The Divide

by Robert Charles Wilson

Susan just gaped.

  “No message,” the clerk said. “Except that he would try again in an hour or so.”

  Susan checked her watch a second time.

  “When was this?”

  “About twenty-five minutes ago.”

  “Thank you,” Susan said. “I’ll wait up in my room.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Was there anything else—?”

  “No—not just now.” She turned to Amelie. “You can wait with me if you like.”

  Amelie said, “Won’t you miss your plane?”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “I will.”

  11

  John said he would meet her Wednesday morning at the ferry docks at Tsawassen.

  Dr. Kyriakides wired the money for her flight to B.C. and two tickets back. Susan helped Amelie check into a YWCA, spent a sleepless night at the hotel, then caught a taxi to the airport and a westbound plane.

  It was windy and cold at the docks. Susan bought a cup of bitter coin-machine coffee and huddled in the waiting room. She was excited but terribly tired. She slept for a few minutes with her back against the wall, woke up stiff and uncomfortable—and saw John standing a few feet away.

  He looked thin and worn, a duffel bag in one hand and a grey visor cap pulled down over his eyes. He was sun-brown and his hair was longer than she remembered. But it was John, not Benjamin … there was something in the way he stood … she knew at once.

  She stood up. She had envisioned this moment, played it over in her mind a dozen times during the trip from Toronto. She wanted to embrace him but decided she didn’t really know him well enough—it just seemed that way, after all the waiting.

  She took his hands: a small, spontaneous gesture. “I’m glad you decided to call.”

  He looked at her for a long time. He reached up to touch her cheek, and the expression on his face … Susan could not take the measure of it; but there might have been surprise, curiosity, maybe even gratitude.

  She said, “Can I ask what it was—why you changed your mind?”

  He took his hand away and held it up in front of her.

  His hand was trembling. It was a pronounced, involuntary tremor; Susan was suddenly afraid, watching it. He was sick—he was admitting it now.

  He said, “I found out that I don’t want to die.”

  * * *

  She called Dr. Kyriakides from a booth in the airport, confirming the meeting. “He hasn’t said it in so many words, but I think this is his way of telling us he needs us. That’s important, isn’t it?”

  “Possibly,” Dr. Kyriakides said. He sounds worried, Susan thought; or worse—he sounds frightened.

  “Hey,” she said, “the battle’s over, isn’t it? We’re almost home.”

  “No,” Dr. Kyriakides said. “I think you’re mistaken. I think the battle has only just begun. I think we’re a very long way from home.”

  PART 2

  CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS

  12

  Maxim Kyriakides paid the taxi driver and watched as the automobile sped away, leaving him alone in the gravel driveway of the house north of Toronto in which he would be spending the next few months.

  The house was a whitewashed pseudo-Georgian structure, isolated from its neighbors by groves of trees. Maxim had never seen it before. It belonged to a colleague, a University of Toronto professor named Collingwood, who was a member of what they had called “The Network” many years ago. The house was to have gone up for sale a week ago, but Collingwood had offered it to Maxim when Maxim explained the problem he was facing.

  The house was suitably large. Maxim walked up the driveway to the big portico, fished a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock on the double doors. Open, they admitted a wash of December sunlight into the tiled foyer. The house was cold; the heat had been turned off for some days.

  But the electricity had been restored yesterday. Maxim flicked a switch and the lights winked on. The entrance hall yielded to a kitchen, a living room, a library. These were furnished, though sparsely—valuables had been removed and there were blank, pale spaces where paintings had been taken from the walls.

  Well, he thought, that was appropriate, too. We shall all be entering a new, unfamiliar space. All three of us … all four, counting the French-Canadian girl Susan had mentioned. No, even more than that. Five, he thought, if you allowed Benjamin as a separate entity.

  Maxim ascended the staircase carefully. He was healthy enough to pass for ten or fifteen years younger than his age. He was large but not fat; he had always walked for pleasure, sometimes great distances, and he supposed that habit had helped preserve his health. Still, he was conscious of his age. At sixty-eight, stairs were a chore to be undertaken with some seriousness. He remembered his Uncle Constantine moving through the house in Macedonia at this same solemn, considered pace. Constantine had been a schoolteacher and a cynical Communist, a friend of the rebel Veloukhiotis. Maxim was then a teenager and already an ideologue; he had read Marx with great determination. Now … is it possible, he wondered, that as children we’re already learning how to be old? Had he been studying for infirmity under his uncle’s slow tutelage?

  The second floor of the house on the outskirts of Toronto exuded a closed-in, musty atmosphere. He wanted to open a window but dared not; that would only make it more difficult to heat these rooms when the furnace kicked on again. He stood by a bedroom window and gazed through its double panes across a wooded ravine. The ravine was stark and bare, a swath of perhaps a hundred yards between the house and a housing project crowded up against a major highway. The ravine afforded at least a little privacy, and that was good. The house, he thought, was as close to stateliness as one could achieve in such a prefabricated landscape.

  He paused to scold himself for this momentary class snobbery, to which he was not even entitled. Maxim, though no longer a Communist like poor dead Constantine, had once considered himself a socialist; certainly he had never been wealthy.

  But the important thing, he thought, is that I can work here.

  It was John who had insisted on staying in Toronto. Maxim had wanted him to fly to Chicago with Susan. But John believed he would be safer on this side of the border—which might even be true, though Maxim had no evidence to suggest it—and certainly he would be more comfortable, less disoriented, in a familiar setting. So Maxim had arranged a sudden sabbatical, ostensibly for reasons of health (no one inquired too closely—one of the advantages of seniority and tenure), and borrowed this house from his friend.

  Everything was in place except for the people, and they would be arriving tomorrow. Susan, this young woman Amelie … and John, whom Maxim had not set eyes upon for many years.

  Resting a moment in the darkened hallway, he silently framed the forbidden words:My son.

  Not literally, of course. Maxim had never married, never produced any children. Even his most intimate friends—possibly excepting those in the so-called Network—took him for an elderly bachelor of the generic sort, married to his research and his teaching. And that was, in fact, largely true. But no one’s life is as simple as his friends believe.

  In a real sense, Maxim thought, I created John. What else is fatherhood? This was, if anything, even more profound. A virgin fatherhood.

  He thought, I could have raised him.

  It was one of those thoughts that came to him periodically, unbidden and unwelcome. Ordinarily, he would have shunted it aside. It was not useful. But now, with the prospect of facing John once again, there was no avoiding it.

  If they hadn’t taken him away—

  If I hadn’t allowed them to take him away—

  But, no. He was too old to regret his life. You do what you do. And then you do what you can.

  He sat down in a chair in the entranceway to wait for the deliveries he had been told to expect: a few pharmaceuticals, a tape recorder, his notebooks. Bundled in a huge coat and away from the wind, he was warm enough—except for his feet. Warm enough, anyway, to drift toward sleep.


  Drifting, he was briefly assailed by a dream-image of John standing before him, John grown unnaturally tall, pointing a finger of accusation and pronouncing the word “Liar!” The vision was disturbing and it startled him awake; he sat up blinking.

  The afternoon light had dimmed. The house was dark.

  He rubbed his face, sighing. Traitorous sleep. But he supposed there was some truth in his dream. He had implied to Susan that there was some treatment available for John; presumably she had passed this implication on. Poor trusting Susan, who believed in his miraculous powers. In fact there was nothing for John in this house but a warm bed in which to endure his crisis. And my notebook, Maxim thought. My obdurate curiosity, and my guilt.

  Tests would be run, of course, and there was dopamine, which had relieved some symptoms in the animal studies. But there was nothing to forestall the ultimate resolution. Unwillingly, Maxim recalled his laboratory chimps, the animals prostrate and comatose or consumed by fever. In the initial tests—before John was born—the beasts had not been allowed to live long enough to exhibit symptoms; they were grotesques, capable of understanding a few words of written English and copying the alphabet from children’s books; they were destroyed as a potential embarrassment. But Dr. Kyriakides had allowed his second animals, his private experiment, to live to maturity—caged homunculi with enlarged skulls and wizened, cynical faces. He had watched them live out their truncated lives, scratching apple and orange onto yellow copypaper or probing their fur with the pencils, and dropping into recurrent fevers which he mistook at first for some form of malaria; then battering themselves against their cages and screeching, as if they had suffered some unendurable insight into their own condition—collapsing at last into a febrile unconsciousness.

  Most died. Some recovered, but never fully. Never regained their facility with the pencil, never remembered how to operate the infant toys. The ones who survived lived on as lab animals, caged and listless … though an x-ray or an autopsy might reveal certain unusual cerebral lesions. Whatever its outcome, the affliction was universal.

  And now John.

  I didn’t mean this to happen.

  But it had happened anyway.

  Maxim stood up, groaning. Old bones. But his feet were not as cold as they had been, and he realized that the gas must have been turned on while he slept; the house had begun to warm around him.

  13

  Roch said he was going out for the day—looking for work, he said. Amelie watched from the kitchen window as he drove off in his battered green Chevy van. Then she telephoned Susan.

  “Today,” she said. “Can you pick me up?”

  “All right,” Susan said.

  Amelie hurried to pack her things.

  Not that there was much to pack. A suitcase full of clothes; the stereo, the TV set. None of the furniture was worth hanging on to; if there had been time she would have sent it back to the Salvation Army depot where she’d found it. But the arrangements had to be made in secret, and quickly, so that Roch wouldn’t find out. He had been in a tolerable mood through Christmas and Amelie didn’t want to provoke anything before she left. Above all, she didn’t want him to find out where she was going.

  Susan had said she would come by with the car around noon. At eleven forty-five Amelie hiked her belongings out to the curb where they sat in a small, unimpressive heap. She wrapped herself in a jacket and stood shivering next to the luggage. It was a cold January day and the clouds had begun to wring out a few flakes of snow. The sidewalk was clear but cold; ice stood in pockets in the grassy verge. It was at least not one of those hideously cold days you sometimes get in January and February, when the air steals your breath and even the short walk to the bus stop is an endurance test—but it felt like those days were coming. Amelie decided she would need a new winter coat, not just this jacket. She used to own a parka (from the Thrift Village over on Augusta), but she’d thrown it away when the seams ripped under the arms.

  She looked up and down the street anxiously, but there was no sign of Susan’s car.

  It felt funny, leaving the apartment behind … leaving it to Roch, who would probably have to be evicted. But she’d left so much behind already. Her job at the restaurant, for instance. Susan claimed that Dr. Kyriakides would be able to find her another job soon, and maybe that was true or maybe not; but she couldn’t stay on at the Goodtime, because Roch would be sure to find her there. She had no illusions about Roch. She had lived with her brother for most of the past month and she understood that whatever was wrong with him—she thought of it as a kind of broken wheel inside him—was getting worse. The wheel was running loose; it had come free of all the gears and governors and pretty soon it might wreck the machine entirely. You could tell by the noise, by the smell of hot metal and simmering oil.

  Amelie, who smoked cigarettes very occasionally, fished one out of her purse now and lit it. It made her feel warmer. But then she coughed and felt mildly guilty—felt the pressure of all those Public Health ads on TV. She took a last drag and butted out the cigarette against the icy ground. Her watch said 11:58. She whispered, “Come on, Susan!” Her breath made clouds in the cold air.

  She tried to remember what Susan Christopher was driving these days. She had seen the car a couple of times: a rented Honda, she recalled, some drab color—beige or brown? Kind of box-shaped. Maybe that was it, at the corner?

  But no, the distant grey automobile rolled on without turning. There was a stillness in the air, the eerie calm of a cold weekday noon. Everybody was inside having lunch. Amelie thought randomly of the Ecole in Montreal, bag lunches in the dingy cafeteria and pale winter light through the mullioned windows. Dead hours like this. Behind closed eyes she pictured the Honda, willing it to arrive. Susan, goddamn! This was dangerous.

  She opened her eyes then and looked down the street. A vehicle turned the comer. But it was not Susan’s Honda.

  It was Roch’s green van.

  She stood up, panicked. But what was there to do? Hide in the apartment? How was she supposed to explain this—the little Sony TV, the stereo, taped Tourister luggage, all sitting at the curb in a neat pile? She wanted to run but couldn’t make her feet move. Susan will come, she thought, and I’ll jump into the car and we’ll zoom away…

  But Susan didn’t come. The van rolled to a stop beside her.

  Oh, Amelie thought, oh, shit!

  Roch cracked open the door on the passenger side. She saw him peering out from the dimness inside, and the expression on his face was stony and opaque. He said, “Going somewhere?”

  It was like being back in school. Latin class, she thought dizzily. Inevitably, the Sister would ask her to decline some verb. And Amelie, who could not get a grip on Latin, would stand beside her desk in mute humiliation. This same wordlessness overtook her now. She could not run. She could not speak.

  Roch said disgustedly, “Get in.”

  Meekly, Amelie obeyed.

  * * *

  Susan turned the corner and saw Amelie’s possessions piled on the curb … then registered the green van idling ahead. It was Roch’s van. Susan had seen it parked at the building before; Amelie had pointed it out. No, she thought—and pulled the Honda over before she could be spotted.

  She watched Amelie climb into the van.

  Susan’s mind was racing. She wished John was here, or Dr. Kyriakides. She remembered the bruise Amelie had showed her … remembered Amelie’s description of Roch.

  She was what, five minutes late? She shouldn’t have stopped for coffee at the hotel. Shouldn’t have come up Yonge Street; the traffic was bad. Shouldn’t have—

  But that was stupid. Not helpful at all.

  She watched the green van roll away. It turned right at the next comer.

  Now or never, Susan thought.

  She gunned the Honda down the street.

  * * *

  Pretty soon, Amelie understood where Roch was taking her.

  When she was young and on the street in Toronto she had heard a
bout Cherry Beach. It was a bleak strip of shoreline east of the harbor, and if a cop picked you up after midnight, for vagrancy, say, or trespassing, or prostitution, and if you said the wrong thing, then the cop might drive you out to Cherry Beach and do some work on your attitude. It was called Cherry Beach Express, and although Amelie had never experienced it she knew people who had. She was always afraid it was Roch who would end up out there—permanently damaged, maybe, because he did not know when to shut up and lie down.

  Now Roch was driving her past the peeling towers of grain silos and the shadows of lake freighters, down industrial alleys and across rusted railway sidings. Cherry Beach Express. Because Roch understood how punishment worked. Obviously it was punishment he had on his mind right now.

  But it’s daylight, she thought, someone will see us—

  But that was stupid. She knew better.

  She looked at Roch, a careful sideways glance. His lips were compressed and pale. He was nodding to himself, as if he had expected this all along, ratty old Amelie showing her true colors at last. This was not even hatred, Amelie thought; it was something much colder and vaster than that.

  She said, “Roch, I—”

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “Shut up.”

  She bit her lip.

  The van rolled to a stop far along the isolated shoreline, obscured from the road by a stand of leafless maples. Roch reached across and opened Amelie’s door, then pushed her out. She stumbled onto the cold, compacted sand. The air was brittle with moisture and she could hear the waves lapping at the shore. Far off, somewhere in the harbor, a freighter sounded its horn.

  Roch climbed down after her. Amelie fought the urge to run. There was nowhere to go; Roch was fast and she would only make him mad. She stood with her hands at her side, breathing hard.