‘I remember her … ’
‘Well, she’s a fucking cunt … Anyway, Julie told Alex and the other girls that I’d been making fun of Heather’s hair loss. She said I was making fun of Heather for being bald. Heather was my friend and Alex was my best friend and Julie told this awful lie about me and for some reason everyone believed her — I still don’t know why. I told Alex it was a lie — I told everyone it was a lie — but no one believed me, and a couple of weeks later Heather was dead. And you’re right, then high school started and this vicious, just plain stupid lie followed me there and made my life a living hell.’
‘I had no idea. Really? That’s a terrible story. Were you in touch with Alex again?’
‘Not really. I tried, and then she moved to Sarnia with her family, who were devastated, and it seemed like there was no point, in a way, after a while.’
‘So, who bullied you?’
‘Everybody, pretty much.’
‘I didn’t know, really, like at all.’
‘I know. That’s one of the reasons I liked you. We talked in math class a bit and we’d smoke out in the pit and you were nice and always stoned and totally oblivious to my rep as someone who makes fun of friends dying of cancer.’
‘Yeah, that’s certainly not how I thought of you. So what happened when you left high school?’
‘I moved to the States, lived in Detroit briefly, after staying with my aunt in Windsor, then started hitchhiking, at first on my own, and then I met a guy in Florida.’
‘You hitchhiked to Florida?’
‘Well, yes, and took some Greyhounds, but I ended up in Tampa for about a year. I met my boyfriend Jeff there and we lived together for a year or so. He’s the one who gave me the dragon tattoo.’
‘He’s a tattoo artist.’
‘Yeah. When we broke up I made my way back here. Back to London. I lost all my weight during my transient years.’
‘I don’t remember you as being particularly fat.’
‘Ha! Don’t be ridiculous! I was a whale.’
‘You aren’t a whale now.’
‘No, no I’m not. Do you like watching me dance?’
‘I do.’
‘I’m hot, aren’t I?’
‘Very.’
‘You can touch me a little, you know.’
‘That wouldn’t be weird?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I want you to. Give me your hands … Do you like that?’
‘I do. Yes. Do you?’
‘I do, a lot.’
‘We’ve been in here for a few songs. How much do I owe you?’
‘Don’t worry about that now. Just enjoy. It’s nice to see you again, Mark Phillips.’
‘Thanks. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Pamela.’
SIGISMUND MOHR: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT ELECTRICITY TO QUEBEC
‘Je suis le souverain des choses transitoires.’
Money, a need for money, that’s what led Sigismund Mohr — a Prussian immigrant, from Breslau to London to Montreal to Quebec City — to establish the City District Telegraph Company, which would lead Mohr to the Dominion Telegraph Company, the establishment of telegraph and telephone networks and, eventually, the first hydroelectric plant in Quebec. When Alexander Graham Bell bought up all the smaller telegraph and telephone companies in 1880 and was granted a cross-country long-distance monopoly, Mohr was hired as his agent in Quebec City, where he fulfilled his post successfully and dutifully, selling subscriptions and installing and improving upon the equipment, while tinkering with inventions of his own. The telephone caught on fast. But Mohr tired of working for Bell and in 1884 became director of the Quebec & Lévis Electric Light Company (Q&LEL Co.).
This is when he brought electricity to Quebec.
He initially set up a small thermal power station in the military warehouses near Port Saint-Jean in Quebec City. Bright electric light, powered by dynamos, started to replace gaslights.
The townspeople resented the plant greatly, however, with over a hundred inhabitants signing a petition for the disruptive power plant to be moved from the neighbourhood. He moved the plant to Montmorency Falls thirteen kilometres away, at the base of the falls and on a craggy bank, where the noise wouldn’t bother anyone. For some, Mohr was a prophet, for others the Devil himself, and for others still yet another gifted engineer-slash-inventor in the age of gifted engineers-slash-inventors.
On September 2nd, 1889, he writes in his journal, I try not to spend too much time thinking about Father Time, with his sandglass and sickle. A friend and colleague, Charles Lemont, and Mohr had recently broken off their association at Q&LELCo. Charles Lemont was politely asked to leave, though not by Mohr, according to Mohr’s journal. Competitiveness, coupled with Charles’s coveting of Mohr’s wife, stained their friendship. Charles was once a dear friend, Mohr writes. And Mohr wasn’t known to have many friends, as he was possessed of an obsessively industrious nature, though his industriousness wasn’t always profitable; in fact, it wasn’t until after 1880 that he finally started getting on top of his debts, his residence in Montreal having being condemned as insalubrious not a decade before. Eventually, he made some money, though not a fraction of the amounts of money that his ingenuity would make for others after his death on December 15th, 1893, from pneumonia, after going out two weeks earlier in a snowstorm to fix power lines at Montmorency Falls, the waterfalls he used to generate power for Quebec City, thirteen kilometres away, that is to say, the farthest electricity had hitherto travelled to power anything, let alone the city’s port district.
Although Mohr was always in need of money, he was an impractical man, like many great inventors. He felt, as early as 1870, that he would one day make money, money earned from his creations — Soon things will change, he often said — though instead he found himself entangled in lawsuit after lawsuit for most of his adult life. His earnings went to debts and his family, lab and materials, and his efforts went on and on, without profit.
Mohr and his wife, Levi (née Blum, from New York), had five daughters — Philippine, Amelia, Lenorah, Fanny and Clara — and two sons: Eugene Philip and Henry Ralph. Despite financial strains, Mohr was a man of great concentration, a point his son Eugene Philip iterates in his memoir, Days at Montmorency, a short volume about the days leading up to Mohr’s great exhibition of electric light on September 29th, 1885, in Quebec City, from Dufferin Terrace, when 20,000 people gathered after nightfall and cheered as he lit up thirty-four light stations. By a signal given by Lieutenant Governor Louis-François-Rodrique Masson, writes a journalist for the newspaper Le Canadien, by means of an electric bell, the appearance of the terrace was transformed as if by a magic wand. For the rest of the week, similar-sized crowds showed up to see Mohr light up the town by means of transporting the fluid produced by Montmorency Falls to the thirty-four centres of light.On the third night of his exhibition, in a moment of improvised showmanship, Mohr cut the current, then restored it immediately; the paper reports, The crowd erupted in applause.
Luciferian in the dark night, with his wild silver hair, moustache and muttonchops, Mohr stood on the terrace, controlling all the fire-like light. The crowd stood and stared, rapt. And the electric light lit up moisture coming out of the tens of thousands of townspeople’s mouths; the fog floated in the air, suspended in the light — that is, charged, shifting and coruscating, as if the light were holding the vapour before it evaporated into the cold night air.