The Strangers' Gallery (11 page)

I didn't query that one. We moved on down the corridor toward the presidential suite. Everyone else had gone inside. The boardroom looked like a hospital ward—two casualties had their legs in casts—and all the pain in the room seemed to be focused in the grim face of our director, Alasdair “Alice” McKeever, still recovering from a serious operation. We had begun to call him Alice after hearing his wife call him that at a departmental social many years ago, though we discovered later—seeing a post-it message from her on his office door—that she spelled it “Alas.” Alas, it was then too late. As he looked down the table past the black eyes, caged heads, and plaster-casted limbs, he seemed to be trying to stretch his lips into a sympathetic grimace of a smile, which ruefully waxed and waned. Poor Alice was probably in more pain than any of us.

At our June meeting, he had informed us that he needed an operation and would be taking short-term leave. He was suffering from a form of temporomandibular joint dysfunction called “internal derangement,” he explained, oblivious to all the hands that had risen to hide the smiles. The TJs, as his oral surgeon called them, are the hinges that connect the skull to the jawbone, and are the most complicated joints in the body. With internal derangement, the disks in the joints keeping the lower jawbone and the skull from rubbing against each other are out of their normal position and have to be reshaped and sewn back into place.

Internal derangement: Alice, who was generally well liked, whose only real flaw as a manager was that he had no sense of humour whatsoever, had given us this tasty morsel of mockery material, along with a detailed explanation of his condition, without blinking an eye. All authority—even the most well-respected and kindliest kind—being subject to routine and usually harmless undermining, you can well imagine what we did with that.

I laid my secretary's notebook on the table and sat down beside Katrina Maunder, the new acquisitions librarian—well, not that new, she'd been here at least a year—whom Elaine's old flame, Stuart A. Rowsell, had described as “too beautiful to look at.” He had, nevertheless, been busy not only looking but trying to acquire. She plays viola in the orchestra, and the first time the subject of her avocation had come up over coffee, she tried to hide her dismay at the lack of musical sophistication amongst us. In response to someone confusing the viola with the cello, she replied, innocently enough, “No, it's not the one you hold between your legs. The viola is like an oversized violin.” I could see, however, that Stuart had seized upon the idea of Katrina as cellist rather than violist. His eyes had become oversized, dilated with desire, as he imagined himself, her instrument of pleasure, resonating between the legs of the beautiful Katrina.

She now had an oversized, insulated steel mug of coffee in front of her, perhaps anticipating a long meeting. After the agenda was approved and the minutes reviewed, the concerns of our young intern, Colm Veitch, were the first item of business, deferred at our last meeting. He is pursuing archival studies at UBC, and interning with us for another semester. After treating us to a mini-history of information storage—from clay tablets and animal skins to CD-ROMs, by way of papyrus, parchment, vellum, rag paper, wood paper, microfilm, and microfiche—and reminding us that more than 90 percent of the books in the Research Library are less than one hundred years old and thus had been printed on acidic wood-pulp paper, he proffered the grave prediction that within another hundred years, at best, they all will have crumbled to dust.

He said there was a more pressing issue, however; it was not the books, but the book-keepers, who were in immediate danger. Our fire extinguishing system was obsolete, he announced. (I recalled that he had mentioned this to me when he was here last summer, but just in passing. He was brand new on the job, a mere student assistant, and had not been bold enough to make an issue of it.) It was a so-called dry system, he said, using concentrated CO2, designed to protect irreplaceable documents and books. In the event of a fire, and the sounding of the alarm, the ventilation system would immediately shut off. We would then have only sixty seconds to evacuate before the gas was released.

He had noticed the red cylinders all over the building, but as far as he could make out there were no separate zones with independent release systems, so the entire supply of gas would be expelled all at once throughout the building. To be effective, it all must be expelled within ten seconds, shooting from the tanks at extremely high velocities. If by chance the alarm didn't go off, the odorless, colourless gas would asphyxiate everyone instantly without any warning symptoms. An “accidental dump,” as it was called, was not all that uncommon. One had occurred just recently in an air traffic control tower, he said, where the gas was used instead of liquid in order to protect sensitive electronic equipment. Fire investigators couldn't figure out why the system went off.

There was a long silence after Colm's revelations, as if we were already mourning the death by asphyxiation of several members of our archival crew. We were all waiting for chairman Alice to speak. He seemed to be searching for something among his papers, trying to talk by opening his lips but not his teeth. Finally, without any discussion whatsoever, he struck an ad hoc committee to neutralize Colm's concerns, if not the acid and the CO2.

The main reason for Alice's hesitations, his unresponsiveness, his great difficulty in speaking, was that after surgery his jaws had been wired shut to reduce movement. If his nose became blocked, however, problems might ensue, and it was rumoured that he carried a pair of wire cutters in his pocket in case of emergency. No wonder that the threat of fire and pestilence and imminent destruction might not seem like such a big deal to him. He might have been worried about asphyxiation, but for a different reason altogether. His face had a funereal aspect at the brightest of times, but he now looked desperate, on the verge of weeping.

I knew that Alice would never bring up the real problem, however, which I felt I had accidentally diagnosed after reading about his condition in the
Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
. One afternoon, while waiting to speak with someone in the medical library about some archival documents in the Founders' Archive, I read in this hefty, authoritative tome that the root of the temporomandibular joint problem was stress, which caused a person to clench and grind his teeth, making the muscles and ligaments around the joints tight and painful. The problem, in other words, was not in the joints but in the joint—the one he directed, the Archives, the various parts of which would not take direction, from him or anyone else.

The next item on the agenda was the ongoing question of faculty access to the Research Library stacks. First, students had been denied access because of persistent theft. Surprisingly, the thefts had continued, so faculty had also been denied access, leading to much acrimonious grievance and protest—the Troubles, as we now referred to it, for a professor emeritus of Irish history was rumoured to be behind the campaign. Today a petition from the entire history department was presented,
demanding
free access. Alice was in no mood for this and, again without any discussion, struck another ad hoc committee. Then he suddenly excused himself from the rest of the meeting.

As discussion had been pre-empted for the first two agenda items, we went off on quite a few tangents for the remaining ones, and though I know I'm not required to minute all these digressions—arguments, complaints, enthusiasms, diagnoses, miseries—I usually do, for they're generally more interesting than the actual agenda. Ergo, I'm always the one with his head down at meetings—and not just meetings, but lectures, conferences, workshops, and symposiums—diligently recording almost everything that's said. Sometimes there's no agenda, no program, no formal paper; or the presenter will not make it available, or departs from his text; or the most interesting information comes out of the questions at the end. I've witnessed—and recorded—some emotional free-for-alls.

I write down everything, in fact, though I'm not a writer, just a self-appointed, obsessive recording clerk. It's a job no one else wants, at least in my experience, in all the organizations I've ever belonged to. My colleagues jokingly refer to me as a “recording artist,” but no, heaven forbid, not a writer. All those drafts, revisions—visions and revisions—reconstructions, amendments, without any hope of an amen. For a recording secretary, a humbler scribe, the first draft, thank god, is usually the last—except of course for the clean copy, the typed copy, and I have been known to make more than one. And then, I've noticed, curious things happen, corruptions of the most innocent kind. There must be an artistic impulse in all of us!

When I was in Literary Manuscripts about ten years ago, I will never forget reading on the last page of the “final” draft of one of the landmarks of our literature: “Abandoned, August 15, 1969.” This was on the last of a dozen drafts, most of them handwritten, the last two or three done on a manual typewriter, a manuscript of more than five hundred pages. And still with hundreds—no, thousands—of changes and corrections. I thought of Dante's inscription over the gates of Hell: “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” And what is surely our greatest proverb: “We must live in hopes, supposing we die in despair.” Hope is surely the most incurable of the human virtues.

What is Miles's grave nostalgia, his melancholic mania, but a great withering hope, imbued with an unquenchable thirst for justice. He remembers…he remembers…he remembers…everything. “The history of the Colony is only very partially contained in printed books,” Prowse wrote in A
History of Newfoundland
. “It lies buried under great rubbish heaps of unpublished records…in rare pamphlets…forgotten manuscripts…” And not just unpublished, rare, and forgotten, but lost, destroyed, unwritten, and unspoken. Yet archived—
darkived
—in minds, hearts, and souls, Miles Harnett's not least among them.

A darkive, indeed.
Just
asc
.

It's worth remembering that the word
record
means “memory” or “remembrance,” from the Old French word
record
; the Latin word
recordari
means “to remember” as well. And
cor,
of course, refers to the heart. Memory, the oral tradition, our first archive, long before so-called recorded history, when the only records were what was learned by heart—stories, mainly, which were changed in the telling. Of course, the oral tradition, like the past itself, as some wag once remarked, is not what it used to be.

I myself am a print-bound child of Confederation. History for us began, as Miles has taken every opportunity to remind me, in 1949, and this neurotic note-taking on anything and everything is more than just the archivist's curse. I've never trusted memory, so now my memory—for so-called facts, at least—is so bad from lack of use that I can't remember anything, which makes me even more anxious about forgetting things, and more obsessive about writing them down than ever.

At last count I've filled one hundred and twenty notebooks, the old black hardcovers that you can use on your knee. I started them about twenty years ago, when, freshly minted from archival summer school in Ottawa, I heard one of our pre-eminent historians reproach us for our embarrassing record-keeping heritage—the carelessness, the neglect, the deliberate destruction of personal, mercantile, ecclesiastical, and government records. What has been saved is just a fraction of what was created. We should be more than just sorters, sifters, and keepers. We live in a place with five hundred years of history, but our archives are less than forty years old.

After leaving work I ventured to the edge of the tch, the trans-campus highway, to pick up the trail along Rennie's River. After eight, sometimes ten, hours of stale air, dry heat, and artificial light—especially if I've spent half a day at a cantankerous meeting, or in the Rare Book Vault (the Tomb, as we call it), where all our rare and irreplaceable books and documents are stored—the walk along the river trail feels like a resurrection. Birdsong, sunshine, rushing water, a fresh breeze. The flowers, the trees, the light, the air! Today it felt as if summer had started again. Indian summer, perhaps, though it felt like winter the week after Anton arrived.

Halfway down the trail, I thought of my young colleague, Colm Veitch, still interred in the Tomb, still beavering away when I left just before six o'clock. A tireless and obsessive worker, he went back down there after our meeting. He will undoubtedly find a place with us when he's finished his degree. He seems oblivious of his surroundings; bare beige wall or babbling brook is all the same to him. When on the scent of new and exciting archival revelations, he has been known to work up to sixteen hours a day, barely stopping for a bite to eat. But he's very young, only half my age, and has the stamina and enthusiasm for it, the heartwarming idealism.