“Does it go very far?”
“Dead end. It stops at the corner of the house.”
“See anything?”
Lisa brushes off her jeans. “Nope. Pipes, spiderwebs, old electric wires.”
Without saying any more, making a show of youthful, imperial indifference, she goes back to stripping the veranda. After a moment of doubt, Robert shrugs and sets about patching the hole with a piece of drywall. In forty-eight hours, with four layers of plaster and two coats of latex, every trace of the secret passageway will have vanished, and Lisa can’t imagine a more fitting outcome: a secret room is of no value unless it is kept a secret.
IT IS ALTOGETHER POSSIBLE FOR someone, given enough time, to acquire a reasonable grasp of modern Greek from listening to the neighbours quarrel.
As Jay mounts the staircase to her apartment, she reflects on this strange osmosis. Through the imitation wood partition as thin as corrugated cardboard, Mrs. Xenakis can be heard shouting her head off. As a rule the range of topics is limited. At the moment they include tea, TV and feet. The cramped lexicon of a closed-circuit life.
Mr. and Mrs. Xenakis have owned this duplex for forty-five years. They have no children, no pets. Mrs. Xenakis’s legs trouble her and she has not left her apartment—and possibly her bedroom—in the last two decades. This puts something of a strain on their relationship, and they lay into each other from ten in the morning until a quarter past midnight.
At the head of the stairs, Jay automatically reaches for the switch. The Sputnik lamp on the ceiling flickers, dithers and dies. For two years Jay has asked again and again for an electrician to come and fix it, but the lamp, along with the rest of the apartment, is part of a long-term experiment on the laws of universal deterioration. One day an electric arc will form and the fire will spread through the ceiling.
Jay has lived in this apartment since she was released on parole seven years ago. At the time, she no longer knew anyone in Montreal—no one, at least, that she was permitted to contact. She had been airdropped into hostile territory. No connections, no opinions, no moving allowance. In the tightly controlled ecology of the public service, her case defied classification. It did not come under labour standards or the collective agreement—it was, instead, an arrangement. Her status was that of a perpetual intern. Her probation officer claimed she was getting off easy, but Jay took the liberty of doubting it.
Be that as it may, she rented this little one-bedroom at the northern edge of the Villeray district, a hundred metres from the Metropolitan expressway. Neither glorious nor well lit, but affordable. There were children in the alley and a Portuguese bakery at the corner of the street that sold decent pastéis de nata. The headquarters of C Division was at the other end of the city, on the far side of Mount Royal, eight kilometres as the crow flies, which suited Jay perfectly. Better to keep one’s distance.
For several months the apartment stayed almost completely empty. At first, Jay owned neither furniture nor dishes, just a clock radio dating from the Reagan era, whose face shone like a lighthouse in the dark. She drank water and beer as she followed the London bombings. She ate very little, slept on the floor with the windows open, listening to the roar of the air conditioners nearby and the quarrels on the ground floor. The paycheques piled up in her bank account.
In the early autumn, Jay resigned herself to furnishing her domestic space by searching through that infinitely renewable resource, the garbage. Everything in her place, from the flimsy futon to the rococo fondue forks, came from the sidewalks. Jay was secretly convinced she would end up a bag lady. All she had to do was wait a little—it would come. In the meantime, she was getting her hand in.
Seven years have gone by, and Jay still sleeps on the futon as thin as hope, where she is harried by strange dreams that she rarely remembers.
Jay’s arrest had not really been covered by the Quebec media; she had been lucky enough to be apprehended the day the NHL announced the cancellation of the hockey season.
The trial was expeditious, and Jay was preparing to spend her three-year sentence in a squalid penitentiary with a view of eucalyptus trees. An embassy representative explained to her that there was no extradition treaty with Canada and that, anyway, extradition was never simply a matter of waving a magic wand; instead, the image one should have in mind was of a kind of bureaucratic tar. A high-viscosity process. Did she know a good lawyer?
She nevertheless was transferred after two months so she could be brought to trial for infractions committed in Montreal ten years earlier. Her eyelids flickered when she heard the news. They could bring her to whatever they liked, so long as she was transferred to a Canadian detention facility. But six months elapsed and there was still no trial. There was talk, and then more talk, but the preliminary inquiry was slow in coming. According to her lawyer, they were going to propose a deal.
And indeed, one Monday morning she was informed that a probation officer was there to see her. The officer, a woman, had come to make her a generous offer: Jay could get out of jail and serve her sentence working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. If she refused, the process would take its course and her three years were likely to turn into a nice round decade, with a remission of sentence once she had completed two-thirds of the term.
The probation officer had brought the contract with her. It contained a great many clauses, but the main ones were meant to ensure a clean break with the “Beneficiary’s,” to wit Jay’s, past life:
2(a) The Beneficiary pledges to adopt a new identity.
3(a) The Beneficiary pledges to sign a non-disclosure agreement (Annex I).
5(a) The Beneficiary shall refrain from leaving Montreal without prior permission; an itinerary may be required (Annex III).
5(b) The Beneficiary pledges not to communicate either directly, indirectly, or passively with any of her former accomplices, specifically (but not exclusively) the members of the family of Horacio Mejía Guzman (Annex IV).
7(c) This accord will remain in effect until the end of the Beneficiary’s sentence, eight (8) years, six (6) months, and three (3) days from the signing date, unless otherwise recommended by the Parole Board (Annex VII).
The exhaustive document, which ran to seventeen pages and of which Jay received no copy, pronounced her gone, erased from the face of the planet. She was to be stripped of her identity, her right to speak, her freedom to travel or make choices, and the frail social fabric she had created for herself in Montreal and abroad.
One tiny concession: they let her choose her new name—the ultimate irony for a girl indicted for identity theft.
She throws her travel bag onto the comforter, unzips it and pulls out seventy-two hours’ worth of dirty laundry, stumbling on volume three of Jules Verne’s complete works sandwiched between two T-shirts. She found the book on the sidewalk at the end of the summer—the garbage works just as well as the Gutenberg Project—and every night for the past three weeks she has tried to like Jules Verne, and every night the book has fallen from her hands. She waded through Five Weeks in a Balloon and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and now she is bogged down in From the Earth to the Moon with the nagging feeling she won’t make it alive to Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
Her passport is wedged inside the book. There is no entrance or exit stamp—she might as well have dreamed of the trip. The only evidence is seventy-two hours’ worth of dirty laundry spread out on the floor. She slips the passport into her shirt pocket and pitches the book into the pile of clothing, where it disappears without a sound. All of a sudden her mood has gone sour.
She walks around the apartment but can find neither hide nor hair of the cat. She ends up in the kitchen and comes to a standstill, as if there were nowhere else to go. Leaning against the counter, she yawns. She looks at the bowls on the floor: the kibble has been partially depleted and the water dish is nearly empty. Three turds have been deposited equidistantly in the litter box. Erwin is alive and holed up somewhere, as is his habit.
>
How the creature manages to disappear in a cramped one-bedroom apartment—there lies an enigma. He must know passageways to parallel dimensions. Sometimes in the silence of her apartment Jay calculates how long ago the cat last showed up. Eight days? Two weeks? Despite the missing pellets of kibble and the turds left behind, Jay wonders if Erwin is still alive, and in the absence of hard data she must assume he is at once living and dead.
For the time being, the situation appears to be stable. Jay tops up the dry food, changes the water and cleans out the litter box.
She unenthusiastically opens the refrigerator door. For years now her appetite has been poor. In any case, there’s nothing interesting left there. A tiny bottle of habanero sauce. A tortilla that has turned leathery. A package of ham whose best-before date probably needs checking.
She chucks all of it in the trash and chooses a pizzeria menu stuck on the refrigerator door. She stares at the telephone number, momentarily imagining just for fun that it belongs to an exporter of phantom refrigerated containers. Her thoughts are interrupted by the rumbling of her stomach. She dials the number, orders a twelve-inch veggie with extra green olives, no drinks, thanks, and hangs up.
Back in the bedroom, she kicks aside the travel bag and stretches out on the futon. There’s a Macedonian soap playing downstairs on the first floor; this is still as close as it ever gets to silence. She tries to recall Horacio’s face, but the image appears veiled with noise and parasite pixels. She has no photo of him—she was never one to document her past in neatly arranged albums.
She falls asleep fully dressed and does not wake up when the pizza deliverer insistently rings the bell and bangs on the door.
THE SUN IS GOING DOWN over the lowlands of the St. Lawrence. Lisa watches the immense ball of hydrogen fusion rolling across a perfectly flat horizon and she tries again to picture the ocean that once covered this land.
As on every last Friday of the month, Robert and Lisa are driving to Huntingdon. They’ve just finished a gruelling day’s work at the Baskine house, and Lisa’s hair is flecked with white paint. She can’t wait to take a steaming hot shower. In the travel bag lying at her feet are clean clothes and everything she needs for the weekend.
Lisa’s life follows a bimonthly cycle that was determined in court long ago: twelve days at Robert’s place, two days at Josée’s. Initially, the reason for the imbalance was her mother’s health. Her condition has since improved, but the routine is so entrenched that no one has considered asking for a review, especially not Lisa or her mother. Two consecutive days add up to a fair dose. Best to leave well enough alone.
Lisa recollects—ever so vaguely—a time when her mother would blow up over any number of trifles. The colour of the sky at suppertime, the scent of Earl Grey or the texture of a cushion was enough for her to descend in flames like the Hindenburg. Her divorce from Robert took place during that time, and her extreme flammability was probably the main cause, but Lisa can’t say for sure. Her memory has blotted out most of the significant family scenes, with no distinction made between joys and traumas. She never questioned her parents about it. Their separation is a reality all the more firmly established because Lisa has completely forgotten what their life together was like, and is in no hurry at all to remember.
Things are better now. Her mother is on regular medication at proven dosages, the result being an exceedingly uniform mood and an addiction to vanilla-scented candles, but then, everything has a price.
Her foot resting on the dashboard of the old Dodge, Lisa sings gibberish over the radio to stave off Robert’s glumness. She knows that the moment he gets back from Huntingdon he’ll return to the Baskine house and work until late into the night. He’ll do overtime toiling away all weekend, and when he fetches Lisa on Sunday night, the poor man will be drained and undernourished.
Just before reaching the town, they come across a long line of cars parked on the side of the road. Cups of coffee in hand, a crowd of motorists have taken ringside seats to enjoy the sight of a hot-air balloon being inflated.
Robert stops the van and Lisa immediately leaps out onto the shoulder of the road. The preparations have barely begun, and it looks as if a gigantic jellyfish has plopped down in the middle of the pasture. People are bustling around the tricoloured envelope. The basket is lying on its side while an industrial fan pushes air into the mouth of the balloon. Lisa takes in every detail of this clockwork choreography, where every crew member knows exactly when and how to pull on this guy line or that section of fabric. Gradually, the shape of the polyester emerges. On the white stripe in the middle of the balloon, the registration number and part of a logo come into view. The pilot ignites the propane burner and the roar of the flame catches everyone by surprise. Jokes are made about a giant barbecue.
A few minutes later, the balloon towers over the motorists, as tall as a six-storey building.
Lisa is as excited as a little girl, and Robert finds it amusing to see her hopping about at the sight of what amounts to no more than a large polyester bag filled with hot air. Still, he has to admit there is something ineffably delightful about the balloon’s roundness and colours that makes it impossible not to smile.
Very slowly, the balloon pivots and reveals the huge RE/MAX logo printed on the nylon. The magic of the moment goes as flat as a whoopee cushion.
Robert sniffs and climbs back behind the steering wheel, looking sullen. He spots an old Tim Hortons cup that’s rolled out from under the seat. He starts to unroll the rim to see if he’s won a new truck. The stiff paper resists, so Robert goes at it with his teeth. The verdict finally appears under the shredded brim: Please Play Again / Réessayez s.v.p.
—
As always, Robert drops Lisa off in front of Josée’s house. He waits for her to mount the stairs, knock on the door and go in. As soon as he and his ex-wife have exchanged a wave, he drives away.
Josée Savoie rented this house on Lorne Street because it was next door to Cleyn & Tinker’s No. 2 mill, where she worked until quite recently. The location is its only asset; otherwise, it is unattractive, soulless and minuscule. The house is not so much a one-family as a sub-family model. The rooms are small and there is only one bedroom. What’s more, the geographic advantage no longer holds now that Cleyn & Tinker have closed their six mills. In addition to leaving three-quarters of Huntingdon’s labour force—including Lisa’s mother—unemployed, the series of closures focused the entire media’s attention on the term “single industry.” Ever since the barriers went up on Route 138, Huntingdon has turned into a national symbol. Today, everyone holds an opinion about globalization, the demise of the textile industry and the economic crisis. Each time the Canadian dollar goes up, the same scenario is played out: jobs move to Ciudad Juárez, Shenzhen, Dhaka. There is a silent war going on, and its front line runs through the heart of Huntingdon, QC.
For her part, Josée Savoie has no hard and fast opinion on globalization, though she does think it’s not about to slow down. Better get used to it. She is still young and sometimes thinks about leaving. When there is talk of a call centre being set up in the old No. 2 mill, she slaps her thighs.
“The day that happens, Lisa, the telephone operators will be flown in from Bangladesh.”
In the meantime, she cashes her unemployment insurance cheque and religiously takes her lithium pills.
When Lisa spends the weekend with her mother, she stays in a large closet her mother calls the guest room. Shopping bags and boxes as well as a humidifier and some boots have to be shunted aside so that the sofa bed can be unfolded. This cubbyhole also contains a baffling number of winter coats (one of which, a two-tone fake fur, Lisa has never seen her mother wear), floor lamps (three in all), a disassembled artificial Christmas tree whose sections are always stored pell-mell in a box with no lid, a profusion of hangers, the skeleton of a Poäng armchair, and an obsolete stationary bike, its chrome pocked with rust. The door doesn’t close and the microscopic window looks out on a city lamppost,
but it is a window all the same, a detail that justifies counting this closet as a room.
Despite these inconveniences, sleeping at her mother’s place does have one advantage: Lisa can use the old turquoise iBook and the Internet connection to her heart’s content.
Her back propped against a pillow, the computer resting on her lap, she trawls the Web. Typing away, she tilts her head somewhat to the right, a tic unconsciously picked up from Éric, and in point of fact she does rather resemble him, what with the computer and that look of concentration. Éric would no doubt appreciate the cubbyhole’s scant dimensions. All that’s missing are the budgies.
There are aquatic sounds coming through the wall from the adjoining bathroom. Every Friday night, in the wavering glow of vanilla-scented tea lights, her mother marinates for ninety minutes amid the ripple of dried petals.
Lisa is searching for a particular piece of information, and this explicit goal prevents her from asking herself if she isn’t also pursuing an implicit goal, a hidden goal, one that involves mitigating the banes of her existence: her mother’s quirks, the closure of mill No. 2, widespread unemployment, shared custody and—peripherally—Éric’s agoraphobia and that other agoraphobia, her father’s, indefinable and unstated, which is expressed in aberrations such as the Baskine house.
On the other side of the wall, her mother starts to hum, too quietly to make the song recognizable but loud enough for some of the notes to travel through plaster, tiles, studs. The effect of specific frequencies getting filtered by the walls, like sea water by sponges.
On the computer screen, Lisa wanders from site to site, strolls among florists, toy stores and welding shops. Or appears to wander—actually, she knows exactly what she wants. She brushes off the ads that are pitched at her. Used Ford dealer, single women in Huntingdon PQ, non-prescription anti-inflammatory drugs. She rewords her query, tries different postal codes.
Six Degrees of Freedom Page 4
