“You can get the overlock ready. We’re starting over from scratch.”
Lisa is stunned. “From scratch? But…”
Mrs. Miron solemnly unzips the bag and reveals five or six coal-black shirts. She cautiously takes out one of the shirts and proffers it to Lisa.
“Pure Guangxi silk. Ebony buttons. My brother had them made in 1957 for his part in Madame Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. There are five left. The sixth he wore in his coffin.”
Lisa fingers the silk in wonderment. Sewn onto the inside of the shirt is a thin golden label like a signature: Jacob Weisberg & Sons. Mrs. Miron smiles dreamily.
“At the time, they were the best tailors in Montreal.”
Lisa shakes her head in protest. “It’s much too beautiful to…”
“Not another word. Fit the overlock with a new pair of needles and let’s get to work.”
Parachute number four receives Sheila Miron’s approval just before midnight. The object is strangely elegant, dark and delicate as a Japanese bat. On the reverse side, Lisa has sewn the Weisberg & Sons golden label. Designer parachutes are not exactly a dime a dozen.
When Lisa steps through the door of the workshop, victorious and worn out, her creation rolled up under her arm like a Picasso that has just been purloined from the Prado, she not only is proud but feels as if she has just discovered the antidote to the primal sense of vertigo. As she crosses the few metres of lawn to her house, she looks up at the starry dome overhead. Conditions are perfect—if only they could finally sell the damned cameras.
She goes to bed with a silent prayer addressed to the obscure deities of eBay.
AT JARRY METRO STATION, THE escalator is under repair. Two technicians are toiling away in the pit like a pair of surgeons in Hell, surrounded by mysterious steel organs and tool boxes, amid wads of chewing gum and Doritos bags and used metro tickets. Without access to their mechanical staircase, the passengers are forced to use the conventional one.
Jay grumbles as she takes on the seventy-two thousand steps separating her from the surface. Her thighs are burning and she is out of breath. She feels ridiculous and geriatric. Sooner or later she will have to emulate Mahesh and go sweat on a treadmill Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon. March across the austere geography of repetition. Take protein supplements and vitamin D.
She exits the metro shelter still short of breath and, at the corner of the street, leans her back against the traffic-light post.
The whistle of compressed air makes her start. The light has turned red, and a China Shipping Lines container looms up a few metres in front of her, filling her field of vision almost entirely. It’s as though a chunk of industrial park has broken off and gone adrift. Somewhere on the outskirts of the city a glacier is calving containers.
The box is painted the strident green used in filmmaking for image substitution, and Jay notices that the container has the same effect: reality bounces off its sides. No one pays any attention to it. Just behind, sitting in her BMW, a woman refreshes her lipstick in her rear-view mirror. On the sidewalk, the people waiting for the bus seem to be looking right through the giant box. They filter its presence as if it were an optical anomaly, a fifth dimension their brains would be unable to interpret. Only a young child, strapped into its stroller, scans the container with big round eyes.
Jay is engrossed in the white Chinese ideograms printed on the container. She recognizes at least the two characters signifying China, the and the but the rest—, , and —could be anything. A furtive box with mysterious contents, adorned with incomprehensible symbols: a colossal fortune cookie.
The light turns green, the truck starts up, the container moves off. An idea begins to germinate in Jay’s head. She walks the rest of the way home, immersed in her thoughts.
When she arrives in front of her door, she stops short. During the day, someone has affixed a RE/MAX sign to the fence. She recognizes, set against the tricoloured background, Alex Onassis, his smile showing six dozen immaculate, perfectly symmetrical teeth. She has already seen this face posted on houses here and there around the neighbourhood. While she is examining the sign, Mr. Xenakis appears on the doorstep. Behind him, his wife can be heard whining at the far end of the house. He motions to Jay with his hand.
“There’s someone upstairs.”
“Someone?”
“The electrician.”
“Ah.”
“You saw the sign.”
“Yes. It would have been nice to let me know in advance.”
Xenakis gives his nose a noncommittal scratch. Over the past forty years he’s become inured to female disgruntlement.
“There will be visits.”
Jay frowns. The last thing she needs right now is to see strangers parading through her private space, probing electrical outlets and drainpipes. Xenakis rocks from one foot to the other, as though struggling to compose a difficult statement. From inside comes a volley of rapid-fire sentences.
“Nai! Nai!” Xenakis answers, turning halfway around. He sighs. “You have to keep the apartment clean. For the visits.”
Jay shrugs. It’ll take a lot more than a clean apartment to sell this dump.
When she gets to her living room, she finds the promised electrician standing at the top of a ladder. He has deposited the carcass of the Sputnik on the floor, next to a half-open box from which its replacement peeks out, a garish chrome fixture manufactured in Malaysia. Life expectancy: eighteen months.
“I’ll be another fifteen minutes,” the electrician says without taking his eyes off his work.
He has pulled a bunch of wires out of the ceiling, like a tapeworm parasitically ensconced inside the apartment’s walls. Mineral wool and flakes of plaster are raining down, and Jay beats a hasty retreat.
In the bedroom, the floor is littered with dirty laundry. She yanks a large duffle bag out of the closet and starts to cram it with clothes. Grabbing a bra, she sends Jules Verne’s complete works, incised cover and all, spinning through the air. She collects her laptop, a minuscule Eee, and stuffs it between two T-shirts. She hoists the bag onto her shoulder, scoops a handful of quarters out of the loose-change bowl and leaves without even glancing at the electrician.
The laundromat is deserted, which amplifies the shock-wave of the purple walls. A narrow vestibule has been fitted out with a condom vending machine, a display case of postcards and the last remaining pay phone in the city.
Planted in the doorway, Jay lets out a sigh. At the age of thirty-nine, aren’t you supposed to have a washing machine and a dryer? She suddenly misses the days when she lived oblivious to the objects that a human being should own as a matter of course. She overloads two machines, inserts the change and installs herself on a bench, legs stretched out. The walls are really very purple. Jay shuts her eyes, leaning her back against a dryer. The soapy backwash of the machines eventually calms her down.
Eyes still closed, she turns the distributed-trucking affair over and over in her mind. Somewhere in Montreal, a Russian illusionist is having fun making refrigerated containers vanish.
That said, she can’t see what’s so complicated about this investigation. The chain has been broken up into segments, fine, but all that’s needed is to draw up a complete list of carriers in the Montreal area and call them one by one to find out which of them was entrusted with container PZIU 127 002 7. This wouldn’t even require a warrant; you can get quite far with an RCMP badge and a good attitude. You just have to slog your way from one call to the next. A tedious but simple procedure.
The clothes in the washing machine tumble over themselves like a heap of entangled identities.
Jay opens her eyes. The purple of the walls hits her full on. She lifts her computer out of the bag and locates an unsecured wi-fi connection. With the screen’s brightness at the lowest setting, she logs on to Canada411 and chooses the category “Containers—Carrier Services, Montreal QC.” The list comes up on the screen: Transport Globalex, Tremblay Express, CargoPro, Tran
sport Nguyen, RTF Express, Logistique Robert, and so on for another twenty-five pages. It’s impossible to display all the results on a single page. What’s more, she would have to click on each carrier to access the contact information. This means copy-pasting everything manually. Pure drudgery.
Closing her eyes again, Jay works out a more efficient method. She could code a script in Python to identify the relevant links on each of the twenty-five pages of results and then extract the contents of every linked page. Afterwards, she could filter and organize the addresses, which would enable her to automatically transpose them onto OpenStreetMap and determine a route by means of combinatorial optimization.
Jay feels a weight building up on her chest.
She opens her eyes again—that purple!—and casts them at the vestibule of the laundromat. Suspended under the old pay phone is a copy of the Yellow Pages, swollen from age and humidity.
Jay has not opened a paper telephone directory for at least twenty years. Propped against the condom vending machine, she flips through the thin, crinkled pages until she gets to Containers—Carrier Services. A single page. She delicately tears it out, folds it in four and slips it into her pocket. Anyway, what sort of dinosaur still uses the Yellow Pages?
CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS, HERBERT THE Clown does not have three heads. He’s neither funny nor sketchy, and he doesn’t reek of cigarettes or stale beer. He’s only a fifty-something, ill-shaven guy who lives in a former convenience store on the corner of a busy street. Resting against the door jamb, he looks as if he’s just awoken from a nap.
In front of him, tiny Lisa nervously shifts her weight from one foot to the other.
“I called to reserve a gas cylinder.”
“Lisa?”
“That’s me.”
Herbert yawns and, after sizing up his customer, points to a hundred-and-twenty-five-cubic-foot cylinder standing at attention near the door. Lisa is surprised to see how massive it is. She was expecting something easier to handle, more clownish, pink and shiny, not this big welder’s cylinder. She apprehensively strokes the cold metal. Thor’s hammer comes to mind: it could be used to slay giants.
Standing on the sidewalk, Robert Routier watches in stupefaction as the deposit and rental fee are duly paid. Herbert scribbles the amount on a receipt, which Lisa stuffs into her pocket. What Robert does not know is that the rental of this gas cylinder results directly from the long-awaited sale of the old cameras his daughter found in the attic of the Baskine house.
The outcome hinged on an eleventh-hour eBay surge. The Instamatic 110s weren’t worth anything, except for the one containing a film cartridge, which, thanks to the curiosity factor, got up to fifteen whole dollars. Collectors spurned the Retina IIa and the Mercury for reasons to which only collectors are privy, and the magnificent Polaroid might have had potential if not for the subtle aroma of bat guano permeating the bellows—a detail that could hardly be kept secret. Just when Éric and Lisa were about to lose all hope, the Leica III, the dark horse that was off everyone’s radar, pulled up on the outside track and, with an astonishing burst, finally, on August 17 at 2 a.m., attained the sum of $245.
Seventy-two hours later, nearly all the money is gone and now in the possession of a fifty-something clown from Valleyfield.
As soon as they’ve loaded the cylinder into the van (“It has to stay upright!” Herbert yells from the doorway) and firmly secured it, father and daughter head back to Domaine Bordeur. Not a word passes between them during the ride back. The radio is playing a retrospective of Willie Lamothe’s country music career. Two or three times, Robert seems to be on the verge of asking about the object strapped behind his seat. In the end, he thinks better of it. When they get home, he simply asks—affecting an air of detachment—if he can drop Lisa and her helium off somewhere. She shakes her head. No, that’s okay.
As they unload the cylinder, Lisa is struck by how she receives the spontaneous consent of the adults around her. She’s starting to wonder if she has acquired some sort of reputation.
She walks over to the Mirons’, where, after ten years of heroic treatment, and by a fabulous coincidence, the Datsun has just now started up—oh, ever so briefly, scarcely long enough to produce a blackish fart—but start up it did, nevertheless. His hands smeared with grease, Gus Miron gives Lisa a disconcerting high-five. The car’s awakening has taken thirty years off him in thirty seconds.
Then Mr. Miron looks hard at his young neighbour. He knows that expression: there is something she needs.
“I’ve got something heavy to move. Could I borrow your hand truck?”
Watching her hurriedly fasten the cylinder to the hand truck, Mr. Miron shows signs of apprehension. He notices the green diamond: Non-flammable contents. All right, no danger of an explosion.
Lisa carts the cylinder to her father’s workshop, then she goes back to the house and fixes herself a pickle sandwich.
—
At 4 a.m., the clock radio begins to chatter, smothered under Lisa’s pillow, where she has hidden it.
She pulls on her jeans and a thick sweater. On her way through the kitchen, she grabs an apple, which she will munch on while standing in the wet grass. There is a faint hint of dawn above the woods. She noiselessly removes the lock from the door of the workshop. Under the fluorescent lights, the cylinder appears even more massive than yesterday evening. Lisa takes a deep breath, takes hold of the hand truck and, with a spring in her step, sets out on the long trek to the Gaieté cul-de-sac.
When she arrives at the end of the blind alley, she is relieved to see a lamp shining in the sanctuary window. She scratches on the screen and Éric’s head pops into the rectangle of light. He eyes Lisa and then the cylinder.
“What’s up?”
“I don’t want to wake your mother.”
“She’s not here.”
Lisa is taken aback. She parks the cylinder at the bottom of the stairs and goes in. She finds Éric still in pyjamas, bare-chested, doing his prison routine. Every morning—whether it’s 4 a.m. or 9 a.m.—the gentleman starts his day with a series of push-ups and sit-ups, uses as dumbbells whatever objects are to hand, jogs in place, and concludes with ten minutes in the low squat position. He’d read somewhere that prisoners stayed in shape with this sort of minimalist workout, and what’s good for a prisoner is good for him.
Lisa, meanwhile, feels she has already done her share pushing the cylinder this far. She mops her forehead with her sleeve.
“Your mother’s spending the night out?”
“She’s seeing someone—a colleague.”
The silence is charged with innuendo. Éric moves on to his dumbbells du jour (four Stephen King novels).
“Do you really have to finish your exercises?”
“Uh-huh.”
Lisa settles onto the bed, an appealing warmth still emanating from the sheets, and leafs through a shoddily printed booklet titled Manual Operation for GPG Beacon Garmik 55. (Warning: May contain Chinglish.)
“Is that something new?”
“What?”
“Your mother sleeping away from home.”
“It’s been going on for a few months.”
“I never noticed.”
“My mother is a ninja.”
“And do you know this colleague?”
“Haven’t met him yet. My mother never talks about him. But I googled him, just in case.”
“Jealous?”
“Well, before you know it, poof—there’s a psychopath.”
“And?”
He lays the Stephen Kings down on the floor, checks the time and directly assumes the squat position. With his striped pyjamas, half-closed eyes and slow breathing, he looks like a suburban Zen monk.
“And nothing special. His name is Anker Høj. He’s from Copenhagen. Civil engineer specializing in pre-stressed concrete. Published a number of articles on winter additives. Anyway, the Danish police aren’t after him for some brutal quadruple murder.”
He finishes hi
s workout and gets dressed. As he slips into his sneakers, he hesitates momentarily, and Lisa wonders if he has completely got out of the habit of wearing shoes or if he has simply outgrown his sneakers. They finally go outside carrying a large cardboard box and a backpack.
When he sets foot on the street, Éric looks up at the star-studded sky. The horizon has begun to glow toward the east, but the Milky Way can still be easily recognized tilting down over the U.S. border.
“I’d forgotten how big the galaxy is.”
“You should get out more often.”
The strawberry fields on the other side of the fence are empty. It’s been several weeks since the Mexicans left. The two conspirators stride across the rows of strawberry plants. They’ve hidden the hand truck in the ditch on the edge of the field; Lisa carries the cardboard box and the backpack, and Éric lugs the cylinder (he insisted).
Having reached the far side of the field, they clamber one at a time over a rickety fence, passing their load over the wire. They handle the box like a newborn baby and the cylinder like an old, cantankerous torpedo. The pasture has been grazed down to the ground, and far off, where the farm lies, the cows can be heard lowing as they line up at the milking machine. Lisa turns around to gauge the distance they’ve covered.
“Don’t you think this is far enough?”
Éric shakes his head and points to the neighbouring field. Lisa shrugs. The sky is growing brighter and the surroundings are more sharply defined. The space around them expands as the night retreats; suddenly Éric stops dead. He puts down the cylinder and drops to his knees.
Ohshitohshitohshit, Lisa is thinking. She has never witnessed one of Éric’s attacks of agoraphobia and has no idea how to cope with it. She’ll just have to wing it.
Six Degrees of Freedom Page 6
