A la question What is a lapse for you ? … Nathan Raine a décidé qu’il s’agirait de trois jours.
Three Days
I had three days. I had three whole fucking days to do it. Most people kill for three days. Three days is like the accused grabbing beers with the jury before the trial. Slapping backs and stumbling to the bar for shots. Three days is that once in a lifetime flight upgrade to first class. Forget the peanuts. The half cup of orange juice. The square little napkin, gritty like a single ply of cheap toilet paper. I’m getting the caviar, the champagne. I’m getting it served on a silk fucking cocktail napkin by short-skirted flight attendants. Flight attendants who know my last name. Throaty whispers as they bend over. Your caviar and champagne, Mr. Raine. Your silk fucking napkin, Mr. Raine. That’s what three days is. Three days is luxury. Three days is an eternity. Three days is a license to self destruct.
The first day I was in celebration mode. Not the kind of celebration that cedes party hats and narcotic deliquesce. Rather, that quiet, internal celebration when your [presumed] imminent fortunes and triumphs paint a golden sheen of nonchalance over everything. Lapse a bit, man. You’ve got time. I tried on my roommate’s clothes. I lip-synched to songs I didn’t really know. I tried new methods of dishevelling my hair. I pooped for, like, twenty minutes. I did most all these things in front of a mirror. I wondered why procrastination and mirrors go so well together. You don’t want to just rush into things like some overeager hack. It’s like the guy beside you at a red light. The dude with the muscle car, the Pantera tape blaring from the speakers, the black oily hair. He blasts from the intersection at the change of the light. Pathetic. You don’t want to blast off when given the green light. You want to ease in slow. There’s traffic and collisions and death up there, man. You’ll get there.
Near the end of the first day, sprigs of responsibility tried to uproot. Don’t squander this. They know you have three days. Make it look like three days. Even though the horns were blaring behind me, I still hadn’t taken my foot to the accelerator.
By the second day I stopped hearing those horns altogether. The absence of them, the silence, is far more distressing sound than their anxious blare. My friend Jep called me.
“Dude, we finally got those new countertops put in,” said Jep.
“Which countertops?”
“The ones we wanted to put in.”
“Oh.”
“The design is called ‘Marble Magenta’. They’re very interesting.”
“That’s very interesting.”
“There’s like metallic streaks and flecks running through it. You should see it.”
“I’m not even sure what magenta is.”
“It’s like a pink,” Jep said, “a melancholy pink. A pink that mopes around.”
“Magenta stays in on the weekends.”
“Writes poetry in the dark.”
“Thinks baking croutons is fun.”
“Dude, why are you finishing my sentences for me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey,” he said, “aren’t you supposed to be doing that thing?”
I’d say that’s about the point where I stopped paying attention.
By the third day I had accomplished absolutely nothing. You had three days. After a bit of self-loathing and excuse-conjuring, I began to think about time. I tried to imagine a world where time is negotiable, where it percolates around us like some celestial body for us to hurl ourselves into. Infinite directions. Times and places suspended for us until the very moment we should decide to waft our way in. We could see past lovers. Dead relatives. Future children. We could climb our family tree, plot the love. Generations. Flower pedals and laughter and love. Our life’s history, twinkling and orbiting around us like an infant’s mobile. And all I would do is go back three fucking days.
I read somewhere that time is slowing down. Something about tidal friction from the sun and moon is making
Earth’s rotation slow down. In 140 million years, one day on Earth will last 25 hours.
Shit man. Those will be the days.
Nathan Raine
Né en 1986 au Canada. Vit et travaille pour le moment à Paris.
Nathan Raine se présente comme « jeune et séduisant auteur et journaliste originaire du Canada ».
Né entre un vendeur loquace et une femme au grand cœur, il a quitté ses immenses prairies dorées du Saskatchewan pour rejoindre Paris depuis peu dont il est venu s’inspirer.
En 2012, à Vancouver, Nathan Raine a écrit et dirigé un court-métrage d’hyper-réalité intitulé Love Sick. Il a également collaboré et contribué pour plusieurs publications canadiennes comme : BlackFlash Magazine, Planète S Magazine, The Métro, The Albatross et The Sheaf.
Son style d’écriture peut être comparé à la prise d’acide, si tant que les délires psychotropes étaient finalement tout à fait ennuyeux.
La nouvelle pour laquelle il a été récompensée est disponible sur www.wagsrevue.com/15/fiction/raine1.