Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  Besides, how did a notorious agoraphobe manage to surround himself with such a bevy of jet-setters? A selfie taken at the international airport in Hong Kong, a large latte ordered at the Starbucks in Dubai, someone baring their soul at the Marriott Rio de Janeiro. Increasingly, Jay has the feeling she is going around in circles in different languages. Hvad har du på hjerte? No que você está pensando? Again and again, back to square one: all people are alike even in their differences. It took twenty years of GeoCities, Tumblr and Facebook to arrive at this collective conclusion.

  Among Éric Le Blanc’s 103 modern and globalized friends, only one account refers to that backwater of Western civilization’s hinterland called Montreal: the one belonging to a young woman named Lisa Baskine.

  On her spartan home page, the young Baskine states that she was born in Huntingdon, a geographic detail that in itself should be enough to convince Jay this is the Individual with a capital i, but she mistrusts geography and capital i’s, and anything stemming from the Web in general. In fact, she wonders if Lisa Baskine is really a young woman and not some paunchy philosophy prof with a satyr’s goatee. Whom can you trust? It’s getting close to midnight, and after forty-eight hours of intensive searching and four potfuls of Earl Grey tea, Jay is starting to experience severe paranoia coupled with colour separation on the periphery of her field of vision. Everywhere in the room, objects are fringed with the double pink-blue halo of old 3D films. Jay is burned out.

  How to find this flesh-and-bones Lisa? According to 411, the closest Baskines live in Washington, D.C., and Miami. Jay could hack into Lisa’s Facebook account, but there is no guarantee of finding the slightest bit of useful information. The only definite links with the real world are the IP addresses from which the account was accessed, and to obtain them one would have to consult the Facebook and ISP registries, which would require several warrants to be issued as part of an official investigation.

  Up to now, Jay has found nothing concrete, aside from a cracked camera and numerous bits of evidence. She is resourceful, of course, but her personal resources are laughable compared with those of the RCMP machine, and she is beginning to feel a little worn out.

  Lying on the floor, she gazes upside down at the Canon on the living room table. The camera’s blank eye holds her gaze impassively.

  IT’S SEVEN IN THE MORNING when Robert Routier is intercepted at the Covey Hill customs office sitting behind the wheel of his old black Dodge Ram in his pyjamas. Mr. Miron had hidden the keys, but there must have been a spare set somewhere in a loose change bowl or at the bottom of a drawer.

  When the customs officer steps up to the window, Robert is unable to show any kind of ID. The fact is, he never owned a passport. The officer would later describe him as “confused but courteous.” When asked about his destination, Robert declares he would like “to go to 1978,” which arouses a certain degree of bewilderment.

  “I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to park your vehicle over there and come inside with me.”

  What happens next is marked by calmness and docility. The customs officers install Robert in a waiting room with some coffee and an old issue of Fly Rod & Reel and call the Sûreté du Québec to report that an incoherent Canadian national came knocking at the gates of the Great Empire and it would be very nice of them to come fetch him. The upshot is that Robert now finds himself at the hospital in Valleyfield.

  Having come as fast as her Honda could bring her, Lisa listens to the policewoman’s account of the exchange between Robert and the customs officers.

  “He said what?”

  “That he wanted to go to 1978.”

  Lisa is perplexed, not only because the incident reveals the extent of her father’s illness, but also because 1978 means nothing to her. What in the world took place that year that would make her father want to return there? He had just turned thirty-seven. What did he do, where did he go? Whom did he meet?

  Evidently, Robert Routier also had secret passages hidden in his walls.

  An hour later, Lisa thinks back to her father’s words as she rummages through his drawers. She pitches his clothes into either an old sports bag or the laundry hamper, according to the smell. Clearly, Robert was finding it increasingly difficult to draw the line between dirty clothes and clean clothes. She adds his toothbrush, a few magazines and—after hesitating momentarily—a framed photo of father and daughter, proudly posing on the staircase of some sad bungalow.

  Lisa doesn’t even know how long her father will be away from his house or, for that matter, if he will ever come back to it. She found their conversation at the hospital disturbing. At first he seemed to recognize her, but the more they talked, the more Lisa got the impression her father was actually speaking to a hybrid person who was part Lisa, part Josée Savoie.

  She looks up, and what she discovers in the mirror is an exhausted young woman with a lined forehead, who appears to have aged ten years that day. True, she has her mother’s eyes, but who does she take after? It’s not easy to rise above yourself, to gain altitude so as to see yourself objectively, as others see you. She searches for her parents’ features in her own, as if this could attest to the emergence of a personality. Will she be bipolar like Josée or get Alzheimer’s like Robert?

  Once she has collected the essentials, she checks her watch and sets about cleaning the house. She can’t believe the place could have deteriorated this much in a few days. She does three loads of laundry, mops the floors, scrubs the counter. The situation in the fridge is toxicological. She jettisons whatever has passed—or is about to pass—a best-before date, leaving only a bottle of plum sauce and a tube of Krazy Glue.

  Cleaning up in the bedroom, she discovers a few hundred little white pills dumped in the nightstand drawer. Lisa estimates that this amounts to a dozen bottles of Ebixa. An entire year’s worth of prescriptions that her father refused to take. So that explains it.

  While the third load of laundry is tumbling in the dryer, Lisa tackles the spare change box, where Mrs. Miron deposits the mail she retrieves from the mailbox each morning, and which Robert has neglected to open. It’s a mishmash: flyers, pizzeria ads, two Christmas cards, New Year’s wishes from the New Democratic Member of Parliament, a few unpaid bills (Lisa is surprised the telephone and electricity haven’t been cut off), papers from the CLSC, random newspaper clippings. There’s even some mail for her: an offer for a platinum credit card (low fees, competitive rates) and a delivery notice from Canada Post.

  Lisa considers the notice, at once intrigued and annoyed. She will have to make a detour to the Huntingdon post office, and this doesn’t suit her. The day is slipping away and she would like to spend another hour with her father before heading back to Montreal. She still has to review her notes on advanced circuitry for the exam tomorrow evening, and she can’t see where she will find the necessary time and energy.

  Outside the window, a light snow has begun to fall.

  When the time comes to leave, the Honda reaches its expiry date. It looks serious this time. One could scarcely imagine a worse moment for this to happen, and Lisa is too exasperated to think straight. She mistreats the starter for a few minutes, until a dark silhouette appears beside the car. Lisa lets out a sigh and rolls down the window. Mr. Miron leans toward her. His moustache is speckled with snowflakes, which soon transform into tiny water drops.

  “How’s your father?”

  Lisa gestures. All right. It’ll be okay.

  Mr. Miron extends his forefinger with a set of keys swinging on it. “Take the Dodge. I’ll take care of your car.”

  Lisa feels she’s about to double up. She presses her temple against the rough back of Mr. Miron’s hand. She could go to sleep right there, with the snow softly gathering on her head.

  When she finally arrives at the Huntingdon post office, there are big dry snowflakes dashing against the Dodge’s windshield like airplane debris. It’s about ten minutes before closing time. The place is dead, the atmosphere muffled by the snow and the C
hristmas music. An old woman is having fifty or so greeting cards postmarked. In a corner, an employee is assembling a pink artificial Christmas tree one branch at a time, verrry slowly. The scene is all Lisa needed—now she is completely depressed, and suddenly her only wish is to be shut inside her apartment with a beer and her laptop, watching a kung fu movie. She turns toward the window and wonders if going out on the highway is a good idea. The outline of the Presbyterian church across the street can barely be made out.

  If her mother still lived nearby, Lisa would gladly invite herself over for the night, but Josée has moved to the South Shore with a new boyfriend who does not like IKEA.

  “Next!”

  Lisa hands the delivery notice to the clerk; he straightens his glasses.

  “This is dated September.”

  “I know. My father forgot to give it to me.”

  “Normally, we hold on to packages for three weeks.”

  “Oh, okay. No problem.”

  “I can still go take a look.”

  Pinching the notice between his index finger and thumb like a used tissue, he disappears into the back, where Lisa can hear him shuffling boxes. He comes back with a look of surprise and a large bubble wrap envelope, which he turns this way and that.

  “No sender’s address.”

  Lisa looks at the Parkinsonian letters written on the yellow paper:

  Madame Routier

  46 rue de l’Allégresse, RR 5

  Huntingdon, Québec

  There is nothing recognizable about the handwriting. She tucks the envelope under her arm and goes out to face what looks more and more like a storm. Five minutes in the post office was enough to bury the van. Lisa gets in behind the wheel without clearing the snow off the windows, starts the engine and turns the defroster on full blast. Then, in the half-light of this cocoon, she tears open the envelope, rips out some bubble wrap and tugs at what clearly appears to be packaging material.

  Her fingers react at the first touch. The tactile sensation is at once so familiar and so strange that Lisa perceives it as an electric tingle. Her left hand grips the wheel, as though seeking to ground her. She pulls out the packaging, which in reality is the greyish silk of several shirts that once belonged to an opera singer. The parachute slides slowly out of the envelope, and suddenly everything spills onto Lisa’s lap: Mrs. Le Blanc’s PowerShot, the GPS beacon and the piece of cardboard on which Lisa wrote her address. Scribbled on the reverse side, in the same seismic calligraphy, are the words found at Thetford Mines, September 9.

  In disbelief, she turns the camera around in her hands. Acting on an irrational reflex, she squeezes the shutter release button. No response. Corrosion has welded the batteries together in their compartment. Lisa ejects the memory card and examines the connectors. Good as new.

  She opens her bag, grabs her laptop and inserts the card in the SD slot. The spring makes the satisfying click of parts falling into place. The computer hesitates but eventually displays the card’s contents: a number of folders nested one inside the other, and containing the 253 photos—253!—taken by the camera.

  Lisa keys in -A and launches the slideshow.

  She and Éric appear in the cornfield at dawn. The pictures are slightly underexposed, but it’s still possible to make out the heads of the two stratonauts: young, disheveled and hard at work. Next are several shots of corn, a sea of egrets and leaves. Then the field shrinks. The balloon rotates and the camera, borne along by the wind, immortalizes at random. The Ouimet hog farm. The Domaine Bordeur. Route 209. She spots their respective houses, and a microscopic orange dot that must be Gus Miron’s Datsun.

  Now Lisa scrolls through the pictures at high speed. The balloon gains altitude. Whole swaths of the region appear. Huntingdon surrounded by a grey and yellow mosaic, Cleyn & Tinker’s Mill No. 2, Vermont. Vast tongues of forest slashed by the line of the river. The mosaic grows blurry. Boundaries and details fade. Roads and buildings can no longer be distinguished. The wind tosses the camera about in every direction. The horizon takes on an increasingly curved shape. From time to time, the sun explodes in the lens.

  In the very last photo, the balloon floats at such a great height that the true nature of the Earth is clearly visible: a large, bluish bowling ball, streaked with cirrus clouds. Near the top of the picture, the sky turns dark blue. This is where space begins.

  JAY MOUNTS THE STAIRS AND exits from the Lionel-Groulx metro station. Above ground, it looks like Monday morning. It snowed the entire weekend and now it’s raining, and pedestrians are scurrying on all sides like climate refugees.

  She walks alongside the line of buses thrumming at the stops and begins her daily ascent to Westmount. Every morning she contends with gravity to get to her workplace, and every evening gravity pulls her down toward the metro. She tries not to read any hidden meaning into this.

  She climbs Greene Avenue and its houses with their sedimentary facades, walks under the Ville-Marie expressway with her nose turned up. If she’s going to be struck by a piece of a span or a dead pigeon, better to see it coming. True to her morning routine, she notes the damaged underbelly of the expressway, the missing slabs of concrete. The rush hour vibrations spread through the piers and down beneath her feet. Overhead, the southern roadway slowly crosses her field of vision, followed by a narrow strip of grey sky, followed by the northern roadway, followed by the wooded belt of the escarpment and then the CPR viaduct. Each morning, she walks through the same sequence, strip after strip—concrete, sky, concrete, wood, railroad—like a bar code that holds the secrets of the city.

  —

  When she arrives at the corner of Dorchester, the traffic light is red. She looks up toward the headquarters of C Division. A pure expression of 1970s brutalism, the vindication of natural concrete and the line of the formwork. Welcome to your workplace.

  The floor of the vestibule is covered with brownish water, which the janitor is mopping unhurriedly. It’s past the rush hour, and Jay is alone in the elevator. She waves her access pass, goes up to the seventh floor, waves her pass again to go through the glass doors. Officially, she has two (2) years, two (2) months and twenty-eight (28) days left to serve.

  She heads for the coffee machine, absent-mindedly greets a colleague from Fraud, grabs a coffee along the way, turns the corner, crosses the microclimate of the photocopiers and takes the home stretch toward the Enclave.

  At a distance of twenty metres, she knows everyone is there: Sergeant Gamache, Laura and Mahesh, all stationed in front of the latter’s computer. Sergeant Gamache is on the telephone. The closer Jay gets, the easier it is for her to see what’s happening on the computer screen. She could recognize a Google page from a hundred metres away: the logo, the list of search results, the royal blue of the hyperlinks, the apple green of the URLs. Mahesh has just brought up the grey and yellow mosaic of a map. A few more clicks and there he is on Google Street View.

  Jay stands motionless on the threshold of the Enclave, but even at this distance she recognizes the photo of Autocars Mondiaux, located at 230 Gibson Street.

  AT THE END OF FORTY-EIGHT hours in the purgatory of the hospital, and after a series of blood tests, X-rays and MRIs, urine and mucus samples, examinations and consultations and forms, it is obvious that Robert Routier will not be going anywhere. The subject under investigation does not understand why he’s being prevented from going home or, even better, back to 1978. (When questioned in this regard, his answers remain evasive.)

  The doctors are unable to ascertain the exact name of Robert’s illness. They talk about invasive near-borderline sclerosis and degeneration of the temporal walls, but, clearly, all this mumbo-jumbo comes down to pure speculation.

  Be that as it may, the next step is a long-term care facility. Lisa finds the expression long-term quite inadequate for a man who has already forgotten what he ate for breakfast. A perpetual-now care facility—that’s what her father needs. Whatever. While waiting for a place to become available, they catapult him to the
Westmacott Building in Saint-Anicet, twenty-five kilometres west of Valleyfield.

  Her father’s new room is dingy and cramped. Left behind by the previous patient, who either died or was transferred, are a miniature Christmas tree on the windowsill and an imitation potpourri air freshener plugged into a socket. “Greensleeves” plays in a loop in the corridor. Lisa feels as though she is living in a slow-motion horror film, but she puts her head down, clenches her teeth and does what needs to be done. She makes sure her father has enough socks, underwear, T-shirts. She encourages him to eat. She brings in a spider plant, knowing it doesn’t have a chance. When it dies, she’ll get another.

  December sweeps down, grey and ugly, over the St. Lawrence Lowlands. Lisa ponders the meaning of life and declines her mother’s repeated invitations for an IKEA outing. She resists the intruder. Éric has been incommunicado for three days, no doubt busy with holiday preparations. Lisa was quick to show him the 253 photos taken by the probe as it rose above the cornfield toward the stratosphere. She can’t help feeling a kind of cognitive dissonance whenever she looks at the spectacular images—as though, all at once, their dreary adolescence at the Domaine Boredom had been transmuted into a National Geographic article. Éric, for his part, had a strange reaction when he saw them.

  Edwin Schwartz decided to close the hardware store for two weeks without giving notice or an explanation. Lisa finds herself temporarily with neither income nor employment. She eats plain macaroni and draws up long, more or less methodical to-do lists: buy her father slippers (point number three), write to the Attorney General of Quebec (point number eleven), study for the final exam that she had deferred until late December “due to a family emergency” (point number twenty-three), start to empty out her father’s house (point number eight), terminate the telephone service and pay the electricity bill (points fifteen and sixteen). The list grows longer and more complex from day to day, from hour to hour. Everything is complicated and overwhelming.