by Liam Durcan
Elyse spoke in vague terms about coming to Neuronaut headquarters in Cambridge when all of this was over. She wanted to sit down with the team and get a feel for what neuroeconomics was all about. Yeah, right, he thought and nodded, wondering where he could get her picture to better warn security that she might show up. She’d like to see Heather again too, she said, maybe have dinner. The waiter brought another beer to the table. Patrick didn’t remember ordering it.
“I heard one of your big fans from the Democratic Voice is coming,” he said, taking his time pouring the beer into a glass, enjoying the theatricality of turning the tables on Elyse. But Elyse just shrugged, as though he’d described an extended forecast of rain.
“I’d be disappointed if they weren’t here,” Elyse said. “I’m happy they’re here. I find being on the other side of an issue from the Democratic Voice reassuring. I mean, everyone knows their agenda”–her voice descended to a practised, reason-enumerating drone–“protect American corporate interests, maintain and protect puppet dictatorships friendly to said American corporate interests, reframe the debate so that anyone who opposes them looks like a Marxist dupe. Am I missing anything? And it’s not like they dispute the facts. They’re lining up behind what Hernan did, behind everything that happened in Honduras. They’ll probably be there when they try those soldiers for what went on at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”
“They say they just want a fair trial for Hernan.”
“They say a lot of things.”
Patrick wanted to ask her what she meant but was too occupied by the enormous head of foam that had dribbled over the side of the glass and onto his hand and the table. As he mopped up the suds, Elyse leaned over to him: “Why do you think Hernan won’t meet with them?”
“I don’t know, Elyse. I haven’t talked to him either.”
“C’mon, Patrick, you must know something. Why else are you here?”
Patrick went cold. “We’ve been through this. You know everything I know. More.”
“He was practising medicine in the back of his store, Patrick. Did that just slip your mind? All those years you were there, you knew it. How do you think I felt having someone else break that story, knowing you hadn’t told me? Well, I think you have more you’re hiding.”
“Believe me, I don’t.”
“You have choices, Patrick.”
“Pardon me?”
“You can tell me anything, you know that, right? That way you’d at least have some control over how it came out.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just that I’ve heard that you might be subpoenaed.” Elyse’s expression was neutral, a sky of imperial greys. “I’ll let you in on a little secret: everybody knows everyone else’s business here. It’s common knowledge that di Costini was talking to you in Boston. I’ve heard rumours that the prosecutors are interested in speaking to you too. Now that you’re here, I wanted you to know.”
“Thanks,” Patrick said, as calmly as possible, as he felt the physiologic reaction to a threat engaging inside him. He knew the circuitry: pathways converging on his amygdala that, in response, fired like an automatic weapon, a heartbeat pattering after, spent shell casings bouncing off the floor. He’d never considered being called to testify against Hernan, never thought that coming to Den Haag would make issuing a subpoena such a simple task. He’d been a fool to come. He imagined Elyse watching him for any sign, sneaking a look at his pupils or checking his brow for that first sheen of perspiration. Wondering how much he knew and what could be proved. And then, as if making a compromise to another physiologic reaction, the sense of panic passed. Elyse was just another person across the table. Nothing will happen, he repeated to himself. “Would you like dessert, Elyse?” he said, and felt the moisture on his upper lip.
THREE
Big bright sun outside the restaurant and Patrick stared up like a tourist taking in a special attraction. The wet Frederikstraat glistened and gave that odd sensation of something clean and filthy at the same time, which to Patrick seemed a pretty good civic motto for any place, even Den Haag.
The topic of a subpoena had ended the meal, and they’d waited in uncomfortable silence for the waiter to arrive with the check. After that, Patrick excused himself and, without further explanation, got up to leave. Not one to take offence, Elyse announced that she too had other business–trams to ride, threats to make, he thought–and added, to his back as he walked away from her, that she was ending her afternoon with a meeting with someone at the tribunal.
He tried to flag down a cab on Frederikstraat, but they blew by him like he was waving a meat cleaver. It was nothing personal, he was assured by the cab driver at a taxi stand in front of a hotel two blocks away, no roadside pickups–that was just taxi policy. He sank into the seat and minutes later he was deposited at the entrance of the Metropole, where Pieter the concierge, Edwin’s shift replacement, made a scene.
“Dr. Lazerenko, there are people who are wanting to talk to you all day,” he pleaded, almost breaking into tears at having met the man who had been the source of his grief, the serial MBA threats he had endured, all those identical shouting American voices. Patrick understood that hotel culture must have a tolerance for clients like the one he had become: frightful, messy mysteries, importance gauged by the depth of complication they left behind them, forgiven only because they also trailed certain rewards in their wake. And sure enough, when Patrick promised he’d attend to the messages immediately and thanked Pieter for his attention with a requisite gratuity, the clerk dipped his head as if to acknowledge this understanding. It was wonderful, cleansing them both, like a UN guilt-for-cash exchange program. Then came the elevator ride of mirrors and silence followed by the exquisite calm of a thickly carpeted hallway outside a newly made-up room, and for a moment Den Haag was nothing more than a theme park of business-class adventures where no one had been hurt and no one was accused of anything more than not answering their messages. He found a mint on the bed.
He called Neuronaut and spoke to Steve and Jessica, needing to reassure both of them that he wasn’t dead or in rehab somewhere (although he suspected doubts lingered about the rehab denial), and then Marc-André got on the line, telling him that Sanjay had taken the Globomart data and barricaded himself in his office, causing an increasingly worried Bancroft to check up on the young man every half-hour. The employees, beginning to sense the pressure of the spiralling Globomart mess, had done the logical thing and established an office pool–the Sanjaywatch–estimating the date of his resignation, offering a triple payout if Sanjay did anything more rash than quitting. Marc-André said he’d put his money down on Thursday, noon, immolation. Oh, and, by the way, he added, Barry Olafson (Lyle’s son–or was it Henrik’s?), a Globomart senior VP, had called from Medina to tell Bancroft they’d have to postpone their marketing launch if they didn’t have an analysis they could use by the end of this week. The resulting sequence of events–botched advertising campaign, disappointing fiscal fourth quarter, a failure to meet earnings, massive layoffs, the squashing of Neuronaut like a bug–were implied in the way that Barry Olafson had calmly said, “The marketing launch will not be postponed. We trust that is understood.”
Patrick listened to Marc-André and wondered if every future success would, by necessity, lead to moments like this, the never-ending crisis of raised expectations. It was enough to make a person want to explore the healing qualities of systematic failure. Neuronaut was officially a victim of its own success, having its first big corporate victory advising Globomart with its last campaign–a huge re-orientation of its marketing strategy into something the company christened “Values”–that had featured unprecedented saturation advertising and had resulted in a spike in sales and profits. The campaign ended up airing commercials that Patrick found, all in all, fairly compelling and creepy in that Leni Riefenstahl sort of way. Prior to this, Globomart had spent billions on advertising with only the vaguest idea that its marketing worked, the assumption b
ased on the observation that the company continued to crush its competitors and produce profits along the lines of the gross domestic product of Spain.
Neuronaut hadn’t told Globomart what to do, so much as confirm for the company that the theme of a certain campaign had a profound, measurable, and reproducible effect on the brains of consumers Globomart was targeting. As a result, Globomart felt confident about immediately doubling its advertising budget, in the end achieving spectacular success. Neuronaut’s results, which had showed decreased activation in a part of the frontal lobe associated with complex decision making when a person was exposed to certain types of advertising, was the marketing equivalent of the smart bomb. Or the dumb bomb, as Patrick liked to say when the people from Globomart weren’t around.
And now Globomart had made the commitment to dominate the world’s retail landscape more completely, more scientifically. It had ponied up a budget for neuroscience research that dwarfed half the universities in the country. After the success of the Values campaign, Globomart wanted–demanded–proof that every dollar they spent had effect.
The problem was that none of the data for the new campaign made any sense to them.
“Globomart is upset because the imaging tests aren’t showing any difference between the various themes they have to choose from,” Marc-André said. “Nothing is clear like it was in Values. Globomart wants Values, just like they had before.”
“They don’t understand the technology, we’re talking about percentages of difference. There’s no guarantee there’ll be a difference between the choices anyway,” Patrick replied, before telling Marc-André that the data could be modelled in different ways, that he and Sanjay had run up against these sorts of problems before. “Sanjay will get it done.”
A grunt, emitted in Boston, travelled three thousand miles into space and bounced back to earth, where it was relayed from a tower in central Den Haag to be heard by Patrick the moment before Marc-André ended the call.
It was late in the court day when Patrick got back to the tribunal. The crowd had partially dispersed–there must have been more lurid proceedings in another courtroom–but it was still a respectable showing. He took his place among the other congregants and fiddled with the cords and the earpieces, something that made him feel grumpy and old. It wasn’t until later that Patrick looked up to see Hernan García in the dock, blue shirt and erect posture, hair and moustache greyed to the point where he bore an ungodly resemblance to Omar Sharif. The defendant sat motionless, apparently listening, although there was no way an observer could tell for sure. It was riveting to see him now, making Patrick worry that even though he’d accepted Hernan’s guilt, he had somehow re-invented him over the last five years as a more heroic figure, that in his mind someone could grow in stature even through pure infamy.
Then García moved, brought a hand to his eyes to wipe something away, and Patrick saw him differently. It had taken a moment, but he had found the man who was his friend and who, at one time, he would never have believed could be a part of this. And he was in a cage.
He had met Hernan García on May 24, 1986, at a little before eleven in the evening. Patrick was sixteen and had been downtown with friends, part of the crowds celebrating the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup victory. The whole city was out, whooping down St. Catherine Street from the Forum to downtown. The crowds stopped traffic, and as the revellers streamed by, the cars had no choice but to join in with their horns. It was before the era when overturning cars became part of the expected civic response during post-championship celebrations, and the cops were smiling and high-fiving too. Patrick didn’t care for hockey. If pressed he could probably name a few of the players, but he was sixteen and the spectacle of so many people in the streets was irresistible. So he was a fan for a night.
Later, he went to a party in a semi-finished basement where he gathered among a group of teenagers bullied into a corner by a pool table. When they ran out of beer, Patrick offered to go to the dépanneur to get more. He rushed because he knew it was illegal for dépanneurs to sell alcohol after eleven–owners slapped padlocks the size of a fist on the coolers at the stroke of the hour. To Patrick this was a typical adult law, arbitrary and stupid; the only effect it had was to make teenage drinkers like himself acutely aware of the minutes before closing. He began to jog.
By the time he reached Monkland Avenue, he was sprinting. Still, six blocks away from the nearest dep, lungs on fire and beginning to doubt he could reach it in time, Patrick came across a newly opened store on the corner of Marcil. He checked his watch, two minutes to spare, and decided it was the right time to support this new business. He opened the door of Le Dépanneur Mondial to that nasty aural itch of wind chimes, and was met by the intense stare of a dark-skinned woman who managed to smile, seemingly against her will. A thick book was cleaved open in front of her. She had a pencil, and Patrick could see she was underlining or writing on the pages. Patrick smiled back at her, gave her a thumbs up, and said, “Go Habs,” to her bewilderment. Then he began to stalk the store for the beer aisle. His first recollection of Le Dépanneur Mondial was the eye-aching glare off the clean floors, much too clean for a real dep, something he chalked up to the newness of the place, knowing that in six months it would be scuffed, pissed on, and beer doused into a more recognizable shade of dépanneur grey. What struck him next was that the store didn’t seem to have recognizable food in it. The shelves were well stocked and clearly marked but the shapes and colours and smells were different. The labels were strange and even the fruits and vegetables looked disguised. Then it dawned on him. It was an immigrant dépanneur: noodles from somebody else’s country and spices that would wring tears from your eyes. He would have been curious but he needed beer and that was the one thing he couldn’t find. Patrick did a quick perimeter search and then came back to the counter lady.
“Beer?”
“No.” She shook her head placidly, the punchline to a joke he hadn’t told.
“Beer, or wine?” He pointed at his watch to remind her that he had been there before the padlocks were due to go on.
“Her-nan!” she shouted into a back room, and a man materialized, six foot two and athletic-looking for a guy stepping out of the back room of a dep. He crossed his arms and leaned toward the woman.
“What is it?”
“He wants beer.”
The dépanneur owner turned to Patrick.
“We don’t have beer.”
“But you’re a dep. Every dep has beer.”
“We don’t carry beer.”
“You should have to put up a sign,” he said as he looked at his watch and shook his head. “Shit, now it’s past eleven. Thanks a fucking lot. I don’t know where you come from, but in this country, if you don’t sell beer, you put up a sign.”
This altercation, which embarrassed Patrick whenever he recalled it later in his life, was best thought of as a geopolitical conflict. The geography involved was his neighbourhood–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a district of Montreal with correspondingly high densities of dépanneurs and teenagers, its 160 square blocks a testing ground for new and innovative forms of dep owner abuse, the alkali flats of smart-assing. Throughout his adolescence Patrick–endowed with a temper and a taste for the darkest vocabulary–spat profanity at French Canadians and Anglos alike and generally took pleasure in browbeating men and women of all colours and creeds who dared to serve behind the cash registers of neighbourhood corner stores. Once, he had made a Korean dep man cry and shouted at his angry, more resilient wife when he returned the next day to see if he could make him cry again.
The man looked calmly at Patrick. “Are you mildly mentally retarded?” he asked.
Just “retarded” would have provoked Patrick, but the addition of mildly mentally knocked him off balance with its sincere curiosity, as if concern were being offered along with a rebuke. “No,” Patrick said, already cursing himself for having answered.
“How old are you?” the dépanneur owner asked. The lady a
t the cash sat motionless, letting him go to work. She looked like she had seen this show before and didn’t mind it at all.
“What?”
“You are too young for beer.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It is my business, indeed. Let’s see your ID.”
Patrick was on his way out when the dep owner said this, but he turned back.
“You can’t card me if you’re not selling me beer.”
“It’s my store.”
“This isn’t fucking Pakistan or wherever.”
The dep owner pointed to bags of rice. “It’s Spanish you see all around you. We are not from Pakistan, you idiot.”
“Fuck you.”
“Good night.”
When Patrick returned later it was with a spray can and plans to redecorate for the new Pakistani grocer. He found the back of the store in the lane and felt the exhilaration that the young and angry and slightly drunk know so well, a buzz amplified by shaking a spray can, that infectious rattle tocking away as a wall is sized up and claimed. Then came the hiss of the spray and any tagger will tell you that that alone is a trip, a serpent muse calling out, even if it isn’t art, just profanity dripping down a wall. It was better than art; it was you imposing yourself on a white wall. Sovereignty and revenge in one vaguely creative act.
Patrick’s bliss was halted by the sudden thud of a hand clamping onto his right shoulder while another slapped his forearm, knocking the spray can to the ground. He spun away and ran, hearing footsteps pounding down the back lane behind him. It was likely the owner of the dep, making Patrick think he was home free since a city block was all anybody over forty was good for. But five strides later, he had the sick feeling that his pursuer was gaining. At the end of the lane near the corner, Patrick felt a hand on his jacket, this time pushing him forward. He flailed and lost his balance, lurching into some bags of trash but finding enough concrete to take some skin off his forearms. The man hauled Patrick out of the garbage and he braced for a fight but found he was too tired and embarrassed to take a swing at anyone. They both just stood there, bent over, unable to speak. In the light of the streetlamps Patrick saw the man shake and sweat and try to catch his breath and for a moment he thought about bolting again, but the dépanneur owner was a big guy and angry as hell and even though he was breathing hard he had already run Patrick down once and could probably do it again. He looked at Patrick and muttered, “I should call the cops” over and over between breaths until Patrick finally said, “So call the fucking cops,” but the guy was already marching him around the corner, which was freaking Patrick out, thinking he was in for some rough justice right there on Monkland. He was relieved when the guy only grabbed his wallet. He assumed the man would take whatever money he had–which wasn’t much–and call it even. But the man he would come to know as Hernan García just stood there, keeping Patrick collared on the sidewalk and going through his wallet. A couple of good citizens passed them and said nothing. And while it was now, all these years later, painfully clear to Patrick why Hernan had wanted to avoid contact with police at all costs, his decision that night to deal with the matter himself–perpetrator in hand, past midnight–seemed far more ominous than a brush with the law.
