Huntingdon is a more sprawling municipality than Jay expected, but, admittedly, she wasn’t expecting much. Distracted by the excessive Christmas lights, she misses a bridge, backtracks, lurches along. She passes through the unmapped village of Hinchinbrooke, beyond which the signs become downright cryptic. Over here is Herdman, over there Athelstan, and down that way is Chateaugay, New York.
The Christmas decorations grow sparse and end abruptly with a dilapidated, nightmarish Rudolph, followed by a string of DuProprio realtor signs. All the houses are for sale. The real estate apocalypse has swept through the countryside, carrying off bungalows and barns.
After a few kilometres, Jay is convinced she is truly lost and needs to consult the map. She pulls up in the yard of a New Holland dealer, where combine harvesters hibernate under a yellowish street light. At the perimeter of the circle of light, a yellow dog barks and strains at its chain. The dog is not on the map. Jay ignores it. Where exactly did she go wrong? The scale of the map is inadequate at this point, but there is no way to download a new version without an Internet connection. She checks the list of available networks. Nothing. Adventures in the heart of No-Wi-fi-Land.
Jay looks up from her computer. On the other side of the road stands an oversized mansion completely unlit, deserted and bleak. The RE/MAX sign looks as though it was nailed to the door years ago.
Out of nowhere, a Honda Civic shoots past at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour—the licence plate framed in fleeting black LEDs—and vanishes into a parallel nowhere. The tireless dog keeps on barking, as steadily as a metronome.
Leaning over the road atlas with her fingers in her ears, Jay decides she is not lost. This country is a labyrinth not because of the complexity of the roads but the impossibility of distinguishing one road from the next. She starts up the car and abandons the dog to the night.
She plunges deeper and deeper into the plain. Cornstalks, copses. Time stretches like a plastic bag. The stopover in Valleyfield feels as if it was hours ago, yet according to the dashboard clock only thirty-five minutes have elapsed. On the horizon, Montreal amounts to an orange streak of light pollution.
When she finally finds the entrance to Domaine Bordeur, Jay pauses briefly to examine the mailboxes. She counts about forty residents. No addresses or names on the boxes, just anonymous numbers. Attached with wire to a limbless spruce tree, a sign announces high-speed Internet. A bunch of advertising bags hang under a rudimentary shelter made of corrugated sheet metal. A floor lamp and a rusted propane tank have been discarded next to the Dumpster. Still life number twenty-seven.
Jay wonders what the time might be off the coast of the Philippines.
She enters the Domaine and makes her way among the mobile homes. After the drive through the desolate fields, this feels like a return to civilization. The trimmed shrubs are hung with Christmas lights. The roads are illuminated by a few street lights, yet one can still see the inhabitants going about their business inside the houses.
She drives up de l’Extase Street, turns at Bonheur, slows for the traffic bump, takes l’Allégresse and goes down the Gaieté cul-de-sac, with the vast black hole of a field looming in the background. The place is poorly lit, but it’s impossible to go astray—a strategic advantage of blind alleys. She advances at a snail’s pace, finds the scene almost touching. She feels she has reached a sort of epicentre, although she realizes she has no game plan. Does she really see herself knocking on the door with an innocent air and asking the first question that pops into her head? Excuse me, is the Rokov Export terrorist cell here? Do you recognize this camera? What were you doing on the nights between June 12 and October 12?
She drives past 1 and 3. Visual contact with the objective. Her foot slides off the accelerator and onto the brake.
The number 5 is still visible next to the door frame, even though there is nothing left around the door. The house is almost a total loss. The fire must have happened just a few days ago, and all that remains are minimalist ruins. The four walls and roof have collapsed, leaving only the naked frame of the trailer. Parked on the grounds, a backhoe waits for the impending cleanup. A sign announces the work will be done by Sinistres 3000, a Valleyfield company specializing in calamities.
Jay turns the car around and heads back to Montreal.
THE MONTHS GO BY AND Robert grows thinner. His last bungalow was sold at a loss, and the tireless worker has been put on forced rest for an indeterminate period, perhaps for good. He watches TV and sorts nails, while his health swiftly declines. His vocabulary escapes him, one word at a time, like sand in an hourglass. He soon struggles to name the handsaw, the coffee maker, the door. His environment drifts into a semantic fog.
Even so, he takes things with a gallows humour unfamiliar to Lisa: “I forgot a hammer in there,” he grumbles, rubbing his skull.
From Lisa’s point of view, her father’s condition worsens even faster because she sees him only intermittently. She tries to call him every night and visit him each Sunday, but one missed visit is enough to put her half at sea. Robert has become a Venezuelan TV series where events move at an insane pace. Gus and Sheila Miron keep an eye on him, and a nurse from the local public health clinic sees him once a week, but already this help is no longer enough. Lisa often must stay with him until Monday morning and sometimes rush back at a moment’s notice in the middle of the week.
It quickly becomes impossible for her to juggle the shuttling back and forth with her full-time studies. She has to severely prune back her schedule, keeping just two miserable courses per term. As a result, the Ministry of Education terminates the modest loans and bursaries she was receiving. Unable to study full-time, she now must study and work simultaneously—which, ultimately, doesn’t help at all.
Some people have flight plans. Lisa has to make do with vicious circles.
One Sunday in November, she shows up at Domaine Bordeur with Portuguese chicken wrapped in greasy aluminum foil, fries and coleslaw. Robert doesn’t eat much. He looks more demoralized than usual—or maybe just more lucid. The conversation drags on without content or cohesion. Robert’s life is now devoid of narrative developments, and he finds it hard to show an interest in anything. He eats the fries with his fingers, seeming to be wholly absorbed in this task. He drifts off for long stretches, comes back down to earth, repeats the questions he asked ten minutes earlier, scarcely listens to the answers. Lisa is from another world, one he is no longer equipped to understand.
After the meal, he looks for the tea tin for several minutes, eventually spots it where it has always been for twenty years, forever, drops a teabag into the pot and pours the boiling water without saying a word. Then, while the tea is steeping, he conspiratorially motions to Lisa to follow him.
They take the back door and go over to the workshop. The Virginia creeper has invaded the surface of the old container, which seems to be covered with a thick layer of military camouflage.
Inside, the air is cold but dry. All of Robert’s tools are there, many stored in their boxes or hanging on hooks, others fanned out on the workbench, under the blinking fluorescent light. Antique blades, several generations of clamps, squares that would delight the curator of an ethnological museum, but also the hammer drill bought the previous winter, the laser level and the orbital sander. There’s a cross-section of a century and a half of woodworking in this place.
Robert advances, slowly rubbing his hands together. He respectfully grasps a maple wood plane polished by generations of palms. He strokes the wood, sets the plane down again, but his hand remains suspended over the workbench. He is searching for a tool, searching for his words. He draws S‘s in the air with the tip of his index finger.
“The oldest tools…the plane, the adze, the chisel…they belonged to Simon, your great-great-grandfather.”
Lisa’s eyes open wide. “My great-great-grandfather? But…you always told me that…”
Her sentence goes out like a match, sending up a whorl of vapour. Robert always claimed th
e tools came from garage sales. Flea markets. Want ads. Lisa never heard anything about this Simon. Robert does not stop there.
“Grandpa Simon worked in the dry docks, at the shipyard. The St. Lawrence Marine Works. Near the Old Port. Doesn’t exist anymore. There’s a highway there now instead. You know which…highway…”
“The 15?”
“No, the other one.”
“Bonaventure.”
“No, the other one.”
Lisa shrugs her shoulders. Robert pushes on. He waves an enormous brace fitted with a bit long enough to sink a schooner.
“This was used to install bolts. And the adze here—Grandpa forged it himself. You see, this is his signature, here.”
He points to the side of the blade, but Lisa does not see any signature, only wear and tear. He goes on enumerating: the caulking mallet, the male and female plow planes, the straight gouge, the spoon, the burin, the files. One tool after another, he resurrects the vanished docks of Montreal’s Old Port. The vocabulary comes to him with no apparent effort.
Lisa marvels at discovering these bits of unimpaired memory, just as the rest of it is eroding, but she cannot help but wonder how much of this family history course is fabricated. It may be easier, when there’s nothing left of a life but words, to summon up the distant past. In the end, it hardly matters if it’s all invented or not, if the tools come from a mythical forebear or a Valleyfield flea market; at this very instant, in this icy container, Lisa can see the squared-off tree trunks at the edge of the dock, the massive hulls on their cradles, the steel rivets glowing red-hot in braziers, the smell of dross and the iridescence of oil on the water’s surface, broken here and there by a dead rat floating belly up.
And Robert keeps on talking, indifferent to the landscape he is conjuring up in the cold air of the workshop, travelling back in time, talking about her great-grandfather Jean-Charles, about his whetstones and his scraper, his spokeshave, his marking gauge, his collection of squares and compasses.
Lisa’s attention wanders as she listens. Not that the tools don’t interest her anymore, but she suddenly realizes that three of her forebears worked at the shipyard, building and repairing steamships and schooners, until her grandfather Émile closed the works in 1950, so that Robert was the first one in four generations of Routiers to ply another trade.
At this point, Robert puts a large rasp back in its place and catches his breath. He hasn’t spoken for this long in months. The steam rising from his mouth and his shirt collar envelop him in a silvery halo.
He points at the tools with a sweeping gesture. “It’s all yours now.”
To Lisa, this feels like an uppercut to the diaphragm. Yet there wasn’t the slightest trace of melodrama in Robert’s voice. These days, he is well beyond—or well below—dramatic effects.
“I don’t have any room for it, Papa! I share a three-bedroom apartment with three other people.”
“You’ll make room.”
“It’s twenty years of your life. You can’t give me all of it.”
“I have the right to give you anything I want.”
Robert strikes the workbench with the flat of his hand, then does it again, a little harder, as though wanting to add something. He stops, looking as though he has immediately forgotten the subject of the conversation.
Lisa feels her body temperature drop a few degrees. Mrs. Miron warned her that her father had been growing irritable after suppertime. The public health nurse called it sundown syndrome. It’s best to avoid vexing him; tread carefully. Lisa decides to stall for time: if she claims instead that she intends to take the tools the following week, her father will have forgotten this business by then. But Robert shakes his head.
“You’ll need to do several trips in any case. We’ll load up your car. You’ll take the rest of it next week.”
Lisa sighs. “Okay. If you insist. But for now, your tea must be ready.”
“What tea?”
AS SOON AS SHE GETS HOME, Jay first pulls out her computer and then unwraps her quarter grilled chicken with extra piri piri sauce, in that order. Sitting cross-legged, the aluminum foil unfolded on the floor, she digs in with her fingers while keeping an eye on the computer’s charge level. The battery was completely drained on the way back, and she had to fall back on her memory. Huntingdon, the St. Lawrence Seaway, Valleyfield. The return run seemed shorter to her. The kilometre you know always takes less time than the one you don’t.
Gnawing at a metacarpus, she takes stock of the evening. She has come back from Valleyfield with a name: Isabelle Le Blanc. She can’t yet see the connection between this woman and Rokov Export, but it’s only a matter of time. There are lots of little bones left to crunch, in this investigation.
She licks her fingers. The chicken is perfect—just spicy enough to wring a few tears from her.
What’s the next step? Wait until Monday morning to do some research at the RCMP office? Negative. Civilians have no direct access to the databases; she would have to ask a co-worker to do the research for her. Very bad idea.
Rewrap carcass in aluminum foil, degrease fingers. Keyboards don’t get along well with Portuguese grilled food. Jay cracks open a beer, wakes up the computer and loads the Facebook home page. She creates a fake account and immediately looks up Isabelle Le Blanc. Le Blanc with a space. Surely not very common.
In a nutshell: about fifteen Isabelle Le Blancs have a Facebook account, not to mention the Isabelle-Leblancs-in-one-word and the Isabelle-LeBlancs-with-no-space-but-with-two-capitals, as well as the Isa-or-Isabel-Le[]Blancs, who are still potentially in the running. Anyone can be subject to orthographic inconsistency, especially on Facebook.
Jay scrolls down the list. It stretches to infinity. She feels as though she has stepped into a parallel world populated exclusively by Isabelle Le Blancs—perhaps even a single Isabelle Le Blanc endowed with multiple extensions and outgrowths. A sort of distributed intelligence that is at once married, unmarried, underage, lesbian, menopausal. Who is young, old, ageless, wears a straw hat and a miniskirt. Who was a student at the Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe, Université Laval, Paris-Sorbonne, MIT. Who is French-speaking, English-speaking, bilingual, who speaks Tagalog and Italian and even a little Vietnamese, who eats cucumber and citrus salad, who likes poutine and hot dogs, who does pottery and paragliding and cycling, and who just scored an eighty-three-point word in Scrabble. Isabelle has many friends, of all ages and all colours. People who are old, shy, loquacious, trolls, friends who like everything Isabelle posts, announces, reveals, shares. But above all, Isabelle lives everywhere. In Trois-Rivières and Montreal, Paris, Kedgwick, Longueuil and Lévis, and again in Longueuil (Jay notes an impressive concentration of Isabelle Le Blancs per square kilometre on Montreal’s South Shore), in Iqaluit, New York, Copenhagen, Tunis, Lyon.
In short, there are Isabelle Le Blancs everywhere, except—and this is beyond a shadow of a doubt—except along the Valleyfield–Domaine Bordeur corridor. It’s as though a kind of perimeter had been established to create an Isabelle Le Blanc–free zone. A bothersome statistical gap.
How can each Isabelle be differentiated from her namesakes, and, especially, how can they be eliminated one after another until only one remains? Jay has nothing to go on but geography.
She takes a swig of beer, cracks her knuckles. She’ll have to use triangulation.
She keys in the query “Isabelle Le Blanc” + Huntingdon OR Valleyfield OR “Domaine Bordeur.” She needs to rephrase her query several times before Google deigns to spit out what she wants, but after a few minutes she feels a tug on the end of her line. Search result number thirty-five, after the genealogy pages and online dating sites, takes her to a LinkedIn account. An Isabelle Le Blanc was an administrative assistant for a Valleyfield consulting engineering firm from 2003 to 2006, before taking on new challenges with an engineering company in Copenhagen.
Jay rubs her hands together. There are some kilometres between Gibson Street and Copenhagen, not to say a great many
kilometres, but it’s her most tangible lead. In the picture, Isabelle looks intelligent and relaxed, early forties and radiant.
This is her target.
Back to Facebook, where Jay quickly identifies the Isabelle among the Isabelles. An explosion of sorts occurs, blasting away all the supernumeraries and leaving just a single survivor in the middle of a smoking crater. So Isabelle Le Blanc lives in Copenhagen. She has two children, Éric and Lærke, and is in a relationship with Anker Høj, a civil engineer with a friendly face. (A quick search indicates that he is a specialist in pre-stressed concrete and has published a number of papers on low-temperature additives.)
Isabelle is fond of winter sports, Discovery Channel and hot scones with stikkelsbœr jam. She writes her status updates in English and Danish, and occasionally in French. She seems very comfortably integrated into her new country, considering she has been living in Denmark for only six years. Her last vacation was in Palma. She is quite active on the page of a Danish group devoted to agoraphobia. Scrolling down her page, Jay observes a slightly higher than average ratio of cat pictures. A notable percentage, not yet pathological or even abnormal, but one that attests to a marked interest.
A light bulb comes on in Jay’s mind: it’s not possible for this Isabelle Le Blanc to be mixed up either directly or indirectly in the hijacking of Papa Zulu. Jay can’t say why, but she is certain of this. No doubt because of the cats. The number of cat pictures posted on a Facebook account is inversely proportional to the probability of the user being a terrorist. The people at Facebook surely must have developed algorithms to identify such social deviations. The relationship between pictures of reptiles and psychopathology. Frequency of posts and kleptomania. Eating habits and depression. The future is in data mining.
Jay peruses the photos one more time. Suddenly, there it is, plain as day. The album Sommerferie 2012 shows Isabelle on the beaches of Palma in July, and then in the little village of Skagen in August. The album Fødselsdag Éric, dated September, shows her preparing a birthday cake. She could not have been in Montreal between June and October.
Six Degrees of Freedom Page 12
