Returning from the dead
used to be something I did well
I began asking why
I began forgetting how
Margaret Atwood, Power Politics
Joel was coming apart, and he knew it, but it didn't feel like disintegration. It felt like closing up, as if he were being cocooned. One night he dreamed that there was a deep wound in his chest, as if from heart surgery, and as it healed, the scar tissue took over his whole body, encasing him from head to foot in strands of hard white material.
It was hard to move. His face felt dead, like meat, and there was a peculiar warmth in being so numb. Nothing mattered, and that quelled the panic. He spent days under in the Aphanes, mind awash with white, but even when he was visible, people didn't seem to see him. Or, no, they saw, but their eyes passed right over him. It was like being inanimate, rather than invisible. A tropical plant in a dentist's office -- about that level of relevance.
In sessions with Dr. Xavier, Joel was silent as a dead insect on a windowsill.
"How are you feeling today?"
The pattern of the carpet was sickening, a twisting mass of purples and browns, leaves and flowers. If you stared long enough they moved, brown like seaweed underwater, the plants in the lake where they had the cottage. Joel could almost see the shadow of the canoe gliding over them, a black ovate shape drifting across his vision...
"Joel."
He blinked. An answer was required. "I'm okay."
It was important to be polite.
"Are you really?" The Professor tried to catch his eye -- in his peripheral vision, Joel saw him moving his head.
"No."
"Ah. Progress. So what's wrong?"
It hurt the way a fever does, nothing exact, just an unbearable no from the brain, a pervasive discomfort. "I dunno. I'm not..."
Dr. Xavier's sharp eyes were watching his face, as if trying to pick out a bird from foliage. "Yes?"
"I don't know."
Long, long release of air. "Do you want to talk, or shall I just let you go for today?"
Shit. Get it together, asshole. "I'm sorry. Uh, I'll talk."
The Professor looked down at his notes and said, "You were saying, a few days ago, something about meat in an art gallery...could you say a bit more about that?"
Joel shrugged, because he wasn't sure that he could say any more about it. It had probably been a mistake to even mention it. At the time, he had thought, or hoped, that Dr. Xavier would understand, that the image would speak to him in a way that Joel himself no longer could. Then he had remembered that Meat Dress was probably not common knowledge in New York -- it wasn't important enough -- and he felt like an idiot for bringing it up. The Professor never asked, and maybe he thought the idea of meat rotting in a gallery was Joel's own invention. Who knew what he thought? The Professor was healthy, so no one could ask him questions like that.
"Do you feel, perhaps, that you are on display somehow?" Xavier prodded.
"A bit." That was part of it, but the crime was the waste of taxpayers' money. There were starving people on the streets of Toronto. He was rotting, all the chemicals in his body were changing, there was vermin laying eggs in his brain, that was how he felt.
The Professor sighed. "Joel, if you aren't going to talk, perhaps you could try to stay solid so that I can get an idea of what you're thinking?"
Something shook inside him, then, a muscle deep in his chest spasming involuntarily. It made him want to sob and cough at once, and suddenly he didn't care about being good and not imposing on people. "Do you think I'm, do you hate me for this? I wish I knew, I wish I could say..."
He put his hands to his face, as if he could put the words back in, but it was too late. "I'm sorry."
"I don't hate you, Joel," said Dr. Xavier quietly. "I want to help you."
"You can't, though." It was very clear all of a sudden. "You can't."
"Why not? Why don't you believe that you can get better?"
"Because it's been too long. I'm scarred over, I don't work anymore." He had the unnerving feeling of the dream again, his fingers bound together by the white strands.
But the professor wasn't listening. He just said something about having hope, about healing always being possible, and Joel knew that he had failed to make it clear just how bad the situation had become.
Most of the sessions were like this, long stupid silences and bursts of self-pity. Occasionally they talked about Antigone, and that was much easier. Joel had studied it before, at St. Rita's.
"Antigone!" his father used to say fondly. "It should have been Creon. You know Trudeau said he felt like Creon, during the October Crisis. Perfect metaphor. Duty versus humanity."
Joel did know that little factoid; Trudeau had been prime minister in the eighties during his father's stay in the House of Commons, so Joel had grown up knowing a lot of Trudeau trivia like that. His father idolised the man.
So convinced was Joel of the Trudeau detail's significance that he even mentioned it to the professor, who was barely aware of Trudeau and had never heard of the October Crisis. "What was it?"
"Oh..." He bit his lip, embarrassed. But it was a direct question, so he tried to squeeze out an answer. "1970, there were terrorists. French separatists setting off bombs and stuff..."
The professor nodded. "Ah, yes, I remember now. The name 'October Crisis' was unfamiliar to me, that's all. They kidnapped a politician, didn't they?"
"A politician and a diplomat, Laporte and Cross," said Joel, warming to his topic a little. He liked history. "Laporte they killed. Trudeau declared martial law over the country and rounded up a lot of francophones for questioning. A reporter asked him how far he would go, and Trudeau shrugged and said, 'Just watch me.' It was famous. James Cross was rescued, but he never forgave us."
"Never forgave...?"
"Us, the country, he never forgave us. We were doing our best. More than that, people said Trudeau should never have done what he did. But Cross wasn't satisfied with that." Joel looked back down at the book and remembered he was supposed to be relating this to the play. "People said it was unjust and autocratic. But Creon thought it was necessary. Trudeau thought so too, but with more reason. Parliament asked him to declare martial law, that wasn't just a whim of his own."
"That's the most you've spoken in weeks," Dr. Xavier observed.
Joel shut up and said nothing. What did he think he was, a Heritage Moment? Stupid blabbermouth.
The Professor wheeled close to him, and took the book from Joel's hands, gently. He looked at the pages.
"You have this underlined -- to value life then one must value law. Is that something that spoke to you?"
Dad underlined that. It was his pen. Joel could feel the fogginess of the deeper Aphanes beginning to close over him, but he dug his fingers into the cushy arm of the chair and said, "I guess."
"What does it mean to you?"
Joel stared down at the book in the Professor's hands, trying to work out what it could mean, what his father might have meant. Joel heard that sort of thing often at home, and understood the tone, the general principles at work, but rarely thought about the exact meaning. Finally he worked backwards from another of his father's aphorisms, and said, "The law protects life, I guess."
"Does it?" Xavier smiled, a little sadly. "It certainly should, you're right about that."
Silence. Joel ran his fingertips along the brocade chair, trying to bring himself back to full solidity. Touching, and being touched, was useful in this first stage when he was only ghostly around the edges.
Dr. Xavier said, "So this is an important idea to you - that people need to be protected. Why do you think this matters so much for you?"
"It matters to everyone."
"No, it doesn't," said the Professor evenly. "Many people think just the opposite, that people should protect themselves. Why is it that you have a different opinion?"
Joel shrugged. "I'm an Ottawa kid. The nanny state is my natural habitat."
Xavier tilted his head. "Then turn it around this way: do you feel protected?"
Another silence.
"No," Joel whispered.
"Why not?"
"Because -- because I'm not -- I don't know. I know my parents tried. Their whole life, since they found out something was wrong with me, has been this: trying to protect me. But still, I feel like...as if I'm not really in the category of people that get helped. I'm not a person anymore at all." He felt his next words form in his mind, debated for a moment whether to say them aloud, and then decided he might as well: "I feel like I'm already dead."
As expected, this got a reaction. Dr. Xavier's eyes widened for a fraction of a second, before his professional calm settled again. "How so?"
But Joel could not get more specific than that. He only shook his head.
There were always questions about suicide, every session. Joel usually lied, because it was unthinkable to tell the truth to Xavier, who had given him so much. He was half-aware of the argument that it was the Professor's job to deal with this, but something else in him was tightly laced and stiff-lipped, and unwilling to be so crass as to discuss suicide.
But he thought about it. And he thought about the time he had attempted it. The first time, when he was fifteen, it had been an impulse thing. At a party, a dinner party given by one of his father's friends. Why had he even been invited? He couldn't remember -- probably curiosity and pity on the part of the friend. No, more likely Dad had thought it would be good for him to get out.
The friend was someone Dad had known from the Human Rights Commission, a guy named Marin Leavitt, who was the type who would fall all over himself to make people feel accepted and welcome. It backfired, at least with Joel. Joel remembered that Mr. Leavitt, balding with a neat grey beard and glasses, had asked questions all night: how did they feel about the recent Supremes decision, what schools were they looking into, did they have an opinion on the Mutant Health Care & Education Act, what were their options?
And the question he wasn't asking, the question that was still in Leavitt's face every time he looked in Joel's direction, was, "How does it feel?" How did it feel to be sui generis, the minority of minorities, the only person who could do this one trick in this one way? How did it really feel to be a mutant? All night long, Leavitt's face had been filled with that question, the question that wasn't asked.
Or not. Dr. Xavier had been telling him not to assume like that. "You aren't a mind reader, Joel. I am, but you're not."
Joel remembered that he had tried very hard not to fade away and embarrass his father, but it started to happen anyway. His mother: "Marin, maybe a little of that rosé? It might settle his nerves a bit."
He drank it down quickly, like medicine, and it actually worked. It dulled his fear enough to keep him solid. Midway through dinner, dizzy and giddy, he ducked out politely and locked himself in the bathroom with the contents of the medicine cabinet.
Why then? Father Gilles had asked, again and again. How had he been feeling?
Joel could not remember any feeling other than excitement, delighted anticipation. He wasn't thinking about death, or thinking about anything -- it was just that glee that you get when something that has been broken suddenly starts to work, or something that was forbidden is suddenly allowed.
He might have succeeded, if he'd been more circumspect about the setting. That was stupid and inconsiderate -- they very narrowly averted a major scandal. Leavitt and his mother jimmied the door open with a bamboo skewer, and they found him curled up in the bathtub, unconscious and covered in vomit.
"Had it been anyone else," said his father later, "Anyone but Marin, who I've known for years, and who understands the pressures mutants are under these days -- it would have been over. The Tories would have jumped all over it, and never mind the press. It used to be that families were off-limits, but that's changing. We're becoming Americanised. I have some allies who would be swayed by that sort of thing. Dragging Marin into it is completely unforgivable."
And his father was right. The Conservatives in the Senate had already made hay with the fact that Jim McCree's son was a mutant. It destroyed the aura of "objective justice" that Joel's father once had; that phrase of his, "objective justice", had made headlines, back when he was Justice Minister. But he wasn't objective anymore, and families were no longer off-limits.
A suicide attempt was serious business, but it was only nuclear if it happened in Ottawa, at the very home of a politician or the friend of one. Then it was a political act. But now Joel had been sent away, and he was already dealt with and gone; what he did now couldn't hurt his father.
It was just a matter of nerve. Joel knew what he was -- not merely a mutant, but a waste of time, energy, money, and oxygen. He had become the living dead, like his grandfather: someone everyone had to care for and tiptoe around, who did not and could not contribute anything in return. He was the Lares of a Roman house; he was a family tomb to be whitewashed every year.
And he had to put other people's interests first and excise himself from the world. That was his duty, and it was perfectly clear. His father was a skilled politician, and could make gold out of this if he really put his mind to it. But it would really be unforgivable to leave a corpse in the Professor's house. He could maybe do it outside.
Quotes and Notes: Trudeau really did draw the comparison between himself and Creon, although I can no longer remember where I read this (it may have been in his memoirs). For more on the October Crisis, see the CBC Archives and Wikipedia, which actually has an accurate and informative article for once. Joel geeks out by mentioning the Lares, who were the household gods of the Romans.