In the City of Pigs Audiobook by André Forget

Tantor

Audio, a division of Recorded Books,

presents

In

the City of Pigs, by André Forgé. Narrated by Andrew Joseph Perez.

My

words appear to leave you cold.

Poor

babes, I

will

not be your scolder. Reflect,

the

devil, he is old. To understand him,

best

grow older. Goethe, Faust, Part 2.

First

Movement,

The

City of Pigs. One.

I

have nothing to say about Montreal.

I

remember

only

the slow inevitability of the train pulling out of Central Station, the benevolent red glow of the Five Roses sign,

the

whiteness of the year's first snow sprinkling the trackside. Montreal was a dream from which I awoke as we sped past the Lake of Two Mountains,

a

patchwork of brown, nocturnal memories,

a

puddle of piss turning to steam on the sidewalk.

We

left the last suburbs behind us.

The

beverage cart came by and I ordered a drink.

The

porter flipped open the tab of the beer can with a disdainful thumb. I could tell he thought I was a train drunk.

He

didn't understand that this was not a thoughtless or routine drink, but a drink laden with ritual meaning. Drunk to memorialize the end of a catastrophe, and not, therefore, subject to the usual conventions governing alcohol consumption.

He

placed the can on the tray in front of me, covered by a superfluous plastic cup,

and

I felt only pity. Outside the window, dead fields lay under a dusting of snow so fine the darkness of the furrowed earth was still visible.

It

was the last day of November. Laptops snapped open around me, and my fellow passengers pulled up their spreadsheets and quarterly reports.

I

had no work to do.

I

turned to the window and listened to Glenn Gould's recording of the Brahms intermezzo on my phone.

I

was in a sentimental mood, and nothing has ever been more sentimental than Gould's fingers landing on the opening cords of that E-flat major intermezzo.

There

was nothing outside the window but farmers' fields and ditches and forests. Occasionally, a small town's asphalt roofs and dejected steeples passed by.

The

only indication we were leaving one unhappy province and entering another was the signposts. Towns named for polysyllabic saints gave way to towns named for colonial administrators.

And

yet I couldn't look away. Montreal had died for me so the rest of the world could come alive.

I

hadn't been to Toronto in years, but the city had, over the past months, taken on a dense significance in my mind.

This

was not because of Gould and his delicate E-flat major intermezzo. Gould's Toronto had disappeared decades ago, buried under condo towers and chain pharmacies.

If

anything, the more or less complete erasure of the city Gould had known made it possible to imagine moving there. Toronto attracted me in direct proportion to the claustrophobia and disgust I felt walking the streets of Montreal.

The

city, as it existed in my mind, was an elaborate perversion.

A

glassy necropolis where skinny men in Tiger of Sweden suits ran free beneath a sky refracted and colored glass. A vulgar and frictionless place, a city that could now never produce a Gould.

My

fellow passengers were staring at their screens, sleek in their cotton blazers and wool ties.

Their

proximity thrilled me.

I

wanted to follow these people into their twelfth-floor condos and watch them send one last email while leaning against Formica-topped islands, drinking glasses of $20 Chianti.

To

wait outside their bathroom doors while they listened to Alt-Pop and brushed their teeth. To watch them get two pages into some CBC-recommended novel before going back to their phones and eventually falling asleep nestled amid enormous pillows.

The

lives of these people seemed impossibly exotic.

Perhaps

I, too, might find a middle management job at a bank where I would spend my days denying people loans.

My

face would grow smooth from shaving, I would get a gym membership, and I would invite sophisticated older women to join me at the symphony.

I

would surprise them with charming anecdotes about the lives of German Baroque composers and smile mysteriously when they asked me where I'd learned such things. Soothed by these fantasies and calmed by the gentle rocking of the train, I fell into a light sleep somewhere west of Kingston.

The

snow had turned to rain by the time we got to Toronto.

I

stepped out onto a platform that smelled of diesel and rusting metal. Descending into the warren of corridors and half-finished hallways beneath the station, the people I had been watching with such curiosity became hunched and ordinary, diminished by arrival.

It

took me several attempts to locate the exit.

When

I finally emerged from the underground, I found myself on a large plaza bounded on one side by the blank façade of Union Station and on the other by an ostentatious hotel.

There

was a line of taxis waiting with lit lanterns.

I

walked up the main avenue, away from the station, suitcase banging against my leg.

The

pavements were slippery beneath my feet.

Everything

seemed to be closed.

I

had thought to catch a streetcar a few blocks north, but the misting rain turned into a proper downpour.

Cold

water trickled down the inside of my collar.

I

took shelter in a construction passageway and waved my arm at a passing cab.

The

address I had been given meant nothing to me, but the driver wordlessly pulled away from the curb and into the stream of traffic heading west.

He

was following a foreign language program on the radio with great interest.

We

drove down narrow corridors threaded between tall towers, whose sides glowed black and orange in the darkness, through blinking intersections and echoing boulevards.

The

skyscrapers gave way to older, more human architecture.

The

streets became cheerful and welcoming, lined with boutiques and restaurants that had the kind of expensively dirty look that marks a cresting wave of gentrification.

After

blocks of parks and promenades and increasingly dingy bars, the driver pulled up beside a storefront.

It

was completely empty, save for an old soccer ball that had what appeared to be a cactus growing out of it.

A

series of numerals and diacritical marks were plastered over the entrance.

He

looked back at me expectantly, and I gathered that we had arrived.

I

paid the fare and stepped into the rain with my suitcase.

There

was a black door with a tarnished lion's head knocker beside the mysterious shop,

and

above the lintel was the address I'd been given.

The

handle wouldn't open, and the number I had been told to call when I arrived went straight to voicemail.

The

rain was falling more softly now,

and

the wet asphalt mirrored the golden light of the street lamps into a yellow sky.

I

sat on my suitcase in the shelter of the awning and sent a text.

The

minutes ticked past.

I

was almost resigned to a night in the park when I heard a clatter of steps and the turning of a deadbolt.

The

door swung open,

and

framed in the darkness was a man wearing a pair of old sweatpants and a t-shirt advertising a sinister-looking hot dog franchise.

He

blinked unhappily in the cold, started to speak, and then cleared his throat and tried again. It's not the first, is it?

He

asked in a way that suggested he was aware of the date.

I

nodded silently. Are you sure? Yes, I said. I mean, technically.

The

arrangement I made with Charles, he said I could arrive evening of the 30th.

I

was under the impression he'd cleared that with you. Uh-huh. I'm Alexander Otkozov.

I

believe we corresponded about me subletting the apartment.

This

was more a statement than a question, but

I

was standing on an unknown street in a strange city, with everything I owned packed in a suitcase, and I hesitated to make the point more forcefully.

That

was probably in the

email, wasn't it?

I

believe so. Right. Okay, well,

come

in

then. He

led me up a narrow flight of stairs that terminated in a dark room.

The

man gestured to a short hallway leading to the front of the building.

You're

in the room at the end. That was Charles's.

I'm

at the back. Sasha is next to you. Washroom is on the other side of the kitchen.

I'm

working early tomorrow, but I can show you around the rest of the place in the evening. Or Sasha can. Or you can show yourself around. It's not a big apartment.

I'm

Ted, by the way.

He

said, extending his hand.

I

shook it and felt calluses on his upper palm and on the pads of his fingers. Pleasure to meet you, Ted.

Make

yourself comfortable, or whatever.

Ted

disappeared into the darkness at the back of the apartment, and I carried my suitcases to my room.

It

was completely bare, with a bay window overlooking the street.

I

took off my coat

and

laid a towel on the floor beside one of the walls, padding the pie out with a few sweaters, and lay down.

The

ceiling was covered in whorls of textured plaster.

The

pale, periodic chime of a streetcar bell rang outside the window.

I

listened to the mechanical shudder

of

great metal bodies stopping and starting until somewhere in

the

depths of the night I fell asleep.

Two I

awoke the next morning to pale light

shining

through the dirty glass of the window, illuminating things I had not noticed in the dark.

The

walls were cracked and discolored, cross-hatched with scratches and lines where furniture had been moved and repositioned and moved again.

The

closet doors hung at odd angles, and there was a slant to the floor that inclined me toward the wall.

These

imperfections had a comforting effect.

However

much money there was in Toronto, the neighborhood I had moved into was marked by a reassuring kind of decay.

I

might have stayed there in the crook of the floor the entire morning had the need to use a washroom not impressed itself on me.

The

hallway was stygian after the winter light,

and

I didn't notice until I was halfway through the living room that I was not alone. Stretched out under a blanket on a green paisley divan, there was a woman reading a magazine.

Good

morning, she said, looking up. Welcome to Toronto.

The

woman's dark eyes were framed by a square-cut bob,

and

she was wearing a crimson house coat that looked like it had come from a period drama.

She

did not seem surprised to see me.

Are

you Sasha?

Yes. I'm

Alexander.

I

know.

You

got the email, then.

I got

the email.

Sasha

returned to her magazine, and I made my way to the bathroom.

It

was covered in beige ceramic tile, and there were intricate arabesques of mold on the ceiling.

The

toilet didn't flush very well, and I detected the unhappy scent of rotting drywall.

A

variety of male and female grooming products were arrayed on every available surface.

Do

you want some coffee? Sasha asked when I emerged. You can help yourself,

she

gestured toward a half-full French press on the counter.

On

the stove next to it, a very large stainless steel pot was bubbling with a brownish liquid that smelled agricultural.

I

poured a cup of coffee and sat down on the only other piece of furniture in the living room, a sort of low bank of mattress foam covered in an afghan, mounted on what appeared to be milk crates.

The

coffee tasted much better than I expected it to.

Sorry

about that, Sasha said, looking up from her magazine. Ted built it last summer. He's become very attached to it.

I

don't want you to get the impression we can't afford a second couch. Ted just prefers to make his own furniture. It's his name on the lease, so...

It's

quite comfortable. I'd be careful with that kind of politeness. He might insist on building you a bed.

I

do need a bed, actually. Charles hadn't mentioned, yeah, I think he actually meant to leave you some furniture, but the bed he was using belonged to an, uh, ex or something, and she came by to pick it up a couple of weeks ago. I'd take a careful look at Ted's bed before you take him up on any carpentry offers.

As

it turned out, Ted had put his skills to work on a number of domestic construction projects. The living room was smaller than it had seemed the night before, a series of shelves in fantastical geometric shapes hanging from the walls and suspended from the ceiling using hooks and rope.

It

opened onto an equally small kitchen done in blue Mediterranean tile work. Most of the shelves were empty. Sasha encouraged me to use as much room as I wanted.

He

found this old turntable and hi-fi system by the side of the street last summer and decided he was going to get into record collecting and built all these shelves to store the records he was going to buy, but he only picked up, like, four albums by bands his university friends were in and then lost interest. That's all we really listen to, so if you've got books or records or whatever, feel free.

I've

been using them to store back issues of Vogue,

trying

to raise the tone around here, you know.

Did

you bring any records?

That's

a shame.

I'm

getting a bit sick of Ted's collection, to be honest. Sasha slid gracefully from the divan and tied the belt of her dressing gown around her narrow waist.

In

her slippers, she was nearly as tall as I was.

She

had the purposeful walk of someone used to running things.

The

apartment was a long, narrow rectangle, with rooms stacked back from the street one behind the other.

The

main living area divided mine and Sasha's rooms at the front from Ted's at the back.

A

narrow corridor running beside Ted's room connected these common spaces to a long rooftop patio that opened onto the back alley.

An

extensive network of gardens had been built along the cinderblock parapets of the rooftop, and out of these poured a jungle of dead vegetable matter. Plastic planter pots dotted the concrete deck, and here and there could be seen the withered remains of tomato plants clinging grimly to bamboo stakes.

A

large trough of earth running along the back wall of the roof had a tree growing out of it.

It's

paradise in the summer, said Sasha, leading me back inside. So long as you don't mind the raccoons, or the rats, or the smell of bad meat.

The

dumpster out back belongs to the butchers next door. We throw our garbage in there at night. Otherwise, we'd have to buy bags from the city. Sasha's main job was waiting tables at a restaurant, but she also reviewed art shows for one of the local newspapers.

She

had moved in with Ted the year before after a breakup had forced her out of a third-floor loft in one of the cooler retrofitted warehouse buildings off Queen West.

It

was the best apartment I've ever lived in. Sean was absolutely not the best boyfriend I've ever had, but his apartment?

You're

from Montreal, so maybe you don't understand. Sasha and Ted had done fine art degrees at the same university, but she'd stopped booking shows a couple of years after graduation because she was tired of writing explanatory essays.

I

made an abstract painting. It uses a lot of red. Do I really need to pretend it's a meditation on menstrual blood and the Catholic Church? I mean, Jesus Christ.

She

was quick to explain that she wasn't planning on staying in the apartment long. In fact, she was constantly on the lookout for new places. It was just hard to argue with the rent. $450 for a bedroom with a back roof, a decent kitchen, and three excellent bars within a two-minute walk?

Take

that into account, and living with Ted really isn't so bad.

So

what's your thing? She asked, taking a seat by the kitchen window and lighting a cigarette.

You

a sculptor? A DJ? Not really.

Does

that mean you have, like, an artistic practice that you never actually do? Or do you mean you're actually not an artist and know Charles through axe-throwing or something?

I

don't know Charles through axe-throwing.

Yeah,

you don't seem

like the type.

I

trained as a pianist.

Right.

It didn't work out.

I

coughed politely.

I

wasn't generally opposed to smoking indoors, but

Sasha

had forgotten to open the window, and the kitchen had quickly filled with a yellowy haze.

Sasha

began frantically jerking the window up with one hand and waving the clouds of smoke into the narrow alley between our building and the next.

I

always forget to do that,

she

said apologetically.

She

slid the pack of cigarettes across the table.

Help

yourself. It'll give your lungs a chance to build up some resistance.

We

sat by the window, smoking, and I gave an abbreviated version of how I had come to leave Montreal. Sasha was inquisitive, but easily bored, and before long the conversation moved on to other things.

I

was grateful.

Sasha

was beautiful, in an aristocratic way that was both intimidating and vaguely asexual, and she had a kind of energetic detachment that made me feel like I was being interviewed for an extremely cool job I wasn't qualified for.

It

was very stimulating.

So

you don't, like, have work or anything? Sasha finally asked after I finished explaining that I no longer had any real confidence in the potential of contemporary art music to radically expand the horizons of piano repertoire in particular, and the Western musical tradition in general.

Not

exactly. Charles sort of suggested you had a few things lined up.

He

said rent wasn't going to be an issue.

It

won't be. Right. The thing is, this city has a way of eating into your savings account. Not to put too fine a point on it.

I

can put in a word for you with the manager at the place where I'm working if you decide you want to supplement your revenue stream.

It's

a kind of high-end brunch spot down on King Street.

The

tips are good, everything else is bad, but I make more in two months serving three shifts a week there than I used to make working an entire semester as a sessional instructor. So,

you

know,

think

about it. Sasha had said all this so matter-of-factly that it was hard to tell whether she was concerned about the possibility of my skipping out on the rent or was merely being polite.

I

told her I'd let her know.

She

briskly explained a few further elements of housekeeping to me, including that I was under no circumstances to eat any of Ted's jam

and

stubbed out her cigarette on a saucer and flicked it into the alley. Wrapping her housecoat tightly around her shoulders, she returned to the divan and took up her magazine.

I

sat at the window until the last ribbon of smoke disappeared.

Three. In

the days that followed, I established

a routine of rewarding leisure. I slept until late in the morning, and in the afternoon took long walks through the west end and down to the lakefront.

The

weather, though cold, lacked the vicious edge I had gotten used to in Montreal.

Each

day brought new diversions.

I

explored the boutiques of Queen West and the last remaining Maltese cafes of the junction.

I

cut my way through the stench of new money and Catholic nostalgia on Roncesvalles and Little Italy.

I

watched the swans beat each other for crusts of bread by the breakwater.

I

became acquainted with the midnight world of Ossington Avenue.

My

senses seemed sharper, the world denser and more textured.

Those

frosty December days were not without their anxieties, but

I

still remember very clearly certain details from those walks.

Ted

got home from work at seven o'clock most nights, and the majority of Sasha's restaurant shifts were for brunch.

In

the evening, we would gather in the kitchen and listen to one of Ted's four records and talk about what had or had not happened to us that day.

Ted

had a connoisseur's attitude toward beer, and the endless pots bubbling on the stovetop were the mash for his homebrew.

We

drank out of mason jars while Ted led me point by point through the beer-making process,

and

what distinguished a pilsner from a lager. Sasha didn't bother to feign interest. She'd heard all this before,

and

she considered beer to be calorically wasteful.

Her

preference was for extremely dirty martinis made with cheap gin and expensive vermouth.

Sasha

was one of the few Torontonians actually born there.

Her

parents had emigrated from Hong Kong in the 1980s,

and

during their first decade in Toronto established a small design firm specializing in print advertising in English and Cantonese.

Their

venture was so successful

that

when their only daughter had completed her primary education,

she

was sent to an Anglican boarding school somewhere in Forest Hill as a day student.

This

was followed by a brief stint at the University of Toronto, where she picked up and dropped a variety of subjects in quick succession, eventually receiving a degree in drawing and painting at OCAD. Unfortunately, her parents' business had fallen victim to the irreversible collapse in fortunes that hit the newspaper industry in the first years of the 2000s.

They

salvaged parts of the company and pivoted to digital work, but the relationships they had built up with Chinese and English-language newspapers were dealt a near-fatal blow.

By

the time Sasha graduated, she had taken a job at a diner to cover her tuition fees.

She

came out of these experiences a confirmed atheist, with a pronounced, if largely performative sympathy for the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and an abiding hatred for rich fucks.

Most

of this I pieced together on my own. Sasha didn't like talking about her life before university, a reticence made only more remarkable by the total candor with which she shared stories from her adulthood. At OCAD, the repressed Protestantism of her early life had flowered into the healthy bon ami of a party girl.

At

twenty-five, she had met a minor art critic from Paris on the train to Montreal.

They

fell in love when he asked if the Quebecois couple sitting across from them also sounded like peasants to her.

She

returned to Canada at twenty-seven, disillusioned as much with art as with the Frenchman.

She

took a job at the restaurant to make rent and started to take writing more seriously.

If

that idiot could build a career off of blowing cigarette smoke in people's faces and declaring things to be dérive, so can I,

she

explained.

All

through those final weeks of December, we spent our nights smoking on the back roof, watching the lights go on in the neighboring apartments, the slow change of the colors on the CN Tower off in the distance.

I

found myself able to think about Montreal without wincing.

I

even started telling little jokes about my life there.

To

my own great

shock and surprise, my plan seemed to have worked. Four. Reality came crashing in with the new year.

Filled

with disgust after a particularly costly night of shouting at Sasha and Ted over a live band at the Cameron house, I faced the music and looked at my bank balance.

The

mocking little numbers on my phone told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to start working again.

I

had a cigarette with Sasha that evening and delicately suggested I might not turn down the prospect of a job if one was available.

It's

a bad time of year, Alexander,

she

said, blowing smoke out through her perfect nostrils. You know what the number one financial resolution people make in January is? Spend less money eating out.

And

I don't know if you've noticed, but the weather makes that kind of easy.

It

doesn't last, of course, but we're definitely in belt-tightening season. I thought that might be the case.

You

should have said something last month. We were hiring before Christmas.

Right. Are

you going to be able to make rent?

Don't

worry about it. That's not encouraging.

Look,

one of the barbacks was caught doing coke in the main dining room after his shift ended, so they might decide to replace him.

The

head manager likes me these days.

Give

me your resume and I'll put in a good word.

I

crafted a CV so inflated it was almost fictitious and waited for a phone call.

It

came a couple of days later. A neutral-sounding voice asked if I could come in for an interview, and I rushed down to Liberty Village, hair still wet from the shower.

As

in so many of the old industrial neighborhoods, where the solid manufacturing economy of the twentieth century had given way to the steroidal finance capitalism of the twenty-first, attempts to preserve Liberty Village's architecture only rendered it ridiculous. Sheer glass fragments jutted precipitously out of the roofs of three-story brick shopfronts, brand-new English pubs designed to look as though they'd been built in the nineteenth century, set cheek to jowl with the corrugated steel of squat box stores.

Everything

was scrubbed and new and extremely well-lit.

I

felt like a trespasser in someone else's erotic dream.

The

restaurant was in a converted warehouse standing on a rise off Atlantic Avenue, overlooking the rail line that curved gently into the heart of the city.

A

broad flight of concrete steps led up from street level, and beside it, a ramp rose in thoughtful cutbacks to an elevated promenade that ran beside a showroom selling fast furniture marketed to the upwardly mobile.

I

made my way up the stairs, shoes crunching over the salt that covered every surface.

The

people of Toronto, I surmised, were extremely litigious about icefall incidents. Inside, the restaurant had the unnerving look of a place that had been designed to pass off thrift as good taste.

The

ceiling was impossibly high, and under the painted steel girders, all kinds of flowing bits of fabric were suspended from steel wires, intended perhaps to make the space feel less cavernous.

The

color scheme was a blend of light pastels and heavy charcoal,

and

the seating appeared to have been designed by a sex pervert who wanted to maximize patrons' discomfort in ways that would make them suggestible to arcane forms of depravity.

It

was completely empty.

I

hadn't been waiting long when a young woman emerged from behind a curtain near the front vestibule. She ushered me around a corner to the bar, where another young woman, even taller and skinnier than the first, was slowly shredding a piece of celery with a potato peeler.

She

nodded at me, with calculated neutrality.

I'd

barely had the chance to get uncomfortable when a third woman appeared suddenly from a set of swinging doors, and told the celery shredder to make two lattes.

Do

you like lattes? She asked in the faintest Berliner accent. A latte would be, I'd love a beer, of course, but it's not five o'clock yet. That's just a bit of fun, of course. We try not to drink on the job here, she said, giving the celery shredder an exaggerated and slightly deranged wink.

The

celery shredder tightened the muscles of her mouth in a way that was technically a smile.

Sasha

said you're looking for a job. Do you have any restaurant experience?

I

pushed my resume across the bar, and she glanced over it quickly.

You're

from Montreal, I take it? Most recently.

Good

city for restaurants? Yeah. Based on this, I assume you've tended bar?

I

thought it best to let her assume what she wanted. I had spent a lot of time in bars, after all, and a lot of time making drinks, and for a few disastrous months,

had

even been employed as a dishwasher.

I

felt this was close enough to being a bartender. Only for six months, though, the woman said, as if she was catching me out in something. Unfortunately, we can't hire you to work behind the bar with this experience, but we do have an opening for a steward. We'd need you for two weekend shifts to start, plus one weeknight. You'd be working for minimum, plus a cut of the tips. How does that sound? Does that sound good? We'd need a commitment right away. Can you make a commitment?

I

made a commitment.

By

the time I walked back out into the ice and the salt and the wind, the darkness had set in completely, and I'd been booked for a training shift.

I

bought myself a bottle of the Good Canadian Club on the way back to the apartment. Sasha was waiting for me with an empty glass.

I'd

offer my congratulations, she said, but

it's unlikely you'll be thanking me for this in two months. Five.

It

isn't possible to really know a city

without working in it.

Not

because work forces you to interact with unpleasant people you would otherwise avoid,

which

can easily be managed by hanging around an art gallery or going to the beach,

but

because a city is essentially a massive production line, and only by entering its infernal machinery can you see how it operates.

This

was the main reason I'd avoided having a job whenever possible.

There

are things I preferred not to know.

The

work I had reluctantly picked up over the years, playing music, teaching piano lessons, freelance writing, allowed me to remain aloof and mobile, retaining the illusion of freedom.

I

liked jobs where I was paid to make a very specific contribution. Jobs with titles like Head of Product Acquisition or Customer Relations Associate had, until very recently, left me with a sense of incipient dread.

Working

at a restaurant was far from ideal, but

it

was a low-investment way of paying the bills.

And

unlike my peers, whose more purely North American pedigree allowed them the illusion that art is subversive,

I

understood very well that musicians are always in a basically symbiotic relationship with the ruling class.

I

might have preferred playing piano to pouring drinks, but

I

was not stupid enough to believe these were fundamentally different things.

After

I got over the initial humiliation, being a steward was rather peaceful, compared with other jobs in the restaurant.

The

premise was so absurdly simple, carrying food to customers, carting away dirty dishes, that I quickly learned to dissociate from all the people yelling at me.

It

became a very pure experience of time. Packing up a plate of $15 french fries for a customer so they could throw them out the next morning took about two and a half minutes. Clearing, cleaning, and resetting a high top took around three minutes. If the

napkin... Sample

complete.

Ready

to

continue?

I would like to add on my phone and it's my own

head

to finish

the menu.

I would like to add a whole new.