Mar 24

01

THE ONDAATJE MEMOS

* * *

[Ad Agency]

Darkness between the deadline and ourselves.

I write this, my hands poised as if over a marionette, each depression of key and corresponding letter adding incremental pressure to the air that surrounds. My brow rippled like a mackerel sky, like the concentric circles of a stone skipped across nervous water.

I poured coffee in a cup for my soul.

Today the Client stood, here, indifferent to the tortured cries of practical time, and stated, in a clear voice engorged with blood, that dates will not change, no matter the winds. His fingertips met like mating seahorses. He closed his eyes and eschewed equivocation.

And so if, when the clock looks at once straight up and down, I have not yet signed off on final layouts, your employment, like the perfume of she who is unseen for days, will evaporate.

Michael

[Law Office]

The enclosure of memory we came to call Johnson vs. The People of Ontario has awakened again, like a bear whose hunger calls out, like the engine of a Fokker triplane escaping its hangar.

My eye alongside its memory.

In advance of a gathering, you will rise from your tasks. And soon. You will rise and comb the drawers of silent recollection, and gather into expanding envelopes the colour of an infant’s gifts the leaves of foolscap that belong. That speak. Past.

Michael

[Movie Studio]

From a dream soaked in cardamom and persimmon juice I awoke, my face pressed flat in a pool of saliva on page seven.

My opinion of this script now rests with you.

Michael