Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [154]
“Especially Saul. He’s so damn sensitive.”
“Or Professor Hopper, right, whom I made welcome in my home. Oh, excuse me. How is Blair?”
“He’s taking early retirement. We’re going to spend a year in London, where he can finally finish his biography of Keats.”
“There have already been about six. What in the hell has he got to say that’s new?”
“Barney, control your temper.”
“I beg your pardon. Saul’s the one with the hot temper, not me.”
“Saul’s your spitting image and that’s why you’re so rough on him.”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“Blair doesn’t want you reminding anybody that he once wrote for The American Exile in Canada.”
“Then why is he hiding behind your skirts? He could have phoned me himself.”
“He doesn’t know I’m making this call, and the real point of it, honestly, Barney, is that I’m worried about you and want you to see a doctor.”
“Give Blair a message for me. Another biography of Keats. Christ. Tell him I said there is absolutely no need for more books like artificially ripened tomatoes,” I said, hanging up before I could embarrass myself further.
I did not hear directly from Blair, but, soon enough, there came one of those WITHOUT PREJUDICE registered letters from his lawyers in Toronto. Their client, Professor Blair Hopper, Ph.D., had learned, through an application made to the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, that, in 1994, an anonymous letter had been sent to the principal of Victoria College, University of Toronto, stating that the aforementioned Professor Hopper, a known sexual deviant, had been sent to Canada by the FBI in 1969 to spy and report on the activities of American draft-dodgers. If this slander, totally without substance, were to be repeated in a forthcoming memoir, by Barney Panofsky, Professor Hopper reserved the right to sue the author and publisher. Enlisting the aid of Hughes-McNoughton, I wrote back, WITH PREJUDICE, to say I would never stoop to writing an anonymous letter, and if this vile accusation were repeated in public, I reserved the right to take legal action myself. I went out to register the letter and then had second thoughts. I took a taxi down to Notre Dame Street, bought a new typewriter, redid the letter, and registered it. Then I threw out my old machine, and the new one as well. I am not the son of a detective-inspector for nothing.
3
I’ve got a neighbour on the lake, one of an increasingly large number of TV pirates, who has installed a pizza-sized satellite dish that is against the law here because it picks up a hundred American channels not licensed in Canada. He manages to unscramble these channels by forking out thirty dollars for a decoder. I mention this only because, in my present state of decline, I suffer long nights when I receive a veritable jumble of pictures out of my past, but lack the means to unscramble them. I have wakened more than once recently no longer certain of what really happened that day on the lake. Wondering if I had corrected the events of that day even as I have embellished other incidents in my life, enabling me to appear in a more favourable light. To come to the point, what if O’Hearne was right? What if, just as that bastard suspects, I did shoot Boogie through the heart? I need to think I am incapable of such brutality, but what if I were in fact a murderer?
One night last week I surfaced, badly shaken from a nightmare in which I shot Boogie and stood over him as he convulsed, blood pumping out of his chest. Freeing myself from sweat-drenched sheets, I dressed and drove out to my cottage, arriving at dawn. I wandered through the woods, hoping that the site would jog my memory, leading me to the scene of my alleged crime, in spite of how much growth there had been since Boogie had disappeared some thirty-something years ago. I got lost. I panicked. All at once, I didn’t know where these woods were or what I was doing there. I must have sat on a fallen log for hours, pulling on a Montecristo, and then I heard music, far from celestial, coming from somewhere. I walked toward it until I found myself on my cottage