From Planes Flying Over a Monster, which was published last month by Catapult. Translated by Christina MacSweeney.
The Grande Bibliothèque is an enormous glass edifice that stands opposite the Berri–UQAM metro station and Place Émilie-Gamelin, surrounded by buildings belonging to the Université du Québec. The area is transitional, difficult to read. When I first visited Montreal, in 2007, it was still a seedy neighborhood. On Rue Sainte-Catherine, prostitutes lined up outside the entrances to the strip clubs, massage parlors, and video booths. A few blocks to the north was the Gay Village, with its saunas, rent boys, and drag shows.
For almost a century, Montreal was a sort of eastern Tijuana. New Yorkers—from the city and also from upstate—crossed the border on weekends to live it up with their strong dollar and sample the privileges of Canadian table-dance clubs, where, unlike in the United States, the artistes allowed punters to touch them. The Italian Mafia has had branches in the francophone city since the Thirties, and later it teamed up with the French-speaking Hells Angels to control the distribution of drugs entering through the ports. The streets near Rue Sainte-Catherine filled with dealers and, soon afterward, addicts.
Little remains of that city conceived of as a center of vice. One or two legendary strip joints still exist, though the prostitutes have disappeared from the streets, and the tolerance zones for addicts have moved northwest and northeast. The Grande Bibliothèque is part of a sustained process of neighborhood gentrification, but Place Émilie-Gamelin, diagonally opposite the library, has resisted change. On the park’s northeastern side, there’s always a group of five or six people selling minimum doses of crack to the most desperate addicts, paying scant attention to the squad cars that pass every few minutes. In the surrounding bus shelters, which offer protection from the icy wind, there are always two or three people smoking crack from glass pipes.
The opioid users’ territory is a few blocks along, in the streets linking the Gay Village and Boulevard René-Lévesque. Weather permitting, you can walk around there before seven in the morning and watch the dealers sell oxycodone, tramadol, and morphine. If you want heroin, it’s best to go to Montréal-Nord or to the “shooting houses” in Sainte-Marie and Hochelaga, but contraband pills are freely available at various open-air sales points on the stretch from the Grande Bibliothèque to the Jacques Cartier Bridge, along the bank of the St. Lawrence River.
The Grande Bibliothèque may seem innocuous to those seeking seclusion and study, but for anyone with the eyes to see, it’s a place full of stimulants. At one entrance is often a group of homeless crack smokers; one of the armchairs on the fourth floor is always occupied by the same aged cross-dresser with bruised arms. Every so often you hear a scream, a quarrel, and the security guards throwing a troublesome addict onto the street.
Still, the homeless, down-and-outs, misfits, and drug addicts spend many hours in the library. They check their email, read the newspaper, or simply doze, hard to miss among the university students revising for exams: men in rags and women with black nails who shout aloud every so often and cough without attempting to muffle the sound. The library is their kingdom. During the day, readers and junkies cohabit in this neutral, hospitable land. There’s a sort of poetic justice in their proximity, hinting at a strong bond between reading and drug dependency.
When—in an effort to get out of the apartment, work on my novel, and take my mind off the morphine—I began including the Grande Bibliothèque in my daily routine, I hadn’t counted on having to share the space with my fellow users, nor had I realized that the syringe-disposal box in the first-floor restroom and the blue lights installed in the cubicles so that junkies can’t find a vein would serve as constant reminders that the city was awash in substances to replace my bottle of Statex when it ran out. My supply was already very low. (The situation isn’t exclusive to that particular library; in the Vancouver Public Library, there are librarians trained to administer an antidote—naloxone—if a visitor overdoses. First aid training has become an indispensable part of librarians’ résumés. This is also the case in Calgary, Denver, and Philadelphia. Public libraries have become one of the main battlefields in the war against drugs.)
At the library, I read the novels of Réjean Ducharme, a cult idol of Quebecois literature. I also read Mordecai Richler, Hubert Aquin, Nicole Brossard, and Leonard Cohen, all of whom walked the same streets and visited the same libraries replete with people on the margins of society. At the library, replete also with bedbugs and slushy puddles left by boots, I attempted to convince myself that Montreal was a possible city, a North American city to which one moved to try one’s luck, and in which one would discover a simple but delightful vocation and attain vigorous old age in the care of public-health institutions that prescribed painkillers like there was no tomorrow.
Visiting the Grande Bibliothèque wasn’t the best option for forgetting about my small stash of morphine. Quite the reverse: I began leaving the building and walking among the dealers in the nearby streets to see what goods they had on offer. I checked prices, weighed advantages and disadvantages. As a sort of free trial, one gave me a small pill that he said was oxycodone. I snorted it a few hours later, and the effect was the same as the morphine. I was soon convinced that if I continued going to the library to “write,” I’d end up becoming addicted to something much stronger. So I returned to spending the mornings in bed or in my armchair, making a titanic effort to ignore the bottle of Statex on my dresser and calculating how many weeks of vice I had left.
