By Kevin Potvin

As you come up the gentle hill of Parker Street, you can see, poking above a dark stand of looming cedars, an unpainted weather-beaten riser. It looks more like a vintage World War II watchtower the way it’s perched unsteadily atop that narrow and leaning three-storey house. If you stand across the street to take all of this ungainly structure in, you can tell this is not a happy house. The stairs to the front porch are broken through in places—some kicking fit in a long-past rage? There is a snapped-off post giving evidence there was once a railing, but no more. On the porch, if you climb the stairs, you’ll see the rubble of lives in long-term disarray, including a fridge, still filthy with decades of kitchen grime never cleaned, also bearing tell-tale kicked-in dents. On top of it is a box of old vinyl records—you can tell because the contents are in a slow-motion avalanche out the decayed bottom of the box. Beside the fridge is a couch, it’s stuffing torn out by raccoons, crows, maybe even rats, who knows. One of the three big front window panels was so long ago replaced with a sheet of plywood, it’s grey and cracking. When you come close, you can see on the front door there is a sign on paper in long-faded marker, barely discernible, stating in the simplified staccato of professional murderers: “No flyers.” The only indication this place is inhabited by humans at all is that stack of firewood placed as near to the door as possible without blocking it.

This is not a house that sees many visitors, not a house where the inhabitants do a lot of coming and going. Were it on a hill by itself at the end of a long winding driveway, it could be the perfect cartoon haunted house. You almost expect to see Mrs Bates in the window of that riser. On either side of the house are good looking, newly restored and painted craftsmen-era homes, the kind now occupied by the gardening type. The street and the neighbourhood has been up and down and up again over the century since it was first developed. But this house looks like the mad cousin in the family nobody mentions. Neighbours walking home laden with bags of groceries from Commercial Drive instinctively cross to the other side. Children instinctively stare, like they would if they saw Elephant Man picking blackberries in its wildly overgrown front yard, before their mothers nudge them and grab their hands. Even dogs and cats put their heads down and move along quickly.

You can imagine the inside. A misguided burglar would first find in the hall the light burned out, and in the living room only the occasional bare bulb glaring painfully out the top of one or another oddly-placed junk-sale table lamps with no shade. There were chairs, but not many, a kitchen-style one in the living room, a recliner—ripped of course—in the kitchen, that sort of thing.

But there were tables of every style, kind, and level of stability all over the place. And all of them, each looking like neighbouring buildings of the World Trade Centre, groaned under heaps of debris, draped under the onerous weight of a lifetime or more accumulation of insatiable curiosity. Books, magazines and newspapers were piled high as a clubhouse sandwich everywhere. There were hallways like the Wall Street canyon in New York’s financial district so narrow you would have to slide sideways between the wobbling highrises of paper. If you breathed you could cause a collapse that would bury you under a crushing weight more heavy than earth. Evidence of previous catastrophic failures, like the twisted patterns of granite in the sides of cliffs, appeared throughout this collection, buried under still more layers of a constantly drifting sediment of literary culture that always, all of it, passed into this house, but seemingly never, none of it, ever out again. The house had become over so many years to Western literary culture what a drilled core sample is to a geological formation.

The only items in the entire house that betrayed any kind of noticeable ordering and arranging, besides the firewood stacked outside the front door, were the notebooks. These were of every size and thickness and type, from spiral-bound notepads to perfect bound journals, to left-over or stolen university exam booklets, to kids’ primary school exercise books, but they were all tidily stood on shelves of bookcases lining the hallway running beside the stairs. Someone had made little signs and taped them to the edges of the shelves denoting some kind of elaborate archiving system, bearing codes like “CF12G,” and “CH21S,” and so on.

And so this was a house where someone with an extraordinary, long-term, and all-consuming obsession lived, you would have to conclude. But you wouldn’t be quite right. In fact, three men with extraordinary obsessions lived here. And the truly remarkable thing is, they all suffered the torment of the very same extraordinary obsession. It consumed them all for most of the last 24 years. Here, inside this crazed Dr Suess of a house, lived three men who first came together so innocently so long ago as ordinary university friends, and then roommates, and then this, this slowly unfolding catastrophe.

This jointly-shared obsession began as a pretty good idea, as all catastrophes usually do. All three young men, so many years ago now, confessed to each other over beers at the Student Union building one ordinary Friday that they all felt they were betraying their true calling. They came to make a pact with each other that grey November night in the wet blackness of the forest near the centre of the deserted campus. That pact was to forego the remainder of their university careers, pool their resources, and dedicate themselves to a coordinated, cooperative effort to support each other in their shared quest to become writers of novels.

The agreement they made was to give it 25 years, which seemed at the time more than adequate. And so they languished, never publishing anything over the first 24 years. It was while slurping cups of noodles around the table one dark wet evening when one of them realized it was, to the day, the 24th anniversary of their fateful 25-year pact. And now only one year remained in which to write their novels.

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