At the hotel, I walked straight into an argument on all sides. It was almost eleven o’clock. Punctual as ever, my father had made the family return from dinner by nine, just as he had said he would. Since then, they had all waited for me.
“I can’t understand you,” said my mother. “Where have you been?”
“I just wanted some fresh air,” I said.
“The police station is closed now,” my father announced. “I thought we had agreed you would make a statement.”
“I never agreed to make a statement,” I said. “What’s the point? It’s just one of those things that happens.”
“One of those things that happens to you,” Laura said, pointedly.
We were all in my room. They were standing in front of me, blocking the path to my bed. It was as if they had formed a picket line in a show of family solidarity against me.
“You don’t take this seriously, do you?” said my father. “This random attack, this supposedly unprovoked attack? I’m wondering how random it was. You’re not upset, not disturbed, not even a little bit concerned about giving the police some details that might help them to protect other citizens out there?”
The language he used made me want to laugh. He was quite right. I was not serious. What was I supposed to say to him?
“Luke, at least go to the doctor,” said my mother. “In the morning, we can take you. Concussion is serious.”
“I don’t have concussion, Mom.”
“You should get a checkup,” she insisted.
My poor mother. I sometimes felt a twinge of regret at what an act I had to pull in front of her. The problem was, she always sided with Dad. They were a united front. No matter what tensions existed between them, and no matter how little they appeared to have in common with each other, they always found a way to unite against me.
I sighed deeply.
“You know what would make me feel better? Going to bed and sleeping it off.”
My mother shook her head.
“This is not the way you behave on holiday, Luke.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I was attacked, Mom. I just want to rest.”
“This isn’t the way to act, ever. But it especially isn’t the way to act when we all came here to have a great time.”
I sighed angrily.
“I’m having a great time, except for the last four hours of today. A great time. Can I go to bed now? It’s late, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
21
My father was not at breakfast the next morning. He was at the Hilton Hotel, preparing for his keynote address at ten. He was going to be very busy all day, and nobody expected to see him until late. But tomorrow there was something we could all look forward to: a dinner with his colleague from McGill University, Dr. André Bouchard, along with his wife and two children.
He had said to me explicitly the night before, “You will be there, Luke. No more getting into trouble. You will be there.”
I was looking forward to this as much as a visit to the dentist.
After the waiter had poured us our morning coffee, my mother asked what I wanted to do today. The question was specifically for me, as if I had now proven myself in need of special attention.
I shrugged.
“More coffee?” asked the waiter.
We all said yes. Everyone tucked into the food on their plates, not with real appetite, but with real need nonetheless. There was no talk about going to the police or the doctor, which was a relief. There was no talk about anything for a long time. We didn’t want to talk to each other. Or rather, they didn’t want to talk to me.
“How is Zoe?” asked my mother, eventually.
I shrugged. I had no idea. Only a half hour earlier, I’d tried again in vain to call her.
We struggled through the rest of breakfast. My mother suggested we visit Montreal’s old port. We got up from the table and the tension dissipated just a little. We returned to our rooms to get ready. Laura and I, stuck with each other briefly, did not talk. We did not even exchange one word. As agreed, we joined Mom in the lobby, and then we headed out to play the part of a happy family on holiday in Montreal.
Almost no genuine images come to mind when I recall that day. I have pictures of Montreal that might as well have come from a postcard sent by a distant aunt. I can see the Hotel de Ville, the Place Jacques-Cartier, and all the old stone buildings down by the water, and I know we were there, and I know we ate on the patio of an Italian restaurant and that everyone agreed, the food was fantastic. At the Bonsecours Market, we posed outside for a photograph. We handed Laura’s camera to some German tourists for this purpose.
“Cheese!” they said.
The robustly-framed husband and wife handed back the camera, beaming at us, with no idea what a giant lie they had helped create. For years afterwards, an enlargement of that photo would hang in the living room. It was eventually taken down because of all the commotion of building the hot tub directly on the other side of the wall. Nobody ever bothered putting it back up. I don’t know where it is now. The photograph amazed me when it came out. Somehow, we had all contrived to have perfect smiles.
After dinner in the hotel, I tried Zoe again. Still no answer. It was hell trying to sleep. I drifted off in the small hours of the morning, only to wake up at four. There were people shouting on the street outside. Drunks coming out of the clubs. I stared for so long at the ceiling that the blackness appeared to turn white.
My father was very pleased with himself at breakfast the next day. Yesterday’s address at the conference had gone well for him.
“I had an invitation to deliver a paper in Argentina,” he said.
My mother asked when that would be.
“It’s an open-ended invitation. Final dates are not set.”
My father looked at me and looked away again just as quickly. He could hardly bring himself to acknowledge me. I watched him rush through the rest of breakfast. The holiday had boiled down to this: his professional glory at my expense. That’s the way it seemed to me. When at last he felt he had put in his time, he pushed his chair back, pulled on his sport jacket, and smiled disingenuously at us all.
“I must go listen to my friend André now,” he said. “We will all meet here at five o’clock before going to dinner, all right? You got that, Luke?”
All it would take was for Zoe to answer the stupid phone, say something nice, and it would set my mind at rest. I returned to my room to call again. The phone rang and rang and rang. Eventually, a very sleepy but irritated voice answered it.
“What the hell do you want?”
It was Zoe. It was an octave too low, but it was definitely her.
“It’s Luke…”
“I know who it is. Who else would be calling from Montreal?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“You’re hearing it. How does it sound?”
“You sound pissed off.”
“I am pissed off, Luke,” she retorted. “You keep calling. Is there an emergency there?”
“No,” I replied. “I just—”
“You wanted to hear my voice. You told me.”
“You could be a little nicer,” I observed.
“It’s eight in the morning here. And yesterday you called at six. Why are you calling at six in the morning if there isn’t anything wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I can’t handle you calling twice, three times a day,” she complained.
“What difference does it make if you never answer?”
“Luke, you’re back this weekend. You don’t have to call every day.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“I’m sorry too. I think we need a break from each other. This is getting way too serious, way too fast.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Since you’ve been gone, I’ve been thinking that I appreciate my independence more than I r
ealized. I’m not ready to have a boyfriend who lives here practically half the week.”
“I don’t live there. Sometimes I sleep over there.”
“You have a drawer in my dresser for your clothes… Whatever. I’m not going to argue over the phone. We’ll talk when you get back. Enjoy the rest of your holiday.”
The line went dead.
I had built up a near-reverential image of Zoe in my head, as if she were the only solace from this unbearable holiday. But now that she had proven herself to be completely heartless, I remembered that Zoe was not such a wonderful person after all. In fact, whenever she was not high, her personality was quite different. She became very impatient and irritable. Just as she had been on the phone. What time was it in Edmonton? It was only just past eight in the morning. She wasn’t high yet… Of course.
I wasn’t about to stick around the Ritz-Carlton to find out if Laura and my mom had schemed up another exciting local tour. If I sneaked out now, I would escape them easily.
I headed down Sherbrooke, having no thought in mind but to put as much distance between the hotel and me as possible. I passed the dignified stone walls of Dawson College, and then passed into Westmount, which was the most luxurious town I had ever seen. All of sudden, I thought of staying here instead of going home. What was there for me in Edmonton, after all? A bitch of a girlfriend — most probably ex-girlfriend — and a final year of high school? None of this appealed to me. There were my friends, of course. There was my comfortable bedroom, my CDs and my porno mags. I missed all of that, but only because they were familiar. Why didn’t I just stay here and carve out a new life for myself? In under two years, I could be working the doors at one of those sex clubs. I could go to the gym and become big enough to deal with the troublemakers. I knew I could. In the past year, I had been in three fights and easily won them all. The beautiful women at the clubs would come to love me, because I would be kind and gentle to them, but a menace to whoever tried to get fresh with them. In the meantime, before I was old enough to work at a sex club, I could become a dish-pig like my friend Samuel. It was only six bucks an hour, but if you worked thirty to forty hours a week, you could afford rent and food.
Hatching all these schemes brought me as far as a major freeway. I stopped and watched the streams of traffic rushing north and south. Christ, what a lot of people. How many people lived in Montreal? A million? Two million? More? And then you had to take into account all the millions more that lived in Toronto and all the rest of Canada, then all the millions that lived in New York, Los Angeles, and the entire enormity of the United States, and then consider the billions collected elsewhere in the world… It wasn’t hard to see that life was completely pointless for the overwhelming majority of the earth’s inhabitants. There were maybe a couple of hundred lives that counted — that made a difference — the lives you saw on television. Presidents and prime ministers, sports stars, musicians, and actors. Maybe some rich businesspeople, too. And that was about it. No one else distinguished themselves from the crowd. But despite their irrelevance, people still hurried on their way through the world — the people in these cars included. They were so serious about getting to wherever they had to go, it was comical. You had to laugh at people like that. Why did they do it?
Maybe they did it because occasionally, they convinced themselves that they were happy — that they had found meaning in life. Just as I had done with Zoe. For fleeting moments in her bed, when we were as good to each other as two people could be, I had truly believed in something, even though I could never have articulated what that something was. And that must be how other people made it through their lives. By believing in something.
But the moments I had believed in seemed to me now as total charades. If they had been genuine, there was no way Zoe could have talked to me the way she had just done. Nobody was so mean to someone they actually cared about.
Just like me, she was a liar, only worse. When I had made love to her and been in love with her, I had actually believed it. There had been not a single false feeling in me. But for her, as with everything else in her life, those moments had been composed of more lies.
I had to turn my back on the whole thing now. It was bullshit.
I did a 180 at the freeway and passed all the brick edifices of Sherbrooke that I had already seen, taking an hour to get downtown. I did not stop at our hotel. I kept going. On a whim, I walked through the McGill campus. There were not many people around, but those that I did see turned out to be beautiful young women. At the other end of campus, I found myself walking through an old neighbourhood basking in the sun. I started to walk as aimlessly as possible. I remember heading away from the mountain, down an incline, then coming back up again further east, and arriving eventually at the Square Saint Louis. I was tired from walking. I sat down and stared at the fountain. This was a pretty idyllic place, I had to admit. I thought again, why the hell should I go back home? I could smell pot smoke in the air; there was a group of people my age opposite gathered around a guitarist; behind me was another small cluster — including a couple of really cute girls — who were hacky-sacking and kidding around and laughing. This seemed my sort of scene. I pulled out a cigarette and, even with my parched mouth, I very much enjoyed smoking it. Some cigarettes aren’t just the relief of an addiction, they are events unto themselves.
A kid approached me. He also wanted one of my cigarettes. He only had to make the gesture for me to understand. I gave him one. Then he held up his hand and said, “For my friend, too?” So I gave him a second one. He thanked me and went back to the guitarist and his group. About five minutes later, the kid came back again. He wanted to know if I had any interest in buying some pot. Of course I did, and as luck would have it, there was still some cash in my pocket. The transaction was conducted with him talking in a heavy French accent, and me trying to give a simple explanation of my further needs: some rolling papers and, if there was any, some water. I knew I was going to be coughing a lot. My throat was like sandpaper. The kid, who wore a battered Montreal Canadiens hat, offered to roll me a few joints. He said, “Come join us.” And so I picked myself up from my comfortable bench and walked to the other side of the fountain. There I met some of the nicest people I had ever encountered — some of them French-speaking and some of them English-speaking. A lot of them wore plaid shirts and baggy jeans. They were exactly my kind of crowd. There was only one girl in the mix — pretty, but kind of spotty. As soon as I was high, I started to find her downright fetching. She was called Marie. She lived in a neighbourhood called Rosemont. Her English was vastly superior to that of the first kid who had spoken to me. We shared a cigarette. Somebody asked if I could play guitar… They had been listening to the one guy for over an hour and some different tunes would be cool. But I couldn’t play guitar. Somebody asked, “What can you do?” I had to think long and hard about this. Then I remembered a break-dancing move that my friend Tony had shown me a couple of years ago. I got on the cement, pressed my elbow against my knees, lifted myself, and tilted toward the group, then moved my hands so I was walking along like a strange, twisted-up animal. I knew it didn’t exactly look cool, but I had busted out this move a few times at parties and people always appreciated it. It never failed to provoke a few laughs. The reception among this particular crowd was great.
“What do they call that move?” one of them asked.
I had no name for the move. So I called it the Champions’ Walk, after the fact that Edmonton’s motto was “City of Champions.”
Then the hacky-sackers joined us because they wanted some pot. More money was discreetly exchanged behind a bush; a few more joints were rolled and two of them started going around the circle. That is the most pleasant thing about pot smoking. It is a very communal activity. It is rude not to share. We had already finished one of mine. At this rate, I was going to be totally stoned. I could feel it coming on.
Marie put her hand in mine. I clasped it tightly.
One of the hacky-sa
ckers could play guitar. The beat-up Yamaha changed hands and some new riffs hit the air. I leaned in to Marie. She cradled me in her arms. When she talked to me, I could feel her breath in my ear.
“What is it like in Edmonton?” she asked.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s nice enough in summer. Long winters. What about Montreal?”
“Long winters, too. But I love it.”
“You love winter?”
“No, I love Montreal.”
I nodded my head. It seemed natural to be in her arms, even after only a half-hour acquaintance. I vowed then that I was not going to go home. I turned to kiss her, but to my surprise, she declined my gesture.
“This is a cold sore,” she said, pointing at a spot on her lip. She smiled. “I’m sorry. It is a bit disgusting.”
I turned back around. It was okay. It was okay to just sit with her.
“And what is this?” She gently touched my bruised nose and my temple. My war wounds did not look severe, but sitting as close as she was, it was impossible not to notice them.
What kind of story would I tell her?
“That’s just something that happened in Edmonton,” I said.
I left it at that.
“So mysterious,” she said with a laugh. “What happened? Tell me.”
“It’s nothing serious. It happened outside a bar. Some guy was drunk. I looked at him the wrong way, I guess. He said, ‘What are you looking at?’ He was wearing a Calgary Flames hat. So I said, ‘I’m looking at the only Calgary Flames fan in town.’ It was a joke. But he got mad and started throwing punches.”
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