Behind the eyes we meet

by Mélissa Verreault

  “Will you help me look for Hector?” Manue asked her underdressed friend.

  “You’re batshit crazy! Are you actually going to put up posters around the neighbourhood asking for help finding a goldfish? Where’d your head go?”

  “I can at least have fun with it. I know the signs probably won’t work, but it’ll be entertaining, won’t it?”

  “Girl, if it’s gotten so bad you need to make up stories like this, you seriously need to rethink where your life is going.”

  “That’s so insulting!”

  “What? Seriously, Emmanuelle, this is ridiculous. Do you honestly think the posters will help? Because they certainly won’t help your self-respect. You’re going to look like a real nutcase.”

  “Geez, if I’d known you were going to be so judgemental, I’d have gone somewhere else to eat.”

  Serena wasn’t always the most understanding when Manue came to her with weird ideas and eccentric projects. She didn’t realize they were Manue’s way of channelling her existential angst and fending off madness. Emmanuelle sought to counteract life’s inconsistencies with her harebrained schemes. Wasn’t fighting folly with folly the best way to accept the fact that we have no control over our lives?

  Manue wasn’t stupid; she knew that nothing much would come of it. Investigating Hector’s disappearance was just another excuse to avoid tackling the bigger questions.

  Serena was matter-of-fact. She didn’t believe her presence on earth was particularly meaningful, preferring to see life as something that had sprung from a series of accidents. She was intent on making the most of it; nothing special was waiting after death except a trail of maggots keen to feast off our decomposing entrails. In short, philosophically speaking, Manue and Serena had little in common. And when you got down to it—gastronomically, physically, intellectually, and sentimentally—the similarities were even scarcer. They didn’t have much reason to be friends. Their relationship was a ‘whatever’ kind of thing. The perfect friendship, thought Emmanuelle, who tried to avoid too much emotional involvement, period.

  “More coffee?” Serena asked, pulling Manue from her thoughts.

  “No thanks. My heart’s already racing. Anyway, I’ve got to go.”

  “Already? You just got here. We haven’t had time to chat yet.”

  “We can catch up tonight. Mojitos at Barraca—you in?”

  “Perfect. Meet you there around five. And I’m bringing a friend. I’ve been wanting you to meet Bertrand for a while.”

  “You’re always trying to set me up! Leave me alone, I’m fine being single.”

  “Liar. I know you’re crazy unhappy. You aren’t like me; you were made to have a boyfriend.”

  “Well thanks for the flash psychoanalysis, but I have to go. I’ve got posters to put up.”

  Emmanuelle walked out onto Hochelaga, where a reluctant sun was trying to pierce the powder grey clouds. The Olympic Stadium tower rose proudly up against the Montreal skyline, like a phallic beacon lighting the way to seafarers run adrift. Emmanuelle felt a sudden glimmer of hope as she beheld the cheap postcard image. For some inexplicable reason, she felt that things would start to look up from there on out. She would soon discover meaning where things were now unclear, and just over the horizon she’d find the right path to finally attain what most resembled happiness. She returned to her apartment buoyed by a wave of optimism, her body floating along the swell of jubilation like billions of particles newly released into space after being held captive for millennia.

  Sherlock HoMa

  armed with a roll of scotch tape, a pair of scissors, and a stapler, Manue combed the streets of her neighbourhood one by one, from north to south and east to west, leaving a poster on every fifth telephone pole in her wake. A little girl around six watched her for a while, then decided to follow on her bike so she could spy. Manue pretended she hadn’t seen her to avoid getting hounded with questions. Kids made her uncomfortable; their sweet innocence was a poor match for her grim cynicism.

  The tousle-headed blonde chomped on her grape-flavoured bubble gum without saying a word. Every once in a while she would ring her little bell, warning imaginary passersby to get out of her way pronto or she’d run them down. She got off the bike when she reached Aylwin Street, bent over to pick up a big grey rock streaked with pink that she dropped into the basket hanging from the handlebars, and hopped back on.

  Despite efforts to avoid the child’s inquiring gaze like the bubonic plague, Manue was unable to escape. The curious little girl turned to her sweetly and casually asked, “Why are you hanging pictures on all the trees?”

  “Um, they aren’t trees. They’re telephone poles.”

  “The poles come from trees, so it’s the same thing.”

  “If you say so.”

  “My mama says it’s not nice to ruin what belongs to otters.”

  “You mean ‘what belongs to others’?”

  “Yeah, otters. They live in rivers.”

  “You sure know your animals.”

  “Yup. That’s a goldfish in your picture.”

  “You’re right! That’s my goldfish. Have you seen him hanging around here by any chance?”

  “You left your fish hanging around? That’s not good. My mama says to always clean up your things or someone’ll trip and crack their head open.”

  “You’re absolutely right. But it wasn’t on purpose; I lost my goldfish.”

  “Honestly miss, you can’t lose a goldfish. You’re weird.”

  And without leaving any room to argue, the little girl pedalled off. Manue was speechless. Had she really reached this point? Was she so disconnected from reality that nobody, not even the neighbourhood children running gleefully through back lanes, could appreciate her touch of crazy? If Hector wasn’t lost, then what had happened to him? She didn’t think she could rest until she’d found the answer.

  Turning onto Joliette, Manue came across someone else hanging posters. She walked over and read the white sheet he’d just stapled to the telephone pole:

  FOUND

  Rouen Street between Davidson and Darling

  Small orange kitten

  De-clawed, no collar

  Call if yours or if you know the owner

  Fabio – 438-729-2932

  While Manue covered the city with desperate posters letting the whole world know that her goldfish had run away, this man was struggling to locate the owners of a poor stray kitten he’d come across. A fish lost, a cat found.

  For a brief moment, Manue thought that maybe the kitten had gobbled up her goldfish. Then she took a step back, admitting that the tomcat couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Hector’s disappearance. She took a second glance at the do-gooder and thought she recognized him. She ran over and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” she broke in, slightly out of breath. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “Hello,” he replied, flashing a large smile. “Know me? I’m not sure. It’s possible.”

  “I recognize your accent…”

  “There are thousands of Italians in Montreal. I’m not the only one who sounds like this, unfortunately.”

  “Yeah! In the bathroom! I saw you in the bathroom!”

  “Sorry?”

  “At Beaubien. You work at the Beaubien Cinema, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were cleaning the girls’ bathrooms last night when I went to see a movie with my friend.”

  “Oh, that bad Romanian one, I remember now. It’s a small world.”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Yes, on De Chambly.”

  “There aren’t too many Italians in HoMa; what are you doing all the way out here? It’s pretty far from the Jean Talon market.”

  “I didn’t leave Italy to wind up in a smaller and even m
ore self-involved version of the same place.”

  They chatted for several minutes. Manue felt as if she’d met the Italian well before their paths had crossed in a grungy bathroom. But it was only a feeling—probably just an episode of déjà vu conjured up by her tired brain.

  “Your French is good.”

  “I’ve been here four years.”

  “I know people who were born here and who don’t speak as well.”

  “I spent all my summers as a kid on the beaches of Brittany; that might have helped.”

  “I know where you vacationed as a kid, but I don’t know your name.”

  “I’m Fabio.”

  “Oh, of course. It’s on the posters. Nice to meet you. I’m Manue. Emmanuelle actually, but I don’t really like my full name.”

  “But it’s so pretty. It sounds…”

  “Dirty, yeah, I know.”

  “Dirty? No. I was going to say melancholic.”

  “Melancholic?”

  “Yes. It’s beautiful.”

  “Melancholic. That’s the first time I’ve heard that one.”

  “I see you’re hanging up posters too. You aren’t looking for a cat by any chance?”

  “No. A goldfish.”

  Fabio told her that a few years back Rome had made it illegal to have fish as pets. A law had been passed declaring it a crime to keep a fish inside a tank. Animal rights groups had argued that it was cruel to hold them captive, especially since confining them to tiny bowls without enough oxygen eventually made them go blind.

  “Goldfish can live to thirty and get as big as any other freshwater or saltwater fish.”

  “Hector was itty bitty.”

  “He probably suffered from dwarfism. That’s what happens to the ones whose bowls are too small. They die young.”

  Emmanuelle suddenly felt uncomfortable. She loved animals; had she unknowingly been abusing them all this time? She was flooded with regret, acknowledging that Hector was likely better off wherever he was now. Noticing her discomfort, Fabio offered reassurance: how could she have known? She had every right to hope to see her pet again. He put a comforting hand on her shoulder and flashed a dazzling seaside smile.

  She decided to tell Fabio all about Hector’s mishaps. If he thought her first name sounded melancholic, he might be the kind of person to find her story charming instead of downright absurd. She opted for the long version, launching into a drawn-out saga that didn’t skimp on the juicy yet not-strictly-necessary details: the flattened pigeon, the bottle of Bichon Louvet, David’s premature ejaculation, the damned Romanian film, the gruesome discovery while she was on the toilet, closed-minded Serena, the sexy waitresses, and finally the little girl on the bicycle.

  “I’ll help you find your fish,” Fabio offered simply.

  A handsome Italian with numerous European connections was going to help with her investigation, giving it an international flair, a certain prestige. What if Hector had deliberately made for the ocean, choosing to return to his roots on the other side of the world? Had he travelled south through the Strait of Magellan or opted for a northern route, skirting around Greenland? Would she have to issue a global alert, call on Interpol for help? If Hector had fallen into the hands of a crime ring, Fabio claimed to know people in Naples who could be of some use. Emmanuelle and her accomplice chuckled as they imagined all the harebrained outcomes their rather bizarre investigation might produce. She was relieved to have finally met someone who would play along with her game instead of laughing in her face.

  The world was such a serious and depressing place, what harm could a few innocent fantasies do? What they could do was save two people from the gloom of their inevitable fate. They could tell stories to brighten up the day-to-day, transforming the world into a place of infinite possibility. One where nothing ever truly dies.

  The Periodic Table

  a few minutes after she walked in the door, Manue got a phone call from someone named Gerard who claimed he’d seen her goldfish around the neighbourhood. She was caught off guard. Convinced that her poster would be ignored, she was unprepared to field information from anyone who called about Hector.

  “I lost a fish recently, too,” Gerard explained.

  “Oh yeah?” Manue feigned interest.

  “Then when I saw yours had taken off, it came to me. There’s no mistaking it, I said. It’s a conspiracy!”

  “You think so?”

  “Now I’m not looking to scare you, but I’m almost positive it’s aliens.”

  “They kidnapped our fish?”

  “You got it!”

  Manue hadn’t entertained this possibility, though it was just as feasible as the dozens of other outlandish stories she’d concocted.

  “Me and you is in the same boat, darlin’,” Gerard insisted, neglecting both his grammar and his manners.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We know things others don’t.”

  “Like?”

  “You must have seen my posters.”

  “I don’t know. Which ones?”

  “Kraft. They’re all a bunch of Nazis.”

  “Kraft as in Kraft Dinner?”

  “Bingo. They’re trying to wipe us all out.”

  “Hmm. I think they just make really bad macaroni and cheese.”

  “It’s the same orange powder they used on the Jews.”

  “It’s a fascinating theory, Gerard, but I’ve gotta go.”

  Emmanuelle hung up. Poor Gerard: another victim of the mental-health closures. Who else did she think would call about Hector? Why had she even put up the posters in the first place—and used her real phone number? What had she hoped to achieve? If she’d wanted to study the mental health of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve residents, she should have enrolled in a master’s in sociology from UQAM. At least she’d have gotten a degree out of it. That would have been useful.

  Useful. Always do things that are useful; that’s what is expected of us. Of Manue, of her generation, of those that came before and those yet to come.

  Performance.

  Value.

  Profit.

  Interest.

  What was the use of doing anything that didn’t meet any of the above criteria? Achieve without a goal, accomplish without an agenda, execute without ambition. Couldn’t actions stand alone without justification? Couldn’t we accept an embrace without the romance, an exploit without the medal, a bottle in the ocean without the message? Just then, Emmanuelle wanted a life free of purpose, one where she didn’t have to struggle desperately to find meaning. An incidental life, when hanging up posters for a lost goldfish was completely acceptable. Yet Manue was the first to protest when told to do something she considered unnecessary. Back in high school she’d groused for hours about sine, cosine, and tangents when a teacher tried to convince her of trigonometry’s future benefits. She was forced to calculate the trajectory of a trout being reeled in from a lake, a strung arrow ready to be shot, a baseball hit by a pimply teenager. All this was supposed to better prepare her for the future? She’d been asked to learn so much useless information: the periodic table of elements; tedious conversations between Paolo and Paula in Spanish class; French verbs in the pluperfect subjunctive; agricultural practices in ancient Egypt; the different types of clouds; how to play the recorder without rupturing anyone’s eardrum; Aesop’s Fables; how to write in cursive; how to draw perfect circles without using a compass or lifting her pen off the page; dinosaur species and their dietary preferences—all for what? She’d wondered countless times what the point of it all was, why they were forced to learn information that would only disappear into the tangle of her neurons, taking up space in her mental hard drive once final exams were over.

  Hola Paulo. ¡Hola Paula! ¿Cómo estás? Muy bien gracias. ¿Quieres ir a la playa conmigo? Sí, que buena idea. ¡Vamos! Que j’eusse dit, que t
u eusses cru, qu’il eût menti, que nous eussions caché, que vous eussiez déformé, qu’ils eussent mal compris. Flooding season, akhet; growing season, peret; harvesting season, shemu. Cumulonimbus, altostratus, and cirrus. Do, re, mi, mi, mi, re, do, re, re, re, re, mi, fa, fa, fa, fa, mi, re, do, do, do, mi, mi, sol, sol, sol, sol, fa, mi, fa, fa, fa, do, re, mi, mi, mi, mi, re, re, do, do, do. A Lion lay asleep in the forest, his great head resting on his paws. A timid little Mouse came upon him unexpectedly, and in her fright and haste to get away, ran across the Lion’s nose. Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. Ornithischia = herbivores / Saurischia = carnivores and piscivores.

  That was all nice and good.

  But what should you do, whom should you call, what language should you speak when the weight of life became unbearable and the only thing you wanted was to forget everything you’d ever learned?

  The Toothpick

  by late afternoon the sky had clouded over and thunderstorms threatened to burst at any moment. Emmanuelle got to Barraca at 5 o’clock as planned, but Serena wasn’t there yet. Manue ordered a cocktail, thinking she wouldn’t have long to wait. There was still no sign of Serena fifteen minutes later. Bored and a bit cranky, Emmanuelle finished her mojito and ordered another, feeling the need to explain herself to the server: “I walked a ton today, and now I’m really thirsty.” The server turned away with a smile. He’d seen more than one alcoholic scrambling to justify each drink.

  5:34 p.m. Still no Serena. A man sitting two tables away seemed to take a keen interest in Manue, however. He’d been staring at her since she sat down. But, too shy to approach her, he’d settled for casting curious glances her way. He was slightly cross-eyed, which made the whole thing even more uncomfortable. At first, Manue acted as if she hadn’t noticed him. But when the tension became unbearable, she decided to speak up.