Impurity Larry Tremblay (novels for students .txt) 📖

non-reaction. He phones Frédéric. Frédéric is out. He doesn’t leave a message. Turns on the TV. Lands on 2001: A Space Odyssey. He remembers having seen it at a repertory cinema that his father dragged him to. He’d been subjected to constant comments. Antoine absolutely insisted that he grasp the metaphysical range of the film. He considered the opening scene a classic, as necessary as Plato’s writing or an excerpt from the Bible. “To understand Kubrick’s intentions, watching the film’s not enough, you have to think,” he whispered to his young son, annoying the spectators sitting near them. “Man is neither the beginning nor the end of all things. Man appeared, he will disappear, but even so the universe won’t cease to exist. Something is superior to Man, even if it’s only light whose speed cannot be surpassed. The great power of the film is giving a concrete form to that superior entity. You see, it’s represented by a rectangular black object, a monolith that gives off a mysterious energy.” Jonathan couldn’t take any more explanations and left in the middle of the screening, swearing that never again would he go to a movie with his father. It’s not until several years later that he is now seeing the end of the film, on TV.

In the final sequence, the prehistoric grottoes give way to space travel. The mysterious black monolith is in orbit around the planet Jupiter. Astronaut David Bowman leaves his spaceship onboard a capsule to observe the immense object with its perfect geometry. But as he gets closer, he is sucked up by it, propelled into a corridor of cosmic colours and landscapes, strange and fabulous. Then, with no transition, the astronaut finds himself in the body of an old man, his own. Ever stranger, the scene unfurls in a chamber with decoration reminiscent of the splendours of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century France, it’s hard to know. Lying on his death bed, Bowman tries to touch the black monolith that has appeared in front of him. And then he passes from a prematurely old man to the state of a fetus. A fetus teleported into space inside a transparent bubble!

Jonathan loses the thread of the story. To be honest, he has been wondering for a while now if the TV channel has been using a defective copy, poorly edited, with entire sequences missing, making the storyline totally nonsensical. Which doesn’t stop him from bursting into tears at the incredible image of a fetus closed within its globe of light, orbiting the earth. Overtaken by a stifling nostalgia, he feels a desire to be back in his mother’s womb, the way the astronaut David Bowman has gone back to the womb of the universe.

On April 5, 1994, the Nirvana frontman blows his brains out. Jonathan is fourteen years old. Looking into the mirror in his room he’s surprised to see tears flowing for this man whose music he has only vaguely heard. A famous couplet, though, comes to his lips. The lyrics talk about wanting to have a father, but instead only having a dad.

As if a rotten floorboard were collapsing inside him, painful heartbeats reverberate in his chest. Sobs shake him. It’s clean, brutal, he too suffers from a secret wound, from filth that contaminates his life. He too could put an end to his days, like Kurt Cobain.

Over the following days, he recites Cobain’s life like the life of a saint. The singer had left a heartbreaking letter of farewell. His blood had contained three times the lethal dose of heroin. His daughter had just been born. The tragedy of his life had been his parents’ divorce when he was nine. He had wished he could live in a normal family. He dropped out of school two weeks before graduating. His mother ordered him to get a job or leave. He absorbed every drug imaginable. He told about having to sleep under the Wishkah River Bridge. Jonathan closes his eyes and pictures Cobain, dirty, alone, wrecked from drugs, sleeping under a gigantic iron bridge. The scene fascinates him, saddens him, attracts him. He repeats “Wishkah River” to himself like a mantra and lets his mind drift over the sweetness and the pain locked inside those two words. Jonathan has no idea where that bridge is located. He hasn’t bothered to look it up. He prefers to make it appear behind his eyelids and to sleep under a memory of it. He listens to Nirvana’s recordings in a loop and immerses himself in the creepy world of songs fed by incurable despair. The world is sick. That must be said, cried out. And the body is the most visible place to display the sickness of the world. The body, his body, the body that makes him ashamed.

Jonathan has Antoine’s blond hair and Alice’s green eyes: a combination from which the purity of his features takes all of its singular force. He tells himself that in a few years he’ll look like Cobain: deep gaze, long blond hair. Every report that he reads about his idol gives weight to his pain, words to its beginning. He shuts himself away in his unhappiness, no longer smiles, no longer gets enthusiastic. He is no longer the sunny, narcissistic, only child who has benefited and suffered from the excess of attention that his parents, by force of circumstance, have given him. He is no longer interested in anything, he who wanted to learn everything. He stops his piano lessons, his karate classes. School doesn’t interest him. He doesn’t talk, doesn’t answer his parents’ urgent questions. One night Antoine, alerted by a neighbour, picks him up at the end of an alley. He disappeared two days earlier. Antoine contacted the police to report that the boy had run away. Alice was on a book tour in France for her latest novel. Antoine told her nothing, to keep from worrying her. When he finds Jonathan, he’s asleep on soiled cardboard. His clothes