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By Root 1067 0

reputation as a sexual conquistador that led to the performance-art project he was now two-thirds of the way through: The Alpha Bet. It wasn’t Norval’s idea; it arose from the brain of a colleague at the U of Q, a drunken erotologist named Antoine Blorenge. The terms: Norval had to seduce an alphabet’s worth of women, in A to Z order according to Christian name, within a six-month span. Twenty-six women in twenty-six weeks. The proof: “artistic” photographs of the women at his place or theirs, digitally dated, and Norval’s word of honour that a sex act of some sort had occurred, unpurchased. The stakes: if he succeeded, Norval would receive a $26,000 bursary from the Federal Arts Council. Dr. Blorenge happened to be head of the jury that year. If he failed, Norval would have to teach Sunday School at the university’s interfaith chapel for twenty-six weeks, while refraining from sex of any kind, including the self-assisted variety, for the same duration. Again, word of honour. Many sins had been committed in Norval’s elastic theology, but going back on his word was not one of them. The only hitch so far: Dr. Édith Dallaire, Head of Women’s Studies, had somehow gotten wind of the project.

Noel’s brain, meanwhile, had been taken over by a mantric inner voice: Samira Samira … How could he not think of her? He’d been in love with her for years, in his fantasy world, and now he’d met her. And now she was endangered, alphabetically endangered! He would have to do something to prevent this … anti-art, this lettricide …

Breaking in on these thoughts was the anti-artist himself, holding a foot-long Toblerone in one hand and a burning cigarette butt in the other. He took one last Herculean drag, inhaling the fumes of the filter, before ashing it against the chair in front of him.

“No smoking in the theatre!” the same hairless man shouted, from several rows down.

“Shut up, you fat fuck!” was Norval’s arch reply. He then sat down, slouching in his seat, knees up. He reached into his pocket for a small tin of aspirin, which Noel suspected contained something else.

For at least a quarter minute, his temperature rising, Noel glared at his friend. Norval slowly turned his head. “And you would be gaping at … what, exactly?”

“Have you ever thought about …” The siege of The Alpha Bet was the subject Noel wanted to broach, but he’d already expressed his views on it, quite plainly. He’d also tried to explain that he had a terrible feeling about it—a premonition of danger, of disaster—but Norval wouldn’t listen. Norval scorned presentiment and superstition. Now, however, there was a new element in the equation: Samira Darwish. Was she part of the premonition? “Have you ever thought about …” Ending this mad enterprise is what Noel wanted to say, but still the words wouldn’t come out. All he could express was childish anger, bravado. “What is there, Nor, except for mindless whoring, that I can’t do better than you?”

Unfazed by its tone, Norval pondered the question to the count of two. “First, with this bar, I can hit that bald shitwagon sitting six rows down; second, I can swim across the Saint Lawrence River at its broadest point; and third, I can give you one hell of a good thrashing.”

Noel nodded. He couldn’t deny any of this, or summon a return thrust of any kind.

“Right,” said Norval. “So tell me what’s going on in this dungeon laboratory you’ve been going on about. Transforming lead into gold? Uranium into plutonium?”

Noel was upset. And when he got upset words confused him, bled into other letters from other times. So it wasn’t surprising when the symbols for lead and gold, both the chemical and alchemical (Pb, Au; , leeched into his brain, followed by the opening line from Miss Julie (“Miss Julie’s mad again tonight—absolutely mad!”) since Strindberg, he’d read the night before, was interested in alchemy. With a concentration that hurt, he attempted first to decode Norval’s words, and then to formulate a clever retort. “No, I … I’m not transforming lead into gold.”

“But you are up to something. The black arts? Frankenscience?