I heard a voice
calling from the wilderness,
calling from the wilderness.
Not quite a whistle, not quite a song.
Not too short, not too long.
I know you but you don't know me.
Martin Tielli
It was dawn, or close to it; the clock in Xavier's room with its rotating gold spheres read half past four. Outside, the sky was just lightening to a milky blue, and the blackbirds in the trees were beginning to sing the dawn chorus. Charles was awake, sitting in his chair by the window, looking out over the green pastures and half reading a book about Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
He'd been up since three, and now he shut off the lamp sitting beside him, changing the colours of the room from mellow gold to soft greys, the morning light seeping in cold.
Cold indeed; Charles shivered, and wondered if the insulation around the window needed to be replaced. Then he felt it, or heard it: at the very edges of his range, the inner sounds of some turmoil.
Charles could sense repetitive thoughts, tumbling over each other, thoughts that circled and collapsed on one another. The thinker was too far off for Charles to be able to hear specifics, but the ingrown pattern of the thoughts, censorious but irrational, like a tangle of thorns -- he knew who it was. Listening to Joel think was like reading Kafka.
There might be good reasons why Joel was out at four in the morning, but Charles decided he didn't like the smell of things. He closed his eyes and called Scott, loud enough to wake him.
In a few moments, Scott responded, thoughts still bleary from sleep. Professor?
I hate to disturb the two of you, but if you and Jean could go out and find Joel, it would be much appreciated.
Scott took a few moments to process this. What? Where is he?
Out in the woods somewhere, I believe. I'm a bit worried about his mental state.
A few obscenities drifted through Scott's mind, but he assented and woke Jean.
Charles, hoping he wasn't sending them off on a fool's errand, wheeled off to check Joel's room, stopping by the door to put on his slippers against the chill.
The air was fresh and damp, and the blue early morning sky was rapidly clouding over. It felt more like autumn than early summer, and Scott half expected to hear the sounds of gunshots and flapping wings coming from the woods.
Jean wore a navy blue polar-fleece tracksuit with high rubber boots, which amused Scott; it was an okay look on her. She saw him looking and said, "Oh, dry up. You don't look any better yourself."
"I'm a guy, I'm allowed to wear flannel in the woods at five in the morning," Scott said with a smirk.
"It's practical," she said, but she was feigning offence. It was the first time she had taken one of his jokes with good humour in several days, and Scott wondered if the dry spell had broken of its own accord. "It's freezing out now, and it's going to rain any minute."
"Oh, I understand. Whereas millions wouldn't. Can you hear anything?"
Jean closed her eyes and frowned. She was silent for a long time, the wind blowing her ponytail around, until at last she murmured, "Liver damage."
"What?"
"Liver damage," she repeated, looking at Scott with her earnest eyes that could look so fierce. "If he's -- follow me."
She took off in the direction of the creek, in long, loping strides. Scott followed, hoping that Charles and Jean were both wrong and that they wouldn't be spending the rest of the day in the hospital. Or worse. It was a slim hope, but he kept it going as he mentally prepared for the alternatives.
The easiest alternative was death; cold, yes, but that was reality. The McCrees had probably prepared for that possibility -- Scott would, if it were his son who was in and out of psychiatric facilities for two years. More difficult would be the nightmarish hospital scenarios. He could almost hear the words being spoken: vegetative, comatose.
That would be bad. Scott knew all too well how it felt to be slapped with the brain damage label, and he could imagine...well. Probably in that case the McCrees would take him back; presumably the Canadian hospitals and homes could take care of a vegetative mutant as well as the Xavier institute could. Hyperarousal triggered Joel's disappearances, so extreme brain damage would probably solve the problem of his powers.
But now he and Jean had found their quarry. There was a bench by the creek, under a stand of tall pines. Jean, oddly, nearly missed it; she could obviously tell that she was in the right place, but she was looking around and panting, and only Scott saw the foot, and the body almost hidden under the bench.
"Oh, Jesus," Jean said, sounding resigned, and helped Scott drag the boy out. She started slapping his face lightly. "Joel, wake up. We're going for a walk."
The kid was alive, in a manner of speaking. His skin was grey and his front was soaked with yellow bile and vomit, stinking of ammonia. It occurred to Scott that he had never seen such a good-looking kid look as ugly as Joel did most of the time.
Scott supported the half-conscious boy on his shoulder. "How fast should we be moving, hon?"
"Fast," said Jean grimly.
Charles opened the door, warily, as if he expected the body to be in there. Not the body, no, there was no body yet. He was sure of it. But there might be other things in there, other signs of suffering and illness, and he proceeded slowly. So as not to hurt himself.
The room was clean and quiet, though, and the bed was stripped, covers folded neatly at the foot. Joel's books were all put away in boxes, except for one that lay open on the desk.
It was a large, heavy book of photography. The picture on the open page was of a polished white marble figure, a bishop, with blind lidless eyes staring out in an expression that looked like horror. The caption read, "Marble effigy of François Xavier de Laval-Montmorency (1623-1708), first Bishop of Quebec. The impressive tomb is in the Basilica, Quebec City."
There was also a long quote identified as part of Colombière's eulogy of Laval. The last sentence was marked very lightly by a fine pencil-stroke in the margin:
"It was with good reason that Providence permitted him to be called Francis, for the virtues of all the saints of that name were combined in him -- the zeal of Saint Francis Xavier, the charity of Saint Francis of Sales, the poverty of Saint Francis of Assisi, the self-mortification of Saint Francis of Borgia; but poverty was the mistress of his heart, and he loved her with incontrollable transports."
This was a message, obviously, but Charles could not decide if it was intended as a compliment or a rebuke.
The premeditated quality of these proceedings, especially the stripped bed, was not encouraging. Joel had made an impulsive attempt once before, as Visineau had recorded, but this was not an impulse.
What had he chosen? Not a gun. Something slow, something that would give him time to reconsider. Charles looked at the frozen face of Laval. Were the eyes simply meant to look closed? But he could not unsee the white staring eyes, without lids or pupils, and he suspected that this, rather than the paragraph about the saints, was Joel's real message -- that Charles was missing something.
Damn Joel. If he lived, Charles was going to stop coddling him in session and playing along with these little tricks. For that was what they were: Antigone, Trudeau, and Laval; meat rotting in the National Gallery; lists of saints in a eulogy. Joel was hiding, hiding behind a paper-thin cultural difference. Giving Charles a history lesson, while the psychotherapist rushed to do his homework, as if reading up on Trudeau was ever going to explain anything about McCree. Visineau had been right -- Joel resisted therapy. Whether he did it in invisibility, silence and vague statements, or trails of clues that wound through Canadian history and Butler's Lives of the Saints did not matter.
Like Erik, Charles realised -- Joel was like Erik, even though it would seem that the shy Catholic boy from Ottawa with his naïve beliefs in the supremacy of law bore no resemblance to the wily Magneto. No resemblance on the surface, anyway, but Charles could see through that: Joel was not in the business of making his feelings plain, and neither was Erik. Both preferred to step around the subject, dropping hints, deflecting questions and feigning ignorance. Both were more comfortable debating the principles of the rights of man than discussing what the problem really was.
The lad was a failure at chess, but perhaps Charles had still underestimated him.
How frustrating that Joel had stripped the room, Charles thought, not leaving any clues but this deliberate one. Then he saw, on the bedside table, two envelopes.
One was addressed to Charles, the other to Joel's parents. Charles hesitated for a moment, then opened the one addressed to him. Written at the top was the odd legend, P.P.C. (and JMJ), which he couldn't begin to decipher.
Dear Dr. Xavier,
I'm very grateful to you for everything you've tried to do for me, but I've been wasting everyone's time long enough. I am not going to get any better and I can't function like this. I can't connect. If I thought there was a chance that I could ever be useful, I would put up with the pain, but I really can't be fixed. You did your best.
My body is in the woods by the creek, on the bench by the stand of pines, unless animals have carried it away by the time you see this. Please have it sent back to Ottawa; all my money is in cash in the drawer, and my parents will cover the rest of the costs if needed. I am very sorry for bringing attention to the school like this, and I hope you can forgive me.
All my gratitude and respect,
Joel McCree
Charles opened the drawer of the bedside table, and found a thick stack of twenties bound together with a rubber band, and another, much smaller stack of Canadian bills underneath. Probably about four hundred dollars in all, so clearly Joel had been to the bank.
Suddenly enraged, Charles slammed the drawer shut and threw the wad of bills at the wall, where they made a disappointingly small thuck sound and fell behind the table. Gratitude and respect! Joel must have been lying to him for days, weeks maybe. Had Charles deigned to investigate internally a little bit, he would have figured that out easily. Unethical, yes, but he had held back and now the boy might be dead.
But with an effort, Charles calmed himself and sent out a call to Jean.
Apparently he is by the bench near the creek, Jean.
We know, Professor, Jean sent back. We're bringing him back now. We'll need an ambulance.
Alive, then?
Yup. And Jean closed the connection abruptly.
Well, that hadn't been of much use. But he could operate a telephone, at least -- Charles picked up the phone on Joel's desk and called the hospital.
As he was waiting for the switchboard to put him through to emergency, Charles happened to glance at the back of the suicide note, on which was scrawled, diagonal and haphazard:
I am helpless in the grip of my own ugliness.
Jean rode in the ambulance with Joel. He had thrown up on both her and Scott a few times on their way back to the mansion grounds, and she now stank of stomach acid almost as badly as he did. She'd been through worse than that at work, but Scott had not been amused. He had called Joel some choice names, but the boy wasn't conscious enough to notice. Still, it was less the vomit, for Scott, and more the act itself.
"Cowardly fucking thing to do, you know," he had muttered, not really to Joel but to Jean. Scott, she knew, put a high moral value on endurance and had a natural mistrust of extravagant gestures. It was one reason why Jean rarely talked with him about her time in the asylum -- not because she doubted his compassion or his desire to understand, but because it was hard to make him truly comprehend irrationality. She liked that about him, sometimes.
The ambulance attendants were reluctant at first to let her ride in back. "You his sister?"
"His physician."
They might have passed as relatives, with their similar colouring, although "sister" was ridiculous. Jean felt flattered, briefly and stupidly.
The boy's eyes slid open and he licked his lips. For the first time he seemed to register what was happening, and his thoughts sounded like ships crashing. Relief, yes, a little, but also a ferocious frustration at having failed. And he knew he had failed; in Jean's experience, most patients knew on some level when death was likely. It was a low thrumming, or perhaps a high whining way in the stratosphere of the mind, the sound of some distant machinery coming closer and closer.
"Hospital?" he whispered.
Jean nodded. "They're probably going to intubate, put a tube down your throat, okay?"
"Yeah." He had been through it before, of course.
"What did you take?"
"Tylenol."
That was as she'd suspected, and he'd done a bit of homework if those thoughts she'd picked up about liver damage were any indication. "One bottle? Two?"
"One," he said, and looked almost ashamed. "Should have taken booze with it."
"Why didn't you?" Jean asked, in spite of herself.
Joel looked a little surprised. "It's against the law."
One of the ambulance attendants laughed, although he tried to suppress it. Joel didn't notice, retching some more into the kidney-shaped dish Jean offered him. Then he said, "What hospital?"
"St. Vincent's." Jean had no privileges there, but the McCrees had signed forms to the effect that Joel should be brought to a Catholic hospital if emergencies arose.
Joel sank back -- he was propped up in a sitting position to prevent him from choking on vomit -- and closed his eyes. "I wish it were the Civic."
Jean took a moment, then recalled the name from his medical records. "At home, you mean?"
He nodded, then shivered and seemed about to throw up again. She held up the dish, but nothing came. "The towers, the bells -- there was a poem, I knew it once. I do. I'm stupid now."
The Professor would probably know what he was talking about, Jean thought. It was strange how easy it was to penetrate his mind, while he was solid like this, and yet she couldn't make heads or tails of his thoughts. She could hear the half-remembered lines of the poem drifting together, their ends bumping clumsily like boats against a dock. The towers and roofs are blue...no...the distant city with its towers...no...
And little else. She wondered if she had expected to hear detailed explanations of why he had done it. Certainly not now; anyone with a stomach full of acetaminophen was going to be way too sick to think clearly.
But then, forming around the confused lines of the poem, she saw the image that he was recalling, and she understood a little bit.
Jean spent most of the day with Joel, and finally left in the early evening to go home to dinner. Charles, taking over the shift, found Joel's room empty. Presently, however, he heard a noise from the bathroom, and waited.
After what felt like a long time, Joel emerged from the little bathroom, still pale and holding the doorframe for support. He started when he saw Charles there.
"You'll be spending a lot of time in there, they tell me."
Joel nodded, sitting back down on the bed and adjusting the thin blanket and hospital gown. There was a long silence, like the ones they often had in session. He didn't meet Charles's eyes, and instead he played with his hospital bracelet. Joel Kevin McCree, it read in bold black letters, and there was an M next to his name, for Mutant.
Charles said, "How are you doing, other than the physical discomfort?"
Joel reached for a plastic cup on the table, drank a bit, and then said, "I'm all right."
His voice was a hoarse whisper, which Jean had said would be a result of the intubation.
Charles wheeled closer to the bed. "Yes, I know you're not up to talking right now. But then we've been talking for over a month and you still haven't really said very much, have you?"
Joel started to speak, and Charles held up a hand. "I'm only making an observation, Joel, not a criticism. It's hard for you; I know that. So, just for now, perhaps I'll be the one to talk.
"I'm going to be honest, because I'm not sure that Dr. Visineau was ever honest with you. I don't believe that he ever said to you what I'm saying now: I don't understand you. We've been talking, almost every day, and yet you managed to plot this completely without my knowledge. It almost makes me wonder if I was wrong to have taken such a firm stand against reading minds without permission. Do you know, if I hadn't heard you at the very limits of my telepathy, you might well have succeeded? You disappear so often that you wouldn't be missed for days."
Joel's face was unreadable, but then it often was. Impassivity incarnate with high cheekbones; it reminded him of Scott, but Scott would give himself away with other mannerisms, behaviours that betrayed him. The only thing Joel's body language ever expressed was fear. The nerves were the problem, as Hank and Visineau had both told him.
"You didn't want that," Charles continued quietly. "You didn't want to die; I'm certain of that, even if I haven't understood anything else you've said or done. Do you know how I knew?"
Joel shook his head silently.
"I knew because the eyes of Bishop Laval are still closed."
Joel's eyes widened a bit, and Charles caught the flicker of expression from the studied deadpan to genuine blankness. "What?"
Just then, Scott came in, bearing a newspaper and looking grim. He handed the paper to Joel, and then sat down across from Charles, resting his elbows on his knees.
The newspaper was the Toronto Star, and Scott had probably gone to some trouble to find it. It was a nice gesture; Joel devoured newspapers, on days when he could read, and especially liked to keep up with the news from home. Scott noticed things like that, and had tried to bring the boy something he liked, only to be the literal bearer of bad news. On the front page was a photo of an attractive suburban house, with a mailbox at the end of the driveway blown inside out, aluminium and yellow plastic scattered on the sidewalk. In the background were an ambulance and a fire truck. The headline was the single word MASSACRE.
"What is it?" Charles asked Scott.
Scott rubbed his eyes under the glasses. "One human rights official killed by a mail bomb, two RCMP officers killed, one member of Parliament killed, and one Senator kidnapped."
"Who?" Joel demanded.
"Canadian Front for Humanity, apparently. They gave a statement to the media claiming responsibility."
"No, who was kidnapped?"
Scott shook his head. "Name hasn't been released yet. They're informing the next of kin."
"Jesus God," Joel whispered, scanning the article. "Two Mounties, Jesus, right on the Hill."
He rustled the pages, spreading them out over the bed. Charles almost wanted to put a comforting hand on Joel's shoulder, but they had never had a touching relationship. Neither of them was the type.
Joel was so agitated that he began to flicker at the edges, and reading the statement released by the CFH, he made a sound somewhere between a cough and a sob. "Jesus," he said again. "They killed Marin Leavitt, my God."
"Did you know him?" said Scott.
"My dad's friend. Why the fuck would they do that to him? CHRC never does anything. Jesus."
Charles handed him the cup of ginger ale. "Rest your voice, Joel. I'm very sorry."
Joel took the cup but didn't drink. His voice was raw and cracking. "Why release his name and not the Senator's? Fucking Star."
Then, to Charles's surprise, Scott leaned over and pulled Joel into a tight embrace. It was awkward, all elbows and fists, but Scott held on and when they broke apart, Joel was red-eyed and Scott had a faint sheen of snot on his shoulder.
The black and white picture on the inner pages was almost a twin to the fine shot of the Parliament buildings that Charles had seen in Joel's heavy book of photography, the one labelled with a quote from a poem: "The far-off city, towered and roofed in blue / The bell-tongued city with its glorious towers."
Quotes and Notes: The book on Joel's desk is Roloff Beny's classic book of Canadian photography, To Everything There Is a Season: Roloff Beny in Canada. You can see the picture of the Bishop of Laval here.
Beny quotes two Archibald Lampman sonnets ("The City" and "Winter Uplands") to form the quote at the end of this chapter. Lampman was another Confederation poet, like Sir Charles God Damn Roberts, who lived in Ottawa for a number of years.
