by Liam Durcan
But back then, Hernan García let go of the younger man, gave him his wallet, and straightened him up.
“Hingston. Where’s Hingston Street?” he asked.
And in keeping with the general mood of surprise and bafflement, Patrick pointed without hesitation in the direction of the street where he lived.
His parents met Hernan García on the porch of their house a few minutes later when they answered the door to his bailiff-like poundings. They had probably been awake at that hour but even so opened the door with the understandably aggrieved look that seems appropriate when some stranger is banging on your door past midnight. There was some shouting between Hernan and Patrick’s father, Roger–Patrick was reminded of a nature show’s classic two-bear encounter: the two rogues swiping at each other, the bark and roar before someone ambles away. Patrick’s mother, Veronica, who had popped her head out like a prairie dog inspecting the air, vanished from the doorway, ostensibly to say a rosary and call the police. Then Roger–T-shirted, mountainous, and Popeye-armed, and yet causing no apparent alarm in Hernan–looked over at his son and, seeing him, obviously decided that Hernan must have had a legitimate complaint. Roger did a wonderful homage to a concerned parent as Hernan introduced himself and then described the encounter in the alley. Patrick knew that as the culprit, caught and collared there on the porch, his fate was sealed and punishment was clearly coming. And yet his father seemed to take Hernan’s earnestness as a cue to pretend that he hadn’t made up his mind about his son’s guilt or innocence, that they’d discuss this in full because they were all enlightened people. Patrick would have preferred the standard Roger treatment: nod at the accusation, tell the accuser that he would handle it, and yell at the kid to get inside the goddamn house. But it had been different that night; there was a polite discussion, some thoughtful nodding and excessive wrinkling of the brow, as if Patrick were six and had taken somebody’s Lego. Then Roger took a stage pause, looked his son in the eye (what was this, an after-school special?), and asked Patrick if what Mr. García said was true and waited for his son’s reply. As if. Patrick was incapable of responding in the same spirit of improvisational theatre, choosing to nod yes and then forced to say the word when finally goaded. Hernan García listened to it all, quiet enough that Patrick thought he too was going to nod, satisfied, and walk away. But Hernan wasn’t finished.
“There is still the matter of the cost of damages.”
Roger, impressively, kept his composure even through this, not slamming the door or telling Hernan to piss off and call the cops already. He listened to this stranger on his porch and agreed that in lieu of immediate payment, the debt could be worked off in Hernan’s store. Patrick was incredulous. It wasn’t that Roger was keen on compromise or alternative forms of restitution. No, he agreed because, in Patrick’s eyes, it wouldn’t cost him time or effort or hard cash. It was hardly fair, but still, it was better than the cops or a back-alley curb stomping by a wronged dep guy. Both men ponied up the decorum for a solemn, friendly handshake, the last act in that night’s theatre of the absurd. As he was turning to go, García had told Patrick to show up for work at seven on Saturday morning.
Patrick slowly turned his head and surveyed the crowd. Most were watching Hernan. This was why people came. García then leaned to one side and his right elbow flexed and although Patrick couldn’t see his hands it was clear he was fishing something out of his pocket. He brought a small pump up to his mouth, an inhaler with reddish-pink liquid inside. Even from a distance, Patrick could tell it was nitrospray. García held his hand in front of his face, the thumb and forefinger pinched together around the inhaler, as though he were taking a photo of the gallery. His face changed: a grimace, the slightest puckering of lips, and then–Patrick could swear, from sixty feet away he was certain–a look of surprise. Patrick was alarmed and suddenly became conscious of his own heart, of the pains he’d never felt before. But in a moment it was over. The inhaler disappeared and García’s face returned to its default setting. Minutes passed in this way, his expression still, a placidity unimaginable outside sleep or cults. Patrick was relieved when Hernan’s brow finally furrowed, followed by the slightest elevation of his gaze. Hernan was looking out at the crowd. Patrick followed, mentally crawling into Hernan’s chair and scanning along with him, trying to guess what he was seeing. This process fascinated him, in a professional way; he couldn’t think of any other act so intimate and yet speculative as imagining what another person saw, projecting into someone’s head and then out again. Hernan scanned past the prosecution table and up three or four lower rows of seats that were never occupied. A woman sat alone but he passed over her. Up again to the sixth row and over to the right where a young man and woman sat. There. These were the faces he had sought out. It was Roberto and Celia. Patrick was certain García must see them too.
This first glimpse of them almost drew Patrick from his chair but he stayed seated, instead slowly altering his posture, a ship listing to starboard, to get a better look at García’s family, at Celia specifically. Celia and Roberto stood out from the others in the gallery so clearly that he was astonished he hadn’t seen them before. Roberto sat with his arms crossed, as always, as though restrained by an invisible straitjacket, his indignation barely held in check. It was immediately evident to Patrick–after more than ten years, across an auditorium, in another country–that he’d lost weight. Celia sat beside him. She was beautiful. The words came to him, as though some independent observer had broadcast it over the PA in his head. Though he knew it was trite to be suddenly struck by the beauty of a person he had always considered beautiful, it was an alarming experience to see her. He saw Celia in profile, her black hair gathered into a thick ponytail. Her eyes periodically darted down from the scene in front of her to her lap, where she was writing in her notebook.
Patrick understood he was a poor witness to history. He was the sort of person who took some consolation in thinking that, human nature being what it was, during the Nuremberg trials people undoubtedly doodled in the margins of their notebooks or dozed off or daydreamed about loved ones far removed from the atrocities under discussion. But Patrick’s particular disgrace came when, during the testimony of witness C-144, Celia looked over at him and they made eye contact for the first time in more than a decade. C-144 was forgotten, all the shocks and trauma and meaningless pain, lost. The words dissolved into a hum of consecutive sounds, buccal, lingual, glottal. He saw Celia. The physical reaction was as clichéd as one would expect when one’s insides are hosed down with adrenalin, when every good memory is compressed and released into one moment of remembrance and all of it is coupled to the heartbeat like the repetitive slamming of a door. I loved her.
This experience, of course, is never complete without the trough that follows the swell. He felt sweaty and shaky and for a moment the room seemed dimly cloud-covered as he remembered that this woman that he’d lived with for three years, staring back at him now, was someone he had already disappointed and injured, someone who likely considered him to have been one of the major mistakes in her life. As an accompaniment to watching Celia, Patrick heard the testimony from C-144–“Once you regained consciousness, did you see him then?”–followed by the sound of C-144 shuffling in his seat, noises (the chair, his joints, a sigh) audible through the microphone, untranslated. Witness C-144 continued, describing what he’d seen, what he thought he’d seen when he came to in that interrogation room in Lepaterique and Patrick thought, Yes, this is a disgrace. But he couldn’t look away–why was the brain like that? Able to slip loose of the reins of a more serious issue for a glimpse at something else?
Celia held his gaze for a moment more and in that epoch he wondered if there was a sadder statement than I loved her. The severance it implied. The loss and constant accounting of the loss. He’d lost her. Celia’s face showed no anger, no surprise. They were little more than strangers now. She gently tilted her head toward the proceedings as if to admonish him for taking his attentio
n away from what was important.
He was ill. His first bet was the bami goreng or the beer stirred up by adrenalin. The room drew tighter around him and he felt a swell of nausea. He got to his feet, not caring what the guards or the other voyeurs thought, and shuffled back down the row to the aisle. He found a washroom and threw open a stall door, certain he was going to be sick, but it passed, leaving him sweating and winded, sitting on a toilet in Den Haag, studying the freshly scrubbed surfaces of the stall. Patrick ran his hand through his hair and it emerged damp, a Den Haag shower. His throat was tight and he was still short of breath; it was only when he managed to get a couple of tablets of Valium out of the bottle in his pocket and into his mouth that he felt the pressure fade away. He sat and breathed and waited for the pills to do their business, soaking his synapses in that feeling that passed for relief. In the lower corner of the stall’s door, an area that had escaped the cleaners’ scrubbing brush, handwritten words were faintly visible. He bent forward to take a look, wondering what type of graffiti a place like this attracted, expecting feverish political indictments or blood libels with an ethnic spin, but he could only make out a telephone number and, three inches to the right, the word moordenaar.
Twenty minutes passed before he could stand up, and when he did he was able to take only tentative, newborn calf steps past the stall door, then a quick stagger toward the sink before he felt cold water on his face. “I am better,” he said to the faucet, to the water spilling off his face and down his wrists to wet the sleeves of his shirt. I’m better. I am.
Once out into the corridor, Patrick began to feel stronger. People were passing through the foyer, heading to the exits. It was quiet and dreamlike, surprising him, pleasing him. He floated out into the crowd, a balloon of him filled with benzodiazepine bliss, messages of distress falling from him like ballast.
The crowd dispersed onto the Churchillplein, swallowed by space. He looked around the plaza past the fountain and saw Celia and Roberto walking away. Nina–that must be her, little Nina outfitted in an adult frame–was with them now. Patrick shouted out “Hey” in an embarrassing broken croak, the voice of someone who hasn’t spoken to anyone for hours, a voice that caused quite a few heads to turn. Roberto stopped and looked at him, a Serengeti stare, a calculation of space and velocity and a certain type of hunger, all of which caused Patrick to freeze in his gazelle tracks; but that lasted for a brief second before passing into a haze of memory. These were my friends. His stoner calm returned and he approached them. The Valium whispered a tuneless hymn of brotherhood and peace into his ear. He could see Celia. She was holding a child, a young boy who had buried his head under her chin. She was walking toward him. Roberto was beside her, several paces ahead. She had a son. He tried to read the look on her face, to see any sign of emotion, his eyes riveted to the details of her eyes and mouth, taking in every gesture in that way humans are wired for. But nothing came easily; with every step closer her features became more distinct, but she was still inscrutable. Her face. Celia’s face, changed now into an adult face, a Modigliani of sadness and beauty. It was the last thing he remembered, this intense effort to decipher Celia García’s expression, before he saw a flash of movement shear in from the right and a vision of sky, spinning, dusky.
FOUR
Celia smiling at him through a window that he still needed to clean. Evening. At seven o’clock she installed herself on the balcony with her easel, surveying the view down Lorne Crescent. She kneaded the pigment out of her brush with a rag, looking away from him and back to the scene in front of her.
He was pleased Celia brought her paints; the smell of her oils and turpentine filled the room, masking the stink that he noticed for the first time seconds after the janitor dropped the keys into his hand at the door. Hours later, he was still inside the apartment, scrubbing the sink and hoping that this and running the water would take care of the odour. He washed his hands and reached for a bag of plums, tore open the plastic bag and, holding two plums in each hand, washed them in the sink that still smelled. The give of the plastic and the deep crimson plum skin. The fruit was the only colour in an apartment filled with still-unopened cardboard boxes, a few with his belongings from home, others with pieces of entry-level Swedish furniture waiting to be Allen-keyed into existence.
He heard shouting in the distance but it didn’t disturb him. This was where he lived now and so it counted as ambiance, as neighbourhood. He had moved not just to be out of his mother’s house or closer to the hospital but specifically for voices, talking, laughing, even shouting. He felt guilty leaving his mother alone in their old house but they had lived in a silence that mutually acknowledged he was already on his way. He lived in the student ghetto now, twenty square blocks of studios and three-storey walk-ups, a neighbourhood of balconies and student apartments polished and worn with use, a patina of serial tenancy. The walls were freshly layered with that skim-milky wash that greets new tenants, veined more thickly around corners and over the electrical outlet plates.
He opened the door to the balcony and, to his delight after the anaemic pall of his apartment, entered a world that could not contain its colour. The eastern slope of the mountain rose from the rooftops to take a deep verdant bite of the sky. Who could blame its appetite? It was an evening of soft scattered clouds, flanks bruised with shades of yellow, shades of blue. Celia sat, working. His plums belonged out here. Windows were open. He heard music along with voices.
Below them, pickup trucks jammed with personal belongings and mattresses wedged on end weaved between other trucks pulled up at angles to the curb to better unload. It was the first of July, moving day in Montreal, the only jurisdiction in the world with the inexplicable rule that leases should all end on the same day. It was a day of heroic friends and physical exhaustion and curbside drama, a windfall for movers and pizza deliverymen. Everyone he knew had spent at least one moving day dealing with unconnected phones and cardboard boxes and the competing physics of walk-ups and sofas. Moving was a shared experience, a tribal event that renewed and reset the neighbourhood. It was a rare day when people from other countries, provinces, and neighbourhoods took to the streets in migration. Forget the calendar, this was the real New Year’s Day.
He sat down on one of the lawn chairs and dried off the plums. Celia was using broad brush strokes to cover the upper parts of the small canvas in front of her, trying to capture the light of the evening sky while there was still time. “Good luck,” he wanted to say but didn’t, knowing the way it would sound.
He heard voices, louder, making what Celia was saying unintelligible and with this he felt a surge of panic. He looked over the balcony and then pulled himself back to the fruit resting on his lap, cradled in a crumpled paper towel.
All day long it had been building. It was the most unusual feeling, a simultaneous emptiness and fullness, and the only way he could explain it was to say it felt like the hunger for what he assumed his life was going to become. He wanted the future to arrive, a desire not based on any hardship he’d endured, not because he felt he was due this future, but simply that he thought it was going to be as beautiful as the mountain and the plums and Celia recording it all. It was an intense optimism, amplified now under this sky, a desire that frightened and consoled him, a succession of feelings that he knew were the first conceits of an adult life.
The sky ran through its riot of evening colours, finally ceding to a deep shade of purple. Their eyes stung with the day’s last light. Celia put down her brush and he stood up to see what she had done. He had always taken pleasure in being the first to see each new work, but she reminded him that he could only ever be the second. He was the boyfriend. And while she tolerated his sneaking around for a peek, maybe even condoned it, she let him know that she didn’t particularly need his approval. She was the artist. He looked at the painting. In an hour, she had easily captured the movement of the street below, the lines of the neighbourhood and the looming swell of mountain. It was her sky that stoppe
d him. It wasn’t just a skilled representation but an exploration of sky, all possible skies, made plausible in front of him. He could tell her any number of things, all of which would sound facile and wouldn’t properly convey what he felt. So he said nothing, instead choosing to stare dumbly at the street settling into shadows and at the illuminated cross on Mount Royal. What he could not say, could not even understand at the time, was that Celia’s sky saddened him in a vague and shameful way, hinting of a future of beauty and promise that he had no hand in.
