by Nino Ricci
Shouting, frantic, and a boy in a dirty wife-beater, no more than eight or nine, is jabbing him hard with the point of a rifle.
“Stay there! Stay there! I will shoot!” Wild-eyed, so that no response seems the right one.
An older boy stands laughing behind him.
“Is not a goat, to poke him like that!” He is dressed in a torn Public Enemy T-shirt that shows a swath of bony ribs. “Is not a chicken!”
But he pokes David in turn to make him rise.
“You see, we have found you, G.I. Joe!” Up close like this there is nothing buoyant in his tone, nothing heartening. “Now we can kill you!”
They force David down to the street at gunpoint, paying no attention to his leg. Three more boys are waiting there, just as ragtag, all with rifles. None looks any older than David’s own son. One has a second rifle slung over his back: Wali’s.
Public Enemy pulls David’s Beretta from his own waistband. David hadn’t even noticed it was missing.
“Is nice gun, G.I. Joe, how much in America? Two hundred? Two-fifty?”
“I bought it here,” David says.
The boy ignores him. He aims the Beretta at his young sidekick’s head and the whole group seems to ready itself for whatever antic is about to follow.
“Boom!” Public Enemy says. Then he raises the gun ever so slightly and pulls the trigger.
The air explodes and a look a terror crosses the boy’s face before he erupts in fury, pounding his fists at Public Enemy and trying to wrest the Beretta from him. The other boys are doubled over.
“Boom!” they say, again and again, reliving the moment.
Public Enemy leads the way, up streets that rise higher and higher yet only keep repeating the same landscape of ruin. Two of the other boys flank him at a distance. David’s leg has purpled and swelled from his ankle to his knee, but they offer no help.
“G.I. Joe!” Public Enemy says. “Why are you walking so bad? Come now, we are almost there!”
From a distance come urgent shouts and imprecations. They pass what look like the remains of a school and come to a dusty playing field: a group of boys are playing soccer.
“I think you know this game, G.I. Joe. Can you play it?”
The boys crowd around them at the edge of the field as if David were some prize game animal Public Enemy had bagged. Public Enemy spins out his story until he has everyone in stitches.
“ ‘Stay there, stay there, I will shoot you!’ ”
Some of the boys are as young as four or five, all with the same anemic look of having been out too long in the open. It jars David how close it all is to his dream, the company of boys, the laughter and jokes. Public Enemy has got to the part about the Beretta.
“Boom!” he says, and the sidekick pounds at him again, and everyone laughs.
There is a sudden hush, and the boys part to let someone through. It is the older boy from the checkpoint, still in his hood but looking larger now, more the leader, no longer just a kid extorting petty cash at the side of the road. He ignores David and goes straight to Public Enemy, meeting his expectant grin with a backhand that nearly knocks him over.
“Is this how you bring in a prisoner? Did you think to tie him? What if he runs? What if he grabs for your gun?”
Before he has finished saying it he has pulled the Beretta from Public Enemy’s waist. Public Enemy looks close to tears.
“Sorry, sir.”
“And then you go bragging! How long did it take you to find him? Why did you let him kill that man? What of the car they were driving, what has become of it? We are not playing here, you fool! This is no game!”
Only now does he turn to David. His cheeks are gouged with tribal markings David hadn’t noticed before, just healed-over gashes, really, so crude they look self-inflicted.
“So you don’t want to pay the tolls, G.I. Joe. But now you will pay.”
There is barely enough time for David to think of the pettiness of this before the boy cracks the butt of the Beretta against his skull and his mind goes blank.
In the old stories it is only in hell that the hero learns what will set him free. The trick is remembering. The trick is making it back.
These are the things that David can no longer remember: What it felt like the first time he made love to Julia. The first time he held Marcus. When he learned his father was dead. The images are there, the memories of the events, but not the important thing, what mattered most. As with history. Only to show how it actually was. A joke.
Even now, after so many years, he still has his dreams of returning to his father’s hometown. The dream is always the same and yet never quite; there is always the train that pulls into a station, made up of luxurious sleepers or the filthy cattle cars of concentration camp transports, or there is no train at all, just an arrival, a sense of walking through streets at once familiar and utterly foreign. People greet him and smile, then stare after him from behind closed curtains. Tell him nothing. Tell him everything. Tell him he is lost, has made a mistake, has taken a wrong turn, or wonder how someone who claims such an interest in history has not even bothered to understand his own.
He is the man of history who wants to stand outside it. Who wants to think he is born out of nothing. Who doesn’t want to pay.
He must remember to save a coin for the ferryman for the trip back.
David opens his eyes, to the taste of blood.
He is on his knees at the edge of the playing field, under the slanting afternoon sun. He tries to move but feels strangely encumbered, realizes his hands are bound, his ankles are. That the sun is like daggers.
He tries to remember what dream this is. If only there were a clock, or a mirror, or a book.
“G.I. Joe, you have come back from the dead!” The boy in the hood stands over him, haloed in the sun but somehow not blocking it. “You are welcome, G.I. Joe, you are welcome!”
Laughter and jeers. The whole troupe surrounds him now with their rifles and rags, dozens of them, a republic of boys, their leader’s joke rippling through them. G.I. Joe! You are welcome!
“Do you think is a game, G.I. Joe? Do you think you have come here to play? You can join us for football. You can show us American style.”
More laughter. David knows he has to make the effort to think more clearly, to understand, yet the more he understands the more his leg throbs, the more his wrists and ankles burn, the more the sun pokes its daggers.
The boy still has the Beretta. He makes a show of inspecting it, flicks the safety on, then off again.
“US M9,” he says. “Very fine, very fine. How much, this gun, in your country?”
The question feels more freighted this time.
“I bought it here,” he says, as before.
“Here? I think you are lying, my friend! Is not possible here, this gun. Only American soldiers and CIA.”
“Maybe some soldier left it behind. Maybe only his body went home.”
He regrets his tone at once. There are some titters among the boys and then screaming pain as Hoodie cracks his skull again.
“You think we are joking here, with your lies, but is no joke! Tell me why you have come here, G.I. Joe. Who has sent you?”
He needs to tell them about the Malana, about his book. About Wali’s son waiting for his father’s return in the kitchen courtyard; about his own. At bottom, though, he knows the boy is right. Knows he is steeped in lies, that there would be no end to the unravelling of them.
He can’t shake the dream he had of these boys before they took him, the feeling that he is the one who has chosen which version is dream and which is real.
“I’m a journalist,” is all he gets out, and then another hammer blow.
“Lies, my friend! Where is your press card? Where is your recorder? Where is your pen? The truth is you are a killer, isn’t it? The truth is you are a spy, CIA!”
There it is, finally, the ludicrous charge, almost heartbreaking in its insufficiency.
The mountai
ns that rise up at the end of the playing field seem to hold them here as on a stage. David imagines all his separate selves massing in the wings like a chorus, readying for the final turn.
The boy presses the gun to his head.
“Last chance, G.I. Joe. Only the truth!”
The sun beats down.
In his last years of high school David had developed a small trade in pot and hashish in his neighbourhood so he wouldn’t have to go begging for cash to his father. Once he crossed a dealer in the Jungle by underselling him and the dealer showed up at David’s school in his beat-up Olds.
“No funny business. Just to talk. Man to man.”
David got in the car. That was how green he was then, how arrogant.
They drove out to an empty parking lot and smoked a joint. The dealer had such an easy manner it was hard not to like him.
“Back home we fix this kind of problem very quickly,” he said, as if setting up a punch line.
“And how’s that?”
“It’s very easy.”
He reached in his glove box and pulled out a small silver-plated pistol. David knew nothing of handguns in those days and thought at first it was some kind of toy.
He put the gun to David’s head.
“You see how easy? Before you can close your eyes, the problem is solved.”
Click.
David felt wetness beneath him.
“No worries, man. Stay out of the Jungle and your secret is safe.”
The fear before the hammer had fallen had been like black poison going through him, like a blinding flash in the darkest corner of himself. Yet even then there was that part of him that had thrilled, awaiting the bullet as if there were already a phantom space in his brain set to receive it.
The accusations move through the boys like a wind or a fire, killer, liar, spy. Then the refrain. Make him pay.
With the gun to his head David sees things more clearly. The stark contours of the mountains at one end of the field, the vivid blue of the sea at the other. That he can take so much in, that his brain can hold it, is a wonder to him.
If he walked far enough through the desert that stretches out beyond the city he would reach the outposts of ancient Rome, the still-standing custom houses and theatres and city walls, and then beyond them the pyramid tombs of the pharaohs, the ziggurats and ruined temples, the valleys that were the very birthplace of the human race. All of this he has wanted to give a shape to, right back to the animal past that was still almost all of what humans were, back to the shifting continents and striking meteors and drifting orbits that made every notion of virtue and blame, of progress, of hope, an irrelevance. Thinking it his job to breach every protocol and wake every sleeper. As though, if he cast wide enough, if he took in enough of the muck and the gore, the animal stench, the cold mineral sheen of indifference, even the likes of himself could be accounted for.
The sun has begun to drop behind the mountains, giving them the unworldly look of a planet in its end times, a place where no one has yet spoken the words and yet day by day, the certainty grows.
Hoodie’s finger is on the trigger.
“What can we do with this liar, this killer? Why should we save him?”
Make him pay.
Any minute now, David is sure of it, he can feel the urge growing in him like the howl of all his disparate selves, he will do the thing that will land a bullet in his brain. He has never felt more awake.
Acknowledgements
For their material support during the writing of this novel I am extremely grateful to Antanas Sileika and the Humber School for Writers; Sheila Bauman and the Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence program of Kitchener Public Library; Professor Anthony Cicerone and the Canadian Studies program of Bridgewater State University; Steven Hayward and the Creative Writing program of Colorado College; Greg Hollingshead and the Writing Studio of the Banff Centre; Professor Jeremy Adelman and the Canadian Studies program of Princeton University; Andrew Westoll and the Writer-in-Residence program of the University of Toronto Scarborough; and the Canada Council for the Arts.
For their generous permission to use a reproduction of Alex Colville’s Pacific 1967 for the novel’s cover my sincere thanks to Ann Kitz and the Colville estate and to A.C. Fine Art Inc., which owns the copyright.
I am deeply indebted to my agents, Anne McDermid and Martha Webb, and to my U.S. publicist, Saverio Mancina, for continuing to take me seriously; and to my incomparable editor at Doubleday Canada, Martha Kanya-Forstner, for always being a reader I could trust.
Of the many sources I consulted in writing this novel, Jeff Warren’s The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness was particularly helpful. Special thanks also to John Montesano for his insights on Toronto’s neighbourhoods and history.
The poem by Gaius Petronius Arbiter cited in the novel is from Chapter LXXIX of the Satyricon and is a liberal translation from the original Latin indebted to many other translations from across the centuries as well as to Google Translate.
My greatest thanks go to my children, Luca, Virginia and Sarah, for helping to spare me the fate of the protagonist in this novel, and to my wife, writer Erika de Vasconcelos, for her indulgence, advice and support, and for filling my life with beauty and love.
