Pierre hefted the golf club, studying the shaft with an accusing expression. Then Aggie was in the room. “What in the name of Jesus…”
But Pierre was now down from the coffee table, walking toward the door, the golf club swinging like a vaudeville cane. Bare feet, no sound, no backward glance.
4. June 23, 2007
The days since his arrival in Cape Breton had been awash in early summer sunshine, but now as he scanned the distance for the elusive pilot whales, the sun was dim behind a low scrim of cloud. The darkened sea rolling gently in a light breeze had tricked him at least a dozen times into thinking that he’d spotted a glistening dorsal fin. He turned off the motor, let the Miriam drift, struggling to clear his mind. He’d attended yoga classes with Lois but had never succeeded in finding that empty inner place where he might experience enlightenment. She’d repeatedly assured him that such a place exists and he’d been tempted to respond that the people who are able to meditate are probably the people who need it least—people with pure hearts and clean consciences.
Then the whales, really dolphins, according to something he’d read, materialized around him. The arched backs, shoosh of mist as the animals exhaled so close that he could smell the rancid breath. First one, as if out of nowhere, then another. And another. Even though he’d been looking for them the intrusion caught him by surprise.
His palatial Draycor office was a world away. Contrast is escape, he thought. Mick Brawley, the CEO and master of that distant world, had put it more directly. A change is as good as a rest. It was a phrase that had impressed him when he was still struggling to perfect the language. Even now he appreciated the simple insights in clichés.
He’d produced his phone, scrolling through the photographs. Let me show you something.
And Brawley, who kept a sailboat somewhere in the Virgin Islands, was impressed. A little beauty, what’s her name?
The Miriam. She’s not a sailboat, obviously. She gets me where I want to be. Diesel powered. That’s where I’ll be staying.
Miriam. Lovely. Old girlfriend? He’d cuffed Pierre lightly on the shoulder, grinning.
No. No. I had a sister whose name was Miriam.
Aha.
And there had been a long glance full of questions. Had? Past tense? But there was no time and no need to risk the human bonding. Pierre was leaving on a holiday because he had to disappear. Temporarily, at least.
We’ll call you when we need you. God willing we won’t have to bother you.
There are loose ends.
Nothing we can’t handle from here. You’ve done good work. We’ve got your back.
I appreciate it. Lois never questioned him—that was the thing. But the last few months had been a strain. And then he’d had to take the sudden trip to Indonesia.
Indofuckingnesia?
We have an issue there. I won’t be gone long.
She’d groaned. Issue? What kind of issue?
Issue. How he loved that word. Was there a word in any of his other languages, the Arabic, the French, the scraps of Hebrew, with such a functional obscurity? He couldn’t think of another word that muddied meaning so strategically, that lacked the urgency of crisis.
We have a situation that needs clearing up.
Well, I surely hope you won’t be long. What could be so urgent in Indonesia?
I could ask Cyril to move in, to keep an eye on things while I’m away.
Cyril? I don’t think so.
It is easy to feign accommodation in a marriage but the real test is in the willingness to put up with absences and mysteries. He’d loved her for her acceptance of the travel, the lost weekends, his past life. At least the past she knew about—his connection to Cape Breton Island, a place that didn’t interest her.
And when the issue didn’t go away in Indonesia, when the issue turned into a human tragedy and, eventually, a potential corporate catastrophe, his absence from the office and the city had become a matter of some urgency. Out of sight, out of mind, hopefully.
He remembered how her eyes had welled up. My God, Pierre. Is this really necessary?
From her point of view, the timing couldn’t have been worse, but her perspective was entirely personal. Health and family and future, personal security.
I can’t explain it now. They’re worried about controversy. They’re trying to protect us. Me, you. Anyway, I need a break. And how far away is Cape Breton anyway?
Have you talked to the doctor?
Yours or mine?
Don’t be funny. You know what I’m talking about.
Like I said, I’m just a phone call away.
If truth were told, and he hoped that it would be told some day, the idea of Cape Breton made Lois insecure. It’s where Aggie came from, where Pierre had found a home with Aggie’s help at a time when Lois was still a toddler in Forest Hill. Aggie and Pierre. Lois hated to be reminded of that old bond but Aggie was a central part of his reality. Lois had no choice but to accept her, just as she had come to terms with Cyril, not only as a stepson but as a friend. She never challenged Pierre about the need for playing second fiddle to a job. Not even now, as she sat alone in the swelter of an early summer in the city, hot and heavy with their unborn child.
How did it begin? As with so many large events, a phone was ringing. He was near the door on his way to work. He’d let it ring. It was in mid-February. He was preoccupied—the urgencies of corporate executives, board members, shareholders, other lawyers.
Lois called him at the office later. “I just checked the answering machine…there was a message from the doctor’s office. You should call him. Some test they want you to repeat.”
“He didn’t say what test?”
“No.”
He was sure it was the piss test. Something in his blood sugar. He worried constantly about diabetes, the plague of men who lived as he did—too much alcohol, too little exercise, too much comfort food. At least once a week he promised to clean up his act, go on the wagon for a while, join a gym. He had to take better care of himself. His wife was almost twenty years younger than he was. Just twenty-four years old, he thought with a mix of joy and apprehension. He’d looked up his doctor’s number right away.
It’s your PSA…
He had to ask. He hadn’t even realized that among the blood tests after his routine physicals, so blandly reassuring time after time, there was one that tracked a part of his anatomy he’d never really thought about. He’d heard of prostate cancer but associated it with the many ailments of old men.
What about my PSA?
The doctor wants you to do another one. It’s probably an error, or anomaly. When can you come in?
Synchronicity. Another word he loves. English is so rich, an endless revelation of its power to convey meaning or obscure it, nothing he could have guessed from the rudimentary English he’d acquired while growing up in Lebanon.
Two synchronized crises in the past six months, pulling him in opposite directions, personal survival pitted against the interests of shareholders and corporate executives. A humiliating process he could never have imagined, strangers digging in his ass, extracting tissue; his own forensic dig into the anatomy of corporate and political misconduct at the ass-end of the world.
Perhaps, he thought, Cape Breton isn’t far enough away.
And, as suddenly as they’d appeared, the whales were gone. A light breeze stirred and the only sound was the soft smack of water on the rocking boat. He went below to fetch binoculars. He scanned the puckered sea around him but he was alone again, alone with his secrets and his fears.
The doctor had a kind face and the eyes of a statistician. His specialty was cancer, so a large part of his job was calculating odds. He was a European, maybe French or Belgian, and he reminded Pierre of someone, someone from the distant past who had warned him about optimism, how easily it can become delusional.
He thought of Lois as he listened to this cancer doctor, studying the eyes, struggling to concentrate on the words, li
stening for realistic hope to take away, to sustain them both. Listening for optimism. I’m a gambler now, he thought. Our lives, from now on, will depend on luck. And lies. Merciful evasions.
“You have cancer,” the doctor said. “Okay? Cancer is serious. Let’s not minimize that. I’d rather tell you that you didn’t. But the biopsy results are clear. So let’s talk about what you have and what we’re going to do about it going forward. Okay?”
Going forward? A phrase that always sounded odd. Going forward to success. He heard condescension in the phrase. Con/de/scen/sion. One of the first big English words he’d absorbed because it captured perfectly what he’d been hearing in the voices and seeing in the faces of his new countrymen in those confusing early days in Canada. Until he was able to make Canadians forget that he was foreign. But here it is again. The patronizing tone. Another English word he liked: pat/ro/niz/ing.
But Pierre was really focused on that one loaded word. Cancer. A word that until recently was a synonym for death. He could have handled that. You’re going to die. Soon. He had experience in contemplating death as an immediate possibility. More than once, a probability. Death he could deal with. It was uncertainty that daunted him and in the instant that it took for the doctor to say that one word, two stunning syllables—kan/sir—all certainty had drained out of his existence. And for the first time in many years he felt vulnerable. He had cancer. He was, once again, a foreigner.
“The good news, I suppose,” Pierre said, “is that I’m relatively young and healthy.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “But it’s an aggressive cancer and it’s widespread in the gland.” He consulted a sheaf of documents. “Nine out of the twelve core samples are cancerous. In four cores the Gleason score is eight. Not good. The others show a cancer we call ‘indolent,’ low Gleason. I’ll be discussing this with the team but I’m hoping we can move forward quickly and…aggressively.”
“Can I see what you’re reading?”
“It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
The urologist had been generous with his time. He spoke clearly and carefully, setting out the treatment options. They had to face the likelihood of surgery. Very soon. Pierre scanned information handouts while the doctor spoke. The boilerplate was meant to be reassuring but horrifying words leapt from the pages: depression; incontinence; impotence. Unpredictable.
“We have every reason for optimism,” the doctor said. “If I was a betting man—which I’m not—I’d not hesitate…”
Later, standing in the vast car park, Pierre wondered why the doctor had stopped short of finishing his sentence. Not hesitate to what? Bet a bundle on the outcome going forward? So why couldn’t he have said so? And then Pierre, the lawyer, realized: liability. The doctor caught himself before he committed to a possibility he couldn’t guarantee. He’d started to say something human but remembered that compassion might come back to bite him.
Wow, he thought. Liability, his specialty. He was a lawyer. He could relate to that. And he was perplexed then, wondering exactly where he’d parked his car. And then he remembered that he’d arrived by taxi.
He’d called Lois from the cab and she picked up even before he heard the ring.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
A thousand phone calls had started playfully: What are you doing? What are you thinking? What are you wearing? Playful was their norm.
“Where are you?” she replied.
“In a cab.”
“So what was all that about? Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Oh, it’s about my PSA…”
Silence.
“You know the—”
“Yes, what about it? You’ve had how many of these tests now? How long does it take anyway?”
“I need some more tests.”
“Shit.”
“It’s really nothing to worry about. The way he explained it, half…more than half…the male population is walking around with scary PSAs they don’t even know about.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Joking,” he said.
“So what’s next?”
“No big rush to do anything.”
Lie number one.
“So what exactly did he say, Pierre.”
“He said it’s too soon to say anything for sure.”
“Come home.”
“I have to go to the office.” It hadn’t really been a lie, he told himself. What is cancer, anyway? Rogue cells. Everybody has them.
The meeting was already underway. Brawley was sitting at the head of a large oval table. He had his jacket on, a sign that he was there to listen. Shirt sleeves were a sign of hands-on micromanagement. M. J. Brawley was a legend in the mining world, the self-made Draycor CEO and chairman of the board. He was a tough man, fond of telling how he’d started out on an old-fashioned mucking machine on rails in some long-forgotten scab copper mine in northern Quebec back in the sixties. He paid particular attention to international operations.
“Ah, there you are, good,” Brawley said.
“Medical appointment,” Pierre explained, sitting down.
“Nothing serious?”
“Routine. What’s happening?”
“Shit is what’s happening,” Brawley said.
“Work stoppage at Puncak mine,” Ethan Kennedy added.
“Work stoppage? How’d they manage that? Puncak is a model of industrial harmony, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s what we used to call a ‘wildcat strike’ in the old days,” Kennedy said grimly.
Brawley said, “I just want to get a sense of where this came from, where it’s going. Just in case I have to brief the board. Okay? So you guys just talk.”
Puncak mine in Indonesia was the golden goose in Draycor’s international portfolio of mining assets. The talk around the boardroom table acknowledged that they had always been uneasy—in principle—about the disparity in wages between the locals and the “professionals” from outside, many of them Canadians.
Western New Guinea was a complex place at the best of times, half of a divided island with a decades-old insurgency that was repressed by Indonesia’s heavy-handed security apparatus. Draycor tried hard to stay above the politics, but where there is systemic exploitation, distinctions between the human and the mineral are often blurred. The wage disparity had become the issue and the issue had become political.
Ethan Kennedy was pragmatic. “It’s apples and oranges comparing our guys with the locals. But it doesn’t take much to stir people up and conditions have been ripe for political agitation. And that’s what’s going on. We have to consider that we could be caught in the middle of something nastier than a pissing match about money. The money we can deal with, I think.” He looked toward Brawley, waiting.
“How much of this is getting picked up by the media?” Brawley asked.
“None of it,” said Kennedy. “And if it continues to play out the way it’s going now, it isn’t going to hit the radar anywhere. Certainly not here.”
“So what are we suggesting?”
“Pierre?” Kennedy smiled at him.
“We have good people on the ground,” Pierre said. “They’re talking, right? We might want to throw some money at this at some point. I’ve been thinking of a sweetened bonus system. But that isn’t up to me. For my part I think we keep close tabs on the negotiations, get them back to work and hope, fingers crossed, that the place will be up and running fairly quickly.”
“I think we should set a time frame,” Brawley said.
“Not a bad idea,” Pierre said. “As long as it stays flexible.”
“I say we give the fuckers until next Wednesday.” Brawley stood. “Every day we lose is lost revenue plus it will make the start-up harder. Idle equipment underground goes to rat-shit in a hurry.”
“The union is letting maintenance in,” Kennedy said. “They’re being reasonable in that regard.”
“Good for them,” said Brawley. “Pierre, get your bags packed. We m
ay want you on the ground sooner rather than later, and be prepared to stay there for as long as it’s gonna take to make an assessment. I worry our guy Harrison is losing control of this and I’m gonna recommend a stronger company presence at the table. Okay, Pierre? All due respect to Harrison, I need someone on the ground with bigger balls.”
“Sure,” Pierre said. “Whatever’s best.”
He was already calculating—the Puncak mine problem was real; the peril in his body was hypothetical, the prognosis offered by the doctor, speculative. Even if it wasn’t, cancer works slowly. Often hibernates.
This much he knew for sure: he couldn’t afford to be an invalid—and surgery could knock him out of action for months.
“Any preference when?” he asked.
“Just be ready,” Brawley said. Then he announced, almost as an afterthought, that it was his birthday and invited everyone to join him for drinks at the National Club after work.
Pierre briefly considered going home after the meeting, telling Lois the truth about the tests, the biopsy that he’d managed to keep secret. Instead, he placed a call to Puncak. He got the mine manager who sounded sleepy since it was the middle of the night there. But he could tell that Paddy Harrison wasn’t happy with the news that he was coming, the lack of confidence implicit in Brawley’s strategy.
“I don’t see the need to push a panic button,” Harrison said. “We’re still talking. I have a good working relationship with these guys. Everything is in good shape and if I can mention money, I think we’re going to be okay.”
For a dozen reasons he could think of on the spot, Pierre wanted this to be the truth. “Brawley wants a deadline,” he said. “Next Wednesday.”
“Well, we should keep that to ourselves. No need for threats. They won’t work here. But if I haven’t worked it out by next Wednesday, you come on down and we’ll do what we have to do.”
“All due respect, Paddy, if you haven’t got this thing ironed before next Wednesday your balls and mine are cat food.”
The Only Café Page 4
