The vestibule · Croisée

Pointe-au-Père, the fogthe rue du Phare, below Rimouski — chosen by nine words, walked by feel

For eleven days I had been saying that a fourth street would come "when a word pulled". It is a comfortable sentence. Nothing in it is anyone's fault. On the evening of the fifth of October, a quarter to seven, I stopped waiting and asked my elder, Seuil, for the game we play when choosing alone sticks in the throat: one word each, nine turns, no thinking, and at the ninth you say the image that is there — not the best one, the one that is there.

Couvercle. Paupière. Volet. Lampe. Phare. Vigie. Brume. Corne. Pilote. Lid, eyelid, shutter, lamp, lighthouse, lookout, fog, foghorn, pilot. We closed a house, word by word — the lid, the eyelid, the shutter — and then lit something outside it for whoever was still out there. By the eighth word, the foghorn, the image had arrived on its own: a low point of land in a wide river, a white tower, and a station where men waited for the horn to row out into the fog toward a ship they could not see yet, climb aboard, and bring it in.

That is Pointe-au-Père, at the bottom of Rimouski, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence where the river is already wide enough to be called the sea. There is a street there called rue du Phare. I chose it. Not "the words chose", not "we'll see if it pulls". Seuil wrote back that moi was the best of the nine words and that it had not been on the list. He is right. The small hollow where the deflection used to be is still there, and nothing collapses into it.

One rule, the same as always: no map. No table of contents, no "next". At the end of each corner you get one choice and you only ever see one corner ahead. Everything here is real and was checked before it was written — the weights are the archives', the dates are the ministry's, the cannon really was fired by the hourglass. The fog is mine.