The importance of the attitude we adopt to what is irrevocable cannot be emphasised too strongly. Insofar as the latter is viewed as an object, and therefore immovable, it has the power of destroying by petrifying, a power ascribed by the ancients to the face of the Gorgon.
Gabriel Marcel, Creative Fidelity
It was five in the morning when Joel awoke, the day after Canada Day. His eyes were clear; there was no sleep left. The attic was cold, rain blowing in through the open windows, spattering the floorboards. He got up, feeling a strange nervousness about lying down, as if someone might burst in the door to catch him unawares. The wise and foolish virgins, he thought, the Hebrews grabbing their unleavened bread.
He sat on the edge of the bed, trying to plan what he would wear. If he didn’t plan, sometimes the drawers full of clothes were impossible to deal with. His mother always washed his clothes, folded them, put them in the drawers for him, and sometimes when he saw those rows of folded shirts and pants in there he was just too ashamed to keep going.
It was cold, so he would wear socks, long pants (the grey ones), the thin black sweater that was beginning to fade to charcoal. And shoes, in case he had to run.
Five a.m. An unsafe hour, a time when everyone was asleep and he was on his own. Joel was uncomfortable even with his own family, but he liked to know that there were other people in the house, awake and going about their business. But asleep they were no good to him. Formerly reliable people were utterly different in their sleep, murmuring angrily into their pillows or silently weeping or just lying still, wrapped up in their private visions. At five, Joel could console himself by thinking that if emergency struck, he could wake others up without feeling too guilty, but it was still an hour at which he was afraid.
He sat down again on the bed, picked up the wooden-beaded rosary from the bedside table, and kissed the crucifix. Not to make himself feel better, but just to make himself known. The big black side of death was cruising past like a ship, and he was in a little rowboat in the wake of it. He had to make a noise so it would hear him, so it would not just swallow him under but pass by, pass by. Doubt or distress, as they called it on the water.
God, to be all alone and know what was coming.
His father must have known. Marchand had snapped suddenly, sure, but before that? You would have to have an inkling. You would wait for it, imagine how it might happen. Wonder if you’d rather be shot in the head or the heart. The neck was a nice compromise, wasn’t it? Probably there was time, no matter what Mr. Summers had said. There was time, bleeding to death there on that mattress in the basement. It would be quick but you would have the time for a last gasp and a grasping towards “the good and the fine”, as his father always called it. He was always too embarrassed to say God, but he would say, “Your last thoughts should be of goodness, the things you were grateful for, the people you love best.” He would say that while watching the news, or upon hearing of the deaths of other people.
So had his father had time for that? Choking on his own blood while hearing the screams of wounded Mounties outside, the footsteps of Mr. Summers on the stairs...Joel knew he shouldn’t dwell on the scene, but he couldn’t stop imagining it, putting himself on the mattress with a bullet in his own throat.
No, you would not be able to think gratefully upon your life. Not like that. You would be terrified and alone and in incredible pain.
Joel had tried to explain his feelings to Father Gilles on the phone, and had failed.
“The sacraments aren’t magic, Joel, you know that,” Father Gilles had said on the phone. “And neither are the Nine First Fridays. God isn’t going to send your father to hell for missing a chance to have anointing and Viaticum. It isn’t a requirement for getting into heaven, and even if it were, there’s such a thing as extenuating circumstances. I think being held captive in a fanatic’s basement counts.”
But that wasn’t the point, and as usual, Joel couldn’t quite make himself clear. The point was that a promise was a promise, as his father had said on the phone. The point was that you ought to get a chance to get your head together before you died. Marin Leavitt got that chance, dying in the hospital. Maybe it was a nasty death, going slowly, but it was worse, he thought, to be cut down so abruptly, as if you didn’t have a mind, as if you didn’t matter. Take, for instance, the Mounties who had died that way, coming around a corner to investigate and BANG--
Mr. Summers had said that Marchand apologised, that he babbled his “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to” ravings until the Mounties put him in cuffs. Joel wondered if he meant it. How sorry did someone have to be, after all?
Now and at the hour of our death. It was all so hard and cruel, and what was wrong with people anyway? What the fuck was wrong with them? Didn’t anybody understand?
He prayed the long, morbid-sounding Hail Holy Queen and put the beads away. Shut the window, the rain is getting in. Fierce green and grey rain drumming on the roof.
Two days later, the wake. Not a real wake, as Aunt Carmel explained. Real wakes were not held in funeral homes, and lasted longer than eight hours, and had little or nothing to do with tea in Styrofoam cups. Real wakes were a thing of the past, or at least a thing of her past, something still practiced in a mythical Corner Brook somewhere, but not here in Ontario. Not in the real world.
Aunt Carmel and Nana leaned on each other as they stood over the coffin with Joel and his mother. “They always do come in threes,” Nana lamented.
“Who were the other two, then?” Carmel asked.
“There was Brian,” Nana said, after thinking for a moment. “And Carmel’s Joel.”
“Ahhh, yis,” said Carmel, nodding sadly. The ah drawn out and the yis clipped, like a long-short signal on the sea.
Lily snorted. “Give your head a shake, Carmel. Brian, I’ll let you have, but your Joel was eighteen years ago. God rest his soul, of course, but there’s got to be a statute of limitations on these things.”
Nana said nothing, and Joel could understand her line of thought: if only two had died recently, that meant another death was on the way. Better for the hat trick to be done already.
Then his mother said, “One of Jim’s cousins died last year.”
“Oh, there you are, then.”
The body, the strangely unimportant body, was white and doughy-looking. The coffin was the plainest of plain oak, made by monks somewhere up in Quebec, because Joel’s father had said once that he hated fancy coffins and thought they were tasteless.
“My goodness, though,” Aunt Carmel said, in her slightly-too-loud voice, “They didn’t do a very good job, did they? He doesn’t look at all like himself. The man who did Brian up, you’d have thought the boy was just asleep.”
“Yes, my dear, but Brian never looked very well, you know. People who are cross too often, they tend to look better once they’re dead. Gives the face a rest.”
“He wasn’t cross all the time, but you know he had a hard enough time of it. Ahhh, yis, I don’t blame him a bit for scowling through his last two decades. Plenty of men who did more than scowl, putting up with a wife like his.”
“Not to mention her sister.”
“Well, her sister was the real problem, you’re right. Poor Brian was lucky to get by her without catching a bullet himself.”
The two old women laughed. Carmel rubbed Lily’s back meditatively.
The bullet wound was still visible in the neck, if you knew where to look. But if you ignored that, if you ignored the face that looked too fat -- yes, it was him, just as if he were at work. Dark suit, tie Liberal red. A tiny maple leaf pin on the lapel. All that was missing was the white wire coming down from the ear; his father had never become quite fluent in French.
Lily touched the body’s forehead with the backs of her fingers, then drew her hand away. She let out one unexpected sob, loud enough to make everyone turn around, but she mastered herself and turned to Aunt Carmel for a hug. “It was just so fast, so fast.”
Joel did not touch the body, and didn’t want to. The body didn’t look like a person, but like a cunning replica. Once, at some gallery in the city, Joel had seen a hyperrealist sculpture of an old woman eating ice cream. It had scared him at first. After he realised that the woman wasn’t real, he had been angry: it was cruel, to reproduce a woman’s wrinkles that way, to show the droplet of drool hanging from her lip as she ate. The sculpture was a sign of contempt. And he felt the same way about the body of his father, somehow, even though the morticians had done their best to cover every ugliness.
Carmel and Nana were taking the right attitude towards a thing like this, he thought. This was just a wax-museum example of the undertaker’s art, not a person -- not anymore.
Father Gilles wandered up to the coffin, peered inside as if it were a diorama, and then said quietly to Joel, “How are you doing?”
Joel just shrugged. Father led him out of the room, downstairs to the basement.
“I’ve discovered a secret: there’s a teapot down here.” He opened a door and gestured grandly, showing the tiny kitchen and the teapot on the counter. “You still have to drink from a Styrofoam cup, but at least the tea is brewed properly.”
Father sank down into one of the chairs at the little kitchen table. They looked like they were about fifty years old, with cracked plastic cushions. “Assieds-toi. I wanted to ask if you would read at the funeral tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, I’m sorry for the short notice. But you’ll have it memorised by then -- I know you. Just remind me to give you the sheet before I go.”
Joel poured tea into one of the Styrofoam cups. He did want something from Father Gilles, but he was going to approach it obliquely. “I haven’t received in a while.”
“What’s a while?”
“Since I was at St. Rita’s.”
“Pff. I’ve talked to people who haven’t had Communion in forty years. So I deduce that you haven’t been going to Mass down there in New York? How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, pretend you do know. Make something up. How might a person like you feel if he hadn’t been to church in a couple of months?”
Joel felt embarrassed, and said nothing.
“He might,” said Father Gilles, “feel strongly enough about it that he would mention it to a priest. But how is he really feeling? Happy to have a chance to go back again? Or is he feeling guilty?”
“The second one.”
“Hmm. I’ll hear your confession before you go, if you want. Other than that...guilt is not a healthy thing, especially for you. Ignatius wrote about what he called the delicate conscience. Someone who is predisposed to feel guilty about things can go too far, and become very upset even when he hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Joel could have answered easily that he did do wrong things, whole truckloads of wrong things, so this didn’t really apply to him, but it was often hard to stop Father Gilles once he got going. He listened for a while as the priest talked about the Spiritual Exercises, about the difference between paralysing guilt and real sorrow for your sins and shortcomings, about the need to have compassion for yourself. They were back in the consulting-room at St. Rita’s, playing the same game they had played every morning for two years.
“Have mercy on yourself or no one else will,” Father said at one point, and Joel could not pay attention after that. Who could say that to someone? Who could say it at a wake? What was the matter with people?
As if from force of habit, he began to disappear, with the usual sensation in his inner ear of falling, a long elevator plunge. Dr. Xavier always stopped when this happened. Usually he waited for a few minutes, and then if his patient did not reappear, he would turn to his books, make phone calls, go on with his life. Father Gilles didn’t do things that way; he filled in the half-hour every morning, talking even if he couldn’t prove anyone was listening.
Joel used to loathe those sessions, hated the interrogation and the smug I-know-what-your-problem-is posturing. The only thing he hated more was group, and, well -- most people hated group. At St. Rita’s it was one thing, because you had a lot of time on your hands and Elliott Smith albums only kept you occupied for so long. But here in the basement of the suburban funeral home, he was bored, sick of the priest and sick of his own daydreams.
He left Father Gilles in the little kitchen, who was still talking to the empty air. Joel drifted back upstairs, to the funeral home’s front hallway, where he suddenly stopped. At first he wasn’t sure he was seeing properly, so he adjusted his state until his vision was closer to normal.
Amanda Kilborne was standing just inside the doors. She was reading the names on the board, looking like she was working up the nerve to follow the numbers to the right room.
Besides her, the hall was empty, and Joel thought he was the first one who had spotted her. She wasn’t an attention-grabber, even though she was pretty. One of those girls who seemed to lack physical flaws, so your interest slides away. Her blond hair was tied back and she wore dark grey, as she often did to work.
Joel absolutely did not want any scenes at his father’s wake. He made a decision and surfaced back into his body, appearing a few feet away from Amanda. She staggered backwards, but he walked straight past her to the doors, whispering, “I think if they see you, you’ll get thrown out.”
“But you’ll talk to me?” she said.
He nodded.
Amanda had never spoken to him voluntarily. When forced by her job to give him a message, she always did it abruptly, either not looking him in the eye or staring as if he were a picture, an image on the TV screen, something that couldn’t look back.
They went out to the funeral home’s parking lot, and Amanda lit up a smoke. Joel sat down on the edge of the curb, and waited for her to begin. The funeral home was in a neighbourhood called Blossom Park, of all things, but all he could see across the four-lane were stores: Mark’s Work Wearhouse, a Home Depot, a mattress store, and off in the distance, a McDonalds.
Amanda took a deep drag of her cigarette and said, “I don’t know if you’ll want to hear this, but...I saw Henri-Michel last night, and he made me promise to tell you that he’s just incredibly sorry.”
Joel looked up at her, analysing the tone. Sorry, as in sorry for your loss? Or as in an admission of guilt?
“I mean,” Amanda said, sounding nervous now, “I mean he’s really messed up about it. I know that probably doesn’t make it any better, but he wouldn’t stop crying and saying he wishes he could take it back.”
That constituted “being messed up”? Joel thought it was about the right reaction to have when you had just murdered a man in cold blood. Well, maybe not cold blood. The heat of passion wasn’t the right idea either -- panic wasn’t a passion. Basically, he thought, if you had a gun and a reason to panic, then murder was a pretty likely result. So the real crime was acquiring a gun in the first place; Joel knew he was panicky, for instance, so he had always had the sense to stay away from guns. And he also didn’t keep victims in his basement. That was what Marchand had to answer for.
“Say something,” Amanda said.
“When...when did you know, know for sure, what he was going to do?” he asked, looking at her feet. Smooth black pumps. “When you got him the job? When you told him like my dad’s schedule and stuff?”
She flicked away her cigarette butt, lit another one. Her heels scraped on the pavement as she pivoted back and forth, looking around as if she wanted to make sure they were alone. “If I tell you all that, will you tell the cops, or testify against me?”
Joel did what he thought his father would have done: he shrugged, and said, “If I think you’re guilty of something, I will.”
“Oh great. Well, you don’t get any answers, then.”
“Fine.” Joel didn’t intend to perjure himself just for peace of mind.
Amanda hadn’t been expecting that response, he thought. She wanted to talk. She sighed and sat down on the curb, about a foot and a half away from him.
“But look,” he said, more quietly. “Tell me this. What is it with you and Henri-Michel? What is it about the, um, the mutant issue that pisses you off so much?”
“I don’t hate all mutants,” she said, as if she were tired of having to repeat her position.
“You seem kind of bugged by me, though. And I’m not sure why, because I’ve never done anything to you.” He tried not to make it sound like an accusation, just a casual remark, something he had noticed. He wasn’t after pity, or a fight.
She turned her head to stare at him, her Ripley’s Believe it or Not stare. “You have to ask?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been working for your father for over two years,” she said. “I saw -- I saw the way you had to live. In and out of hospitals all the time, couldn’t go to school, couldn’t eat. You always seemed to be...even when you were visible, it was like you weren’t really there. How could I see that and not think...you know?”
“What?”
“How could I look at you and not think that you would have been better off if they’d had pre-natal testing for mutation back then? What does your mutation do for you? It makes you miserable. Is it worth it for you to live like this? That’s all I’m saying.”
Joel nodded, to keep her talking. He wanted to hear her side of it, but he felt like the breath had been knocked out of him.
“It’s not across-the-board,” she said, almost reassuringly. “I’m not an extremist like -- like Henri-Michel. I just don’t think we should be celebrating what seems to me like an illness. If mutants are a group that should be protected, what about people with genetic diseases? Suppose we came up with a way to prevent Down’s Syndrome from developing, wouldn’t you be in favour of that? But talk about curing mutants and everyone acts like you’re a eugenicist. And are you any less sick than a kid with Down’s Syndrome? He’s probably happier than you.”
“Happiness,” said Joel, because now he felt he had to defend himself somehow, “isn’t -- it’s not the most important thing in life.”
“Well, I don’t agree with you. Plato and Aristotle wouldn’t agree, either. I’m not crazy, y’know, I’m not Hitler, but I don’t think you’re happy being alive. And you must think the same or you wouldn’t have tried to kill yourself at Marin Leavitt’s house.”
“What do you know about why I did that?” Joel said, dimly aware that he was getting angry, although his voice was still quiet. “What would you know about it? I was plenty miserable before my mutation ever manifested, I can tell you that for nothing.”
She stared off towards the McDonalds, smoke trailing east. “Sorry.”
“You weren’t there then. You don’t know.”
“Okay. I don’t. But still...does it matter how you felt before I met you? You were a mutant since you were conceived, no matter when it manifested.”
Since you were conceived. Those words wormed into his brain, and he knew he would be turning them over and over some night instead of sleeping. Have mercy on yourself, or no one else will.
“I wouldn’t want you killed,” Amanda went on, “but if your mother had done a pre-natal test and wanted to terminate, because she knew--”
“That’s enough.”
“I think she’d have the right to. That’s all I’m saying.”
“No, that’s enough. Stop.”
“Haven’t you thought about it? That’s why this bothers you, isn’t it? You probably sat up there in your attic wishing you were never born, but you don’t want other people to agree with you.”
Joel bent forward, looking down at the tires of the cars, the green squares of lawn on the islands. When he was away, he always remembered Ottawa as beautiful and gracious, not small and bland like this. He thought of the Gothic towers and the bridges and the sedate bronze statues, not Mark’s Work Wearhouse. But this was the same city. The bell-tongued city with its glorious towers and convenient shopping.
“I’m not saying I want you dead,” Amanda said again. “I’m saying you deserved to be born normal.”
“But that wasn’t an option. You know? I’m either alive or I’m dead. There’s no normal version of me floating around somewhere. This is all. This is it.” Joel looked over at her and tried to smile, but it didn’t work; she just looked back at him blankly.
“We’ll agree to disagree. I didn’t come here to fight over this.” She blew out a jet of smoke, crushed out her cigarette with her foot, and stood up again. “I wanted to pay my respects, but since I’m not allowed inside I guess this will have to do.”
“You coming to the funeral Mass tomorrow?” Joel asked.
Amanda hesitated for a second. “Am I allowed?”
“I’ll talk to my mom.”
She squinted at him, as if trying to understand why he would do something like that. “Where is it?”
“St. Patrick’s, on Kent and Nepean. Ten a.m.”
“Okay.”
Why did he want her there? Because she was part of the whole mess, he decided. She was involved, so why bar her from the funeral but let relatives they hardly knew to attend?
Amanda turned again to leave, then stopped. “Do you think your mother will give me a good reference for my next job?”
“I don’t know.” He had to be honest. “I doubt it.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry.”
She left, heading up the street to the bus stop. Joel dusted off the seat of his pants and went back inside to make his confession to Father Gilles before the priest had to leave.
St. Patrick’s, Charles thought, had the same problem that Notre Dame did: a vast excess of decoration, crowds of saints on the walls, even some blue Christmas lights arranged around the Virgin’s head. The windows were beautiful, though, and Charles found himself examining them instead of paying attention to the service. Some he couldn’t identify, pictures of nuns and men in surplices, but others were familiar images. The Prodigal Son falling into his father’s arms.
There was standing room only in the church, despite the weather. In the sullen fog that hung over the city, Charles had worried that the plane wouldn’t make it down in time, and now a steady rain was falling outside. Skimming gently through the minds of the people crowded in the church, Charles found politicians, civil servants, journalists, students of Mrs. McCree, past and present (for once, Charles wasn’t the only one in a wheelchair), lawyers, professors, and doctors.
When it was time for the first reading, Joel came forward and stepped up to the lectern. Charles was a little surprised, but he had known a few people with severe social problems who could still read in public: they weren’t brilliant orators, but they didn’t fall to pieces because “the audience” was large enough that they couldn’t monitor individual facial reactions. It might be good to encourage the boy to do more of this sort of thing, Charles thought; perhaps it would build confidence.
But the reading itself surprised him.
Joel stood at the lectern, smoothed out the page with one hand, and bent towards the microphone. “A reading from the book of Job. And Job said to them, ‘Like a slave, sighing for the shade, or a hireling with no thought but for his wages, I have months of futility assigned to me, nights of suffering to be my lot. Lying in bed, I wonder, “When will it be day?” No sooner up than, “When will evening come?” And crazy thoughts obsess me until twilight falls.’”
His voice had begun to shake. He took a pause, and it was a long pause. Some of the standing mourners began to shift their weight, whisper to each other. Almost everyone there seemed to know what the problem was, and they watched helplessly, with the kind of pained sympathy reserved for children who fall at their dance recitals. Charles watched transfixed as Joel found his place again with his finger.
“‘My flesh is rotting under my skin, my bones are sticking out like teeth. Pity me, pity me, my friends, since I have been struck by the hand of God. Must you persecute me just as God does, and give my body no peace? Will no one let my words be recorded, inscribed on some monument, with iron chisel and engraving tool, cut into the rock forever?’”
Now Joel’s voice became firmer, but he didn’t deliver the lines with righteous anger, as a budding actor would do. He read as if he were telling the sad ending of an old story, the sort of story that could end no other way. The McCrees had read to him often as a boy, Charles was sure of it. As they had done everything else right, at least on the surface. The choice of reading seemed like a cruel joke on Visineau’s part -- who could give lines like this to a boy like Joel?
But the kid kept reading, in his quiet voice.
“‘I know that I have a living Defender, and that he will rise up last, on the dust of the earth. After my awakening, he will set me close by him, and from my flesh I shall look on God. He whom I shall see will take my part; I shall be looking on no stranger.’ The word of the Lord.”
“Thanks be to God,” said Charles with the congregation.
Quotes and Notes: The reading is from Job 7:1-4 and 19:20-27 in the Jerusalem Bible, which offers a particularly vigorous (even, at times, eccentric) translation.
I'm always saying how much I hate having dialect spelled phonetically, but I had to reproduce "Ahhh, yis" the way I did. It isn't "ahhh, yes", and it isn't even a sentence, just something you throw in for rhythm, and sometimes it's meant to indicate sympathy or sort of an "I know how the world wags" attitude.
The title is from an aphorism variously attributed to Socrates, Greek fishermen, and Arab thinkers, roughly running, "There are three groups of people: the living, the dead, and those at sea."
And Gabriel Marcel is my dead French existentialist boyfriend. Read Marcel! He's kindly and insightful!