by Liam Durcan
“Scrimshaw,” Marta said over his shoulder.
“Is this yours?” he asked, and Marta nodded. “What’s all this stuff for?” Patrick said as he looked more closely at the pieces. On the bone in front of him a spear lanced the flank of a breeching whale. Even though it was rendered in miniature, it effectively conveyed the theme of a battle to the death.
“For? For nothing, for me,” Marta replied, picking up what he had recognized was part of a harpoon. She gripped the spear as though she were acknowledging its heft and considering how far she could throw it if she had to. “It is history, Michael Patrick, history, a way of life that is gone.
“I studied Melville,” Marta added, as if in explanation, and he tried not to look blank-faced. “You know, Moby-Dick. Billy Budd.” She smiled and put the harpoon tip down. Nina played with another piece of whalebone until Marta asked her to stop.
“Come to the kitchen,” Marta said, and Patrick followed with Nina like a little satellite, a moon of a moon.
The smells in the Garcías’ kitchen–a pungent cloud rising from a pan of chopped peppers and onions–were the first sign of anything different from his parents’ house. He sat on a stool beside the stove and watched Marta coax the meal into existence.
“You are how old, Michael Patrick?”
“Sixteen.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Two sisters. Older. Way older.”
“Sisters,” Marta said, scraping rice off the inside of a pot with a wooden spoon. She rapped the spoon firmly against the pot’s edge. “So what is it that you like to do?”
“Pardon me?”
“What do you do when you’re not at the store?” Marta’s gaze bounced from the pots and saucepans to Patrick. He tried to speak to her when she was facing him but she always turned away too quickly. He wasn’t sure he was being heard.
“I don’t know. I just sort of hang out.”
“You have friends.”
“Yes.”
“What do you like in school?”
He shrugged involuntarily, and he felt Marta watching him, watching the shrug. He shifted on the stool and then he said something that surprised him for its honesty and, later, for its accuracy: “I like science. I like, you know, how things work.”
Marta nodded as she stirred a large pot that bubbled on one of the stove’s back elements. Patrick felt no better. Science. He heard noises from the back of the house and Celia appeared from behind a door. Her hands were buried in an old cloth and the jagged odour of turpentine cut through the other smells in the kitchen. Marta turned to her.
“Vaya afuera y lávese las manos. Nina está aquí.”
Celia turned and left without a word. Marta didn’t explain what she’d said, and with the silence Patrick felt increasingly self-conscious. Marta moved a lid from one saucepan to another. For a moment he considered bolting, leaving the stool upturned and the pots on the boil and cake behind for them all to laugh at. He’d brought a cake, for christsake. It was a step away from a bouquet of dandelions or a sitcom quality compliment: My, you look lovely in that apron, Mrs. García.
He felt more comfortable when Hernan and Roberto arrived from the store. Roberto pinned him with a stare as hostile as it was familiar, a reassuring source of gravity in the house, holding him down. Nina ferried between the counter and the table, depositing a fistful of cutlery on each placemat that Marta arranged into a table setting. Nina then sat down in her chair, looking over at Patrick in what he thought was an invitation to sit beside her. Marta and Hernan were occupied with carrying dishes of food to the table, Hernan pausing several times to call for Celia.
Patrick took the seat beside Nina, who smiled and promptly got up, wandering away from the table. Hernan chased after her, trying to shepherd the girl back, cajoling her. With Marta still at the stove and Roberto and Celia nowhere to be seen, Patrick was now the only one seated at the table. He felt someone tap him on the shoulder.
“That’s not your place, Mopito,” Roberto said. “Up.”
As Patrick prepared to get up, a hand came to rest on his other shoulder, preventing him from rising.
“Roberto,” Hernan said curtly, “Patrick is our guest, he can sit where he wants.”
“That’s your place.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Facing away from them, Patrick listened, unable to tell how the exchange ended. Marta seemed not to notice and brought the last dish to the table. One by one the Garcías sat down around him, Celia the last to come to the table, without a word or a glance.
Marta said grace and then Spanish phrases volleyed across the table as the steaming dishes were passed around. Patrick couldn’t understand a word but after a while, listening to the percussion and rhythms of the García family conversation, he convinced himself that he could follow what was being said: the excitable, teasing inflection in Roberto’s voice, Celia calmly rebutting him, Hernan and Maria reining them both in. Nina smiled and surveyed Patrick for the alien that he was.
On the other side of Patrick sat Hernan, who would lean over to translate a particular phrase or explain a dish. A plate of carne asada appeared and along with it Patrick was given a short history of Honduran cattle farming. He bit into a tortilla, anticipating a taste he thought he knew but instead experienced the earthier tang of what Hernan explained was the taste of flour made from corn instead of wheat. But the tastes and the sounds and the smells came too quickly and without ceasing; the exotic soon became unintelligible and Patrick found himself feeling increasingly apart. He was a stranger here. He watched and ate.
Hernan must have sensed this, as he made every effort to steer the conversation toward topics that would include their guest. He asked Patrick about his parents’ vacation, reacting as if the potbellied hills of the lower Laurentians were the Andes themselves, expressing an admiration for anyone fit and adventurous enough to attempt a mountain holiday. Hernan spoke of a trip he and Marta had taken with the children when Roberto and Celia were small, a journey by station wagon across the eastern states that ended up on the beaches of the Jersey shore. And while the beaches weren’t much compared to what they had in Honduras, it had been a trip they’d always remembered.
“We did it for the ocean. I needed to see the ocean,” Marta said.
“You lived in the States?” Patrick asked, turning to Hernan.
Hernan paused as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. He nodded. “Detroit,” Hernan said. “For a few years. I was working. Celia was born there.”
Hernan changed the topic to an update on Gerry Delaney: hip stable after an operation; legal prognosis less optimistic. Discussion of the robbery, and Patrick’s involvement in foiling it, drew Roberto forward, smirking: “You didn’t tell us, Mopito, that you knew this guy Delaney.”
“He’s from the neighbourhood, everyone knows him.”
“But you knew he was a criminal.”
Patrick fumbled for words, but before anything could emerge, Hernan interceded. “Roberto–”
“It’s just that I was surprised a guy like that would know when Celia would be alone in the store.”
“She wasn’t alone in the store. Michael Patrick was there,” Marta answered.
“Where were you that night?” Hernan asked Roberto, and Marta placed her hand on her husband’s forearm.
“Yeah, yeah. We were lucky he was there,” Roberto said, pretending to back off, “lucky he had his mop.”
It was near the end of dinner when the phone rang and Hernan excused himself to answer it. Celia was, as usual, in a world all her own, and Marta was occupied with cleaning up Nina. Roberto, in what Patrick thought at the time was an unexpected but welcomed gesture of reconciliation, offered him the last green vegetable on the platter. In the spirit of camaraderie, Patrick popped it in his mouth and bit down hard. The sensation was immediate, foreign, and incendiary. By the time Hernan returned, Patrick’s mouth was ablaze, his eyes leaking as though a canister of tear gas had been lobbed
into his lap. Coughing and choking as he downed a tumbler of water, Patrick pushed back from the table and ran to the hallway, desperate for a bathroom. Finding it, he kicked the door shut and spun open the cold water tap, trying not to retch as he gulped and spat. Even with his head in the sink and the water a torrent in his ears, he could still hear Hernan shouting.
When he returned to the table, red-faced, the hair at the front of his head still damp, he was met by the Garcías all sitting silently around the table. Order had been restored. Hernan patted him on the back and said plainly: “That was a jalapeño.” Roberto then apologized.
“Cake?” said Marta.
At the end of the table sat Celia. All evening he had tried not to watch her, to concentrate on what Hernan or Marta said, but she would appear at the edge of his vision and he would have to look. Now embarrassed, he avoided her eyes. She and Roberto were engaged in another argument–he was animated and loud, while she was trying to affect a look of boredom. Patrick turned in the other direction, wanting anything else to concentrate on, studiously watching Marta slicing the cake, fingering the pleats in the tablecloth. Finally, he glanced up as he passed a plate around Nina to Celia. And that’s when it happened. She looked at Patrick and smiled. The memory of that smile was encoded deep within his temporal lobes, spliced with the lingering autonomic throb it produced, filed away with other landmarks, those moments when life seems to blossom ridiculously into something more beautiful than can be imagined. A second. Two. No one else noticed. No, that was wrong. Roberto noticed.
“Did you bake this yourself, Mopito?” Roberto asked, Hernan glaring at him as he said it.
“Yes,” Patrick said flatly, knowing it was probably the only answer that would shut him up. At this, a corner of his vision cracked open like a door onto daylight. Celia smiled again. He remembered the Garcías like this, a composite of retrieved sensation: tears in his eyes from the jalapeños, the sweet taste of cake in his mouth, Celia smiling.
EIGHT
Patrick sat up and swayed in Den Haag’s early morning daylight. Grey outside, grey on the far wall of the room. The Garcías he loved seemed to exist only in memory. The room floated as he passed through it to the bathroom. There, he dug through his toiletries for more Tylenol. Next, a container that spilled out blue and white capsules, little armoured bugs of better mood, of improved sleep. The right side of his face was a bloated bruise, demanding that he touch the skin for verification, but he resisted, letting the eye rest, preserved in the bunker of his face. He showered in the darkened room.
Patrick’s computer and cell phone told him he was the most popular man in all of Holland. He had more e-mail. His business associates, having given up on calling the hotel and having to go through Edwin or Pieter, were storming the beaches with wave after wave of message, direct to his cell phone.
“Hello? Do you hear me? Hello?”
“I just wanted to let you know that one Barry Olafson is planning on coming. That’s right, Olafson fils. The hatchetboy.”
“Sanjay is fucking it up.”
Marc-André summed it up in his most recent e-mail. Neuronaut’s analysis of the new Globomart campaign was definitely stalled, and even with Sanjay pulling a series of all-nighters remodelling the data, none of the ads or visual cues were eliciting anything close to the results from the Values campaign. This meant that Globomart, which had such faith in Neuronaut that it didn’t have a Plan B, was, for the first time in its corporate history, faced with postponing the start date of its new advertising campaign, which was the retail equivalent of scrubbing a space shuttle launch during the final countdown. Mere rumours of the decision were already creeping onto the business pages, with its stock expected to take the predictable tumble–and Neuronaut’s right after it–and Barry Olafson had indeed flown from the Globomart world headquarters in Medina, Minnesota, to Boston to meet with Bancroft, a meeting that featured some high-amplitude finger-pointing at the meeting and Barry Olafson’s request to meet the “guy whose bright fucking idea this all was.” This, Marc-André said, was doubly noteworthy as it was the first time anyone from Medina, Minnesota, had used profanity. In Patrick’s absence, Sanjay was offered up as the technical spokesman and he tried to handle the situation, but Olafson and his entourage left after tossing him back like a worked-over goat carcass. Then Marc-André got personal:
You’ve completely deserted us in a crisis where you are to blame.
I won’t take the fall for this, you coward.
Bancroft should be bringing you back in shackles.
Patrick would have been angry had it not been for what he discerned as honest emotion. But it was typical of them all to overreact. He typed in a response:
If it can be fixed, I’ll fix it. Tell Sanjay to send me the data. I’ll analyze it here. I need the data.
Then he put his laptop on the desk in the room, swearing that, other than corresponding with Sanjay, he would not use it for the rest of his time in Den Haag. Yes, a vow of silence. The ascetic in his hotel suite. Ted Kaczynski does Europe. He decided to clear all his messages, snuff the red light once and for all, and then unplug the phone. He keyed in the codes and heard that polite Dutch voice–a woman’s this time, thin and bland as a slice of Edam–telling him he had two new messages.
“This is Marcello di Costini calling for you, Professor Lazerenko. Patrick, if we could meet tomorrow morning around nine, at my office, M-218 at the tribunal building. You will have to bring your passport. Ciao.”
Patrick replayed Marcello’s message while searching for a pen to write down the office number. Then he rifled through the contents of his briefcase for the folder that held the notes and references that Marcello had asked to see.
Marcello, in a manner so pleasant and collegial that Patrick only vaguely felt like an underachieving grad student, had asked him to review the entire literature relating to the neurobiology of criminal behaviour and guilt. He was still convinced that there was some biological explanation that they were not exploiting (pursuing was the word he used, but essentially he was trolling for loopholes based on some form of physical evidence, something to counterbalance the reams of photographs and depositions that implicated Hernan). Patrick had warned him that such defences had been advanced before but they rarely succeed. Even juries in the States, conditioned by an endless number of television shows to regard forensic evidence as unimpeachable truth, smelled something not quite right about a neuroscience defence. They could sense the loophole and they wouldn’t buy it.
Message two followed di Costini, surprising Patrick.
“Hello, Mop. Roberto here. I just want to say I’m sorry for hitting you. I hope you understand why I had to do it. But it’s done. I hope you’re not hurt, anyway.”
Despite the assaults that had book-ended their relationship, Patrick had never felt Roberto was his enemy. They were never friends, though. Patrick would be the first to admit that when they met that summer in 1986, he was jealous of Roberto. As a teenager Roberto García had had an almost pathological confidence and ease with people. He was new in the neighbourhood, new in the country, for God’s sakes, and within a month, it was his: he had dozens of friends and was going out with this incredible girl from Westmount who looked hypnotized when she was in the same room as him. He was an invading army of charisma, blitzkrieging from barbecues to pool parties to clubs downtown. Remarkably, he did all this without abandoning his life in the shop and as part of the Garcías. His friends would come into the store and say hi to Hernan or Marta and he’d be wearing an apron and holding a mop and he’d be totally comfortable. It was as though just being Roberto trumped everything.
Then, suddenly, it was over between Roberto and Jennifer from Westmount. While Roberto seemed indifferent, Patrick watched, worried, having just established an entire cosmology based on his charisma. He was reassured days later when Roberto appeared with Isabelle, a film studies major who went to Concordia. Hernan and Marta were unimpressed. The fact that their seventeen-year-old son was
seeing an austere-looking university student who wore black and watched Fassbinder movies for fun, seemed not to trouble, or even interest, them. To a feral teenage boy such as Patrick, this was more than impressive. This was climbing Everest without oxygen.
But that sort of charisma had a shelf life to it. It was a supernova thing, glowing most intensely in high school and college but it demanded a person go out and have an interesting life or they receded into the shadows of that memory. Roberto talked about travelling, but the store seemed to keep him grounded in NDG. In there somewhere, he had registered for a semester or two of management studies, but it didn’t stick. So he stayed in the store and everything else kept moving. Patrick heard he got married and even had a child but that he and his wife had split up after Hernan’s problems started and Marta died. Elyse had told him that, her voice trailing off and employing a look of wry disappointment to imply her opinion of cause and effect at work there.
Elyse had also been the one to tell Patrick that Roberto had taken over running Le Dépanneur Mondial by himself after Hernan’s arrest, buying the property next door and expanding the store against the advice of just about everyone. He’d hired staff and for a time became one of the bigger independents in town, although there were so few now that that wasn’t saying much. He overextended himself and came close to losing the place to the bank a while ago, but they had survived. Since then, Nina had been in charge–Nina! Forever still a child in his mind, now finished a business degree and exercising authority enough to pry her brother’s hands off the wheel of Le Dépanneur Mondial. Patrick had seen the store when he’d been in Montreal for his niece’s wedding the year before. At first he thought about going in but reconsidered, leery about bumping into Roberto when he’d made no attempts at contact for years. Even though it was more of a supermarket now, the sign still read “Le Dépanneur Mondial.” After looking through the windows to make sure Roberto wasn’t there, he’d decided to go in. Patrick had walked up and down the aisles, wanting that inescapable sense of place to swell inside him. He needed to feel better, to see those clean floors and smell fresh mangoes and get lost in those aisles. But almost everything inside had changed, and he felt pathetic standing there, pretending to look for something on the shelves. He wandered around for a while and then bought a pack of gum, paying the young cashier and walking out.
