I've been denied a destination

It gradually dawns on me that I've been denied a destination, caught in a transitional environment, a space between beginning and an end. What I see towers benedictive above my head, and is certainly not Honoré-Beaugrand terminus; I know this now.

Here stands a structure whose purpose was made for people. A space with a very clear intention. Deserted. Forgotten. It's weird, I think. I don't know. A space made for travelers, void of such motion, and I cannot dispose of its perverse emptiness.

I'm dwarfed by the scale of it. 

Every bit of it is carved into rough, angular lines. There are no curves, save for the semi-circular handrail gently churning over the newels of the escalators at their landing thresholds. Few of the ceilings are flat. They soar up, forty, fifty feet and cut at odd facets, sometimes meeting in neat triangles, other times disseminating into geometries that make no sense.

Fluorescent lights flood from everywhere, emanating a faint buzz, but still the place seems dark as though oneiric: a disturbing cast of greenish colour-temperature diffused through protruding beams and slanted balconies, their grooved ceiling lines, as though fingers dragged through the sand, but no, there is nothing natural about this place. 

This subway station, like any city structure, is a space entirely constructed by humans. Even city parks, gardens, and manufactured waterways, which seem to us wild and natural, have been girdled and domesticated by the hands of urban planning. The unpainted concrete, the entirely exposed interior, a vivisection of a body, peeled open like a fruit, its anatomy set on display — I've never seen anything like it. Brutalism is so utilitarian, so institutional. It moves directly against nostalgia. So how is this place then so nostalgic? Why is it both so familiar and so alien? And from where does this nostalgia arise for a place I've never been?

Therein lies the incongruity. There is something dissonant about this place, and it's more than just the look of it. It's the sense that this space was deliberately created to guide busy lives through it arteries and ventricles — passageways for passengers — and in this moment, they are empty. Just for me.

From the moment I came across Coup de Grâce, by Sofia Ajram, as a Kobo 2025 Emerging Writer Prize finalist, I wanted to love it. Subway platforms, stations, tunnels are excellent settings. They have a pulse all their own. Take, for example, the opening passage of Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude, which sets the urban backdrop for that very modern affliction called loneliness. Or the obvious metaphor of the underground and all that lies beneath in the more conventional gothic horror of Anne Hébert's Héloïse.

But I didn't love it. My inner grammar nerd stumbled over awkward constructions. The Montrealer in me puzzled over the bridge bisecting the rails at Charlevoix, a description that doesn't jive with the station I commuted through daily for years. I put my copyediting hat on to devise a better way than italics to indicate "point final" was to be pronounced in French (to mean, Period. Full stop. — a very anglo Montrealer expression of emphasis), when italics further along the same page were used to serve another purpose and the words themselves do not scream of foreignness. Clearly, I have peeves.

Passages like the above tend toward repetition, and would be better reined in. The journey is relayed in a confident voice, perhaps overly so (or compensatorily?), for a character grappling with depression. The narrator is mostly put off by how this unexpectedly encountered labyrinth at a terminal metro station has put a wrench in their plan to do away with themself à la Virginia Woolf. Toward the end, the format shifts toward a choose-your-own-adventure style, which, although it can be seen as evidence of the narrator's lashing out, feels disrespectful to the reader. 

There's a lot of attitude here. Some of it is "style," some of it feels like anger (but the novel never directs it at anything in particular). A good editor and a dose of humility could help make this a writer to watch.

Walking was writing

(though stillness is another kind of movement; it affects the ground, even if not the wind)

The house I grew up in used to be across the street. That is, it was originally built across the street from its current location. They built the school, and they needed a football field, so they picked up the house and moved it. Coincidentally, the man who lived in the house was the principal of that high school, its first, so presumably he took no issue with the expansion of school property, in fact, probably viewed it as a tangible evidence of his professional legacy. They named the street after him.

Today I also live across the street from a high school. They say we repeat patterns, our parents’ patterns. I repeat my house patterns. I live across the street from the school, behind which run the train tracks. I hear the train sometimes when I lie in bed at night. My dwelling before this one and the one before that were also about the same distance from these tracks that curve through the city. I wonder sometimes if my migration pattern is triangulating, or circling in on something. 

The house I grew up in also has railway tracks run through the block it sits on. They are no longer in use, but when I lived there, I heard the trains, saw them sometimes too, I don’t remember if it was morning or evening or when I came home at lunch, they must have stopped traffic, the tracks swerve across our block to straighten out on the middle of a main street, I don’t remember the traffic, I was oblivious to some things. Funny, I remember the trains but only ever moving in one direction, due east, and then southward toward the border, I wonder if they ever came back. 

The house I call the house I grew up in is the house I lived in for only about seven years, but they were big years, the years of primary and middle school. It was the house I walked to school from and then returned to. We still had a black and white tv. The house the neighbour knocked on the door of to say he thought it was our kitten that had been run over on the next street. It was the house my father died in, the house my brother and sister separately each moved out of, and each moved back in again, the house where a baby squirrel dropped into our kitchen via some duct from the attic, the house with odd creaking noises, sometimes I was scared. The house you could climb out the bedroom window and sit on the roof of the addition. It was the only house on the street with a driveway, because it had a stable in back.

The school’s parking lot was across the street from the school, that is, on the same side of the street the first principal’s house was moved to. The parking lot was irregularly shaped, it did not touch our property, but you could glimpse it through the bushes at the back of the next door neighbours’ garden. I would cut through the parking lot sometimes on the way to the grocery store, or to Cathy’s house, but because of its shape, it wasn’t really a shortcut. Every spring, I would go into the far corner of the lot to tear down some lilacs for my mother for mother’s day. The first time was with my dad, and after he died the lilacs continued to seem like a good idea, my mom loved lilacs. It was only the last year we lived there, or maybe the last two years, that I thought to bring scissors. Probably my dad had, that first time, but in the intervening years I struggled, you can neither snap nor pluck a lilac branch, and this difficulty somehow expanded the illicitness of the operation, the lilacs were not public, and were not the school’s property, they breached the fence that separated a neighbouring garden from the fleet of cars, I knew they belonged to someone else and I liberated them anyway, but it was messy and violent.

I have a lilac tree outside my bedroom window now. Until last week, there was another tree symmetrically flanking my terrace, but it fell victim to a construction fence, or the construction workers, or the school’s expansion and revitalization plans. The building I live in now was built on concrete stilts. This winter we learned, as heavy machinery tore through the old annex building, that our basement has no wall. We stood on the sidewalk and peered into the cellar like it was some cutaway dollhouse, like I could just reach in to extract the garden chairs rather than lug them up the rickety ladder, through the trap door, across my art space and the dining room through the sliding doors.

Hyeseong Cho, The Silence 230914-1

Somehow all this helps to make Houses of Ravicka, by Renee Gladman, make sense. All this, and having travelled to places where there are no street signs, or you don’t know where to find the street signs, or the building numbers aren’t in order, or you discover a place you want to return to but you can never find it again.

First, I left my invisible structure and then I walked. No, first I breathed to descend my structure and then I set out to walk. My immediate neighbors did not seem to notice that my living differed from theirs in that my flat of rooms existed in a geometric impossibility. My rooms opened and closed depending on how air moved through my body, and their rooms did not open and close. For a long time, before I understood my breath, I was stuck in one strange light-filled room. [...] When I'm at home, everywhere I stand is the center space, a space surround by objects, and no matter how far I walk in one direction , the room comes and settles itself around me, until I breathe and am in another room, the room for sleeping, the room where I draw. [...] Living was like writing a long, immersive essay: inside something fluid and labyrinthine, where light shined in at odd angles, even during the new moon. Sleeping was a terrifying pause in writing. Walking was writing. Each room held an essay you wrote as you breathed and the subject of the essay usually had nothing to do with the function of the room, but maybe the room's architecture, for that day, was shaped by the quality of your thinking. First I breathed the steps to my house, and then I descended them. 

For more sensible commentary on this odd novel, see The White Review.

Coincidentally, while preparing to visit my hometown, I browse online for local art galleries and discover an artist who paints street windows and sudden walks. She cites an encounter with Franz Kafka's "The Street Window" as a window onto her perspective, an exploration of the "sudden exposure to the scrutiny of myriad gazes." I hope she's read Gladman, because the happy accident of me discovering her while reading Houses created new doorways for me to step through.

Gladman writes in the afterword:

I was now saying something about [architecture] that allowed me inside structures, no longer running my hand along the exteriors or standing outside looking up at the verticality of them but inside now, occupying space that is not visible from the other side of the wall.