There are very few overtly crazy people in Ottawa, such as you see cracked by the pressure of more terrible capitals, but I suspect a hidden strain of suppressed eccentricity. ... If Ottawa were ever to relax its self-discipline and its conventions, a surprising gaiety, bravado, and individualism might bubble out, infused I dare say with neurosis.
Jan Morris, City to City
Joel heard the noise at dawn, late in August. An ordinary noise: the sound of an office chair sliding across the floor, two storeys down.
Don't check it, he told himself. There's nothing there. He had made that mistake often enough, hearing the razor going in the bathroom in the morning, or a sigh and a rattling of the newspaper in the evening. One night he even heard whistling, someone down on the street whistling Henry Martin. Joel had looked that time, gone down to the front door. It was only (of course) Mr. Gillard who lived nearby, but Joel had watched, invisible, as the old man ambled down the road, shirtsleeves rolled up and hat cocked to the side, whistling the old song until he disappeared around the bend in the road.
Sad news, sad news to fair London came,
Sad news to fair London town.
There's been a rich vessel and she's cast away,
Cast away, cast away,
And all of her merry men drowned.
It was a beautiful song, and Joel had never heard anyone but his father sing it. He had almost thought it was a secret, unknown to everyone but them. Mr. Gillard had a fine whistle, all the notes perfect and the trills in the right places.
Joel would have stayed in bed and tried to forget about the sound of the chair's casters rolling over the floorboards, but he heard the sound again -- he was sure this time. There might be somebody in the house.
He sat up and put on a pair of grey jogging pants, his shoes, and a t-shirt from a CHEO fundraiser. The shirt had a teddy bear on it, just the thing to strike fear into the heart of an intruder. Joel briefly considered a career in security -- he could investigate threats completely without risk to himself. With his inborn instinct to fear absolutely everything, he would be a natural. But that tongue-in-cheek thought made him think of Inspector Brazeau's invitation to join the RCMP, and he wondered again if the government was really so eager to press mutants into service.
Dressed, Joel faded out to his invisible state and drifted down to his father's study.
His father had always kept the study door closed and locked; Joel as a very young boy had been inclined to wander into places where he wasn't welcome and help himself to paper for drawing on. He was always stealthy about it, and would only take one sheet from a stack of pages and leave the rest undisturbed. After being humiliated a few times at work, his father declared the study verboten and never reversed the decree as Joel got older.
It was strange now to see the door standing open, the dark blue light of dawn coming through the windows. Joel stole inside, and saw his mother sitting at his father's big desk. Returning to visibility, he asked, "What's going on?"
His mother jerked violently before seeing that it was him. "Lord, Joel, don't do that to me at this hour." She put her hand drolly on her chest and forced a smile. "I couldn't sleep so I decided to get up and work on responding to all these letters and cards."
Every clear surface in the study was stacked with mail, and a Loeb's bag on the floor was filled with shed envelopes. Much of the mail was from strangers, people all across the country who knew them only from the news. Mass cards from all their relatives, now numbering in the hundreds. But Joel had not forgotten the mail bombs, and was antsy being around large piles of envelopes.
"You're being careful?" he said.
"Of course I am." She heard something in his voice and turned her chair around. "Are you all right? Why are you up so early?"
"I'm fine. I just heard -- I heard you moving around down here."
"Are you sleeping okay?"
"I'm fine," he repeated, even though he wasn't sleeping well at all.
"You seem very anxious."
He didn't answer, because he was tired and knew it was the truth. Getting better, yes, despite that sour twisting grief in his stomach, but still anxious. Maybe he would always be that way.
His mother sighed. "Have you thought about what you're going to do with that money?"
"Not really." His inheritance from his father was enormous, at least to him. "Maybe I'll give it to St. Rita's. Or the Professor."
"Not all of it, you won't," his mother said, her voice brooking no argument. "A hundred and fifty thousand for university, at least. After that, you can live like a hermit if you want to -- at least you'll have a degree."
"I guess."
She turned and looked at him, squinting at his face as if he had said something strange. "Do you think it's time to go see Father Gilles? Or to go back to New York?"
"Mom, no."
She looked back down at the Mass card she was replying to. "Are you thinking about hurting yourself?"
"No. I'm -- no. Sorry." He didn't even know what the apologies were for anymore; he just threw them at everyone, hoping they would stick. Sorry he had said anything, that was what he was. He turned back to the door.
His mother, unexpectedly, leapt up from behind him and slammed the door shut before he could leave.
"You listen to me," she said in a quiet, fierce voice. "You listen to me," she said again, but could not finish. She was shaking, and all of a sudden she looked very old and very guilty. Not at his father's funeral had she looked like that, not during visits to St. Rita's, not in the intensive care ward years ago. She looked as old as Aunt Carmel, as if all of that pain was hitting her at once, with nowhere else for it to go, and he knew the universe would split apart if she didn't calm down.
Joel was terrified. He hugged her, to make her stop shaking. "I'm sorry, Mummy, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll go, I'll go."
Father Gilles offered Joel an appointment once a week, until he felt ready to go back to Westchester. A considerable sacrifice of time; the man had plenty to do at St. Rita's, but Jim McCree had been a major contributor to the place. Joel himself, feeling the weight of the money pressing down on him, couldn't help wondering if Father Gilles was angling for a bit more of the famous McCree philanthropy.
Not a kind thought. But Joel was not a kind person, as he explained to Father Gilles.
"People think that, when you're shy," he said during Reconciliation, which they were appending to their sessions. "But I'm not, I'd be a much worse person if I had the courage."
Father Gilles just nodded, and this was what Joel loved about Reconciliation: there were no arguments, no pompous announcements that he was seeing things all wrong. "What would you do?"
"I'd -- I don't know. I'd tell people off more. I get angry and there's just nowhere for it to go, because I'm so scared of people."
"Who do you get angry at?"
"My mother. She's always going through my things, coming into my room without knocking."
"Normal stuff, for a parent and a teenager."
"No, it's worse. She says I'm doing this to myself."
"You're doing what to yourself?"
"All this, all of it." Joel gestured helplessly. He never liked to list his problems, give them their proper names, fearing it would be like calling the wendigo. "Every conversation lately, it's all about how I should be doing something and am I suicidal again and don't I care about her. She doesn't say it's my fault, that's all subtext. But you have to listen for the subtext to get along in my house."
"And you're angry."
"Yes."
Father Gilles nodded again, and Joel continued listing his sins. "Laundry list stuff," he said when Joel was finished. "You're not a bad kid, you know. Sure, people think the quiet, smart kid is a saint, but you're only human and you've had a lot to put up with. But we need somewhere for the anger to go, eh? It can't bust out at your mother and you can't keep turning it on yourself. Your penance is one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and you have to call up an old friend you haven't seen in a while."
"I don't have any old friends."
"Yes you do. Right here in St. Rita's you have friends, in fact. People have asked after you."
"They want gossip. That doesn't mean anything."
"Ease up on them. Curiosity and concern are natural. They're the doorway to compassion, not just gossip. Let's have an Act of Contrition."
Joel stumbled through an extempore prayer and bowed his head through the absolution. This, he thought, was what regular therapy couldn't offer. Dr. Xavier never acknowledged that Joel had real reasons to feel guilty, so his exhortations to "forgive yourself" were useless. Father Gilles said things like that too during therapy, but in confession he became like someone else entirely, patient and accepting. Joel could pour out his self-hatred without provoking a silent, seething fight over who had the keys to reality.
You are forgiven. You are forgiven. Joel didn't even care who was forgiving him, God or the Church or even just Father Gilles himself. To be forgiven by anybody, to receive mercy, it made everything more bearable.
Joel had an idea of who had been asking after him, so he wandered invisibly through the halls of St. Rita's until he found the culprit's room. It was early afternoon, personal time, and a few of the patients were out wandering the halls. Joel recognised only one or two faces, which seemed strange, considering that he had only been gone for a few months, May to early August. For the two years he'd been there, very few patients got out. Once you were in, you were in. Nobody on "the outside" wanted to see them again, or so they would gloomily tell each other.
Paul, of course, was in his room, listening to his Discman. Their frail friendship had grown out of a mutual hatred of group, a shared addiction to newspapers, and a certain overlap in their diagnoses. Both were shy, privileged, miserable all out of proportion to their state in life.
Joel didn't bother knocking, since Paul wouldn't have heard. He materialised in the room and said, "Hey Paul."
Paul jumped, pulling the wires out of his ears, and a flare of orange-and-green surprise flashed over his face. Paul had a rather useless mutation that caused bioluminescent displays in his skin, like the fires of an opal, changing with his emotional state and physical health. He glowed slightly in the dark and was necessarily a poor liar. "Jesus, McCree."
"Sorry."
"Yeah, you always say that. What are you doing here?"
"Appointment with Father Gilles."
"Oh. You're not back with him for good, though, are you?"
"I don't know what I'm doing. I guess I'll go back to New York in September, I'm not registered for school anywhere else." Joel had been hoping that he would be able to live in the real world, as real as things got at home, but his mother was already making noises about sending him back to one institution or the other. "I've got about a billion credits to catch up on."
"Don't tell me. According to the province, I'm fourteen fucking years old." Paul leaned over and rapped his knuckles on a grade nine math text on the bedside table. "I wish it was that easy."
"No kidding."
"I've got a release date, though, did you know that? I'm out in October."
"Shit, really? They couldn't make it September?"
"Yeah, that's what I said. Social said it too, but Dr. Roy said no, two months minimum. I'm on new meds, is why. They're working, but you know...everybody wants to be sure."
"Right. Still, though." Joel thought that other guys his age would have high-fived or shaken hands or something, but he wasn't sure. He settled for a smile. "I'm glad."
They talked for a while about nothing in particular, and then Paul asked delicately about Joel's father. Joel said it wasn't as bad as he'd feared it would be.
"It's always there, but that makes it easier. If sometimes he were alive and sometimes he were dead, and I didn't know what would happen when, that would be worse. Like being sick, we don't know when we'll have a good day and we think we can do it all, and when we have months and months of...of nothing. Worse than nothing. But he's dead. The not knowing was worse, when they were holding him. At least this is real."
"I can't imagine," said Paul simply. Dark violet-blue feathering along his temples. "I hear the trial's been set for next year."
"Yeah."
"Someone was saying -- it was Mark, actually -- that he wished they'd bring back the death penalty for Marchand."
"They won't."
"Oh, they all know that. But everyone's upset."
"I don't want him to be killed," said Joel. His stomach felt heavy. "I wish he'd never been born, but I don't want him dead. I'm not sure which is worse."
Paul shrugged, and changed the subject. "Have you heard anything about the First Minister's Conference?"
"What, inside information? Not really. I heard that Ramsay's drinking again, that's it."
"Yeah?"
"Vodka all day, that's what I heard. Putting it in his water bottle, the old John Turner cocktail."
Paul laughed. "Maybe he'll get drunk enough to give us some civil rights."
"Oh, come on," Joel scoffed. "This won't even get to a referendum."
"McCree, yes it will. Read the Quebec papers." Paul was French; their conversations usually wound back and forth between English and French, switching when one of them got excited and spoke his first language without thinking. "It's no accident that the CFH hid there. I shouldn't have to tell you this stuff."
Joel rubbed the back of his neck. The hair hadn't grown back yet; he felt bare. The room was small, small and bare. A crucifix on the wall, over the door, featureless mass-produced wood and brass. Just the suggestion of a face but it was in pain. "You want to get out of here? D'you have privileges?"
"Yeah, they trust me."
They went to the desk and Paul signed out. The nurse on duty was a stranger and said nothing to Joel. As they left the gates and came out on sunny Sussex Drive, Paul said, "A lot of people got sent out."
"Sent out?"
"Well, people like Berton got released. And Jean-Yves, and James Dudley. And me, for that matter."
Joel didn't see any connection between the names. None were especially hard cases. "So?"
"They're putting the borderlines out to make room, see? That's what we figure. James Dudley was doing okay, but he wasn't ready to go out. None of them were. We think the administration's triaging. They're expecting things to get worse, even with St. Christina's open."
"You sound paranoid."
Paul shook his head, although green agitation was creeping along the net of his veins like ivy. "You know from the beginning that people were put in here who weren't sick. To get rid of them. We were the only place that would take mutants, take them away from the rest of the public. The Fathers took them because it was better than nothing. We always had enough beds for everyone, it didn't matter. Now they're running out of space, and they have to choose between the sick and the not-so-sick. They're choosing the sick, of course. The rest of us are on our own."
"That still doesn't mean some great apocalypse is near."
"No," Paul admitted. "I guess not. But I don't like the sound of the First Ministers' Conference so far. I can't believe that you do. Admit it, they shouldn't even be touching the Constitution. Gay marriage happened without a Charter amendment, why should mutants be any different?"
"Sex-based discrimination was already in the Charter, though. We're not a category at all." They were coming to the Byward Market, and Paul's luminescent skin was attracting surreptitious stares, as it always did. Joel took advantage of a lull in traffic to lead Paul across the street to the quieter side, by the turreted Museum of Nature. "They don't need an amendment in order for us to have civil rights, but if it comes off right it will be good to have that protection in the Charter."
"I'm saying I don't think it will come off. You know Alberta and Quebec are already talking about using notwithstanding?" The notwithstanding clause, the Maginot line of the Constitution, could be invoked to suspend any part of it in a province for up to five years.
"I heard that. They're both talking about federal bullying. But will they keep it up?"
"Do they have to? Alberta gets whatever it wants, and Quebec, we're special, right? Sherbrooke will spare them the indignity of begging."
They fell silent for awhile, walking in the shadow of the severe American embassy with its shiny silver eagle on the iron fence. The guard at the gate followed them with his eyes and said nothing. Joel had been past there any number of times, and usually got a hello out of him, but not this time. When they got around the eternal construction at the corner and had turned onto Wellington Street, going past the Château Laurier, Joel said, "The best that can happen is nothing. That's what my father always said. Better nothing than something you can't undo."
Paul snorted. "You're such an idealist, McCree."
"He also said nothing was permanent, in Parliament. You can always soften the blow."
They were walking across the Canal bridge, past the Asian tourists taking pictures of the locks, the still river beyond, the green hills and the distant statue of Colonel By. Joel loved the statues of downtown, the calm professionalism of the Peacekeepers, stodgy green Bishop Guigues, the prosaic John A. Macdonald holding his gloves, the winged Victory on the War Memorial. Friendly figures, a bit out of place in the city, a little bemused to be there still. I didn't expect to see you here, they seemed to say.
"They aren't going to do anything to us," Joel said. "Not here."
"They already have, Joel." Paul spoke in French, perhaps to take the edge off his words.
"Can't you tell the difference? A crime is different. Henri-Michel is going on trial. The government wouldn't do anything like that to us."
"Not officially," said Paul.
"Oh, stop it."
Swarms of people were on the Hill, tourists taking pictures of the Peace Tower. RCMP cars were parked just inside the gates. "See that?" said Paul. "When do you ever see this place without Mounties everywhere? And yet when someone broke in they didn't do shit. Didn't even follow them across the fucking bridge."
Joel had had enough. "Can you hear yourself? Should I tell Dr. Roy that you're obsessed with a police conspiracy to have my father murdered for the sake of keeping the mutant brothers down? You're messed up, Paul. You're not ready to be fucking seen in public."
Paul said nothing, and kept walking. Joel wanted to leave, but couldn't do it -- he knew he was implicitly supposed to keep an eye on Paul, and anyway you couldn't walk away from someone on the street. That only happened on TV. They turned at Metcalfe Street.
At the Sparks Street mall, Paul said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up."
"No, I'm sorry."
"It's okay." He glanced up at Joel quickly. "Did you mean that? You think I'm paranoid?"
Joel shook his head. "I'm just -- this still sounds so insane. Look, the police weren't involved, but if they ever talk to you about joining or taking a job with the government -- I wouldn't."
"Christ," said Paul, glancing around at the crowds on the mall. "Is it okay to talk like that in public, or...?"
"Probably. Tell the others, the ones who are being released. If they'd take me, it's obviously not because they think I'd be a great crime-fighter."
Paul laughed. "Yeah, that's not the job for you."
"No kidding."
"You could throw your empty Ambien bottles at the bad guys, I guess. Zombie attack! Quote poetry at them until they die of boredom."
"Meanwhile Paul Laliberté, the mighty warrior, would just scare them away with Quebecois pop."
"You'd depress them to death with Elliott Smith albums."
"It's a good idea, that's why. Maybe they'd stab themselves in the chest."
They didn't talk about politics all the way back to St. Rita's. Joel promised to come back next week.
Joel got the idea a few days later, while reading a book about Dorothy Day and half-listening to Cross Country Checkup on the radio. He felt as he had felt the day he took the overdose in Marin Leavitt's house -- as if something formerly impossible had just entered the realm of feasibility. Like those dreams where you find new rooms in your house, new doors and hallways and balconies looking out onto different landscapes. It was an idea that ran all through his body, the body he sometimes forgot he had. Every inch of skin was awake, every nerve was alive. Yes, said this feeling, and that was all it said. Yes. How had he missed it before?
He didn't tell his mother. He didn't tell anyone, but he bought the Montreal Gazette and Le Devoir at the bookstore and read through them carefully, looking at the ads and the city news.
When Saturday came again, and his mother dropped him off at St. Rita's, Joel brought it up with Father Gilles. "How would you go about buying a house in Quebec?"
His dark eyebrows flew up and he repeated, "A house?"
"A big house, in Montreal."
Father scratched his cheek and squinted. "Downtown?"
"Yeah."
"I never had to buy a house, so I'm not sure I could tell you all the details. Religious life is handy that way. Why do you want a house in Montreal?"
Joel was tempted to say that it was an investment, somewhere to put that huge horrible inheritance, but instead he told the truth. "I want to have a safe house in Quebec, for mutants."
Father Gilles seemed genuinely surprised, even shocked.
"I have over three million dollars. I'm eighteen now, it's not in trust."
"Ah. Bon, bon, so you can do it financially. I suppose. Real estate's expensive there, but half a million would do nicely. Well! I don't know what to say to this. How will you run it?"
"Communally, I thought, like the Catholic Worker houses." It sounded stupid when he said it out loud. "I'd have to find people to help me."
"Exactly," said Father Gilles. "It's a very social existence, you know. I spent some time in a house of hospitality, before I joined the Jesuits. It's tough on the shy people, the very sensitive. You're faced with a lot of suffering, a lot of need, and you often have to live cheek-by-jowl with real saints. That's a hard business, dealing with the saints. They can urge you on until you're burned out trying to keep up with them."
How to explain the deep sense of rightness, the way the thought of it tenderised him, made him feel whole and lissom and alive? "But it's, it's doing something. I want to give something to people, you know? I never had the chance before, never had the energy. I could hardly think about it. But now I'm almost..."
"Joel---" Father Gilles stopped and put a hand to his eyes, then continued. "You have a lot of gifts, you know. I could see you as an academic, maybe a lawyer like your father, maybe an artist. You have a good mind, and a good heart. But this is like someone with cancer wanting to run a marathon."
"Terry Fox did it."
"I walked right into that, didn't I? Look, I'm a psychiatrist, I'm not supposed to give advice, so I'll tell you this just as a friend: give the money to Benedict Labre House in Montreal, if you feel called to do that. Keep some for your education. Your father would have been happy with that; he was a generous man. But don't put another unrealistic expectation on your plate. I see you come in here and you're bent double with all the things you think you're supposed to be. You have to take it easy."
Joel thought about that for awhile, then made another sally. "It wouldn't be for another year or so. I have to get my high school."
Father Gilles was weakening. "Well..."
"But the market's good right now, isn't it? I read that. And a house is an investment. I'm planning to go to McGill anyway."
"You know what?" said Father Gilles, holding up a hand and leaning back in his swivel chair. "Don't wheedle to me. Wheedle God. Ask him for the grace to do what you have to do. Pray to St. Francis, see if he can do you some favours. As your confessor, emphatically not as your psychiatrist, that's my advice. Okay? Is that good enough?"
"Thank you, Father," said Joel.
On the twentieth of August, the hastily-convened First Ministers' Conference ended with an agreement, the Gatineau Accord. The Premiers had bickered over the content of the proposed amendment until it was plumped full of regional sops and comfits. The papers lamented the unholy return from the dead of the Charlottetown Accord, with its ill-fated Canada Clause, and indeed Gatineau was full of talk about self-government and suspension of Charter rights for particular groups. They wanted to impose nothing on minority groups, while protecting the growing mutant minority. There were provisions for health care (specifically covering elective surgery for mutants under provincial health plans) which the Citizen immediately denounced as absurd and beyond the scope of any federal document.
Most disturbing for Joel was a line that declared "mutants who present a clear danger to themselves or others" would not be given "certain rights". This line was in the health care section, so Joel presumed from the wording that it had been intended to allow authorities to commit mentally ill mutants. As it was, many psychiatric hospitals refused to take mutants, and there was a legal precedent for a different standard of incompetence for mutants as well. It wasn't a bad idea to buttress the law in that direction -- but what a way to phrase it! And what was something like that doing in the Constitution anyway? A provincial bill could get away with sloppiness like that, perhaps, and at least it would be in their jurisdiction to say who could be committed and who couldn't be.
As Trudeau would have said, a mess that deserves a big 'No'.
Joel didn't want to leave the country until after the referendum, but he knew that was just sentimentality. There was nothing he could do except cast his vote, and that could be done with an absentee ballot. He would buy his house no matter what anyone else thought, soon.
Quotes and Notes: "John Turner cocktail" - John Turner was, very briefly, a Prime Minister. He had a wee drinking problem and was said to drink vodka in meetings while pretending it was water. This didn't go over so well in the television age as it did when Sir John A. Macdonald was PM.
Jan Morris is a British travel writer who captured Canadian cities in the early 90s almost perfectly in City to City, and in a beautifully ironic style. Recommended.