Part I - Life on Grand Avenue
Chapter One
Grand Avenue cuts through the very heart of the city, from 71st Street all the way
to the harbourfront, and although it is eight lanes wide, with a treed boulevard
running down the middle, the Avenue feels claustrophobic and narrow.
Rising up in straight verticals, and flanking either side, are Grand Avenue's
imposing Edwardian buildings, their facades creating two continuous walls. Many
of these edifices were built during the Great Potash Boom of the late 1920s, with
all that that entails: sombre Calvinistic capitalist features and a grim,
heavy-handed feel. Buildings without laughter. From up on high, where the
angels sit, Grand Avenue looks very handsome indeed, a veritable showcase of
architectural dignity. But down below, on the level of the street, it is a far
different scenario, one of littered, gritty, noisy lanes choked with exhaust and
angry taxis, of mad rambling panhandlers and scurrying office workers. A world of
constant din, where the echoing noise of traffic ricochets off the buildings in a
constant, cacophonous roar. The noise is an eternal presence here. With nowhere
to go and no way to escape, it is caught in a perpetual standing wave, a
never-ending feedback of cityscape clatter. Static of the Gods.
But if the dominant sense from on high is visual, and on the street level aural,
down below, in the depths of the Loop, it is the sense of smell that is most
saturated and most abused. Here, in a miasma of fumes, trains rattle-bang on an
endless Mbius strip of work, sweat, salt and grubby lucre. A merry-go-round
where the horses have emphysema, the paint is peeling and the smell of halitosis
and body odour swirls in oily whirls through the air, in the air-is the air. Bodies
inhaling dioxide, recycling waste, pressed into wedges already sticky in this: the
morning rush-hour crush. In the city, the bottom layer, the lowest level, is one of
smell.
Edwin Vincent de Valu (a.k.a. Ed, a.k.a. Eddie, a.k.a. Edwynne in his
poetry-reading college dorm days) emerges from the underground at Faust and
Broadview like a gopher into a towering canyon. On Grand Avenue, the rain is
dirty before it hits the ground. Edwin had once caught a solo drop on the back of
his hand, had stopped and marvelled at that single bead of water, already
streaked with soot.
Edwin is a thin, officious young man with a tall, scarecrow walk and dry straw hair
that refuses to hold a part. Even when dressed in a designer overcoat and
polished turtle-cut Dicanni shoes, Edwin de Valu has a singular lack of presence.
A lack of substance. He is a lightweight, in every sense of the word, and the
morning's commute almost sweeps him under. In the urban Darwinism of rush
hour, Edwin has to fight just to keep afloat, has to strain just to keep his head
above the deluge. No one-least of all Edwin himself-could ever have suspected
that the entire fate of the Western World would soon rest upon his narrow
shoulders.
On Grand Avenue, the eastside underscore of sour milk and stale urine, so
ever-present you start to taste it on your tongue, greeted Edwin like a familiar
slap to the face. Like a worn-out motif. A metaphor for something else. Something
worse.
As Edwin crossed Grand Avenue, en masse with a crush of rumpled jackets, damp
shirts, and groaning attachŽ cases, and as the traffic echoed into white noise
around him and the queasy smells of the city trailed in his wake . . . he looked up,
up to where the morning sun was catching the high edge of the buildings, a
mocking gold glow out of reach and almost out of sight. And he thought to
himself, as he did every day at precisely this spot and precisely this moment: I
hate this fuckin' city.
For all its architectural facades and historic pretensions, Grand Avenue is little
more than a crowded assemblage of filing cabinets, lined up, squeezed in, one
after the other, relentless and almost endless. Inside these filing cabinets you will
find ad agencies, business consultants, secret sweatshops and modern software
developers, pyramid schemes and investment firms, small dreams and big
dreams, executives and peons, plastic cafeterias and anonymous love affairs,
accountants, attorneys, contortionists and chiropractors, moneymen and
mountebanks, systems analysts, cosmetics salesmen and stock-market
financiers: gymnasiums of the absurd and self-cancelling circuses of unrequited
desire.
You will find all this and more filed away on Grand Avenue. But most importantly,
you will find publishers, an entire dizzying procession of publishers: some little
more than a name on a door, some cogs in vast multimedia empires; some
responsible for launching great literary careers, others responsible for Sidney
Sheldon-and every one of them clinging to the cachet of a Grand Avenue address.
Publishers infiltrate Grand Avenue like larval termites. Hidden in the maze of
cubicles and corridors that lie in wait behind the sombre Edwardian facades, you
will find dozens upon dozens of these publishers, swilling their swamp of words,
churning the muck, breeding in captivity. Here, manuscripts are stacked high,
and great mounds of festering papers accumulate. Here, women without makeup
and men without fashion sense sit huddled, sharpened blue pencils in hand,
scratching, scratching, endlessly scratching at the voluminous outpourings of that
most egotistical of creatures: the writer.
This is the belly of the beast, the ulcerous stomach of the nation's book
publishing-world, and Edwin de Valu, crossing Grand Avenue en route to his
cubicle at Panderic Books Incorporated, is smack dab in the swampy middle of the
quagmire.
Panderic Inc. stands near the top of the food chain. Not one of the Cabal Clan, not
Bantam or Doubleday perhaps, but certainly head and shoulders above the other
mid-size publishing houses. Which is to say, Panderic has no John Grisham or
Stephen King on its roster, but it does have a Robert James Waller or two. Each
season, Panderic publishes a full slate, not of books, but of "titles" (in the jargon
of the industry, books are reduced to their very vapour essence)titles that range
from celebrity diet fads to forty-pound vampyre gothics. Panderic puts out more
than 250 titles a year. It barely recoups its investment from half of them, loses
money on more than a third, and reaps a small profit on the remaining handful.
Those magic titles, those rare few money-makers, somehow manage to fuel the
entire sprawling enterprise. In the world of American publishing, Panderic is
considered financially sound.
Although Panderic's specialty is non-fiction and genre novels, on occasion-and
mainly by accident-a genuine masterpiece slips through, a book so humourless
and slowly paced, so plodding and laden with arcana, that you just knew it had to
be Great Literature. It was Panderic, after all, that had first published The Name
of the Tulip, an "intellectual mystery" set in a medieval nunnery in Bastilla, whose
hero was a middle-aged mathematician turned semiotician. The author, a
middle-aged mathematician turned semiotician, had swept into Panderic's office,
thrown down his hefty manuscript like an invitation to a duel and had pronounced
his work to be the height of "postmodern hyper-authenticity." He then flung
himself from the room and into a full-time career as an aphorist and keynote
speaker ($500 an aphorism, $6,000 a note). All this in spite of, or perhaps
because of, the fact that he had never had a single lucid thought in his entire life.
Publishing is an odd industry indeed. And as Ray Charles once said, "Ain't no son
of a bitch nowhere knows what's going to hit."
It was into this world, this postmodern, hyper-authentic reality, that Edwin de
Valu now came.
Edwin has been working at Panderic for more than four years, ever since he
abandoned his original career plans of becoming a professional bon vivant. (Turns
out there were very few openings in the bon vivant category.) Edwin works on the
fourteenth floor of 813 Grand Avenue, in Panderic's Non-Fiction Department.
Today, as he does every day, Edwin stops outside to buy two cups of coffee to go
from Louie (of Louie's Hot Dog and Pickle Stand). Most of the editors at Panderic
favour the more genteel, la-di-da-type coffee shops, but not our Edwin. He has a
rugged sense of the common man about him. Oh, yes, Edwin is the type of guy
who prefers Louie's down-home java over CafŽ Croissant's hand-roasted house
blend, a guy who likes his coffee raw and real. Edwin slaps his money on the
counter, says, "Keep the change."
"You want cinnamon sprinkles on your caffe-latte mochaccino, or would you prefer
white-almond chocolate?" asks Louie, wet cigar in mouth, two days of stubble on
his chin(s).
Every working day for the past four years, Edwin has stopped here at Louie's
stand, every damn day, and never, not once, has Louie remembered him.
"Nutmeg and cinnamon," Ed says wearily. "With a dash of sun-dried saffron. Extra
froth."
"Comin' up," says Louie. "Comin' up."
Inside the lobby of 813 Grand Avenue, the sound is suddenly muted: echoing
footsteps, the distant ping of elevators, the murmur of a hundred impending
heart attacks. Only this. Gone is the constant white noise of traffic outside. Gone
is the cymbal-crash symphony of the city.
On Grand Avenue, this is about as close as you can get to deliverance.