A gift? That would be a first. Christmas has come and gone, and her birthday is still six months away.
She signs absent-mindedly on the device held out by the driver and shakes the envelope, which feels empty. Climbing the stairs, Lisa struggles with the supposedly easy-open strip, conceived by some malevolent designer to poison the lives of his contemporaries. She gets nowhere with her fingers and resorts to her teeth.
Grunting like a Neanderthal, she finally manages to open the envelope and halts on the second floor landing, under the blinking fluorescent light. The damned envelope really is empty. What is this joke supposed to mean? Standing directly below the light fixture, Lisa pulls the envelope apart to give it a closer look. There may be something at the bottom after all.
Lisa turns the envelope upside down, and what flutters out and scatters on the landing is, without the shadow of a doubt, the much-awaited answer.
IT IS 6 A.M. WHEN the woman parks her rental car at Trudeau airport. She wears a grey pantsuit and Ray-Ban sunglasses and pulls a trolley suitcase still bearing the price tag from the Royaume de la Valise ($24.99 plus tax).
She enters the terminal and proceeds downstairs to the arrivals area. The first international flights have started to come in, and the passengers trooping past run the gamut of fatigue and jet lag. Some flight attendants are having coffee. A man goes by holding an enormous bunch of roses.
The woman moves past the arrivals area, exits the terminal through the revolving doors and follows the Park’N Fly signs. The shuttle is parked at the far end of the walkway. The driver is puffing on a cigarette. He greets the traveller with a nod.
“Which lot?”
“Express A.”
He does not ask to see a ticket, and the woman climbs into the bus. The radio is playing softly. Three passengers already ensconced in their seats are immersed in their telephones. One of them resembles Gandhi. He is discussing the price of Kevlar per linear metre and supply time frames.
On the sidewalk, the driver consults his watch. He flicks away his cigarette butt, which ricochets off a post and explodes into sparks. He sits down behind the wheel and moves off. In a single manoeuvre, he cuts off a taxi, drives onto the ramp and turns up the radio. It’s the news bulletin, and amid the grind of the gearshift come fragments of a report on drones in Pakistan.
The first stop is Express B, a small parking lot alongside the Côte-de-Liesse highway. Gandhi gets off and climbs into a Jaguar XK. The Kevlar trade is thriving.
The bus continues on its way, and a few minutes later they arrive at Express A, which covers a far larger area. The shuttle drives around the entire lot. Sitting next to the window, her sunglasses lowered slightly, the woman keeps an eye out for surveillance cameras. Best to assume that every inch of the parking lot is monitored.
Suddenly, the woman grabs her suitcase with one hand and pulls the stop request cord.
“I get off here!”
Muttering, the driver applies the brakes. The woman gets off the bus, nearly loses her footing—stupid high heels—and the doors close behind her. The next instant she is alone in the parking lot, face to face with the old black Dodge Ram. With its two very round headlights and the smirking shape of the grille, you would swear it was expecting this traveller.
She steps closer and, using her hand as a visor, looks through the windows. Imitation wood, dials, vinyl seats patched with electrical tape, eight-track tape player. A paper coffee cup forgotten in the cupholder. The back seats have been removed to free up more room, and the floor has disappeared under the tool boxes. A handyman’s van.
The woman tries the door handle. Locked, of course. On the passenger side too, the lock button has been pushed down. She opens her suitcase and takes out a piece of wire hanger carefully cut and bent. It’s been years since she opened a car door this way. Luckily, there’s YouTube.
She adjusts her gloves, wiggles her fingers and, her expression tight with concentration, inserts the wire between the rubber seal and the window and pushes it inside the door. The mechanism resists, but the woman has lost little of her touch and, on the second try, with a small additional twist, the button pops up.
Not wasting a second, the woman tosses her suitcase onto the passenger seat, climbs in behind the steering wheel and shuts the door.
The van has been sleeping in this parking lot for almost two months, but it still smells of coffee, wood, oil and old carpeting, and another distant scent, rounder, indefinable, a human scent. The olfactory signature of the owner.
The woman opens the glove compartment and picks through its contents: a flashlight, a toothbrush, a road map of Montreal and a grimy car registration. The vehicle is registered in the name of Élisabeth Routier-Savoie.
The woman delicately grasps the certificate. Smiling a little, she raises it to her lips and gives it a kiss.
ROBERT ROUTIER’S EYES, IN THE past, when he was hunting wild bungalows…
His manic spells invariably started with the careful perusal of the newspapers and real estate catalogues, with black coffee and red pencil close at hand. Yet Robert never found what he wanted on paper and always ended up combing the region in the Dodge, looking like a highway robber, stopping for a long time in front of properties for sale, jumping fences, poking his nose between the pales. This time, he would ferret out the deal of the century, el fabuloso bungalow, which would replenish his bank account and allow him to move up to the next level: the luxury home market.
His eyes would glint back then with a worrisome craving, like those of a compulsive gambler sitting at a blackjack table. He hovered, cut off from the world. He would lose sleep over it, and his appetite.
These episodes persisted for as long as Robert did not buy a house and begin working on it. In the meantime, he soared in the upper atmosphere on automatic pilot. Physically present, certainly—able to cook spaghetti, wash the dishes, do the laundry, pay the damned bills and answer the phone—but somehow not there.
This morning, Lisa dropped her Applied Mathematics 2 course. She left a message on the hardware store’s answering machine saying she would not be coming to work today or in the future. She will not return her mother’s calls anymore, especially if they involve IKEA.
She feels light. She walks on the walls and ceiling, and flits about in the living room.
She has transformed her kitchen (the only place in her apartment not cluttered with tools) into an operations centre. She folded the chairs, pushed the table into a corner, pinned up cryptic sketches and lists, pages torn out of her notebook, a whole galaxy of little papers that she will have to convert into vectors, points, plans. For ten hours a day, Lisa bombards the computer with queries in a sibylline dialect. She talks in volts, calories, CFM and lumens, and when she happens to catch her own gaze in the chrome of the toaster, what she sees are her father’s eyes, fevered and serious and focused.
Her eyes consumed by that same worrisome craving.
JAY HAS NOT SET FOOT in this neighbourhood for twelve years.
It is 7:15 a.m. when she parks in the shadow of Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense, still attired in her camouflage-grey pantsuit, with the Ray-Bans perched on her nose.
She shuts off the engine, and in the ensuing silence her stomach emits a long rumble. She’s just officially digested the last molecule of the grapefruit devoured at five o’clock this morning. She should have had a bite to eat at the airport. She sees a dépanneur on the corner of the street. Colmado Real, bière, vin et livraison. It will do.
The cashier is drowsily listening to an Italian radio show. Jay catches the gist: low-pressure system moving up from Ontario, gradually clouding over, twenty centimetres of snow in the Greater Montreal area. She walks all around the store but without any real appetite. She counts ten varieties of panettone, lingers in front of the salami, examines a bag of ruffled vinegar-flavoured chips. In the end, she opts for a coffee loaded with molto cream and, after first checking the best-before date, a box of Whippets.
When she arrives at
the counter, she realizes she has no cash.
“Do you take plastic?”
“Yeah. Give me your card. The chip reader is broken.”
The cashier completes the transaction behind the counter and hands Jay the receipt, which she signs absent-mindedly.
Back in the truck, she rips open the box and bites into the cookie. Over-sweet chocolate, gooey marshmallow and red-flavoured jam. It tastes of 1983: soft and melancholy. She eats a Whippet, slurps a mouthful of coffee. Wonders if this sort of breakfast is still reasonable at thirty-nine-going-on-forty. Then she puts on her gloves and gets out of the truck.
The neighbourhood is still quiet. Jay scans the addresses, swings around toward the north and spots a small apartment building on the verge of collapse. Lisa lives in number 6.
The scene in the lobby is straight out of Beirut. It smells of wet plaster and cigarettes. The mail for apartment 6 has not been picked up for a while. Jay presses the buzzer. No answer. The door leading to the stairs is not locked, and Jay decides to go up and have a look around. There isn’t a sound in the entire building except for the click of her high heels on the cracked terrazzo.
The apartment number has been torn off the door, leaving just a screw hole and the silhouette of the number 6. Jay examines the peephole and the deadbolt lock. An old four-pin tumbler, easy to pick. She tries the handle and knocks. The echo resonates through the stairwell.
Back on the sidewalk, Jay has no intention of going away empty-handed. She walks to the entrance of the back lane, which has not been cleared of snow. She advances despite her high heels.
The apartment building has no backyard but, instead, an asphalt strip bounded by a Frost fence—occupied by a barbecue and bicycle locked together—and a battered trash can. There is a wrought iron fire escape leading up to the balconies. The place is visible from all sides.
Jay pushes the gate open and sizes up the fire escape. The steps are covered with snow; climbing them in high heels would be suicidal. She should have changed clothes at the airport, but it’s pointless to beat herself up. She grips the guardrail, hesitates, is about to turn back. Even at thirty-nine, she is too young to die.
Then she notices some tracks. A cat went up the steps before her, imprinting its delicate pads on the snow. Jay decides this is a good idea. She removes her shoes and starts up the fire escape in her stocking feet. A thin crust of ice covers the snow, producing the sensation of stepping on crushed glass.
Jay climbs the steps four at a time up to the third floor, leaving the very clear impression of her toes on the snow. The back door of apartment 6 has not been opened since the beginning of winter. Shading her eyes with her hands, Jay looks inside. No one in sight. The kitchen is tidy. No dishes on the counter, no corpse on the tiled floor.
On the balcony by the door are a garbage can (empty) and a recycling bin (full). Jay sweeps away the crust of snow, pushes aside the cookie wrappers and yogurt containers, and finds a layer of papers at the bottom of the bin. Her eyes fall on a UPS envelope sent by Éric Le Blanc, København Ø, Danmark, and addressed to Élisabeth Routier-Savoie.
The envelope is empty, but the customs invoice is marked “gift—value $20.”
Jay feels a surge of enthusiasm that almost makes her forget her predicament. To the west, the charcoal-grey band of the storm front is approaching, laden with several million tons of snow. On the opposite side of the lane, people are eating breakfast. At any moment, someone will look up from their bowl of porridge and notice the madwoman in a light grey pantsuit rummaging through the trash on the balcony across the way.
She takes hold of the bin and goes back down the steps looking nonchalant, as though she were leaving for work (which is not entirely off the mark). The nylon of her left stocking has a hole in it, affording a glimpse of a big toe gradually turning blue. Once she has safely arrived at the bottom of the fire escape, she puts her shoes back on, limps her way out of the lane and deposits the bin in the trunk of the car.
Then she starts the engine, turns up the heat full blast, and, after making sure no one is around, removes her pantsuit and slips into her street clothes. With her feet resting against the heating vent, she munches on Whippets and sips her lukewarm coffee. Her morale is like a roaring furnace, in spite of the troubling lack of sensation in her toes. No, things are going not so badly, after all.
She is slightly late getting to work, not even enough to be noticed, and walks into the Enclave whistling, with the box of Whippets under her arm. She comes face to face with Laura, dishevelled, overexcited, ready to break out the champagne.
“Shenzhen has released the data!”
FEBRUARY DESCENDS ON MONTREAL. The winter rages on and the building’s central heating is a triumph of inefficiency.
Wearing several layers of wool, Lisa sips chicken broth. She goes out now only when absolutely necessary: to get provisions, jettison recyclables and trash, de-ice the Dodge. She travels to Saint-Anicet-de-Kostka only on Saturdays. Robert apparently hasn’t noticed. Nor has she returned to the Domaine Bordeur. Over the telephone, Gus Miron assured her that he would shovel the staircase and the doorstep. Good old Uncle Gus. In the background, Sheila asked if the little one needed something. No, the little one has everything she needs.
Lisa toils away for fifteen hours a day and does the job of a small commando. The sketches grow rare on the kitchen wall, pushed out by electrical diagrams and blueprints drawn by computer. The atmosphere increasingly resembles that of an engineering firm, with dirty dishes.
The situation on the Scandinavian front is just as hectic. Éric has assembled a team of programmers who churn out code day and night to rough out the various modules of the piloting software. He reassured Lisa, who was surprised to see him subcontract such incriminating work: in addition to signing non-disclosure agreements as long as the Old Testament, the programmers don’t know each other—at least, they don’t work in the same place—and each of them has been tasked with a different module. Only Éric enjoys a comprehensive view of the project, and he will personally code the most critical segments, assemble the modules and debug the finished software.
In any event, there was no other choice: the only way to have a functional system by the f all was to delegate. Preliminary estimates put the total number of lines of code for the software, tens of thousands of which would be customized, at fifteen million, and this huge mass of text was not going to write itself. The latest reports indicate that automation has not yet been automated. Éric would have been informed.
Meanwhile, the UPS envelopes keep arriving from Copenhagen with clockwork regularity, twice a month. The content never varies: twenty lovely banknotes issued by the Federal Reserve of the United States, each of them bearing the head of Benjamin Franklin, that great electro-cutor of kites. Phrases float around his head like the balloons in a graphic novel. “One hundred dollars!” Franklin seems to be exclaiming. And also, in a tone of insinuation: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private!”
“Private debt”—the expression always brings a smile to Lisa’s face.
Every second Tuesday, she converts the loot, each time at a different foreign exchange office, and then stacks the bills at the bottom of a Cheerios box, under the bag of cereal, in a corner of her pantry. A bank transfer would simplify the procedure, but every envelope from Éric contains a subtext not lost on Lisa: it’s not so much a matter of laundering money as dirtying it. The two confederates use sums acquired legally to finance illegal (or, at the very least, questionable) activities, while trying not to soil their hands in the process. It follows, therefore, that all project-related expenses must be paid with old, crumpled banknotes. Above all, no plastic—what is a credit card these days other than a sophisticated geo-localization device?
When Lisa was seven years old, her father made all his purchases in cash. Even back then, Robert Routier’s money clip was an anachronism, an accessory from another generation, handed down perhaps by his own father, which he persisted in
using for obscure reasons: for the sake of elegance, out of nostalgia or an absolute distrust of banks, or quite simply because the object exasperated Josée. In any case, he had given in to plastic, like everyone else, and the money clip ended up at the bottom of a drawer, along with a handful of Mexican pesos and some unused cufflinks, before eventually vanishing from the face of the earth.
Lisa hasn’t seen her father’s money clip in years and has resigned herself to using a large pretzel-shaped paper clip. She loves to feel the slight bulge on her left buttock made by a dozen bills folded in half. Whenever she pulls out her paper clip, she feels all-powerful and invisible, by virtue of an otherwise archaic technology. “An elegant weapon for a more civilized age,” Ben Kenobi would say.
But more important, for the first time in her life, Lisa does not have to worry about money. Everything seems possible, as if the laws of physics were suspended. Beyond a certain critical mass, money creates its own reality, like a locomotive able to lay down its own tracks, and the tracks appearing before Lisa are strange indeed. A few hours earlier, she would not have had any idea where a bold consumer might acquire a forty-foot refrigerated container, yet here she is, easily navigating through the industrial want ads, as one might have run one’s finger over a globe long ago.
Blurry pictures taken all over the world with cheap telephones stream past on her screen. Walls of containers rusting in the rain in Newark. With peeling paint in the port of São Paulo. Anonymous white containers in Chongqing, Abu Dhabi and Tunis. Reefers in Qingdao, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Rotterdam. Oversized containers in Hamburg, Pakistan, Kuwait. Dented boxes fit for the junkyard, and others transformed into luxury condos, canteens, offices, clinics. Available in different sizes, multiple attractive colours, for sale or long- or short-term lease, single or multiple units, legal documents on demand, some conditions apply, safe and confidential transactions, easy payment via bank transfer, credit card, PayPal. Eighteen months interest-free, satisfaction guaranteed. Collect the whole set.
Six Degrees of Freedom Page 17
