The Memory Artists Read Online Free PDF Page A

off the bat?”
    “I started at the top and worked my way down.”
    “I was also wondering if … well, you’re probably asked this all the time, but I was wondering if you have any advice for aspiring writers?”
    Norval squinted at the antic red letters, as if written wrong-handedly. “Yes, don’t become one.”
    “You wouldn’t recommend it?”
    “There are too many already, too many welfartists walking around calling themselves writers and artists who actually do fuck-all, besides filling out grant applications.”
    The waitress laughed, pushed the hair back out of her eyes. “But seriously, what’s the best way to get published these days? Any advice?”
    “Yes. Don’t recount your dreams, don’t puke up your diary, don’t write anything before age thirty.”
    “Really? That’s not what my creative writing teacher said.”
    “That’s why he’s teaching.”
    “And didn’t you write your novel in your twenties?”
    “Learn from my mistake.” Norval looked up from the card and gazed at her piercingly, as he gazed at every woman. “A rare Z . Pity it’s not your turn.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “You’ll be up …” he paused to calculate, “ … in a couple of months. I will call, Zoé, depend on it.” He drew a mint twenty from his billfold.
    “But I wasn’t—”
    “Now if you’ll excuse me …”
    On the sidewalk, or rather the gentrified cobbles of a pedestrian walkway, Norval examined the pedestrians: an assortment of tourotrash, fashion lemmings and inadvertent comedians. Some of the women, he judged, had made wearable purchases. None of the men had. What were they thinking when they stepped into those clothes? What did they see in the mirror? There is no reason for the nineties, which will go down in fashion history as the buffoon decade, to be dragged into the zeroes. A baseball cap, worn frontward or backward, knocks fifty points off your IQ. A bucket hat? Seventy-five. Pants with the crotch at kneelevel, revealing the cleft of your arse, making you walk like a penguin? A hundred. These articles are perhaps acceptable for four-year-olds, or circus chimps, but adult men?
    “Excuse me,” he said, “what would you keep in a pocket on your calf ? And do you not realise that by storing toilet paper and yesterday’s lunch on your thigh, your limbs assume the girth of oak trees? And what about you? Yes, you. Why is your entire family wearing track suits? Is Montreal hosting a family Olympics? And you, with the canary balloon pants and Martian green headband. You will never get laid in an outfit like that.”
    A cell phone trilled. “Shut that fucking thing off. You are too young to have a phone. You have nothing of importance to say to anyone. Yap yap yap. Generation Y: the dunderhead generation, the hundred-channel generation, basking in a state of know-nothingism. Men have fought wars, gone to their graves, so that you imbeciles can walk on treadmills and twiddle with joysticks. No one wants to hear you prattle in a public place, no one wants to hear your phone ring with a jaunty refrain. ‘Devil’s Haircut’? Beethoven’s Fifth ? Cute. Now go to jail.”
    Yes, he thought, jail . There should be a Ministry of Aesthetics and roving couth-squads. Instead of metal detectors or sniffer dogs, there’d be bad-taste detectors, special laser beams or spectrographs. If the alarm sounded, you’d be placed in a detention facility until appropriate clothes were found and fines levied. You’d be jailed for repeat offences. Three strikes and you’re out. Not capitally punished necessarily, but you’d be locked away for a long time, out of public sight. Antarctica, say, or Neptune. You’d take courses in aesthetics while doing time.
    Excuse me, sir? You heard the alarm. Yes, it’s obvious you were in a hurry today. Name please? Thank you, I’ll just run that through my palmtop … Right, it seems you’ve got a lengthy record: reckless coordination, sensory assault, gaudily harm … This