprints within Distrait’s ex-metropolis. There were now two million denizens in two square miles, pushed high into the atmosphere by a twentieth-century Far Oriental sarcoma of capsule homes and—hat tip to the city council—medina walls that were not allowed to cast a shadow over Mayura Bari. Rooftops uncoveted: falls so grisly they weren’t anymore; humors vaporized clean.

At midcentury Mayura Bari replaced the meager public library on Caniff before being annexed by the national university system. It was now the largest specialist institution of any kind in North America and attracted scholars from all over, said Zq. But no one needed, in an ocean of vinyl, oxides, and concrete block, an elephantine ode to books bankrolled by the Sinhalese plutonium tycoon whose private home was a LEED Antimatter skyscraper in downtown Islande; not one with nearly all the books in lickable vitrines, not one that mandated entry via a silent, shoeless room in which one washed one’s feet in a fountain deep enough to drown in.

Only a foot deep.

One whole foot!

Audiences sat for gatherings and presentations on the bare floor except in spring and summer, when, in circles, under Tagorean ordinance—signed by a salwaared white wraith called fucking Purnima—they unfurled in the swelter of the outdoor courtyard teaching and feeding one another fruits and nutmeats respectively in the mold of Jacques Rancière and infant blackbirds. Everyone blamed the young architect of Minor Oriental origins who disappeared before the project was completed and was never found; the marketing copy—around the hockey-puck plan and the punctured-soufflé section as well as the molluskwhip exploded axon—stated the design hybridized the Minor Oriental house with elements of twentieth-century Finnugrification (Saarifinger; Neo-Birchthumb) in adapting the High Victorian colonial typology to the hard, bright froideur of the upper Midwest.

In spurning the old language it honored all who found refuge in the north.

Zq said, There’s no water. That fountain bleeds rust.

Xq, a student of mythology, offended easily at its misuse: after all, the water eventually came back. Though ungifted as a linguist and ultimately uninterested in scholarly work, Xq found the classical literatures of the Minor Orient countered thirteen years of Jesuit schooling—at the request of their grandparents even though they weren’t Catholic parce qu’il a fallu des rites and one should be allowed to shake off the Protestants after four hundred years—yet they offered similar reverence for ceremony without the tyranny and signifiers of the past, much to the consternation of Xq’s friends of Minor Oriental ancestry in Minor Oriental Analysis. A cathedral of the republic appealed to Xq, who became a librarian.

That evening, in the meditation hall, Xq shut the fine louvers to flick the summer rain and heard a last rush of water from downstairs as V^fx, the gardener, scrubbed down after a long day. Almost alone, Xq began to doze against the glass wall, which sloped so far into the courtyard it was like becoming a swallow. The floor grumbled, then music: gnashing then Tinkerbell flute before zapstatic off.

Muttering and the bumbling clicks of someone who couldn’t lock a door, from the adjoining studio. No one was supposed to be there till Monday. Xq knocked.

A young voice—English? annoyed—demanded, What.

What always startled Xq, who had been taught one said only pardon. Who’s there?

A muttered staccato of profanity unfurled with the locks. Crossed arms sneered, Your boss said I was coming.

K’b? You’re not supposed to be here till Monday. Who let you in?

Yeah.

There’s a motel a quarter mile upward. Many of our residents return with chunks of wall.

All booked. The nearest vacancy is hours upward. There’s nowhere else to go.

There are tent rentals all over Distrait.

The borders close at ten.

You can make it.

It’s raining.

Till October.

Xq ducked under an armpit through the studio entrance. The highceilinged garret triangular-screamed into a nun’s cornette. Like the meditation hall, it had a window that leaned into the courtyard till it committed to a sharp angle, pinpricking into the copper roof. The draping walls were useless—poor acoustics, no pinup space—and misused panels of cork on wheels had been knocked over with rightful anger. Rosewood glaze glared bright in the night. Around the slop sink hung wet underclothes. The geriatric Murphy bed, dressed already in a damp sleeping bag, slumpcreaked against the wall. An unbelted rucksack lay spent and empty like a bear trap. Its beached contents included two drills, a small electric saw, several sets of knives—oils, clay, utility—among limp, feety polyester shrouds.

I’m K’b, by the way; the anti-sculptor.

Xq nearly snapped, Of course, The Anti-Sculptor; The Only One before again catching the sharp flashes of metal, and suggested, instead, that of course it was possible to stay till Monday.

My name is Xq.

Thanks for your lack of integrity.

Xq asked, after opening and closing a dry mouth, How was the flight?

Shite, but what have I to compare it to. I squandered an exit when I was sixteen on my gran’s funeral on the Isle of Skye. Turned out it was the previous week. Now I’ve like got three exits left in my whole life, and if they’re anything like this, I just don’t want to go anywhere.

Couldn’t you apply for more?

No I’d’ve had four left but like all the drills and shit you know make me scary. On the way over I had a transit visa through Inverness, which apparently forbids all knives from England? Not just the ones made in England but any exposed to English air and soil. They didn’t take them, though. Hope they don’t dock me on the way back.

Xq said, Last month the English Embassy threw a celebration on the Northwest 439th floor of the main complex. It was one of the most miserable half hours I’ve spent in a long time.

K’b scoffed. Everyone else is happy with mold and six exits. That’s the trap. Six is all you get. Doesn’t matter if you walk through the walls. You’re allowed to leave the country and return six times in your life.

I’ve never left the country.

Yeah, but, like, in winter you could cross the frozen river and be in another country. And you’re Europeans. Might help you through the day. K’b jerked a thumb at the rest of Hameçon, whose hivemass oozed rust in the light of dusk. Is this the favorite color?

Xq said, Green is scheduled at ten.

Well, don’t miss it. Shouldn’t you go home?

I’m not far.

Sit down, said K’b. I hate when people stand.

I was going to find some dinner.

K’b shrugged. At the newsstand I got tendon gums and ramp foam. Have some. K’b yanked the soggy bedding from the mattress and flung it to the floor, then threw on top of it six silver packets before unscrewing a water bottle.

Thanks, said Xq, arms stretched wide to snap a tendon gum in half before dunking it in the still cold water. These are great: I haven’t had one in years. My colleague tried to bring some and was stopped at border control.

They got rid of the pork ones a few years ago. K’b shrugged. I’m surprised you were OK with my proposal. I’d never have come if you’d asked me to alter it.

Hameçon is very excited about architectures of inversion in the spirit of the twentieth-century American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, stuttered Xq.

I liken cutting square-foot holes through every wall in the building to poundsfleshthievery.

Xq blinked. I don’t remember that part. I suspect you won’t be able to do it.

William Bunge exhaustively studied one square mile at the center of the city. I can’t cut one-square-mile holes through the walls because the building isn’t large enough.

You’ll need permission to do that.

It’s important that all buildings in Distrait mirror similar processes of destruction. I think of Distrait like Beirut a hundred years ago: the bullet holes were its brand. Beirut now? Nothing, France: everything France; Distrait France. If money’s the only thing stopping you I say stop.

Ten years old when the Canton de Distrait joined the EU, Xq was startled when, the day after, all the textbooks were pulped in the disused railyard only to be replaced by flimsy Solresol facsimiles. The archdiocese was denied exemption or even a stay. Over the next ten years, about 59 percent of pupils—unable to master the new language—were dismissed from school and became, the newspeople said, Generation Silasila. Although this massive absence caused a substantial construction delay, they were prohibited from working and had no recourse to any public assistance including the use of roads and water. Xq’s second-eldest sibling, Nz, haunted the elevators. Not even the Name Changes Department knew where Nz had gone.

K’b was gone.

Xq went through the other studio door, which opened to the end of the collection (999, Supraterrestrial Polity) and gasped at the drifts and dunes of tempered casing that buried the floor, along with the odd bloodstained iceberg crunch, and the angry islands of paper and leather and cloth, splayed open; broken bindings flayed the pages to gullfeathers. Shelves squared in murder chalk.

K’b wielded a hatchet—and it was evident from the tense, feeble grip that, consistent with the portfolio review, craft was not a major strength of the exhibited work—heaving pensively like a desert hound, hair plastered to the brow. Xq’s every thought and feeling ever evaporated, replaced by a slow freezing of the nose and outer extremities and an ostrich-egg cracking of the sternum like glass holding blood boiled to gasoline, skull pressed through the nose. Stop, creaked the throat.

At the stair on which K’b stood began the vast Minor Oriental Event Recordings section (950s), facing south, jutting outward from the building to an exterior glazed stair, hanging into the forest so that it became a half sunroom. Pensively—and hatchethanded—K’b panted, the city council approved the library a year after Silex ran out of water. Still none. Eighty years onward.

There was water here. Everyone came.

Your whole country is killing its own people so that swarms of foreigners, maggots and vultures and rats, can slither into the cracks of what no one wants.

Xq clung to one of the corrugated birch panels, whose contours were as wide as a handrail, designed, ostensibly, to be grasped in futility and desperation during an earthquake and tried to creak I’ll call the police, you can’t do that, and please stop but no sound came out.

All this glazing wrapped around brick, like an octopus choking its victim, in an abandoned place, rewilding, ruralizing, back to bury the dead. Dakshineswar colors. Maybe this place will get a tongue-lashing from Kali, who owns all the monsoons and must now be a Muslim.

Xq sputtered, This is not legal.

Can’t be a Muslim: the stairs are Spam, the tinned lunch meat. I like it with rice and soy sauce and maybe mayonnaise. Did you know this year was its 150th anniversary?

What’s that got to do with anything?

That some things are better ground to a bloody pulp. You see, becoming European has done nothing for you. American arrogance is nothing like French laïcité. Americans know all culture, any culture—even their own—is a threat. The fastest way to destroy a culture is to destroy its culture: Mao knew. Hitler knew.

Well, that’s why they built a library, said Xq. Distrait had a housing surplus.

Which has been buried because they knew better than to give it to parasites taking residence before the animal dies. Emigrants are privileged, even the desperate ones. A grand makes you a cockroach king. They’re investors, really, in waste. They want what no one wants. That’s what they did to every ex-industrial wasteland a hundred years ago and now we’re out of Europe and live with the Pakis, for whom you built a monument.

That’s not what happened.

I have two Minor Oriental grandparents. World’s worst people. If they know they’re crawling around on a graveyard it’s victory. K’b nodded at Xq. Doesn’t this bother you? Your own people have been here against their will for hundreds of years, came here, built a city, saw it ruined, and now the government is burying it?

This is a place of refuge for anyone who wants it. You have no right to speak for my own people.

Refugees who make it out are the most privileged. You think the worst off have the guts to flee in the dead of night without? You just lie down and wait and pray it ends.

The rain curved so milkily it refracted the clouds; Xq remembered when, as a child, rain fell almost straight from the sky—crying, according to the clergy, at their misdeeds—and one might primly hold up a metal rod, pinching nylon in a simple frame, as protection.

I didn’t mean to offend you, said K’b. These are the simple truths of your reality. They are painful. But there’s nothing more rightwing than compassion. You don’t have the right to civilize.

Ask Greece about their missing marbles, said Xq.

Everything’s a bloody marble!

Rather literally, K’b believed everything was a marble, the result of a childhood spent between the Exhibition Hall of Evolutionary Wonders—K’b’s parents were professors at the nearby Emperor’s School of Scientific Hegemony—and, across the road, Bert and Vic’s House of Antiquity by these aforementioned grandparents of Minor Oriental origins who felt very strongly that the ungrateful and poorly educated recipients living in the Minor Orient could not understand and did not deserve the noble interventions of English neoclassicism, which just may have done the Romans one better in the orderliness of circulation and contemporary marble work. The Earth itself was a marble, and marble looked like skin and limestone was in abundance and therefore practically the same, and so it was easy to piss away the future like any joke, like you could just shake out the bag and start again.

This was not what K’b was doing: what K’b was doing was, emphatically, not a joke. Everyone could keep their idols. When coal, by popular demand and years of American advisory, began to regrow, the modern art hall—which had in turn rapidly metastasized into a shopping center—was restored to its previous power-station glory. It was there that K’b’s cutting exercises began: to unveil every layer of history from the prior two hundred years. When a friend told K’b about the residency at Mayura Bari, they laughed: of course Americans would discover the ancient Orientalist impulse in themselves just as Distrait threatened to eat itself, its seven-lane motorways haunted by the—literally!—faceless, overrun by bears and elmweeds, bleeding slowly from paper cuts and deaf from German measles, each with two guns (only a median of course; France hadn’t fully sunk in its Communist claws).

Tears from adults sickened K’b. Xq was dying on the top stair like an opera-ballet waterfowl, clinging to pieces of splintered rosewood like it was the flat surface of the earth, howling like a broken jackal, elephant elbow skin punctured by tiny glass filaments. Why did you do it, it squeaked.

Destructive processes are natural.

People stay here when there’s nowhere to go.

Vulnerable enough to be brainwashed.

It’s not about brainwashing.

The problem, said K’b, is that architecture gives birth to the city; without it the city would not exist: separations, thresholds, crossings, borders. This is not a building, but a tiny, demented country. Distrait is defined by its lack of architecture: wild animals. The people of Hameçon are legless hens. The people of Islande are humans. Not to me, though.

Xq sat up. It must be nice to be the only one to see the world so clearly.

I think for myself. The neoliberal economy of the early twenty-first century collapsed and left the world in shambles. It’s a travesty that its idols still exist.

If you take a hatchet to the shelving, won’t that get in the way of your project, to cleanly cut square-foot holes?

K’b looked dumbly at Xq. That wasn’t what I proposed. I want to destroy the archaeology of neoliberalism before it becomes archaeology.

So you’re not only a violent sociopath, you’re a bore.

That means either a lot or very little. Can I boil some water? The gums are a bit stale. Best to sip the broth.

K’b slipped down the stairs two at a time in thick blue socks, looking very young. Xq stood up slowly and stayed several steps behind. They lumbered into the lobby where the harpstringed glass wall tapered behind the circulation desk and the turquoise floor giggled at them. A wide, severely angled doorway to the courtyard in hard purpleheart contrasted with the curve of the sloping birch wall.

Xq presented some water from the machine behind the café counter but K’b refused it and said it must be boiled properly, filling a large copper vessel with rust and straining out the fine iron sediment before the liquid went into a neutralizing device and finally into a kettle that seemed not to have been used in a decade. Xq admitted the process resulted in a fantastic cup of hot water, enjoyed, on its own, without tea or tendon.

Despite the rain Xq led K’b to the interior courtyard, into which the cedar walls bloated like sails. The roof enclosed so severely it might well have been glazed over to create a large indoor atrium, but no matter: it was dark. Even with the shade and birch thicket the grass was still sunbleached. They ignored the Adirondack chairs and sat among the parched tufts, watching the rain move.

K’b, singing arrhythmically and below the breath, plucked eight or ten dry blades and floured them, aerating the powder back to the cracked soil before peeling off an orange jumper to reveal a heavy shirt of magnets and ETFE.

Xq said, You never spent a minute here before cutting up the building.

Cutting it up is the best way to learn about anything, said K’b. Maybe it’s an autopsy.

It’s called surgery when you’re still living.

Who’s living?

Before coming here I had only worked in academic libraries, at which everything was a high-security ritual, said Xq. I just thought it was a great thing, to attend any of the talks or courses, to know culture could shape you as much as a conscious lack of money, or your family, or religion. Knowledge didn’t need to be the prerogative of the privileged.

Wise of the designer to make the courtyard too small for suicides. Your people are dying. Very slowly and all at once the way all Americans want it.

It’s just a library.

The way your monsoons are a mist.

These people you speak of are not dying any more than you or me or anyone who was or wasn’t born here. I refuse to entertain the idea that anyone is more mortal than any other.

That’s ridiculous, said K’b.

Everyone who comes here gets a sturdy desk and a heavy lamp and shelves. They can find almost literally any book they want. It has the mission of any great public library.

Like the British Library. Thatcherism at its peak.

That was a very long project. There must have been five prime ministers.

They demolished much of Bloomsbury for nothing.

What, was Martin Chuzzlewit upset? Xq shouted.

Probably. Martin Chuzzlewit was an architect. K’b guzzled the last of the tendon water.

Xq looked up at Hameçon with its glowering sign, with a smaller version above the douanes’ offices; English-speaking schoolchildren were taught the town name’s meaning with the hook of the cedilla and the giraffe-necked cranes. There were ten elevators, the slowest of which traveled at one meter per second, the fastest fifty in a kind of capillary vacuum. Many—unwilling to adapt to the prevailing mores of the corpulent, enjoyed a leisurely climb up the stairs, and for the bold in rucksacks there were ice picks attached to ropes, hurled a great distance between platforms, with art deco arcuations designed in praise of the automobile by an American president after firing all the architects, banned in Distrait and physically impossible to bring into Hameçon. The banlieue ballooned outward like a mushroom. No one had air rights.

When a magnet dinged Xq on the head it was clear K’b had left the courtyard, perhaps to the studio, or to balance on the sloped roof, scraping green and bronze dust from boot soles or to bash open the glass so as to coat the Rig Veda in ramp foam, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead the sky melted into a last cataract gush; the climber silhouettes in the distance wrapped themselves around the ropes with cheeks Xq knew were bloated, breathing through the ears.

The copper hollow of the roof popped and rose and K’b’s silhouette was distinguishable from the raccoons, who were increasingly large but unlikely to spend much time in treetops, and after tugging the hair of the pearly ghosts in the birch thicket it had reached the court, all Doric, at the base of the city, bubbling upward in twentieth-century sugar cubes. Xq tried to call out but was deaf even to the ears on either side of the skull that instead felt the rush of drainage underground and realized it had knocked everything flat throughout the courtyard.

A police officer rushed in, shouting, The alarms were delayed, what had happened? Was this Xq’s doing? Whose? Why was anyone there so late?

There was an incident, said Xq. I’ve got no details.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t change clothes, said the police officer.

The clock on the nearest tower—Gothic and Venetian, also in tribute to the Minor Orient—clanged eleven. The sky had burst open. Xq thought the constellation Krttika read clearly but it was soon blunted by K’b’s face hanging over, red and taut as Mars. Perhaps five or six police officers were inspecting the grounds and terraces, glowing—glowering too—in the fire of the glass terracing. K’b gestured to them. The police rushed in to identify Cassiopeia and asked K’b if Xq had really been the perpetrator. When K’b claimed responsibility they all heaved with relief; they said they had been waiting for someone to cut holes in an emblem of civic hatred and divisiveness; the destruction of the library would be as momentous an event as Alexandria. Everyone would again say the names of Caesar and Aurelian and Pope Theophilus; men would get their names back; men would be men again. It would be beautiful.