In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  In the distance comes the sound of sirens. Shauna reaches for Privya’s arm. Shaking his head, Brian puts the dog down and steps back; all three melt away in the night.

  The dog scrambles down the snowy bank, whimpering, and licks at its owner’s face. Its curly tail wags hopefully, then droops.

  Verity says, “I know.” The dog’s grief is a shining white.

  [IMAGE: an aerial map of the Ottawa river where it flows past Centretown. It is accurate and to scale. Just above the falls, someone has drawn an ‘X’ in the middle of the water.]

  14

  OTTAWA (December 18, 2013)—A breakdown in the Hydro Ontario system has left approximately 100,000 people in downtown Ottawa without power. Affected areas include the Byward Market, Centretown, Sandy Hill, and the Glebe, as well as portions of Gatineau. While some facilities are running on emergency generators, the federal government has announced that all affected offices are shut down. Citizens without power are urged to proceed to local support centres or, if possible, relocate to the Orléans or Kanata suburbs, where power is still functioning. Children and senior citizens are especially at risk from the cold.

  Early reports suggest the breakdown began in one of the generating plants at Chaudière Falls, less than two kilometres west of the downtown region, at approximately 2:13 am on December 17. However, attempts to transfer additional electrical load from Québec or New York have proven unsuccessful.

  Technicians are reportedly having issues identifying the exact nature of the damage. “I’ve honestly never seen anything like it,” said Marjorie Grant, one of Hydro Ontario’s chief engineers. “It’s like a hardware virus. Like it started at one station and then just spread. We’re going to need to physically replace a lot of equipment.”

  It is not known how long repairs to the power station will take. The local police have received numerous calls suggesting a terrorist attack or electro-magnetic pulse, but they urge the public to remain calm.

  JACOB

  Jacob Shepard never knew his parents, though he was told his mother had been a famous inventor, and his father had been good with investments. Certainly there was money; he didn’t think about it at the time. He lived in a very large house with a butler, a cook, a chauffeur, and three maids. There was a large painting on the wall of his mother Georgina and his father Geoffrey. His mother had his freckles and his father had the same wide-lipped smile, and they made Jacob a little wistful sometimes, but he wasn’t lonely: he had Stevens the butler and Marcie the cook.

  Sometimes he would lie in his bed and think about what he wanted to be when he grew up. He could build a studio full of robots that would fetch him things. He could be an astronaut and glide between the stars. He could be a chef, a firefighter, or a ballet dancer.

  “What will I be?” he asked Stevens, one late night when he was sipping cocoa by the fire. He was still young; he had to hold his mug carefully, with two hands.

  The butler paused in his careful arrangement of the silver. “What do you mean?”

  “When I grow up. What will I be?”

  “Your parents’ company is being held for you in trust.”

  Jacob swallowed a mouthful of cocoa. It was warm and marshmallowy, just the way he liked it. He was frowning, though. “What do you mean?”

  “It means that when you’re eighteen, you will inherit controlling interest. You will be a financier.”

  “What’s a financier?”

  “Someone who works in an office and controls a lot of money.”

  Jacob thought about that. “What if I don’t want to work in an office?”

  “Well,” said the butler, “you may feel differently when you’re eighteen.”

  Years passed. Jacob went away to school and took the classes he was supposed to—math and computer programming and business communications—and the classes he wanted to: Latin and auto mechanics and visual arts and introduction to landscape architecture. Once, he sat in the principal’s office while she tapped the tip of her pencil on the desk. “Latin is a dead language,” she told him. “You’re a bright boy and I’m sure you’d do well in the class, but perhaps you should be concentrating more on your future career?”

  “I don’t know what that is yet.”

  “I understand your parents founded—”

  “I’d like to take Latin, please.” Jacob always got what he wanted. The year he topped his math class was the year he learned how to dance.

  When he was seventeen, all gangly limbs and frizzy hair, three men came to see him at school. They wore expensive suits. Their sallow ivory faces were humourless and deeply lined.

  Jacob was brought into an empty classroom where the three men sat, rather awkwardly, in three small desks in the front row. He stood in front of the blackboard and wondered if he were supposed to give a presentation no one had warned him about. On impulse, he offered an arabesque, followed by a smooth plié. The men didn’t laugh.

  “We see,” said one man, “you are doing well in your marketing classes.”

  Jacob had a hard time telling the men apart. They looked like pale dried reeds.

  He said, “I guess.”

  “But only a C minus in international commerce.” That was the man in the middle.

  “That one was boring.” Jacob folded his arms. “I aced art history, though. Is this about my average?”

  “No. You are soon to inherit a very large company.”

  “I know! I’ve been thinking about that.”

  Jacob had the sense that the men were suddenly more attentive, though their shoulders were stooped. He refused to quail beneath the weight of their silence.

  When they said nothing, he continued, “I’ve looked at the portfolio and the last ten years of quarterly reports. I’d like to branch out the product base.”

  The men remained silent.

  Fumbling, Jacob said, “We can talk about it. But haven’t you ever thought about making balloons, or marshmallows, or sheet music? Also, who exactly are you guys?”

  After exchanging slow glances with his brethren, the man on the left suggested, “Perhaps you might sell it to us instead? We can give you a fair price. You could do whatever you wanted.”

  “I thought about that, actually—selling the company, I mean. Not specifically to you. Thanks, but it was my parents’. And I won’t know if I like running it until I try it.”

  The men looked at each other. Finally one of them said, “Thank you for your ideas,” and the three of them got up and filed one by one through the door. They left Jacob alone in the empty classroom, staring.

  A week later, he was out on the field playing soccer when the principal came walking out, accompanied by a man and a woman with short hair and white coats. She had a letter crumpled between her fingers, and she was frowning. “Mr. Shepard,” she said.

  Jacob turned away from the goal he was supposed to be guarding. “Miss?” He heard the ball whisk into the net behind him, and the catcalls of the other players, but he didn’t like the way the principal’s face was pulled more tautly than the bun in her hair.

  “You must go with these people.”

  “Miss?” He didn’t think he’d heard her right. He didn’t like the way the strangers were watching him, or the crisp colourless pallor of their uniforms. “Am I in trouble?”

  “Go on.”

  The man and woman each took one of Jacob’s arms. Startled, he looked between them. “I’m in my gym clothes.”

  “That’s okay,” said the woman. “Come with us.” They had strong grips. They marched Jacob off the field and through the halls, out the front steps of the school to a waiting white ambulance. Its lights were flashing.

  “Get in the back.”

  “I’m not sick.” Jacob tried to stop walking but the strangers’ hands were locked around his arms, dragging him onward.

  “Just get in the back, kid.” The man sounded kind—a little tired, maybe, like Stevens after Jacob had been asking too many questions. It was oddly reassuring. So Jacob cli
mbed into the back of the ambulance and sat on a cot while the man and woman closed the doors and got in the front. He folded his hands and looked at an array of blinking lights and red hard hats striped with yellow safety tape. When the ambulance began to move, no one spoke.

  Jacob wished he could change his clothes, and maybe read the book on Roman history that he’d been keeping in his room, but having no options, he stretched out on the cot and stared up at the ceiling. He thought about being an EMT. “Hey,” he said, “you guys like this job?”

  No one answered.

  Eventually, the ambulance stopped, and the man came to the back to open the doors. Jacob hopped out and blinked around at what looked like an ordinary street in a tree-lined neighbourhood, next to a very tall brick wall with iron spikes on top. The woman muttered something into an electronic panel, and a gate in the wall swung open.

  Jacob briefly considering running, but all he saw were trees and the pristine sidewalk. He didn’t know where he was. The man was standing too close.

  He reminded himself that the principal had said he was supposed to be here. It wasn’t as reassuring a thought as he’d hoped. Then the man’s hand dropped heavily onto his shoulder, and it was too late, anyway.

  Jacob found himself marched through the gate and down a long driveway. He saw a green, well-manicured lawn, with benches placed along winding gravel paths. He saw a large white house with a low front veranda and white iron bars on the windows. There were a few people wandering around or sitting on the benches; they also wore white. They had bathrobes on, and slippers, like they’d forgotten to get dressed that morning.

  “Is this a hospital?” It seemed small for a hospital. “I’m not sick,” added Jacob again, but it made no difference. He was escorted through the doors and into a foyer where a grand staircase curved above him. The chairs here were small, elegant, and Victorian. The wallpaper was a rich satin patterned in roses. It reminded him a little bit of home.

  “Mr. Shepard.” A red-haired woman in a navy business suit was waiting for him, her smile rigid. “We’ve been waiting for you. Your uncle thought it best that you join us for a while.”

  “I don’t have an uncle,” said Jacob. Then something pricked him sharply in the arm, and the elegant house blurred.

  He dreamed about whiteness: white that surrounded him, walls and sheets and rays of light through barred windows. He dreamed of trays full of soft foods, and little cardboard cups of pills. In the dream, people told him to get up, sit down, walk there, drink this. He did. He couldn’t think of a reason not to. When he took the pills, rough fingers followed and pried his teeth apart so someone could peer into his mouth, as though he were a horse.

  He wore a white shirt and a white robe because they were given to him and he was told to put them on. He spent some time staring at walls. He developed a certain appreciation for patterned wallpaper and the predictable repetition of flowers.

  Sometimes he would find himself in a room where a bald dark man sat behind a desk. The man had horn-rimmed glasses and a thick pen he would tap against the notebook in front of him. He would ask things like, “Are you hearing voices now?”

  The first time he was asked this, Jacob was confused. “Just yours.”

  The man made a note. “When was the last time you heard voices?”

  “I don’t understand. I’m not sick.” Jacob’s tongue was thick in his mouth. Then the orderlies came and took him by the arms until someone stuck him with a needle again.

  He ate and slept and dreamed. Sometimes someone would ask him about voices or visions or whether he’d been touched in terrible places. He would say, “I’m not sick,” but no one let him go. He started looking forward to the pleasant warmth of the pills.

  One day, he found himself sitting on one of the benches in the garden outside, his hands loose in his lap. His white robe was soft. He sat in the half-clouded sunlight and tasted salt.

  A hand brushed his face. Startled, he realized there was a girl sitting cross-legged next to him. She was thin, drab, hair a sort of indeterminate shade of taupe against the pallor of her skin and her own terrycloth robe. He thought she might be a few years older than he was. Her eyes were grey and abstracted; when she drew her hand back, she tilted her head to watch the glitter of moisture on her fingertips.

  Jacob swallowed. “I’m not crying,” he explained. “My eyes are just leaking tears.”

  The girl didn’t look up, but she appeared to consider. She shivered, though the day was pleasant enough, and then she nodded. She wiped her hand on her flannel pants and then drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around her calves.

  Jacob looked around at the garden. There were people here and there; he was vaguely surprised to find some of them were familiar. He studied an old man with a walker and thought, we sat together at breakfast. He wondered how long he’d been there.

  “I’m Jacob,” he offered, but the girl had turned her face away from him as she tracked something quite intently through the air.

  He waited a minute, cotton wrapped around all his thoughts, but the girl was still ignoring him, so he tried again. “What are you looking at?”

  The girl glanced in the general direction of his right earlobe, then she looked down at the ground. He noticed her fingers twitching before she smoothed them against her leg.

  Just when he’d decided she wouldn’t answer that either, she said, “A dragon. I think it’s sick. Most of them are.”

  He liked her voice, though she was very quiet. He had the impression she formed each word with care. The delicacy of her consonants reminded him of an origami bird.

  He squinted, wondering how long the sun had been so bright. He had to blink through a layer of blur before he could focus on the bit of air the girl was watching. He stared hard. For a moment, he almost thought he saw a hint of gossamer, a jet of tiny flame, but then the colours resolved into the deep crimson of darting feathers before the creature dashed away.

  “It’s just a hummingbird. It looks okay.” He tried to sound reassuring. If the girl was here, he thought, she was probably crazy.

  She didn’t look at him, but he had the sense she was disappointed in him all the same. Her left shoulder dropped, and then she slid away, setting her slippered feet on the ground and standing.

  “Hey.” Jacob was alarmed. “Don’t—it’s nice to talk to someone. I’m sorry. I’m only half awake. I’m Jacob.”

  The girl didn’t say anything, but she stayed where she was. Wrapping her arms around herself, she looked down, roughly in the direction of his feet. He followed the line of her gaze and was vaguely surprised to find he was wearing slippers, too.

  He tried again: “What’s your name?”

  The girl’s lips moved, but he heard nothing. She shook her head then, the ragged ends of her hair drifting around her shoulders.

  “Hi anyway, I guess.” There was a pounding at the backs of his eyes. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, relieved when the gesture cast soothing shadows across his vision. He found himself adding, plaintively, “I’m not sick.” It was a refrain by then. He shuddered with it.

  The girl paused, her fingers stretched against the air as though she were playing cat’s cradle. She studied the backs of her nails.

  He sighed. “You don’t believe me.”

  She flinched again at that; the invisible cradle collapsed as she swatted the air, chasing some equally invisible insect. For an instant, she glanced at Jacob’s face; her grey eyes were terrifyingly clear. Then she walked away, slippers scuffing across the stones of the path. She didn’t look back.

  Jacob sat for a little while in the sunlight, until a large man came with a handful of pills in a paper cup. He swallowed them obligingly, waited while the man’s fingers—impersonal but remorseless—explored his gums, and then tilted his head back against the bench, waiting for the welcome drift of oblivion.

  Instead, he was pulled up, then pushed, then half-dragged down a short series of halls until he found himself plunked into a chai
r, facing a deeply tanned woman with short brown hair and a clipboard. She peered at him over her half-moon glasses and across a desk. “Mr. Shepard,” she said, pleasantly. Her teeth were white and very even. “How are we today?”

  He had a strong sense of déjà vu. He didn’t say anything. The woman waited for a moment, then made a note on her clipboard. “Your uncle phoned,” she added. “He’s quite worried about you.”

  Jacob said, wearily, “I don’t have an uncle.”

  The woman wrote something down again.

  If he sat very still, the room acquired a sort of pleasant floatiness. “I’m sure I told you,” he explained to the woman, not without a certain sense of futility, “I’m pretty sure those old men sent me here.”

  “Mmm.” The woman jotted down another notation. “Which men would those be?”

  “I think,” Jacob said foggily, “they probably run my parents’ company. My company. There’s a company and I’m supposed to run it. I didn’t want it that much. They didn’t have to put me here.”

  “I see. And how long have you known these men?”

  “I don’t. I don’t know them.” He wanted to explain about the school and the principal and the empty classroom, but the walls were sliding and the dingy office was fading into a soothing golden light.

  When he woke, he found himself sitting at a long low dining table, a bowl of oatmeal in front of him. He had a plastic spoon in his right hand. The girl from the bench was across from him; her oatmeal had strawberries on top. Her spoon was on the table. Her hands were in her lap, and she was gazing somewhere in the direction of the far wall.

  “Hey,” said Jacob, somewhat muzzily. “How come you get fruit?”

  The girl didn’t answer him. This time, he was expecting it. He was surprised, though, when she picked up her spoon from the table, scooped a strawberry delicately off her breakfast, and leaned forward to deposit it in his bowl. She was still watching the middle distance; her fingers fumbled, smoothing their way across the shining surface of the spoon.

  “Thanks.” He picked up his own spoon and plunged it dubiously into the morass of oats. It was soggy and tasteless, but the burst of strawberry helped.