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Well, I didn’t go to Avenue du Mont Royal. I felt like I was fading, as I finished dinner, and thought it was best to stick to close by where I was staying. This was one of these fateful decisions, or at least it was what shaped the night.

 

I started to walk back towards the AirBnb. Via Duluth, which has always been a favourite street to me—I thought I would go along it and then just end up back close to where I would fall to sleep. I had been meaning to stop at some place I’d passed on St-Laurent earlier, when I’d been dragging my bags up it, have a couple of beers and then go up to bed. But a couple blocks short of the Main, still on Duluth, I saw a second-floor-bar up inside on the building across the street. I stopped—because I was my first night in Montreal, so why pass by a fleeting inspiration? It won’t be this second ever again. So, across Duluth and up the stairs I went. Unlike the jazz place, there was still room. I got a seat at the bar, next to someone going over the draft of a story in French while sipping a wine. I got out the white sheets of my own draft, ordered a beer and set to get a head start on that project.

 

Got to the third page of what I’d brought to work on, while I was there. More than I expected to get done that first night, which was nothing. It got harder to work on it after I was done my second drink, but I was still more than satisfied. I sent my friend Matvey, who lives nearby in Vermont, a picture of the bar out of happiness, because we used to go to places like this.

 

Hey! Turns out Bar Suzanne (that’s the name of the place) is also Matvey’s latest favourite spot in town. Small world. He was quite happy when I sent him the picture, and he recommended I try the dumplings. I had already eaten, but what the hey, I’m in Montreal, so I tried them. They were good.

 

All this sounds silly and superficial, I know. but these things are draped in the emotions of a past. You have no idea what Montreal in general is draped in, for me. Everything in this city, down to the dust motes, is draped in all that for me. So I get a lot out of it past that layer I can put into words in a space like this.

 

I took his advice there and on where to go next—Big in Japan Bar, which is directly underneath where I’m staying—when I wasn’t even planning to go anywhere. This ended up shaping the entire night.

 

Big in Japan Bar looms large in memory. Nothing here is important but memory. I only when there once then, back in the Montreal phase of my life, but it does loom large. It’s important, is what I mean. Matvey showed it to me, that first and only time. How well do I remember it? I think he brought me there early one evening after we’d been on a long walk. The place would’ve had to have just opened that day. Matvey said you’d have to be early to avoid waiting in line outside. I listen to Charles Aznavour as I write this and something is thereby infused in it. La Boheme, if it matters, it is late and I am drunk.

 

Excuse the quality of this entry, because I wrote it drunk—even though I’m fixing it two days later, that is the context I found it in.

 

There wasn’t any line when I waltzed in this time: that might’ve been luck or it might’ve just been the eight years in between. That time, we sat down in the same seats I took this time. Or, roughly—but let me have the synchronicity.

 

Why is memory already so fragmentary? I want to remember details, but I have nothing I can call a narrative. I have flashes. I have snapshots.

 

But tonight: I order a champagne and the plate of artisanal chocolates, per Matvey’s recommendation, because he steers one in a good direction if you can handle the price tag. I finish that, get an impulsive martini, because the ingredient list is so odd (it has sake in it). It, unfortunately, just tastes like a martini. Something exotic on the nose, but still a martini. I would’ve left after that, except, as I was finishing it, the woman seated just across from me asked me what it was I was so intensely focused on.

 

 

I had had my nose in my notebook. Over the two drinks, I’d written a couple of little poems and the first notes of what became this entry you’re now reading. I tell her that. And we end up talking.

 

Justin and Diane: they were my company for the rest of the night. Sitting across from me, the two people other side of the flickering candlelight. The room fades to darkness as it passes behind them. I really had noticed them before—Justin was having beer, and seeing him have that made me aware of how much money I was spending on champagne and cocktails—but it hadn’t occurred to me that I might interact with them. I’m used to being an atom; it doesn’t occur to me that I’ll occur with anyone.

 

We all—the two other people nearby, over my right shoulder, eventually get roped in—start talking. The conversation is good. Since it’s clear I’m staying for longer now, I order a Manhattan, the other retro-classy choice, the sound of Otis Redding and an electric organ. Diane goes to Vancouver often, and likes the food there, and we talk about sushi on Robson St to the sound of Charles Aznavour—that is why he’s still in my life as I copy this out. She asks for recommendations and I give her some, off the top of my head. Because it is identical to the one she’s drinking from and because I’m distracting her, she picks up the candle’s glass and burns her hand. She flexes her hand against the heat in it and reaches for the glass with the other kind of flame, the one she can drink.

 

Justin hands me a two-panel dubble-dubble comic that has been ripped in two. He says the bartender gave it to him, and he asks me to explain it to him. It’s “Pud.” I remember “Pud.” Let’s see if I can remember the comic: first panel has our Pud filling a bubble bath, and he says he wants more bubbles. The next panel shows the outside of a house and bubbles are pouring out all the doors and windows. I had the two halves back to Justin and explain the joke is that he fills the bath too much and it consumes the whole house. It’s not really much of a joke, but I don’t say that. Diana suggests that it’s a pun on the name of the gum: double bubbles.

 

Haha. Ahaha ha. Ha. It’s a better joke than the comic could’ve come up with.

 

The music in that place is very good. Half of any place like that is the music. While I’m taking a moment of silence listening to that, the other two I mentioned are roped in properly. Zach and Brian. They ask for a poem, I wrote one. Here it is:

 

Brian and Zach

Eavesdropping

Got roped into the night

And we introduced each other

Humanity accumulates this way,

It forms clumps of event

And grows like that

And the night endures as an imprint

In ink of itself

And reclines in immortality there

Like the chipped and fading youth

Who live on the side of an excavated urn.

 

There it is, with very minor edits. Forgive me if it isn’t any good, I was several more drinks in by this point.

 

Everything past that point is going to be in flashes and fragments. It’s already a memory to me now, see, and I only have these notes in front of me to work with to build the narrative of it back up. You never do realize how fleeting a present moment is while it’s still the present, but it does hit you over the head when you’re trying to copy it all out in black and white like you were still there.

 

I asked Justin what it was like being a lawyer: he said that sometimes you feel like you’re fighting for something meaningful, fighting the good fight as they say, and that is the part that makes it worth it, and things click then; the other half of the time it feels like fighting for nothing. Like everything in the world, those two halves. I know those halves too. I tell him so.

 

The night is vanishing into smoke, like the day Charles G.D. Roberts wrote about that one old poem I forget the name of that I read that McGill once. Night is the day here. The whole world is smoke except for what we put into words and maybe even that. (See how drunk I am, scribbling this down? Or was—it’s really two days later, I’m recalling the smoke as best I can—but don’t think about that.)

 

What do you see when you blink?

 

This is a blink. All this is inside a blink. Tomorrow this will have been a blink, but look at all the population in it.

 

Diana asks for my impression of the two of them. I am on the spot, but I tell them. I am unusually honest, blame the drink, but I have nothing bad to say. I like Justin and Diane. I’ll keep my exact words between the three of us, because it was for them and not for all of you--but I said, more or less, that I thought they were honest and human.

 

Excuse me, for I am drunk.

 

The place is emptying out around us, and we’re still here. Never let anyone tell you that isn’t a good feeling, having the bar empty out around you as your night endures: we’re going to get to see if we outlive the candles.

 

The chanson continues; therefore life continues.

 

(There is an absurd amount of ice in the urinals here. They’re like American glasses of coca-cola.)

 

We all settle up, and our bills all come to the exact same amount. The bartender gets roped into conversation too, at this last moment. I think I may have given him one of my cards. He writes his name down on a napkin, as I put my coat on, because he’s the last person there whose name I don’t know. “Majd”—it means ‘Glory,’ he tells me. The three of us who’ve just paid up blow out the candles in front of us. I pick up the glass around the dead flame, hold it like something is in there.

 

Then we file out into the street. A man stumbles over from across the street, stares at us like he’s never seen people before. I give him a nod. Say goodnight to Justin and Diane, walk two doors over to the building I’m staying in—so much for an early night.