The Garneau Block by Todd Babiak Read Free Book Online Page B

Let’s Fix It notice out of his jacket pocket and slid it over the silver, uneven table. “What do you make of this?”
    A couple of Harleys passed while Barry examined the sheet. David plugged his ears. Albertans didn’t need any moregovernment interference in their lives, but there ought to be some restrictions on noise. He took out his notepad and jotted down “Harley noise” as a resolution to be debated at next Tuesday’s PC Association meeting.
    â€œThis is amazing.” Barry nodded at the sheet of paper.
    â€œIt’s about the shooting next door. Where Benjamin–”
    â€œMaybe sure, but it’s really about the city, the province, the country, the continent. This is about effin’ George W. Bush. It’s about the humans, David, don’t you get it?” Barry waved the sheet. “Can I have this?”
    â€œThere’s thirty of them on my block.”
    Barry stuffed the paper into his duffel bag, with the street magazines. “This changes everything.”
    The street paper salesman started to his corner. David opened the magazine to Barry’s essay, began to read, and felt anxious. He hugged Garith, who shivered in the cool morning air. It wasn’t the prospect of declining oil supplies, of course. David just strongly felt the lack of a caramel mochaccino, and he knew his wife did too.

 
    12
    understanding godlessness
    T he weekly meeting of the philosophy department was held in an expansive room on the fourth floor of the HumanitiesBuilding, overlooking the jogging trails on Saskatchewan Drive and the river beyond. Thirty years ago, these meetings were populated by forty-five men, all of them wearing suits and smoking cigarettes. They never scheduled classes on meeting days, so nearly everyone sipped Scotch out of coffee cups. As Raymond recalled these meetings, and his youth, he closed his eyes in wonder. How handsome he had been, how droll, and envied by his aging mentors.
    In 2005, professors drank coffee, vegetable juice, or bottled water. Nearly half of the attendees wore jeans, shorts, or sweatpants. The men still outnumbered the women but not for long; nearly all the young assistant and associate professors were female. The few men hired into the department were either gay or foreign. Once the tenured brontosauruses like Raymond Terletsky retired, the dominion of the white male would end, finally, and women could rule as the great pagan gods intended.
    A Running Room group, in matching white T-shirts, passed on the Drive below. In the bright late-morning sun, their black shorts and tights gleamed. Some were chubby, others not so chubby, and a few were in spectacular shape. Mothers, Raymond assumed, working off those pregnancy pounds. He wished, variously, that he was running behind the women and that he was alone in the meeting room with a pair of binoculars. How far could he run without stopping or suffering a massive stroke? When was the last time he had actually gone for a jog? Either 1967 or ’68.
    â€œRaymond?”
    â€œYes.”
    Half the room erupted in laughter. Obviously, Claudia had been calling his name for some time. “Am I interrupting? Were you figuring out a new application for Tractatus Logicophilosophicus ?”
    More laughter. Even though he stopped seriously studying Wittgenstein in the early 1980s, Raymond’s opponents in the department still brought up the now-unfashionable subject of his dissertation. “I was looking at some joggers, actually, critiquing their bums.”
    The other half of the room, a collection of Raymond’s beleaguered and sickly peers in old blazers, fleece jackets, and Birkenstocks, broke out in laughter. Then a few of them trundled into coughing fits.
    â€œIt says here you now have only five students registered for your Death in Philosophy seminar.”
    Claudia lifted her black thousand-dollar spectacles and looked at her watch. “If you lose one more this